"Good morning, Eeyore," said Pooh.
"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it is a good morning, which I doubt," said he.
"Why, what's the matter?"
"Nothing, Pooh Bear, nothing. We can't all, and some of us don't. That's all there is to it."
"Can't all what?" said Pooh, rubbing his nose.
"Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush."
"However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately."
We English are fond of Eeyore and his gloom.

My school recently hosted the Watoto choir: Ugandan orphans of AIDS, children with the worst of starts in life, brought us joy in song and dance, humbled us with their optimism. I sat outside  afterwards in the sun, bemoaning the heat. A parent stopped to talk; he had just flown in that morning from New York. You must be tired, I sympathised. And he replied ‘Life is so beautiful that I never want to sleep.’ You will guess that he was not an Englishman. An Englishman saying this would be suspected of drug abuse.
We British are wary of Tiggers. But education is an act of optimism, of hope. Teachers must have some Tigger in them. Imagine an Eeyore teacher.
‘Good morning, children, if it is a good morning. There is little point in learning, and you probably won’t. Don’t be surprised when you look at the wall clock, if you see time standing still.’ And so on.
But, bizarre as it may seem, pessimism has been rife in our education system for many years. Why else does our system test children more than others? The pessimist tests, the optimist trusts. The pessimist set limits. The optimist challenges. Take your time to read these two tender poems: one of love and one of loss.

Lovers’ Lane
When my love came home to me
Pleasant summer bringing
Every tree was out in leaf
And every bird was singing.
There I met him in the lane
By the gentle waters gleaming
I met him at the end of day
Warm and dear and dreaming.
Only flowers in the hedgerow
And the lilies on the river
Saw our moment of true love
Felt our true hearts quiver.

Grandad’s Bridge
I can be all alone now there’s no one else here
My brother left an hour ago leaving me here
The moors are dotted with animals, with horses and cows
I can be alone now, alone with the cows
Golcar is in the distance bathed in golden light
My Grandad would always say
‘The sun always shines on Golcar; it’s always in the light’
Behind lies the twisting, turning path, bordered by pine trees
I raced my brother through them, through the turning twisting trees
He won of course; he’s much bigger than me
But I’ll never give up, he won’t always beat me
Grandad built the bridge himself
He also built the house himself
And that makes the whole thing even better
I’m going back now, I’m feeling much better

Both poems were written by twelve year olds at my school. As our Reception year struggle with their pencil grips can we imagine they will make such words and shape such thoughts? As our little ones stumble over their letters, do we believe their reading will one day fill a Christmas Chapel with awe? Do we see, in their finger counting, world class Mathletes who will gain golds in the Maths Olympiad; as they struggle to speak with basic grammar, do we greet them as classicists who will write and perform a competition winning play, in Latin?  As they line up for their first ever team event, the relay, with hearts pounding as we hold them, do we crown them as future county champions? In the first scrapings of tiny bows on tiny strings, can we hear the rich chamber music of the future; or in frail young voices the glories that will fill the school? Can the young really shape their world so beautifully into art? Can they really be so joyfully at play from when they first tread our boards to their last dance through Shakespeare in a twilit garden? All of these things and more have been done by my Year 8 this year.

The pessimist sees limitations and says no. The optimist imagines possibilities and says why not. Optimism liberates excellence, places no limits on what children may achieve. Mine is an optimistic school. Our children achieve great things.

Optimism and pessimism are things we make. They are habits of thinking.
There is an Eeyore and a Tigger in us all.
If you think good things last and bad things come and go, your Tigger self is thinking.
But if you think good things pass but bad things last, your Eeyore self’s at work.
If you think good things spread over everything like rainbows and bad things are just spot sof rain, you are in Tigger mode.
But if bad things cloud your world and good things cannot shine through, that’s Eeyore-ish.
If good things mean you are good but bad events don’t make you bad, you are speaking Tiggerish.
But if you think good things just happen but bad things mean you are a bad person, it is Eeyore-ish you are speaking.
Tiggerish and Eeyore-ish – two different languages we learn to speak about what happens. See if you can tell which language this child is speaking after a challenging lesson:
Maths was tricky today but it was hot and running around outside at break tired me out. I won’t be so tired tomorrow and I kept trying and I learned how to do it. I can do Maths. I am good at stuff. Tiggerish or Eeeyore-ish?
And now the same child, with the same experience:
I was bad at Maths today. It was only luck that I got it right in the end. I probably won’t tomorrow. Maths is always hard. I am no good at it and that won’t change. There’s no point in trying. I am no good at things.
Faced with adversity, Eeyore’s balloon deflates. Tigger bounces back.
Tigger’s is the voice of hope in our heads, Eeyore’s the voice of despair. And we can choose which language to use about our experience. We can learn the grammar of hope. And we can teach it. Lesson by lesson, challenge by challenge, we can teach our children the habit of hopefulness.
Scientists of hope tell us the very young ‘are extremely optimistic… For them, good events are going to last forever, are going to help in all ways, and are the child's doing. Bad events just happen along, melt away quickly, and are someone else's fault. Even a depressed child's scores on tests of optimism look like those of the average happy adult.’1

1Seligman, Learned Optimism

We can learn much from the young. If ever I feel low, I visit my tribe of Tiggers, full of bounce and cuddles. Visitors constantly admire their uninhibited enthusiasm for learning, their unabashed affection and joy. They are full of ‘here we go round the mulberry bush’.

And of course, at times, they are also bears of little brain.
Pooh Bear might well have thought that to work out volume in Maths,
You times the length and the width and the upth
Or, after a Year 4 trip to London, that they’d been to hear the London Philharmonic Sympathy Orchestra
An Eeyore might have warned, of swine ‘flu in a University town:
It is important to control your sneezes in case an academic breaks out.
Discussing who next year’s teacher might be, one child said it couldn’t be Mrs McHardy because she's pregnant. ‘Yes’, replied another, ‘ she'll be on eternity leave.’
When told by his teacher that he was being immature, an Eeyore asked later in the day…. am I still being in manure?
In Maths it was certainly a Tigger who answered, ‘What's a sequence?’ with,
‘Oooh it's a little shiny round thing that sparkles’
When a teacher has a sore back but says she is managing with painkillers, a Tigger replies,
‘Yes, painkillers make you seductive, Miss .....Wait a minute....do I mean sedated?’
I hope so.
And it is not only children who can be bears of little brain. For our pensioners’ Christmas Party, the Head of the Junior Department sent out a request for wrapped Christmas gifts asking for them to be labelled with a W for a woman and an M for a man. A rudimentary grasp of the alphabet reveals the problem. An M is a W upside down and vice versa, and presents don’t know which way up they are. To this day, we don’t know whether there is a lovely old gentleman somewhere wandering around in a fleecy nightie.

Pessimism has its uses. It protects us from recklessness. We could certainly have done with more Eeyores and fewer Tiggers in the boardrooms of our banks.
There is now a pandemic of pessimism about swine ‘flu and it may yet prove justified. But we should bear in mind that optimists on average live 20% longer than pessimists. Pessimism reduces life expectancy far more than any ‘flu and we must not catch it. And above all we must not be infected by pessimism about our children.

A startling picture of the changing nature of childhood emerged from the revisions in the new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Here are some of the words that will no longer appear, that children apparently no longer need to know:
bishop, buttercup, bluebell and brook, conker and carol, gooseberry, holly, heron, kingfisher, lark, liquorice, mistletoe, marzipan, poppy, saint, walnut and willow, weasel and wren
Instead we will have:
allergic, blog, bullet point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, conflict, database, drought, endangered, MP3, voicemail, vandalism
The world of childhood is different and it is easy to be nostalgic for an imagined golden age. But nostalgia is an early symptom of the Eeeyore virus.
The world of childhood is more complex, perhaps more challenging, certainly more bewildering to adults. But growing up has never been all ‘here we go round the mulberry bush’.
Hope may come to the very young as leaves come to the trees but we cannot be natural born Tiggers forever. As we grow we discover, like Galileo, that the universe does not revolve around us. With the dawning of self-awareness, we see faults in ourselves that were previously hidden. With increased awareness of our world, we become more conscious of hazards and difficulties.
Talk to the young and you will find them much more aware, more concerned for their world than ever we were. That is wonderful, and it can be a problem. This is the post tsunami generation. Bombarded by images of destruction, news of inhumanity, tales of the planet’s decline, innocent ignorance is not an option. Moving forward in our understanding, we may move backwards in our hope.
The last academic year began for some children in apocalyptic dread. The headlines read ‘research could bring about the end of the world’ and ‘bid to stop CERN atom smasher from 'destroying the world'. Some children were genuinely very worried on the morning of September 10th.
‘No need to worry’, said one child drily. ‘We’ve already been sucked into a black hole and we’re now in a parallel reality.’
We survived, but in such a world, it is no wonder that our growing Tiggers may sometimes lose their bounce. But for all this, their world is not worse than mine was as a child.

Taffy Evans was the first XV rugby coach at my school. Taffy also taught maths and, as was not uncommon then, made expert use of chalk and text books, not for teaching but for throwing at anyone who asked questions. And if you found yourself lying wounded on the rugby pitch and in need of kindness, Taffy would stand over you and say, ‘It’s only pain, boy’ to which I never found the answer.

Or perhaps I did.

This year, as I was watching the children perform The Pirates of Penzance, one lovely child stepped forward to sing a solo. She was looking very anxious. Then, through the glare of the lights she saw me looking up at her. For a moment the world paused, as it sometime does - and something crossed the space between us – then a most beautiful smile came across her face and she sang - wonderfully.
In Taffy Evans’s world, you did not transmit hope. In the world of my school, we do, and there are many thousands of such moments in the life of my school each year, thanks to my wonderful staff. There are many things which distinguish this school and there is one which sets it apart. It is that in all we do, we put the child first and always. Always the child. This is our creed. And it comes from having the deepest faith in children.

We are told that childhood has become toxic, in our broken society, and we know that there is a major decline in children’s mental health. If we put children first and always, we will help them. Instead, our society blames them.

When adults were asked if today’s children had a stronger sense of moral values than in the past, only 7% said yes. 66% said it was not as strong. Yet, when our Reception year recently went to look at their new class, their Year 1 friends spontaneously took each child by the hand and showed them around. And what of the natural kindness of our Year 7 caring for the little ones at their little sports day, giving them hope, or the extraordinary gentleness when next year’s Year 8 picnicked with their new young buddies? Witness the everyday kindnesses of our children. How dare we deride the young?

When asked whether today’s children had a stronger sense of community than in the past, only 5% of adults said stronger. 69% said not as strong. Yet look at the work of our children’s committees in our achievements list. Visit the wood they planted, talk to the pensioners whose parties our children so movingly arranged, look at the causes our children and their parents have chosen to support.

It angers me, for my children and for all children that there can be a pandemic of such reckless pessimism – such a catastrophic failure to invest hope in our children, to tell them that we believe they can make a difference.

Past pupils from my school will be Head Boys and Head Girls at several schools next year, not to mention Prefects and Heads of House throughout the land. That is an extraordinary achievement but it is not a surprise. Our children learn that they can make a difference.
Dear Thommy Purbrook was one such child. Some of my children still remember the monologue she created, of Winnie the Pooh excitedly playing pooh sticks, that enchanted our little ones and won her a Drama scholarship to her senior school. She was Head of House there when, on a school trip just before Christmas, she contracted meningitis and died. It may seem strange that I write of hope in honour of Thommy’s memory – except to those who knew and loved this life force of a child. As I said in my address at her funeral, be we young or old, all that any of us can hope to do in a life, however long, is to leave the world better than we found it, love and be loved. In a life all too short, Thommy did these things, in abundance.

Sometimes our hope faces the most difficult of tests. When I speak of optimism I do not mean that we should be blind to life’s difficulties. I mean that we must face them and support each other with unyielding hope.

The oldest man in the world is now an Englishman. Henry Allingham, now 113 has lived in three centuries. Many of my children may live in three centuries themselves.
Henry was 13 when, 100 years ago, Louis Bleriot was the first to fly the channel. Did the young Henry imagine then that he would see a man walk on the moon?
Did he dream that one day he would be able to carry a world of music in his pocket, see the world before him on a screen, hold in his palm all the information in the world?
Did he imagine that one man imprisoned for 27 years would set the world free from apartheid?
Did he think he would live to see a black man killed for daring to dream aloud that all men are equal, and another made president of the USA?
Our children will one day take as ordinary, things now beyond our believing.
Let them be good things. The world is changed for the good by lives lived with compassion and care.
And there are cures to be found, species to be discovered, songs to be written, oceans and forests to be saved. Nature’s codes are there to be broken, as are the chains of poverty.
Can they do these things? With unyielding hope I say, yes they can. 

Life is so beautiful.
Set your sights over the rainbow and if you are ever in doubt, remember the words of Helen Keller
No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.
Or say to yourself the words of Robert Kennedy - a man filled with hope, whose life was so tragically cut short:
Some men see things as they are and say, why?
I dream things that never were and say, why not?

Kevin Jones