Out of the mouths of babes… or in this case, out of the word processor of Washington Post reporter Emma Brown explaining the impact of the very presence of babies.
We’ve lived in the Washington, DC-area for 33 years and it’s fair to say that the DC school system has tried just about everything to address the human costs of poverty and violence at the same time it also tries to raise test scores that in parts of the city are alarmingly behind national averages.
Under the headline, “D.C. classrooms welcome babies in effort to teach empathy,” Ms. Brown begins her delightful story with these three paragraphs:
“The newest teachers at the District’s Maury Elementary School haven’t been to college. They can’t tie their own shoes. They don’t speak much English. And they aren’t potty-trained.
“They are babies. Mostly bald, and completely mesmerizing.
“Maury is one of five D.C. elementary schools attempting to harness the disarming power of infants to help students recognize and deal with emotions in themselves and their classmates. The babies, in other words, are meant to help teach children how to be kind.”
I used to teach a gazillion years ago and I’ve tried to keep track of the wave after wave of subsequent educational “reform” movements. This one, unlike so many others, is not based on counter-intuitive ideas but derives from foundational truths about who we are as human beings.
The immediate impetus may be concerns about bullying and low test scores but the core motivation is a “growing conviction that teaching certain character traits — such as persistence, self-control and self-confidence — is just as crucial for students’ futures as teaching academics.” (PS the sun also rises in the east.)
How do babies fit into this program which is based on “Roots of Empathy” which is now common across Canada? According to Ms. Brown
“Roots is built on a simple notion: When babies such as June bring their huge eyes, irrepressible smiles and sometimes unappeasable tears into the classroom, students can’t help but feel for them. The idea is that recognizing and caring about a baby’s emotions can open a gateway for children to learn bigger lessons about taking care of one another, considering others’ feelings, having patience.”
Put another way, they are trying to teach the kids “emotional literacy, the words to understand what you feel based on what you’ve witnessed with the babies,” according to Mary Gordon, who founded the Roots program in 1996.
Understandably, there are skeptics, who see it all as touchy-feely, hard-to-quantify stuff, diverting resources that could be better used elsewhere (proponents obviously disagree). So, how does it work? Brown writes
“Roots pairs each classroom with a baby, who visits nine times throughout the year with his or her mom or dad, a volunteer recruited from the community. Each child has a chance to look the baby in the eye, squeeze its toe and say hello before the class settles into a circle around a green blanket.
“A volunteer instructor asks questions related to one of nine themes, from the reasons babies cry to the emotions they feel. The classes — which range from 30 to 50 minutes, depending on the baby’s mood — are mostly a chance for students to watch the baby as it responds to songs and games and to ask questions and share observations about whatever comes to mind.”
Okay, I do not have to drive home some obvious implications for you and me, beyond the powerfully helpful role having little ones in the classroom can have.
First, we can hope that the lessons these children are learning will stay with them. Having a sense of who these little critters are—why they cry, for example—offers the prospect of a greater empathy when someone else’s child (especially the child of an unmarried teenager) cannot be consoled. And, of course, likewise for ones own children.
Second, character-education/social-emotional learning is not just about working hard and being nice. It is grounded in the linkage between cause (diligence and self-discipline) and effect (success), nurtured by the understanding that it is NOT all about me. As one parents said of her daughter, “She’s not just thinking of herself and what she wants, she is thinking about others.”
For us, those “others” are unborn children, little ones born with disabilities, and the frail elderly. Too often we have what has been described as an “empathy deficit.”
Of course talking about this “deficit” is one thing–the first time I heard the idiom it came from the most pro-abortion President in our history, Barack Obama—and putting it into action is quite another. This, like anything else, is not the be-all, end-all.
But it is a place to start. What we all extrapolated this to the unborn child with a slight and revealing twist?
“How come my baby sister can walk, but Baby Joshua can’t walk?” asked a puzzled second-grader at Bishop John T. Walker School for Boys, a tuition-free private school in Southeast Washington.
“We all develop in different ways,” said the instructor, Anthony Davis.
How come the unborn baby “doesn’t look like a baby” in the first few weeks or months? It’s because we all do develop in the same way: this is how we are supposed to look at one week or one month or two months, and so on.
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We take the lives of unborn children for many reasons. Not the least of those reasons is panic which takes on (so to speak) a life of its own until that overwhelming sense of being out-of-control ends when we take control of the fate of the little one.
But an understanding of—and identification with—this unplanned visitor will operate as a gateway, making it so we “can’t help but feel for them.”
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared at National Right to Life News Today.
