Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  “I was saying — I was saying I almost broke down and cried before the child. I turned away, and there she was running up to me and telling me that her daddy was a funny, funny man, and when he got started on one of his real funny stories, she knew the clock would go around and around until at least a whole hour was gone. Then she told me how her father knows more songs to play on his guitar than anyone she’s met, and how he makes faces at her, and she makes faces back. By that time I’d forgotten everything sad I’d heard. The child is so full of life that she makes you want to take her aside and ask her how she does it, become so charming and vivacious. I believe some children are born that way, and their parents have a godsend when they get such a child. I just cannot imagine Sally’s mother or father becoming too sad, not with a girl like her around. She’s like a soldier. She stands guard over people so they don’t sink too low, so they keep their morale as high as possible. And she is not a mixed-up little girl. She’s not constantly worrying over something. I’ve seen children worry about their parents and worry about the entire neighborhood they live in. They may also try to cheer their parents up, but they never do — because they’re not very cheerful themselves. With a child like Sally — she’s not the only child I know who’s so sensitive and thoughtful — the good humor in her soul, the lighthearted quality she has, simply comes across and lifts up a person’s spirits.

  “Don’t ask me where she gets those qualities. I told you I thought one either has them or doesn’t. I think children are born different. Some are going to live, and some are going to die. I believe that. Some look sickly from the first day, and some look as if they’re ready to leap into a boxing ring and start fighting. I’m no mother, but my sister has had four children, and I’ve been working with children and meeting their mothers and talking with them for twenty years now — so I think I know a little. When I get my new class each year, I look at the boys and girls, and in a few minutes I’ve moved from face to face, and I can almost count the children with spark in them and the ones who have given up. That’s what I’ll catch myself thinking with a child. She’s alive, or she’s given up. Sally will never give up. She’s like her ancestors. They were tough people; they battled their way into those hills, and they’ve managed to stay there despite all the suffering they’ve had to face. I’ve taught all sorts of children, not only children from Appalachia, and I do believe there’s a special sadness some Appalachian children feel — and a special liveliness and strength they have. In a girl like Sally I think I see both of those qualities; she’s very wise, the way a tired and old and disillusioned grandmother can be, but she’s also as sprightly and gay and lovable as the young and vigorous child she certainly is.”

  I was told more, all of it essentially the same thing: Sally is a somewhat extraordinary girl, but then every year there are to be found a few children like her because, in the teacher’s words, “that’s the way the human race is.” Sally herself admires a boy who is not in her room but is in her school and her grade; her reasons for admiring him and considering him special and extraordinary tell a good deal about her: “Tim is always trying to run fast and hit the ball as far as he can. He says he could climb up every mountain in Kentucky if he could only have the time. He says he wants to be a pilot, and then he would fly over the mountains and find the tallest one. He would land the plane in a valley, and he would go climb right to the very top. Then he would go down and help get his grandfather to the top, because his grandfather is very sick, and he says that before he dies he’d like to go up the tallest mountain in Kentucky and sit there and look. Afterwards, he could die happy. I told Tim I’d like to go with them. We could see for miles and miles, in all directions. Tim says here in the city you can’t see anyplace, just a few houses ahead of you, and the streets have big trucks, so you can’t even see across to the other side a lot of the time.”

  She goes on to describe Tim as an active, bright boy and she admires him because he is very much able to manage things in Chicago, but at the same time he has not forgotten the mountains and their importance. And Sally, who can blithely deny being born in those same mountains, how can she so admire Tim for talking so much about Kentucky and its hills and rivers and fields and animals and creeks and hollows and small towns and winding dirt roads and ponds and lakes and flowers and animals and fish and single-track railroad lines and small bridges one can casually walk over — right down the middle and with no fear of traffic? Sally is not in the least worried by the apparent incongruities some fastidious grown-up has noticed and seen fit (had the gall) to mention: “I like to get some of my friends real mad at me. Almost everyone in my room was born in Kentucky or maybe West Virginia, my daddy says, or if they weren’t, they just barely made it to Chicago. My mother says a lot of people from the mountains have been here for a long time, so they could have been born in Chicago, a lot of the kids in my room, but their mothers usually have gone home to be with their families when they found out they were going to have a baby. In my room most of the kids admit they were born in Kentucky. No one wants to be born in Chicago. This is no city to be born in! So, I go and say I was born here, and they all laugh and say you never can tell what Sally will come up with.”

  She can actually go back and forth about Chicago: the city is awful, noisy, too big, or the city is full of secrets and mysteries and nice, nice people. There is her schoolteacher; there is her best girl friend; there is Tim; there is the janitor, who is kin of hers, and is very much taken with Sally. “I guess I haven’t made up my mind,” Sally says, speaking about Chicago and Appalachia and urban living and the rural life and her future: “Sometimes I think one way, and sometimes the other. Sometimes I think I’d like to live in a new apartment building right here in this city, on the top floor; other times I want to be back with my uncle and grandmother in Kentucky. I know my daddy’s heart is there; he says so. I know the same is true of my mother — she stays here because we all have to stay here, she says. And she doesn’t agree that we should go back home to Kentucky all the time. My mother says if she was going to have another baby, she’d be glad to go into a hospital right here. When my daddy worked in the mines they had money, so we were all born in the hospital, and my mother had a doctor when she needed one. But after he got laid off they didn’t have any money at all, and my mother lost two babies soon after they got born.”

  For Sally, life goes like that: one measures advantages and disadvantages; one sees the good and the bad; one doesn’t quite know; one tries hard to find and then emphasize the enjoyable and amusing side of life; one does what a person can to keep going, to be animated and of a sunny disposition; and all in all one manages, even at ten, to inspire in young friends and older parents or teachers a certain “gladness” about life. That is the word Sally’s mother uses to describe her child’s influence upon her particular world: “The child gives us a little gladness when we sorely need it.” The mother said that and moved her long, thin, bony fingers toward the child; quickly the fingers worked their way up the child’s short arm and reached her shoulder and clasped it; then the child rocked a little, in response to her mother’s pressure to do just that; and the child smiled, obviously delighted to be having such a good, close time. And the mother smiled, too.

  Those Places

  They Call Schools

  People like me visit a large number of schools, talk with the principals and assistant principals and teachers and children, then leave and soon have our say: this school had some interesting things going inside it; that one was awful; the children over here are learning practically nothing; the children over there may be picking some things up in the classroom, but the price — psychological, emotional, spiritual if you will — they pay for the achievements is much too high.

  Meanwhile, the children keep on going to school. Sometimes we learn what they think: their poems or compositions are published; their words, spoken under a particular set of circumstances are reported. Their “attitudes” are elicited and are analyzed and are declared
to be statistically significant so far as one or another “variable” goes, and are then summarized and written up and discussed. For all the effort that goes into those studies, and for all we find out from them, I am not sure we don’t miss a lot, miss a lot that we want to know and need to know. I realize from my own work how much I miss — how the drawings I ask children to do, because I have in mind certain things, often disappoint me, simply because a few moments earlier or later I hear something or see something that reminds me once again how ambiguous and inconsistent and contradictory and ironic and frustratingly, delightfully unpredictable the human mind can be. So, I have to place those drawings and paintings alongside other “data”: the observations I’ve made of the way children play, the talk I come upon, the things that are done (or indeed not done) in the natural course of a child’s life — a part of which, it happens, I’m going around to witness.

  Yet, I also have to give those drawings or the words I hear spoken an authority all their own, not subject to all the qualifications and interpretations and explanations and translations that in this age have made any statement, however clear-cut, direct, and to the point, something to be deciphered only by a certified oracle. I think one of the children I am soon to quote put the matter very well when he took me to task this way: “I don’t know if I meant anything — except what I said. I listened to what you asked, and then I thought to myself that he wants a straight answer, so I’ll give it to him, and then I thought of what I thought, and then I tried to tell you.”

  Perhaps at this point I had best simply describe what I did and when — the “method of research.” I selected for study schools in thirteen cities, located in every section of this country: the Atlantic seaboard, the Midwest, the upper South, the far West. The cities (large, medium-sized, or small) were chosen because they have, or claim to have, schools which are making some headway, some substantial progress with — well, the boys and girls are called any number of names: “ghetto children,” or “culturally disadvantaged children,” or “poor achievers,” and many other euphemisms. The point was not to document once again how awful it can be in school for ghetto children, or how frustrated and finally enraged many of our teachers have become. Rather, I hoped to discover what hope there is, and to compare one kind of effort against another, and thereby see which educational achievements seem to offer most promise for children, for teachers, for principals.

  So, I traveled the country, and I took the schools at their word, letting their claims determine which ones I studied. If a school declared or even tentatively suggested that it was doing something, then I asked if I could come and see and listen and learn what I could about what can be done to make better students out of apathetic or distrustful or merely indifferent or dazed ghetto children; about what changes have to take place — academic, institutional, psychological — if children are to learn more than they have and remember more of what they learn; about how those changes, when made, actually affect children, and others, too — since teachers and administrators may also change, may also feel themselves on the one hand more useful, or perhaps on the other disappointed or even betrayed, to use a word not at all out of keeping with the depth of feeling I eventually encountered. Throughout, I hoped to learn whether something was actually happening in schools said to be places of improvement, of reform and uplift. I looked at everything in the school that might make teachers teach better and expect more of their pupils, or make children feel better about themselves, their studies, their destiny. I tried to take into account for each school its past history; its present policies; its architecture; its facilities; its curriculum; its personnel and their background, their training, their reasons for being there and not elsewhere; and most intangible but very real, its “tone” — a product, immediately, of a particular principal and set of teachers and group of children, and even the climate of opinion that characterizes a given region, a state, a city, a neighborhood, then a street, a school, a classroom, eventually emerging in a teacher who teaches in a certain way, and across the room, a child who responds to it all in a certain way.

  Though I interviewed a wide range of children — black and white, from rich and middle-class and poor homes — I was chiefly interested, first, in the educational difficulties that face poor children (and their teachers), and, second, in progress made, however minute, rather than yet another examination of how bad things are. In three cities the schools were clearly in ghettos, were almost totally made up of black children, though in each instance the faculties contained both white and black teachers. In five cities a bussing program was in operation — bringing black children, and even on occasion, white children from relatively poor districts to schools set in the middle of well-to-do neighborhoods. In the remaining five cases, whether by deliberate design (districting and redistricting) or by fate (mixed neighborhoods or adjacent ones) children of both races and varied “socioeconomic levels” studied side by side.

  I found among teachers three consistent sets of attitudes and expectations; and I found among children three consistent views of themselves, their position in the world, their future. Moreover, in most instances, what the teachers predicted and deemed possible for the children about what life in the long run would bring them, about what schooling meant and will mean to them, had come true. The children had already, even at, say, six or seven, acceded to their teachers’ judgments about themselves, about what would happen to them, sooner or later.

  Ghetto Schools

  East Park

  Two separate municipalities combine to form this small northeastern community of twenty-four thousand. Before 1966 each ran its own elementary and junior high schools, although one high school served them both. The smaller of the two towns integrated early and easily: in 1948 all kindergarten through fifth grade pupils were assigned to one elementary schooland all sixth through eighth grade pupils were assigned to one “middle” school. The larger town could not find so simple a solution. Since it had only one middle school, integration was guaranteed on that level; but the four elementary schools served neighborhoods of varying racial makeup, and the townspeople were reluctant to bus children to relieve racial imbalance. In 1966 the two municipalities decided to put all students under the control of a single, elected board. The board immediately faced the touchy problem of bussing children, and despite opposition, favored bussing. Today fifty-one hundred students attend the town’s schools; nine percent are black. There are four elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school. Elementary pupils are bussed daily to assure balanced enrollments.

  Sometimes true wisdom takes the form of doubt, confusion, uncertainty. East Park’s superintendent of schools is a young, vigorous, exceptionally well-educated man who has the intelligence to speak clearly and directly, without resort to the jargon that all too many schools of education have borrowed from the social sciences and pressed upon thousands of students. I did not have to ask many questions before he was able — pointedly and exactly — to state the purposes of this study: “You want to know what our teachers want for our children, what they have in mind as possible and probable when they enter the classroom and look at those children, mostly white and well-to-do, but some black and far from well-to-do. We’ve been wondering that, too. We’ve been wondering whether something doesn’t happen almost right off between the teacher and the children. It’s hard to put what I mean in words. I guess you have to talk about an ‘atmosphere’ or a ‘climate,’ or, if you’re an experimental psychologist, perhaps you could say that ‘cues’ are given back and forth. The teacher comes in and says something or does something, or doesn’t say something or doesn’t do something — and pretty soon the children have her sized up: what she likes and dislikes; what she thinks about all sorts of things; what she thinks her job is like; how she expects them to behave and learn and get along together in the classroom. And the teacher — she’s doing her own sizing up: this kid over here said something ‘bright,’ and that one over there looks ‘dumb’ or ‘stupi
d,’ and it’ll be a long, hard struggle with some of ‘those’ over there, and this group right here, near the window, they all seem eager and smart and ready to learn. In a month, maybe a week, and I sometimes think in a day or two, the children and their teachers have it all decided about each other — who’s who and what’s what and how the whole year will go. It’s all frightening, and we don’t like to think about what it all means.”

  Yet, in fact, he was thinking about what “it all means.” In his town black and white children have gone to school with one another for years, but the academic and social problems persist, and he had no desire to let the school system he headed relax and enjoy a certain national distinction that had come its way. In his words: “We moved the bodies together years ago, and we thought that would solve our problems; then we started worrying about the curriculum, and we thought some changes in that would solve the problem. Now we realize that we have to go way back to the most fundamental thing in all education: the teacher. If he or she can’t teach certain children, then no matter what else we have here in this town — well, it’s just not enough.”