The pause - food for thought for heads of school

Stillness, meditation, reflection, silence. A journalist used these words to describe precious moments that she witnessed in a school in Twickenham, UK.

This school employs a short-time period called The Pause, a quiet time of 10 minutes held at the start of each day at this London boys’ school during assembly, far from the madding crowd and yet in the middle of the crowd.

The instructions to the students are simple: “balanced and upright”. The 300 boys that attend this school stopped fidgeting and fell into a seemingly well-rehearsed silence, with many closing their eyes. The injunction continued “And settle... into the inner peace”.

The Pause was here: collective and total silence. What goes through our heads at such moments? Daydreams perhaps; opportunities for reflection, contemplation, creativity and random association – perhaps new ideas. “What is this life, if full of care, We have no time to stand and stare...” is an old poem (over 100 years) by W. H. Davies. Lose the precious gift of daydreaming and we risk losing the connection to our inner selves.

This is particularly easy to do with the constant encroachments on our lives – telephones, mobiles, texts, instant messages, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter … it simply doesn’t end, doesn’t stop.

Our children are not immune to this constant distraction. Worse still, children are constantly battered by electronics, to which they take to like fish to water. Portable games consoles, music players and phones which do both games and play music; all of these gadgets inevitably reduce pupils’ concentration and attention spans.

This school’s rules do not stop at the school gates. Children are not allowed to plug into gaming devices or music players on their way to school as it is estimated that it takes almost two school periods, about 90 minutes, to get pupils’ minds back to school and fully attentive and concentrating on their lessons, potentially leading to a form attention deficit that compromises a significant proportion of the school day and this is worse on Monday morning after an entire weekend interacting with electronic devices.

Moreover, in this school, every individual class begins and ends with 30 seconds of silence, allowing the boys to clear their heads of one subject and create space for the next lesson.

All of these can be easily practised in our schools – the silence at assembly, the silence before the lessons and a ban could be imposed on using electronic gadgetry, including mobile phones, on the school van or bus on the way to school.

All this is food for thought for heads of schools.

Prof.Grech is a consultant paediatrician with special interest in paediatric cardiology. He has published extensively not only in paediatric cardiology but also in general paediatrics and other aspects of medicine. He is the creator and editor-in-chief of the jounral Images in Paediatric Cardiology.