Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  “Me?” said another boy. “Me, I’m going to get myself some kind of a deal just as soon as I can. I don’t want to be like my dad. You know what his trouble is? He thinks if you sit back and try to be a good guy, that it’ll pay off one day. That’s what’s wrong with him. The other day he said I should be a doctor, like the guy who gave him medicine in the hospital, and he was black. That’s right, there are some, like the teacher says, doctors and lawyers and all that. But that’s just a few, and around here there aren’t many who can go and become someone like that. You have to have someone backing you, yes sir. The teacher says if you just read and like that, you’ll get ahead, but my dad says you can read every book there is, and they’ll still step on you and keep you out if they can. I’d like to read, though, I would. I’d like to read faster than anyone, and I hope someday I will. And I hope I can have a car, and someone could drive it for me, and I’d be sitting back there and reading! Boy, would that be a deal! A big Cadillac, and me in the back seat with a book!”

  His friend is much less dramatic: “The way I see it, there’s not much you can do in school but try to get through it, and when you do, hope for the best so far as a job goes. I’d like to have one, a job, when I get through with school, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to — to get one. So, I’m just trying to learn all I can here, yes sir, I am. The teacher, once she said she knew how we felt, that it was hard for us people. And we all said — we all said amen to that. Yes, we did. Then she said it was too bad the school and the buildings around here weren’t as nice as in other places, and we said amen to that, too.” A little later he drew “the school and the buildings around here.” Some buildings were crossed out with a brown X, and the sky was brown rather than blue.

  Vitality and Violence, Life and Death

  If we would only stop and think, we would realize that children are the world’s great skeptics. More than anything else they are seekers. What do they seek? When do they start seeking? And why should their quest be of concern to us as citizens, rather than parents? To answer questions like that we have to break down the separations we usually make between the home and the neighborhood, between the nursery and the marketplace, between the living room and the courthouse or voting booth. Each child of two or three is already well on his way to becoming a fascinating and unique mixture of follower and leader, fighter and peacemaker, activist, negotiator, arbitrator, recluse. It is on streets and alleys, in backyards and playgrounds, that children learn what can properly be called the politics of the classroom. There, we as parents and teachers, and they as future citizens, come to terms with one another more decisively than we may care to realize. “There, children learn to cooperate with one another, to respect one another; or to use and abuse one another. There, children are encouraged to respect older people but feel free to disagree with them as a right, indeed a human obligation; or there, children learn obedience at all costs — fearful obedience, unquestioning obedience. There, children learn to share their intelligence or to exploit it for themselves and themselves alone. They learn to master themselves, or to beat upon the nearest available neighbor.

  In a sense, then, before children even start school they have begun to acquire what philosophers call a “world view,” and what psychologists call an “inner sense” — a sense of themselves as worthwhile or as thoroughly expendable. They have learned that food is around when they want it; or, possibly, that food is simply not to be had. They have learned that the winter brings warm coats and jackets, sleds and toboggans, plenty of blankets and plenty of hot chocolate and hot soup; or they have learned that in winter the rats do go in hiding, but only because the ice and cold of the outside has come inside — to add frostbite and shivers to the hunger that exists in any season.

  Children learn other things, too. They learn that their parents work, or that they can’t find work. They learn that their mother feels reasonably happy and contented, or that she is really up against it, and afraid from day to day of one or another danger. They learn that their fathers bring home no money, or barely enough money, or so much money that they don’t know what to do with it all. They learn that their fathers feel like failures or, to some extent, feel successful. They learn that they don’t have a father, or they do have one but he dare not come home if the “welfare lady” is around. They learn, in short, just about everything economists or political scientists talk about.

  I suppose it could be said that children learn both the joys and hazards of existence — and no region or class or race has a monopoly on either joy or hazard. The politically and socially weak often produce desperately ambitious children, as history proves. In contrast, well-to-do parents have more than occasionally tried to figure out why their children lack all ambition and even spirit. In the ghetto small children learn to negotiate their ways through dark, broken-down buildings and incredibly dangerous streets. And in our well-to-do suburban communities parents worry because their children seem confused or bored or unwilling to take on or negotiate anything. It is no great discovery that life is ironic, but it can be a tragedy for parents and for a country when the ironies begin to pile up — and in the wrong direction.

  One day we may realize that, above all, human beings need a purpose. We are born; we live; we die. It is only a moment we are here, and the mystery and ambiguity of life are always about us, ready in a second to confuse and surprise and frighten us. As children grow they start bombarding us with questions, and we nervously try to comply with answers. Often we are made nervous not because the questions are silly, or absurd, or even unanswerable, but because for a second, in a flash, we have been brought up short. Years of lame excuses, sad rationalizations, and whistling in the dark suddenly are ended by a child’s innocent, humiliating curiosity. Why do people kill one another? Why do we live this way and other children that way? Why is it that on television you keep on hearing that people have headaches and stomachaches? And why are they so nervous? What is it, being nervous? Can’t we clean up the smoke in the air, the way we clean up the house? Why is the river so dirty? What would you really like to be doing, Dad? Why do you say one thing outside the house and something else when we’re alone? Is it true, Mother, that we’re in trouble, and the world might get all blown up? Why should they make me cram all those facts inside my head and then keep testing me to see if I know how to take tests? I mean, why don’t they let me think and say what I think? The teacher says it’s so I can get into college someday. She says you have to start early. And when I ask her why, she says so I can be successful. But I want to know why — why be successful if someone can’t think for himself or have his own say.

  So, the questions keep coming at us. There are brief questions that children of four or five share with philosophers of all time. And there are larger questions, asked by ten- or twelve- or fourteen-year-old boys and girls who are trying their hardest to make sense of all sorts of puzzling and often enough senseless conditions. What are we to do in the face of such trouble — trouble for us as American citizens as well as parents? We can always shrug our shoulders and tell our children to hush, to go off and play. And they listen, too. They hear and sense our silence, our annoyance, our resigned indifference. Often enough they do not dispute us for too long. They do as we suggest, as we urge. They leave us and go out to play. And there, on those carefully tended lawns, or in those alleys littered with debris and vermin, they begin to become us. All too often they begin to fight and squabble, hate and retaliate. All too often they stop asking questions and come up with instant, dogmatic answers which they try to force down everyone’s throat. Confronted with something new, different, and challenging, they hunch their shoulders and narrow their eyes. Why should they exert themselves, flex themselves, take a risk, make a dare?

  Yet, America was founded by people who said no to others and yes to themselves, by mothers and fathers who were willing — more than willing, even anxious and determined — to expose their children to danger, to trouble, to exile itself in order that they mig
ht live not more comfortably, but free.

  Eventually we may persuade and even compel our boys and girls to stop asking, stop thinking, stop wondering. But the price is high — on them as human beings and on us as a nation. Simply put, the price is the death of the heart — the title of Elizabeth Bowen’s novel, in which a young girl slowly becomes disenchanted with a comfortable but hypocritical world. Her passions seemed futile to her because she judged others unworthy of them. And, of course, she came to feel herself unworthy, too. We cannot feel good about ourselves if we have learned to shut out or distrust others. And to do that, to live peacefully and respectfully with others, we need a certain kind of moral order, a certain kind of social order and political order. It is, therefore, no step at all from the nursery to a city hall, a state capital, or the halls of Congress. Children live in particular nations, and nations have particular climates of opinion and stand for particular goals.

  A child’s passion for excellence, for justice, can be killed at home, or in a school, or even, in fact, by public officials. By the same token, those passions can be encouraged, nourished, and most important of all, given coherent, visible expression in the daily life of a child’s nation. A child who sees excellence and justice all around him will not need to learn about such virtues. He will know them in the sure, quiet, unostentatious way that reflects a living, continuous kind of knowledge. Our children desperately need that kind of knowledge, that kind of familiarity with excellence and justice.

  All this has to be said before the so-called slum child or ghetto child is singled out for discussion. Children of the ghetto are first children, the particular children who have to learn things no school will ever credit them with learning. If all children learn about the place where they live and what they can reasonably expect of life, ghetto children do so rather precociously.

  How is it done? Are six-year-olds taught the ghetto’s facts of life by their parents? Do elementary schools brief them on how to fend off large, insolent rats, or how to deal with the mosquitoes and flies that enter windows unprotected by screens? Do those children learn in Sunday School about narcotics and prostitution and alcoholism so that when they walk to a nearby store (and pay higher prices for food than the rest of us do) they can recognize, be unafraid of, and maneuver their way around the drunks and pimps and streetwalkers who frequent certain ghetto streets?

  I can vouch for the old-fashioned kind of morality that large numbers of ghetto children are exposed to. Again and again I have wished some of our most conservative citizens could hear the things I hear, see the things I see. I am not now referring to the wretchedness and hunger and squalor, but to the almost desperate (alas, often enough mindless) puritanism to be found among very poor mothers and fathers. We picture them as “loose,” immoral, thoughtless, those parents — as lazy, as spendthrifts. We say they don’t know how to control themselves, work, save, plan for the future, sacrifice today for tomorrow. And yes, so many of them are wayward, have come to be wayward.

  But what about the beginning, the first years in our urban or rural slums? Were all those children born criminals? Were they told to be criminals by their parents? Is there perhaps some lumpenproletariat ideology, some ethic this nation’s Mexican-Americans and Negroes and Indians and Appalachian whites have all conspired to believe in? Do they all tell their children to ignore school, loaf around, violate laws, cause trouble, take part in riots, appear disorderly or sullen or apathetic? Is the “welfare road” (as one ghetto resident describes his fate) chosen cynically and opportunistically by able-bodied men and women who simply don’t want to work?

  I have no universally applicable answers to those questions, but my observations lead me to believe that ghetto children are treated, if anything, more strictly and punitively than their middle-class counterparts. They are shouted at more. They are beaten more. They are trusted less. They are preached at more. They are given more specific and rigid rules to follow — and less leeway in the following. At the age of four or five they often are quiet, all too accepting and accommodating and fearful in the presence of their elders, particularly their mothers. When they first come to school they are ready to be still, to take it on the chin, and indeed be sternly rebuked — whipped, pinched, screamed at — if they dare go astray. Slowly, however, in the words of one teacher I have interviewed — a woman who has worked in a ghetto school for fifteen years — “the whole thing comes apart.”

  What “thing” comes apart? “Well, everything,” she replies, and then spells it all out: “They’re told to obey, obey, obey. Their mothers scream at them all day long, and beat them at the drop of a hat. Not all of them, but a lot. They’re tired, those mothers, tired and desperate. So they suffer and the kids suffer. And the worst of it is that they keep on telling those kids to shape up, be good and all that, and then they’ll get ahead and be rewarded, by God and their country. Imagine that! It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.

  “And finally those kids get the score, you know. They see that this school, it’s a detention center. They see that we don’t care, that we’ve given up caring. All we want is silence, quiet, just like their mothers; that’s all they want, a moment’s peace. So, we tell them to ‘mind their manners,’ and they get the point. They know we’re running a ‘holding operation’ here, a delay, a period of time between their childhood and their grown-up years which, let me tell you, come when they’re about ten or twelve, when they start doing what they’ve learned about at six or seven: how to live in the ghetto and stay alive.

  “So, that’s about the story. They ‘get wise,’ as they put it. Oh, I’ve heard them say it, exactly those words, a million times these past years. They realize that every word they’ve heard preached at them is silly, foolish, not to the point. They realize that their mothers shout the American dream at them but are themselves, in their very lives, living proof of some terrible nightmare. They realize ‘it’s no use,’ as we hear them say. And so they get stubborn and difficult and ‘recalcitrant,’ we call it. And they wait and wait and wait until the streets claim them, and the courts and the jails and the insane asylums and the hospitals, and pretty soon, death. But, you know, by that time, they’ve been dead a long time — deep inside.”

  Her “deep inside” is in the heart, the soul. And we who live, and die only late in life never quite can “understand.” We keep on wondering why, for God’s sake, they “behave” like that. But can the living ever understand the dead?

  Vitality in Ghetto Children

  When I read about ghetto children in psychiatric journals and educational reviews — not to mention the public press — I do not recognize the boys and girls I meet and observe every day. From the psychiatric quarter I hear about the mental illness that plagues the poor (though none of us has noticed psychiatrists — or any other kind of doctors — rushing in large numbers to practice in Harlem, Watts, or Chicago’s South Side). I read about how apathetic or unruly ghetto children are: the “culturally disadvantaged,” the blacks and Puerto Ricans, the surly, suspicious, “deprived” whites who come from Appalachia to northern cities, or the older southern immigrants who still live in the slums. One report mentions the “poor impulse controls” of lower-class black children; another, the “personality defects” of slum boys who, at five or six, are destined to be “sociopaths,” delinquents, or worse. The picture is bleak: untended or brutalized children threaten teachers, assault one another, violate school regulations or city ordinances, and in general show themselves bound for a life of crime, indolence, or madness.

  Educators confirm what their brother social scientists have noted: ghetto children do not take to school; they are nasty — or plain lazy. I wish they at least were frankly described that way. Instead one has to wrestle with the impossible jargon of educational psychologists who talk about “motivational deficits” or “lowered achievement goals” or “self-esteem impairment.” We are told that slum schools must be “enriched” with programs to suit children who live in a vast cultural w
asteland. Machines, books, audiovisual equipment, special “curricula,” smaller classes, trips to museums, contacts with suburban children, with trees and hillsides — the ghetto child needs all of that and more. He needs personal “guidance.” He could benefit from knowing a VISTA volunteer or a college student who wants to be a tutor or a housewife from the other side of town who wants to give poor children the things her own children take for granted.

  Though some of those assertions are obviously correct, their cumulative implication is misleading and unfair. It is about time the lives of ghetto children were seen as something more than a tangle of psychopathology and flawed performances in school. Children in the ghetto do need help, but not the kind that stems from an endless, condescending recital of their troubles and failures — and often ignores or caricatures the strength, intelligence, and considerable ingenuity they do possess.

  As I have already indicated, for a long time I, too, looked only for the harm inflicted on the boys and girls who grow up on the wrong side of the tracks. I found plenty to point to. Yet, while I was busy documenting such conditions I failed to see the other side of the picture. Determined to record every bit of pathology I could find, I failed to ask myself what makes for survival in the poor; indeed, sometimes for more than that — for a resourcefulness and vitality that some of us in the therapy-prone suburbs might at least want to ponder, if not envy.