An innovator in teacher education and training, Colin Greer is president of the New World Foundation and previously a professor at City University of New York. The author of 10 books, including several on public education, Greer co-edited “A Call to Character,” a compilation of stories, poems, proverbs and fables aimed at bringing parents and children together. A liberal counterpart to conservative William Bennett, Greer also focuses on the values debates currently raging in American politics.
Q: The two political conventions have just ended, with lots of talk at both about children and values. What do you make of it all?
A: Both parties and their leaders are competing for who is the strongest protector of the American family, both in terms of family values and finances. The way they summarize the problem of the family is through the bad behavior of young people. They basically endorse a tougher and more punishing approach to children, as they follow a tougher approach to all public policy.
Q: What do you mean tougher on kids?
A: The code words are there. Curfews, criminalizing parent responsibility, curtailing the juvenile justice system (by treating some children as adults), longer school hours, tougher standards in schools, fewer aides for scholarships and advancement. Even President Clinton’s tax proposal for post-secondary education only affects those currently able to afford post-secondary education. It promises to make life easier for those who can afford it. But it has no impact on those who don’t have the finances, or because poor family finances have inhibited their ability to focus on school work. More kids don’t do well in school because they are forced to work in their spare time, their classrooms are increasingly impoverished, and they don’t have books.
Q: What about the president’s proposal for 1 million reading volunteers so everybody can get up to a 3rd-grade level?
A: A 3rd-grade level is very minimal. It probably takes at least a 10th-grade level to perform adequately in American society. And there’s no evidence to suggest because you’ve reached a 3rd-grade level, you are equipped to get to 10th grade.
A tremendous investment must be made in classrooms and teacher training, to recruit more skilled teachers for smaller classrooms and more well-equipped classrooms for kids to make that leap. It is also true that if, as is the case, the majority of failing kids continue to come from impoverished families, those kids will continue to fail until we do something to improve the quality of life in their families.
Q: William Bennett, the author of “The Book of Virtues” and an aide to Bob Dole, just started a show on PBS to teach children virtues in a television age. You’re no big fan of Bennett. What’s your problem with the show?
A: This show is one of the most diabolical things Bennett has done, namely using public television while at the same time condemning public investment in public television as a waste of resources. Clearly, he thinks it’s an important educational medium and has (used it to) fund his venture into television.
The program is based on a refusal to look squarely at the anomalies in our culture, seen simply through our values. What he has done in the program is try to create a multicultural setting but then argues against multiculturalism in education.
He has used Plato and Aristotle as animal characters in the show because those are the classic philosophical teachers. Yet they were gay. He doesn’t take stock about what that means. If, in fact, we are turning to those giants, might we learn something from who they really were and how they lived?
Q: What about politicians and family values?
A: The politicians are waving the values flag because it makes sense to people. They think something has gone out of the heart of society: communities falling apart, employers not sensitive, families falling apart, kids not finding work. The way in which values pass through a society and create order is in trouble and the pols see that. They are talking the language of values but not implementing a policy of values.
Q: What should they do?
A: The bottom line should not simply be what is the size of the deficit, but what is the impact of our decisions on the most needy of the society. Will it generate work for kids when they are adults?
We are not really asking questions about people’s lives. The pols say we have to protect the future of children by reducing the deficit. We are robbing the kids of services now with the strange claim we are protecting them in the future. We treat the deficit like a house owner who has taken on a high mortgage and decides not to fix the roof because the mortgage is too high. It’s not good for the house or investment. And kids are the roof of our society.
Q: More people probably get a sense of values, good or bad, from TV these days. What sort of values does one learn there?
A: I have three kids, from 27 to 5. Isolation and TV has great impact. My hope about reading, and the hope of the book, is that reading allows parents to reclaim the art of speaking and talking with kids.
If you read together, you are talking together and going through oral communications and sharing an imaginative piece together. If that is kept going in a family, there is a rich channel for dealing with problems when they come up.
Q: What do you watch with your 5 year old?
A: “Sesame Street” and “Barney,” which I don’t like. But also reruns, like “Doogie Howser M.D.” We watch those and talk about them. For example, people shout at one another a lot on TV. My daughter is very sensitive to that. We talk about that and, then, about why we try not to do that in this family. She started to make an association between my wife and me fighting and aggressive, interpersonal style on TV. I wanted her to know that was something that does happen and can end up in genuine hugs.
Q: So what’s your problem with William Bennett and his “Book of Virtues”?
A: (The book’s) position is largely that virtues are acts of will. You simply become virtuous by deciding there are right answers to complex moral questions and you just have to do the right thing. There’s no sense of how we grow, how we make mistakes, how there are serious dilemmas. How we behave is complicated. In our book, a young boy, 14, wants to join the civil rights movement. The father is concerned about safety of (the) family, but he is also concerned with injustice.
Moral questions are full of dilemmas. A virtuous life is one lived in a kind of honest engagement with dilemmas, not just one that knows the right answers all the times.
The position (Bennett) takes is either cynical or hypocritical. If cynical, it’s because it is narrow and shortsighted. How can it be virtuous to worry about daytime TV or the movie industry but not worry about hate radio or the impact of public policy on people who suffer most?
———-
An edited transcript.
