It Takes a Village (19 page)

Schools can help to equip children with the tools to prevent harsh words and playground taunts from escalating into aggressive behavior. In April 1995, I visited a peer mediation project at Seward Park High School on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Every day, nearly three thousand youngsters arrive there from homes in which they have grown up speaking different languages, celebrating different holidays, belonging to different religions, and experiencing different family cultures. I watched college students from New York University who are AmeriCorps members teaching the high school students techniques for mediating their peers' disputes, working in groups to negotiate nonviolent resolutions rather than relying on teachers and administrators to “police” them.

Some of the most effective approaches to promoting affirmative living are those that involve the entire village. A World of Difference, a national educational project sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League, helps teachers, administrators, students, and parents to promote tolerance and diversity in their schools and communities. Workshops throughout the year teach students to recognize and resist prejudiced behavior and to share their reflections about racial and cultural issues. An annual event in Boston called Team Harmony brings middle and high school students and teachers together with local sports figures and business leaders to take a stand against prejudice and bigotry. Local television and radio stations, newspapers, churches, and synagogues get involved.

After the Team Harmony event in 1994, many students wrote about the positive messages they received. “Since the event, I want to do all that I can to stop racism,” one of them wrote. “I want everyone to live in peace and harmony, where there is no hatred and no violence. I don't care that some of my friends are black, white, Chinese, Vietnamese, or Portuguese.”

When racial tensions surfaced in the town of Lima, Ohio, following the verdict in the Rodney King beating trial, Mayor David Berger initiated a series of dialogues about race relations. In firehouses and living rooms, classrooms and church halls, residents came together to discuss their perceptions of one another and of their community, an all too rare opportunity. As one resident put it, “It's not like you can walk up to someone on the street and say, ‘Hey, what do you think about race relations?'”

Members of the community were trained as discussion leaders, with the task of seeing that the conversation stayed focused and that everyone's viewpoint was included. The ground rules were much the same as those the peer mediators at Seward Park were taught: listening carefully, speaking freely and honestly but respectfully, asking for clarification rather than letting a misperception fester, maintaining an open mind.

The ongoing dialogues have proved successful in allowing citizens to confront stereotypes and to move beyond them. As the Reverend James McLemore of St. Paul AME Church in Lima says, “Once people get past the issue of race, they start looking at the problems they have in common.”

In Billings, Montana, organized bigots began to perpetrate a series of hate crimes against blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and Native Americans in 1993. After this had gone on for several months, someone threw a chunk of cinder block through the bedroom window of a five-year-old Jewish boy in which a menorah was displayed to mark the festival of Hanukkah. The boy was not hurt, but the town had finally had enough.

Margaret MacDonald, a local woman who calls herself “the church lady,” recalled hearing how, in Denmark during World War II, ordinary citizens had decided to wear Stars of David when the Nazis ordered Jews to wear them. MacDonald convinced members of her church to display menorahs too. The local newspaper ran a picture of a menorah so that people could cut it out and tape it to their windows, and the editors urged all citizens to participate. “Let all the world know,” they wrote, “that the irrational hatred of a few cannot destroy what all of us in Billings, and in America, have worked together so long to build.” Within a very short time, thousands of homes had menorahs prominently displayed. The hate crimes have ceased, but concerned citizens stress the need to maintain vigilance. Respect is an ongoing lesson in today's village, where so many cultures and races live and work together.

 

N
EVER HAS
our nation been as diverse in its population as it is today. Nor has any previous generation of children been confronted so urgently with the task of learning to respect and empathize with one another and to recognize a common humanity. At a time when democracy depends so much on our finding common ground, and when so many adults are unsure about how to bridge societal divides, there seems to be one idea on which most people agree: we need to find ways to offer our children a vision of affirmative living that can be applied in their daily actions and interactions.

One way in which young people have historically come together and expressed their sense of humanity and compassion is by giving their service to a greater cause. This is an American tradition that extends from the YMCAs and YWCAs and the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, begun around the turn of the century, to the Civilian Conservation Corps and National Youth Administration of the Great Depression, and the Peace Corps, which was launched in the early 1960s. As civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded us, “Everybody can be great because everybody can serve.”

Throughout our history, American thinkers and philosophers have recognized that public service is crucial to safeguarding democracy and to maintaining national unity in peacetime as well as in war. Harvard professor Robert Putnam observes that people who join the PTA or their local garden clubs or bowling leagues learn lessons that are central to democracy: mutual trust, cooperation, the habit of expressing their opinions openly and listening to those of others. In the words of former senator Harris Wofford, who helped to found the Peace Corps and who now heads the Corporation for National Service, “The service ethic should be to democracy what the work ethic is to capitalism.”

But the service ethic does not magically appear upon adulthood. Educator Ernest L. Boyer notes: “If we want good citizenship among older people, it surely must become a part of children's lives.” Compassion and empathy are more likely to take root if they are grounded in daily life. Service can begin at home, with children performing chores—setting the table, vacuuming the rug, watering the plants—on behalf of their families. My mother taught my brothers and me that helping others was not only an obligation but a privilege. She encouraged us to get involved in drives to collect money and goods for needy people through our church and school, and she came up with ways of making service fun. One year, she helped us organize a neighborhood athletic competition modeled on the Olympics to raise money for our town's United Way.

Children need to hear from authoritative voices that kindness and caring matter. Even more important, they need to see adults helping others if we expect them to follow suit. In the words of Rabbi Lyle Fishman, service is “caught rather than taught.” Psychologist Julius Segal recalled: “When my friends and I were young children, we used to see our elders regularly empty their carefully saved pennies from a ‘charity box' and offer them to anyone who came to the door seeking help. My own father's ability to pay the next month's rent was chronically in doubt but never his readiness to reach out to people he viewed as ‘even worse off than I am.' Such acts set tangible standards for children. They fix in the soul a posture of caring.”

My husband's mother also set an example of service for her children. One Thanksgiving when Bill was ten, Virginia sent him to the corner store for some last-minute shopping. One of his classmates was there, eating a doughnut and drinking a soda. When Bill asked him where he was having Thanksgiving dinner, the boy held up his doughnut and said, “Right here.” Bill did not hesitate to invite him home, knowing his mother would have done the same.

From the time Chelsea was a toddler, we have tried to give her opportunities to serve, at home and through church and school. Thanksgivings, we took her with us to volunteer at shelters. At Christmas, we bundled up and played Santa to needy families. But we have also tried to teach her, as we were taught, that service is a part of daily life—as the saying goes, the rent we pay for living. There is no shortage of needs waiting to be met: an elderly neighbor who needs someone to carry groceries, a park or block or strip of highway strewn with litter, a single mother who could use some extra baby-sitting help, a playmate home with a broken arm. We should remember that just as a positive outlook on life can promote good health, so can everyday acts of kindness. The great psychiatrist Karl Menninger reportedly advised a man who said he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown: “Lock your house, go across the railroad tracks, find someone in need, and do something for him.”

Children who are raised with an ethic of service learn to give beyond what is asked of them. Sarah Pollack graduated from high school in Virginia in 1994. Her parents promised to buy her a car for high school graduation if she got good grades and a college scholarship. Sarah got straight A's and won a scholarship of more than five thousand dollars a year. When it came time for her to spend the fifteen thousand dollars her parents had set aside for her car, Sarah asked if she could take the money and start a college fund for needy students at her high school. Asked by a reporter what prompted her to use the money to benefit others, she replied: “They were friends. They were people I respected, with talent. It really just killed me that they could go nowhere…. I'm just passing something on that I've been fortunate to have. That doesn't make me any more special than anybody else.”

My husband met another extraordinarily giving teenager, thirteen-year-old Brianne Schwantes of South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when he visited Des Moines, Iowa, during the 1993 flood. Brianne suffers from brittle bone disease, which means that her bones have broken so easily and so often that her growth has been stunted. Yet when she heard about the flooding, she persuaded her parents to bring her to Iowa to help fill sandbags. There she was, barely four feet tall, fulfilling her obligations to her fellow citizens.

It is often said that children are our last and best hope for the future, and that if we want society to evolve, we must teach the next generation the importance of active citizenship. Teaching children how to become good citizens and giving them an appreciation of governance is another way to elicit their natural empathy, compassion, idealism, and thirst for service.

It is never too early to start on the path of political participation and leadership. My husband and thousands of other American boys and girls have participated over the years in Boys and Girls State and Boys and Girls Nation. I know many young people who have also learned about current events, diplomacy, and statecraft through their participation in the Model United Nations program.

Another impressive forum for teaching governance was the international conference sponsored by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which brought together teenagers from five regions of the world. Called “Tomorrow's Leaders,” the conference offered these students the chance to hear from world leaders and to try to develop peaceable solutions to conflicts around the world.

If youth service is, as our collective history demonstrates and as my husband and I believe, “a spark to rekindle the spirit of democracy in an age of uncertainty,” it must not be left solely to individual acts of altruism. We need to create frameworks and contexts that will allow it to flourish and to become habitual.

I wish every school adopted the model of the Washington Elementary School in Mount Vernon, Washington, where service is integrated into the curriculum. The school's motto is “Service is a life-long commitment.” Students in every grade perform individual acts of service, from tutoring younger children to serving on safety patrols. Each classroom also plans a class service project. One year, the second graders made a quilt for a homeless shelter and the third graders planted flowers as part of a school beautification project.

Some individual school districts require community service. Recently, Maryland, whose lieutenant governor, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, is a longtime champion of the idea, became the first state to do so, making service a learning experience for students as well as a benefit for their communities. At one Maryland middle school, home economics students make outfits for homeless children and deliver them to a local shelter. At another school, students read Charles Dickens's
A Christmas Carol,
focusing on the theme of poverty, and work with local organizations to provide assistance to needy single mothers and their children. At yet another school, students studying ecology help to clean up and maintain the stream that serves as their “outdoor classroom.”

Creating a framework for service is the driving idea behind the National Service Corporation, the public-private enterprise that includes AmeriCorps, which gives young people sixteen and older an opportunity to serve their country in return for financial assistance for college or job training and a modest living allowance during their service. Recruits commit to at least one year (with the opportunity to serve two if they choose), during which time they are trained to help communities solve educational, environmental, health, and public safety problems.

In its second year, AmeriCorps has already recruited more than twenty-five thousand young people. They are working with local churches and synagogues and nonprofit and public organizations in more than twelve hundred communities. AmeriCorps members also help existing charitable and service organizations like City Year, Habitat for Humanity, and the Red Cross to make the best use of part-time volunteers.