Teachers and Children

One of my favorite old-time cartoons was a Merrie Melodies from Warner Brothers titled "I Love to Singa". In it a stuffy, pompous old musician owl and his wife witness their four little owlets hatch, one at a time. The first, already dressed for a concert, immediately starts to sing opera. The second hatches already holding a violin and bow and begins to play with virtuosity. The third has a flute and plays a classical tune on it, right out of the shell. All of this pleases ole papa owl, who expects his children to be perfect from birth. Then the last little owl hatches and starts singing jazz, which infuriates daddy owl, who hates jazz. And the story goes on from there (I don't want to give away the ending in case you ever see it).

Aside from the great animation, endearing characters and funny moments, this cartoon had another impact on me. It illustrated how children are typecast and judged from early in their lives according to their perceived potentials for success in the eyes of adults. And the two main categories of adults that yield the power to either help or hinder children in their development are parents and schoolteachers. As a child, a human being must take life as it comes and, unlike the baby owls in the cartoon, doesn't come automatically equipped with flashy talents to show off and impress the grown-ups with. In infancy and the preschool years there is usually a sort of grace period, but once the kid starts its formal education the categorization revs up. Smart kid, dumb kid, well-behaved kid, unruly kid, shy kid, popular kid, athletic kid, good-looking kid, ugly kid, kid with important parents, kid with unimportant parents. A professional teacher would never admit to doing this to children, but the kids can pick up on things like this. And it influences their relationships with each other. A teacher's job is not to pick out the cream of the crop and discard the rest, but this has been the rule nonetheless, at least from my experience. And by that I mean this: from the beginning of the first grade though elementary school and junior and senior high school, there was never even ONE single occasion when a teacher praised me to my face or gave me some encouragement or direction. At least in the first three grades the teachers did provide structured instruction that enabled me to excel in arithmetic and to read well. But in 1965 my parents sent me to a new "experimental" public school that was supposed to provide a better education. Apparently, this school and its teachers were of the belief that students should be treated in a "hands off" manner; students were reputedly already motivated and focused and needed to be treated with the attitude that they were all little adults who knew what they needed to do with the emotional composure and discipline to follow through with their little adult goals. But kids aren't little adults: they're just kids! They're immature, they're clueless about many things, they usually don't know what they want to do when they grow up, and they're bound to parents of every conceivable variety who directly affect their emotional development and who may or may not hold them to a regimen of discipline regarding their homework. They need kindness and encouragement from the adults in whose care they are entrusted, but more than that they need to feel that they matter for who they are as individuals. All of the time that I attended this school (which was named for an exploding star), I felt that I was unworthy to be a student there and that I was hopelessly behind, with no hope for the future. Looking back on it, I think that at any moment during my time there if just one teacher had just walked up to me and said something like, "Billy, you're a good, smart kid with a great future, I'm rooting for you!", that would have totally transformed my life. I know that's true because my children have had good, caring teachers like that and it's made the world of difference to them. Unfortunately, my own childhood experience with "educators" revealed them to be a caste of indifferent elitists for whose attentions students had to prove to them that they are worthy. Like so many people, I can look back upon my childhood experiences with a adult perspective and either forgive or simply laugh off classmates who showed cruelty and bullying, because I see that in a sense we were all clueless (although some of us pretended not to be) and had issues going in our lives that others would never know or even not be able to understand. But I do find it difficult to forgive my so-called teachers from back then, who should have known better. When I went on to college, I experienced varying degrees of competency in my instructors, but I never knew one who was even remotely like the negligent excuses for teachers in that "titanic" school from the fourth through twelfth grade.