HELPING CHILDREN BECOME SELF-RELIANT

A conversation with my good friend John Davidge about the education of his children got me thinking about a subject that was on my mind every day of my working life but can now be retired to the back recesses of my brain. John described for me a new program designed to bring up test scores in the New York City schools. As I understand it, “Fair Funding” is supposed to increase by as much as fifty percent the money given to schools with large numbers of people living below the poverty level and to schools with racial and ethnic majority populations. People who live in middle-income communities are being reassured that funding for their schools won’t be cut. No assurances are given that classes won’t become larger, and there is no promise that the city’s education department won’t hold funding at current levels for subsequent years. It doesn’t take middle school math to know that more money is needed each year just to keep up with inflation and that the money has to come from somewhere.

All the President’s men and women who were assigned the task of fixing America’s schools put their heads together and came up with “No Child Left Behind,” but the plan has not produced a great leap forward. Signs are clear that many children continue to fail to meet minimum standards. The Bush plan calls for cutting funding and ultimately shutting down schools that fail to meet standards. Presumably parents will find a way to get their kids from neighborhoods with failing schools to neighborhoods where kids’ test scores are higher. Now Mayor Bloomberg is going to fix the problem in his city by throwing money at lowest performing schools.

Neither the Bush plan nor the Bloomberg project will help many people, and those programs will likely hurt many families. So what would I do to fix schools if I were president of the country or mayor of a city? I would begin with what I know works. Reading and writing are essential skills. Although most of us don’t regularly do more with numbers than turn from page one to page thirteen in our newspapers, I agree that math skills also are essential. Then it’s reading, writing, and arithmetic. That has a familiar ring to it, so I guess I agree that not much has changed in terms of what children should be expected to learn in school.

I would put one thing ahead of reading and writing and arithmetic. As a matter of fact, I suggest teachers begin each lesson-planning session by reminding themselves that this one thing is more important than all the others. I would have as a goal in my city and in my country that every child will become self-reliant. All the other things will follow naturally and logically for the child who is growing toward self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Of course, some people are smarter and more capable than others; so you ask what should be done to or for those children who are naturally less self-reliant than others, who grow toward self-reliance more slowly. While we educators don’t talk much about differences in cognitive abilities, and we never ever mention I.Q. in any context, it is true none-the-less that some people have greater cognitive abilities than others. Thank goodness degrees of self-reliance don’t depend on brain power. Will power has more to do with self-reliance than brain power.


Where do we begin? Obviously, the program must start at home. We all know that a new-born infant is utterly dependent. Absolutely everything must be done for a baby for quite a long time after birth. The time comes when the little person begins to reach out to the world, to negotiate with other members of the family and caregivers. That is as it should be and as it always has been with us humans. We modern human animals, individually and as a species, are the result of many generations of evolution. Through the natural process of evolution over millions of years, Individuals who were links in the chain of individuals becoming our species survived and reproduced if they were sufficiently self-reliant. If they didn’t become self-reliant early in life, they couldn’t survive long enough to reproduce. Reading, writing, and arithmetic skills came much later, and even without those skills an individual can grow up and reproduce. In an easier, modern world we now have people living and reproducing, expanding the human population, even though they lack the skills considered essential for productive, satisfactory life experience. We have an obvious problem.

Self-reliance is no longer a prerequisite for growing to sexual maturity. I am tempted at this point to make crude, totally inappropriate remarks on the subject; but that wouldn’t help me make the point that we are obviously failing in our education programs to produce people who are first of all self-reliant. As a species we have developed in ways that make it possible for a person to live quite comfortably without having to do very much for himself. As a matter of fact, having other people in service to meet one’s needs is thought to be a mark of success, a worthy goal. I am an old man with old friends. Apparently, the most successful of us are those who can retire and do nothing.

Common sense dictates the activities for families who want their children to be self-reliant. Toilet training happens. Things get messy and uncomfortable for everybody if it doesn’t. Knowing when and how to take care of that basic need fits naturally into the education of the child in the home. Some parents make it harder than it has to be, but it finally gets done; and the child becomes able to take care of the whole process all by himself with absolutely no help from anybody. The learning curve in developing complete self-reliance in feeding varies from child to child and can also be a bit messy, but that gets done as well. Finally, by the time a child is presented to the school, he should be able to do all kinds of things for himself. If his parents have been overly indulgent, he may expect the school to indulge him. If she has learned at home to be self-directing, she will fit easily into a school routine. If not, the school’s first task will be to address the child's lack of self-reliance. What’s the point of going on to pre-reading if the child doesn’t know how to sit quietly by himself with a book?

In this short essay I won’t offer other specific suggestions about how to develop self-reliance in a child. I offer instead a reading list for kindergarten through grade twelve. Dear reader, don’t misunderstand and think I am doing a Samuel Johnson “Eat the Baby” paper. I’m absolutely serious. The reading list is one I am giving serious thought to making. I admit that I began putting the list together while thinking and trying to dodge cars as I was riding my bicycle around San Diego. The bicycle isn't one of those ubiquitous pedicabs that have proliferated all around San Diego. I was doing my own peddling. I’ve decided that I will suggest only the first couple of books in the list. I want to hear from readers of the BLOG. Please make suggestions about what you think should be the required book at each (or any) grade level. Remember that the object of reading the book is to promote self-reliance.

I am going to be in Europe for a couple of months may not do much blogging until the middle of October. When I'm back home again, I'll go through the suggestions I receive and post a reading list on this BLOG. Please include suggestions for books to be read by children as they go from Kindergarten through grade twelve.

Send your suggestions to my e-mail address: jerralmiles@mac.com

The couple of books I mention come out of my own experience as parent and teacher, and they are stories that I remember from my own childhood.



KINDERGARTEN

“The Little Red Hen,” a nursery tale

I particularly like the version by Helen Dean Fish with pictures by Katharine R. Bernard published in the Better Homes and Gardens Story Book, Meredith Publishing Company, 1958. There are many good versions of this classic nursery tale, but I especially like this one because it inserts drawings of the characters and items for the child to name as he “reads” along even before he can read words. The key bit of dialogue is, “And the little red hen said, “’Then I must go and do it myself.’”

FIRST GRADE

“The Little Engine That Could,” by Watty Piper

The Little Engine that Could” was published in 1954 by Platt and Munk, with illustrations by George and Doris Hauman.
There are several versions of this newer, American tale about a long train that must be pulled over a mountain, but I prefer the Platt and Munk book. Anthropomorphically the engines can speak, and one after another of the larger engines is asked to help; and they all say they can’t pull the train over the hill and won’t try. At last the only one left to ask is a little switch engine, and the little engine says, “I think I can.” Because a generation of older Americans remember actually seeing and hearing trains pulled by steam engines, the sound of the little engine chugging, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can,” is unforgettable.

Children today like the story, and their interest peaks when the grade is steepest near the top and the little engine slows down but keeps saying, “I...think...I...can, I...think...I...can, I...think...I...can,” until it gets bravely to the top and goes down the other side, “I thought I could, I thought I could, I thought I could.”

To think of hard things and say, "I can't" is sure to mean "Nothing done." To refuse to be daunted and insist on saying, "I think I can," is to make sure of being able to say triumphantly by and by, "I thought I could, I thought I could."