RR as hero? Without a doubt.
Your hero has certainly made his mark, a school board votes that when teaching integrity they must censor remarks about the current President:
The Quarryville, Pa., school board polled its voters to hear what people
wanted from their schools; they wanted them to teach integrity. So the
school adopted a new motto ("True integrity shows up when no one else is
watching"), classes on heroes, and a rule against jokes at another's
expense, including President Clinton's.
The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition -- April 21, 1998
Politicians Aren't Heroes
To Youngsters Anymore
By JUNE KRONHOLZ
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Here's a terrible thought: Your eighth-grader has just learned that her hero
committed adultery, fudged the truth, and maybe skirted the law.
Here's a thought that's even worse: Your eighth-grader doesn't have a
hero.
"A hero? I can't think of any," says Teresa Mitchell, a Milwaukee
14-year-old who has an A average and enough sense of her future to
know that she wants to attend Grambling State University and become a
nurse. "No, I can't even think of one."
A teenage Bill Clinton was inspired by his president; Mr. Clinton has told
how meeting President Kennedy in 1963 took his breath away. But
political leaders hold little moral relevancy among today's kids, and the
scandals oozing around President Clinton have robbed him of whatever
was left. "I respected him; he's the president," says Kia Gilliard, a
ninth-grader at Newton North High School in suburban Boston. "Now,
what do I have to look up to?"
In Mebane, N.C., teacher Ann Tangerose led her school, E.M. Yoder
Elementary, through a semester's study of heroes, then assigned everyone
to write an essay on a hero. Annie Oakley and Franklin Roosevelt rated
mentions, but of 380 essays, no one named the president. "They're very
well-informed, they know all the ladies' names, they have opinions," says
Mrs. Tangerose, "and President Clinton is not their hero."
Findings in the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll suggest that
Americans have decided to look to political leaders to perform a job,
rather than to serve as role models. Many of those polled believe Mr.
Clinton has had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, which he has
denied, and the president acknowledged in a court deposition a one-time
encounter with Gennifer Flowers. When asked why Mr. Clinton's
job-approval rating stays high despite the Lewinsky scandal, 30% of the
public said it is because people have low expectations about politicians'
moral standards. But more than twice as many -- 65% -- gave another
reason: Americans have become more realistic about their political leaders,
and accept that they should be judged on their performance in office rather
than on their private lives.
We name our schools after towering figures, but ask the kids inside who
inspires them, and their hero, if they have one at all, is most likely a sports
star, a rapper. Certainly, youngsters a generation ago lionized Mickey
Mantle and the Beatles. But they kept those idols in a category apart from
their political leaders -- and gentler times kept both well-protected from
scandal.
When the Gallup Institute asked teenagers whom they most admired in
1959, the boys said John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower and Winston
Churchill; the girls said Jacqueline Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen
Keller. In 1991, George and Barbara Bush made the list -- but Magic
Johnson and Julia Roberts topped them, and Gallup hasn't asked the
question since.
Cultural Identity
Mythic heroes -- white men like George Washington -- were replaced
with Amelia Earhart, Harriet Tubman and Cesar Chavez, who gave kids a
cultural identity, says Ms. Ingall. But teaching about heroes is a slippery
business when even a titan like Martin Luther King Jr. is suspected of
having plagiarized his dissertation.
So teachers downsized again -- to ordinary heroes, folks who do good
works in the community. At Lansing Middle School in Lansing, N.Y.,
Phyllis Smith-Hansen has her students identify heroes for her instead of
the other way around. "I've lived long enough to see some of my own
heroes fall," she explains. "I wouldn't project them on my students."
If all that sounds like a long fall from Jefferson and Lincoln, it's not all bad
news. Somewhere on the road to moral neutrality, the baby boomers had
children of their own, and found their youngsters' drift disquieting. Thomas
Lickona, a professor at the State University of New York at Cortland,
and author of two books on character education, senses that people are
eager for their kids to identify with figures of moral excellence -- with
heroes. "We talk about sin again," he rejoices.
The Quarryville, Pa., school board polled its voters to hear what people
wanted from their schools; they wanted them to teach integrity. So the
school adopted a new motto ("True integrity shows up when no one else is
watching"), classes on heroes, and a rule against jokes at another's
expense, including President Clinton's.
And when kids have heroes these days, they often are relatives and
teachers who inspire them, and in touchingly humble ways. At Cleveland's
St. Francis School, sixth-grader Terence Jackson's hero is his grandfather:
Lawrence Jackson, a drummer who played the Apollo Theater in Harlem.
An Illinois child names his principal: "When I'm in the pits, he's there to pull
me out." And an Ohio youngster writes about her dad; he makes
"wonderful tartar sauce" for a fast-food chain.
interactive.wsj.com |
