Babar, Bennett, and the Book of Values

...And if a girl's last words need to be distorted by the living in order to accomplish this, well then so be it...

...After all, the relation between Celeste and Babar "is not based on their mutual elephantness at all...

...And such a timbre that bell has...

...do's and don'ts," but the price exacted by such a classroom becomes clear when Kohl details how it would resolve a dispute over coats...

...Back in 1969, Kohl wrote an influential book called The Open Classroom, in which he described "ways of teaching that were not based on compulsion but on participation...

...The problem can also be settled by the class in a general discussion or a mock trial...

...Just because Anne Frank was murdered for being too Jewish for Hitler doesn't mean we should allow her to draw attention to that fact...

...I blame my mother for her bad taste and her cheap ways...

...The students can, for example, settle the matter in private with the teacher adjudicating...

...Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason only do we have to suffer now...

...Mother: "Why, Justin, what a surprising conclusion you have reached...

...Responsibility "means paying attention...

...If only Kohl and Greer had contented themselves with twisting fiction to suit their purposes and left history alone, A Call to Character might have been merely silly...

...Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now...

...And when the Old Lady wonders sadly from her balcony, "When shall I see my little Babar again...

...The 'call' of the title," write Kohl and Greer, "is the call of a familiar dinner bell to a feast with good friends, not a strident trumpet call to attention and obedience...

...From Gregory Bateson's "Metalogue: About Games and Being Serious," we learn about the perils of speaking logically all the time-then, as a father puts it to his daughter, "we would only parrot all the old clich?s that everybody has repeated for hundreds of years...

...The first priority, after all, is to teach children only relevant, updated lessons...

...Happy the human who is blessed with any three of these qualities...

...In the chapter on adaptability, they are told that "one of the most challenging demands on us is how to deal with the inevitable blows we experience, especially blows to our self-esteem...

...And the truth be damned...

...If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example...

...Anything else...

...Can't you just see it...

...Then there are those who have "been uninvited to Babar's world"-for example, "working-class people who don't work in stores and serve the rich...

...Perhaps not...

...The major force in the story is the community or some natural social group larger than the family...

...Next I gave them some history of French colonialism in Africa, and we discussed the meaning of clothes in the story...

...Thus power is given to the male military by the Europeanized king who goes off to new adventures...

...So, then, which stories are children allowed to read in the world of A Call to Character, and what lessons are to be garnered from them...

...Values" and "value judgments" are, after all, distinct from factual or empirical knowledge and are therefore, in the most fundamental sense, ultimately arbitrary...

...Wendy Shalit is a student at Williams College...

...The boys in the band loved having us out there in front of them all the time, bending back and stepping high, in our snug satin outfits and short skirts...

...So embarrassed, so hurt, I couldn't even do my homework...

...In sum, "Babar has been marginalized in both the human and animal worlds by his contact with the Rich Lady...

...That would be too "particularistic" and might get in the way of the universalist lessons which need to be drawn...

...Then in "Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison," by Nazim Hikmet, children learn to watch out for lice and for spring nights, and always remember to eat every last piece of bread . . . After watching for lice, children might want to beware plummeting skydivers...

...to the hurt which can be caused by thoughtless habit and ill-considered convention [and] paying attention to the active if invisible role that is played in keeping harmful traditions alive...

...It's based on his being able to dress and therefore civilize her...

...That is to say, its purpose is to find a market for a leftist version of The Book of Virtues-since surely there are millions upon millions of progressive parents hungering for a collection of bedtime stories for their kids who don't go for all that Bennett-style moralism...

...It is about being true to your navel: "Integrity is rooted in the comfort you feel within," you see, and the selections chosen to illustrate this value are intended to demonstrate "the effort it sometimes takes to like oneself...

...From the 1960s to the 1990s, Kohl is a lens through which to study not only the crisis in American education, but the depths of confusion and moral idiocy to which the left has sunk...

...Children will use their own judgment, make up their own minds about the issues at stake, and often understand the messages of what they read in ways that are surprising to adults...

...The personal closeness provided by serious, non-judgmental discussion, based on shared stories, is as valuable as any specific conclusions you or your children come to...

...But then, of course, there is no truth, is there...

...Their dads, mostly navy men, loved it too...

...This is one form of colonization: seducing some members of the group into letting them proselytize for you...

...Or that the beneficent free-flowing money of the Rich Lady is a form of glorifying the ruling class...

...Are they aware of colonialism...

...Moreover, since Geppetto and the Blue Fairy are helped by Pinocchio when they fall ill, "the passive role of women and old folk is reinforced by Pinocchio's nurturing role in the story...

...Often the question is not whether they encounter Babar but how...

...And, of course, her actual words do happen to be inconvenient for that purpose...

...Do they understand that civilizing the elephants is symbolic of destroying the culture of colonial people...

...This story also shows children that "we all have resources we can draw upon to grow and live fully...

...poor people...

...Kohl concedes that, yes, "all this may take time-time that will be taken away from reading and science and social studies and other supposedly basic work," but these plans may need to be "put aside," since "it is necessary to take time to solve problems communally...

...Babar has been so taken in by people-ways," Kohl explains ominously, "that he does the job of recruiting for them...

...From "Lad: A Dog," we learn that dogs are superior to humans: "Time, patience, firmness, wisdom, temper control, gentleness, these be the six absolute essentials for training a puppy...

...The New Press, 178 pages, $18.95...

...The best thing about creativity, for example, is "the excitement of taking on something new and breaking old boundaries...

...Thankfully in the case of Pinocchio, at least, one is permitted to read the story to children, but only if the "sexist components" of the story are fully explored...

...Anne Frank's remarkable reflections on her suffering-on the suffering of Jews-apparently offended Kohl and Greer's sympathies as they did Lillian Hellman's communist sympathies years ago: Who has inflicted this upon us...

...dictum, "one that leaves the door open for the sanction of male violence...

...And poor Susie is already at the bottom of the stairs, pacifier flung in one direction, Pocahontas toy mangled in the fall...

...not on grades or tests or curriculum, but on pursuing what interested the children...

...Clearly, we are meant to feel sorry for the boy and side against his "unfair" mother, but I can't help feeling sorrier for her, I confess-particularly when the grown-up man accuses, "I blame that jacket for those bad years...

...Perhaps...

...Franz Fanon described this internalization of the colonists' culture as one of the deepest forms of dehu-manization experienced by the victims of colonialism...

...Thus, this excerpt from Ishmael Reed's "Sky Diving": The following noon he leaped But his parachute wasn't with him He spread out on the field like Scrambled eggs Perhaps this is the right moment to mention that a good many of the stories and poems in A Call to Character are not really appropriate for children...

...Flash forward to late 1995 and the release of his fat new book, A Call to Character: A Family Treasury, edited with Colin Greer (HarperCollins, 456 pages, $25...

...But anyone familiar with the Longstocking corpus knows that this sprightly girl doesn't command respect because of her playfulness (though that was, to be sure, endearing) but rather on account of her superhuman strength...

...A little boy's mother is too poor to afford any other jacket for him but one "the color of day-old guacamole...

...Herbert Kohl, in setting himself up in opposition to Bennett and the virtues he enumerated, has now produced two books (totaling 634 pages) in which he is guilty of the very crime the right has accused the left of perpetrating for three decades or more-politicizing everything, even a sweet children's story about a happy elephant...

...After all, "children will not come to a healthy critical stance without adult help...

...Kohl and Greer force Anne Frank to take back these words, because the lesson they want to inculcate is that "prejudice knows no boundaries, is color-blind and cruel...

...Her essays have appeared in Commentary, the Women's Quarterly, and Reader's Digest...

...sometimes one race . . . sometimes another...

...Character develops and is tested throughout life...

...human children...

...In these circumstances something must be done . . . but that does not mean that the teacher should legislate the problem of coats out of existence...

...Kohl makes much, in his description of the democratic classroom, of not "parading out...

...And so, in miniature, we see the crisis of modern-day leftism, bereft of even its belief in a utopian future-unmoored, but still needing to inculcate something in the hearts and minds of its children...

...Perhaps the best tactic of the left, when faced with the success of The Book of Virtues, would have been to sit tight, with lips sealed...

...Consider the treatment of "character," the book's ostensible subject...

...Then it would seem that, like Bennett, Herbert Kohl does have a trumpet at his disposal...

...Thus, not only was he not trying to avenge the death of his mother...

...And "in the story members of the group participate in some collective activity that is centered on an issue of social or economic justice...

...Finally the issue of what Babar learned from people came up, and to the group it seemed that he no longer liked being an elephant...

...Or her habit of crooning while skipping, "I am Pippi Longstocking . . . Watch out heeere I coooome...

...Instead one is disturbed to find in the chapter on idealism an excerpt from The Diary of Anne Frank-to illustrate "optimism"-that isn't really from the diary at all, but rather from the Pulitzer-prize-winning play that Lillian Hellman and Albert Hackett contrived out of it, which features these immortal lines: "We're not the only people that've had to suffer...

...There is no reason why a discussion like this shouldn't be part of the critical literature program as early as the third grade, if not earlier...

...So, "The next day I wore it to sixth grade and got a D on a math quiz...

...And what about Pinocchio...

...By the time she is done civilizing him, she owns him...

...it is not fixed once and for all," they write, and again, a page later, they insist that it "is not a moral nature that is set once and for all in childhood...

...What is most praiseworthy about self-discipline is that it gives children the confidence to "take chances . . . challenging illegitimate authority...

...Idealism means "challenging our conventional ways of doing things...

...He even insinuates that the Old Lady was in cahoots with the hunter who shot Babar's mother, offering this suspicious reading: "The Rich Lady has money, lots of it...

...One thing that doesn't get to be voted on, however, is that stories for children must be radical ones, and to be sufficiently radical means having the following characteristics...

...When Babar lovingly rests his hand on his new elephant-bride's shoulder, that represents "the triumph of the Europeanized male...

...And as long as we're dumping books, let us not forget the Little House on the Prairie series...

...That process, as you know from our prior exchanges, is intrinsically valuable, so inasmuch as . . ." "WAAAAAAH...

...The third-graders must have sensed some of this, because most of them expressed anger at the hunter and no longer thought the story was cute or charming...

...Happily, Kohl and Greer just happen to be on hand to substitute for parents, to help guide children toward sweeter, more progressive hopes and dreams...

...It is no accident, therefore, that Bennett talks about virtues, while our friends with the coy dinner bell talk only of "values...

...And in the chapter on courage, a poem by Marge Piercy illustrates this value by "urg[ing] women who have been silenced because of their gender to unlearn habits of silence": You have the wrong answer, wrong line, wrong face, They tell her she is womb-man, babymachine, mirror image, toy, earth mother and penis-poor, a dish of synthetic strawberry ice-cream rapidly melting...

...The playful Pippi Longstocking is brought into the mix merely to raise "the question: can conflict be defused through play...

...Gary Soto's story "The Jacket" is intended to illustrate such age discrimination in action...

...Like The Book of Virtues, A Call to Character is an anthology of literary works with didactic introductory material...

...In the chapter on fairness, children learn that "in our society, prejudice, racism, and discrimination on the basis of gender loom as challenges to the value of fairness...

...As moving as this 'classic' might seem to European American readers, it is offensive to Native American people who are portrayed in the books as barely human savages...

...Worse still, Babar reveals he is a sellout by treating his little elephant-cousins to sweets...

...It was one of many children's books that showed her that women's happiness derives from being chosen by the right male...

...The reader hopes, upon reaching a chapter on "playfulness," that the gross stuff will stop for a minute in favor of some amusing stories...

...Thus, of the kind Old Lady-or, as Kohl calls her, the Rich Lady-who takes Babar in after his mother is shot, Kohl writes: "She is seen as an extension of the patriarchy, a product of capitalism and colonialism who maintains power by buying it...

...What purpose could all this passion for self-respect and character "choice" serve...

...In the section on integrity, for example, we are told that integrity "is not a matter of dogmatic adherence to a rigid code of behavior...

...It promises to be "more progressive" than William J. Bennett's The Book of Virtues...

...She grunts to a halt...

...And so, surprise of surprises, all that relativism proves too much for Kohl and Greer...

...There've always been people that've had to...

...For example, a selection from Farewell to Manzanar is intended to show how "a young Japanese American woman learns to become strong in the face of prejudice and racism...

...At first glance, what Kohl and Greer have to teach kids is, proudly, nothing...

...I'm so glad we were able to share this kind of personal closeness, a closeness which is afforded only by such a serious, nonjudgmental discussion in which I don't tell you what I think about your conclusion...

...Hanging up coats in the morning, for example, might become a real problem if students fight over hooks or take things from each other's pockets or throw coats on the floor...

...Only these are not Anne Frank's words...

...It's a fair bet that, just as teachers' unions often abandon measurable outcomes in order to absolve themselves of responsibility for actually teaching children, so does abandoning the task of giving content to the moral life of children in favor of such dicta as "be at home with yourself" render the parent obsolete...

...Among the harmful traditions that Kohl wants to kill are the children's stories he doesn't like...

...Many young and older people also feel that they are victims of unfair treatment because of their age...

...Mommy, does that poem we read yesterday in A Call to Character, the one about practicing 'being myself and being 'amazed at myself,' mean I can push little Susie down the stairs if 'myself want to...

...Lad, being a dog, was abundantly possessed of all six...

...We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or representatives of any country for that matter, we will always remain Jews, but we want to too...

...They counsel parents explicitly not to say anything much about the stories they are presenting to their own children: Be careful, however, not to shape your conversations about literature in ways that demand definite conclusions for each session or lead to your children feeling manipulated...

...I received C's on quizzes and forgot the state capitals and the rivers of South America, our friendly neighbor...

...Be brave...

...Let us remain aware of our task and not grumble...

...Not so fast, white man...

...After all, if children create their own values, what does the parent need to be around for, anyway...

...and humans Babar's age"-and let's not forget that "the people in Paris don't all live like the Rich Lady, her friends, and the people that serve them...

...In "How the Children Stopped the Wars," we learn that if the children of soldiers would only come to the battlefield, then wars would stop (each side would be too ashamed to fight with their children watching...

...Just as the democratic classroom absolved teachers of responsibility for teaching children, the democratic family absolves parents of any responsibility for raising them...

...The source of her wealth is unclear...

...Only in A Call to Character, the idea that morality is arbitrary is the subject of all the didactic passion...

...Kohl concludes that, yes, children can be permitted to read Babar, as long as they are made to understand the "power relationships" that lurk within...

...And when Babar is crowned king, and gives wise old Cornelius his hat before going off with Queen Celeste in a lovely yellow balloon, Kohl warns us that "the use of symbols and possessions to legitimize authority is dangerous and antidemocratic...

...For example, Kohl takes his case to a third-grade class: I defined colonialism and pointed out that the costume of the hunter gave him away as a colonist...

...It is our responsibility, as critical and sensitive adults, to nurture the development of this sensibility in our children...

...The people in the class must deal with it as their problem and come to some resolution...

...The first is that whatever you do, you must buck the system...

...It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again...

...in a way he became the friend of his mother's murderers...

...Courage is particularly admirable when it withstands pressure from "authority figures...

...But to Kohl, the ideal classroom "means allowing children to become who they care to become...

...Trust is crucial for critical family reading...

...Even that old-time liberal favorite, compassion, is good mostly because "a compassionate embrace of the world includes ourselves as well and is therefore a central source of love and self-respect...

...For answers to these and other questions, let us take up the extraordinary case of Herbert Kohl, radical educator...

...What a perfect book for our time, then-a whole tome filled with rationalizations for divorced parents, working mothers, for those whose children spend all their time in day care...

...Kohl has now made it something of a habit to visit schools and alert pupils to these dangers and has discovered an amazing thing-namely, that "pointing [these complications] out to children can have a devastating effect on their reaction to the story...

...Yet another seemingly innocent children's book that reinforces "dangerous attitudes"-in this case, the "boys will be boys...

...Who has made us Jews different from all other people...

...Babar, Bennett, and the Book of Values By Wendy Shalit How is it that kids in Communist China don't seem to have time for much of anything but reading, writing, and arithmetic, while we Americans are the ones with the luxury of exploring the communal classroom, the intricacies of self-esteem training, and the blessings of outcomes-based education...

...After all, how can we talk about character when such talk might stigmatize the underprivileged...

...Kohl tartly comments, "She had it right...

...If one must draw a moral lesson from Pippi Longstocking-and I'm not sure that I am recommending it- then Pippi seems more an exemplar of "peace through strength" than a paragon of playful disarmament...

...Her habit, for example, of tossing burglars up to the ceiling and smashing them into bookcases...

...Did it harm a friend of Kohl's, he wonders, to have loved this scene as a child...

...In the story, our heroine becomes a majorette and discovers a rather unexpected lesson: Radine and I were both maturing early...

...For, as the authors note, "It is not easy to be consistently honest if one is deprived...

...And so I went, in my guacamole-colored jacket...

...An overall aspect of the book [must involve] a group working toward unity and focusing on solving a problem of inequity" or "creat[ing] a new order of living...

...Even in this book Kohl vacillates about how "for the active reader, there is no need for one authoritative interpretation" (with the exception, presumably, that Babar is colonialist...

...Maybe it has to do with hiring hunters to trap and kill elephants...

...If questioned, they should have insisted it was merely an accident that someone on the right produced such a book, because such virtues and codes of conduct are in fact common to all...

...Should she have been given a copy of Babar to read when she was six...

...The irony of this philosophy- which is mostly the logical conclusion of John Dewey's favoring of "growth" over content in education-is that students are not likely to grow much when they are taking cues from their belly buttons...

...they, too, have some absolute beliefs they want to inculcate...

...And what are these resources...

...Kohl analyzes the "power relationships" in the now-classic children's stories by Jean de Brunhoff about the king of the elephants and his family, and finds that "in Babar the power is with people and not animals...

...Another section is devoted to celebrating the wonders of "adaptability," a character trait that may or may not be desirable depending on what exactly one is adapting to...

...its dehumanization of the Native Peoples whose lands are being stolen makes it painful reading...

...Unfortunately, what interests students is often themselves, whereas the purpose of education was once thought to involve leaving the cave of one's own experience in pursuit of more profound knowledge...

...A Call to Character is designed to guide "the development of values for you and your children...

...That is the subject of another recent Kohl tome, Should We Burn Babar...