The Meaning of Long

Sorry for the long silence.

Actually it’s ‘long’ about which I want to ruminate in this post. I realise that I’ve become fascinated by all those projects which track people over a long period of time. Nowadays, many of them are film-based; the much-copied 7-Up series, which is following a group of children from the age of 7 starting in 1964 (the ‘children’ are now in their early 50s) is the benchmark. The whole series so far, up to and including 49 Up, is available on DVD, and watching them back-to-back, rather than with a 7-year gap, is an engrossing and moving experience. Give it someone you love and then borrow it from them, or watch it with them (56 Up is expected in late 2011 or early 2012). Beware imitations – from the brief extracts I’ve seen, the BBC’s Child of Our Time, for example, doesn’t come close. Channel 4 has been running an interesting variation focusing on a group of children with special needs, who it has followed for 10 years – Born to Be Different is a dignified and, again, very moving series lacking the voyeuristic tendencies of so much of that Channel’s recent output (How To Look Good Naked [ans: wear some clothes], Embarrassing Bodies etc etc ad nauseam).

When I was at JRCT we funded something called HighScope, founded by Dr David Weikart who, Google tells me, has since been called to higher service. He was a very engaging and challenging fellow, as I recall, but the point of mentioning him here is that in 1962 he set up something called the Perry Preschool Project which, as his New York Times obituary (2003) states -

…took 123 low-income 3- and 4-year-olds and placed 58 in a preschool with highly trained, well-paid teachers who made weekly visits to parents. The rest received no extra attention. He [Weikart] then followed the children through life, regularly checking on them…The results have been consistently impressive. The former preschoolers were more likely to own homes and earn more than $2,000 a month, less likely to receive welfare or be arrested for crimes. Mothers were more often married… He found that $15,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars was spent on each child, while the savings to schools, welfare, prisons and potential crime victims exceeded $145,000. These results were duplicated in studies in North Carolina and Chicago, and the findings became a major element in the national discussion about Head Start...

Weikart studied these children for 40 years, and the learning has informed the nature of pre-school provision in the US and the UK. But all this is by way of background. I’ve been moved to put finger to key on this subject now having just read an amazing article in The Atlantic (available on line here ) which describes what has emerged from a 72-year (sic) study of 268 men who entered Harvard in the late 1930s. I cannot begin to summarise it; it is a most extraordinary study (official name: the Harvard Study of Adult Development; unofficially known as the Grant Study, after its founder, W.T.Grant), and the person who has been responsible for it for the past 42 years is himself a fascinating person. The learning, the understanding about what makes us tick, the insight into the important questions, about how to live, and - the title of the article - 'what makes us happy?',is phenomenal.

All of which presents a real challenge to the foundation world, with its continued obsession with three year funding. Weikart was constantly having to pursue new sources of funding for his work (which continues today – see here). As the Atlantic article makes clear, funding was also an issue for the Grant Study:

Most longitudinal studies die on the vine because funders expect results quickly. W. T. Grant was no exception. He held on for about a decade—allowing the staff to keep sending detailed annual questionnaires to the men, hold regular case conferences, and publish a flurry of papers and several books—before he stopped sending checks. By the late 1940s, the Rockefeller Foundation took an interest, funding a research anthropologist named Margaret Lantis, who visited every man she could track down (which was all but a few). But by the mid-1950s, the study was on life support.

We urgently need new models of foundation funding which provide a degree of assurance and encouragement for those embarked on long-term exercises, alongside the necessary mechanisms for accountability. If, despite market exigencies etc, endowed trusts continue to exist let some of them at least have the courage of their longevity – I long to see the announcement of the first 30 year grant… Meanwhile, if you read nothing else this week, do have a look at the Atlantic article. My guess is that at some point the good old Guardian will provide us with a shortened version, but you, being part of the small cultural elite which has the good taste to follow this blog, will surely want to read the whole thing (and - seriously - tell your friends; they will thank you for it).