The David Gribble Archive : Talks

Children don’t start wars

Leipzig University, 2008
Page 5

Young children are also more likely to show a caring response. Vivian Gussin Paley, who worked in the kindergarten at the Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, recorded many of the children’s conversations, and one of her stories gives a relevant illustration.

Earl had made a clay house, and Eddie had broken it up. What was to be done? The children made various suggestions. Earl wanted Eddie to make him a new house, but Eddie refused. Earl insisted that he wanted a new house, so eventually Fred said that he would make one for him. This satisfied Earl, but the teacher wanted to know what should be done about Eddie. “He’ll do it some other time,” said Earl.
These children were not concerned about justice, they were concerned about happiness. Earl's house had been destroyed, but he would be happy again as long as he had another house. Fred would make one for him, so there was no need to impose any unpleasantness on Eddie, who was already cross about something. Fairness, generally speaking, helps to make people happy, but it is not important in itself. It was not strictly speaking fair that Fred should make a new house for Earl when it was Eddie who broke the old one, but it made everyone happy so it was a more sensible solution to the problem than a strictly fair one.

In these children's minds happiness was more important than justice, but it was not their own happiness they were concerned about, but someone else’s. This was clearly rational altruism. The teacher tried to introduce a justice-based morality – “What about Eddie?” she had said – but the children insisted on a morality of care.

In the right conditions children are more likely to make caring responses than justice responses. Kohlberg's analysis of what he saw as moral development was actually an analysis of the movement of a group of boys from a care-based morality to a rule-based morality. I would suggest that this is not so much a development as a decline.

3. How these ideas came to me personally

(a) When I was twenty I got a job teaching boys aged 8 – 13 in a small private school. I wrote down some rather confused thoughts about their behaviour. This is how I attempted to straighten them out:

I think I mean that all children start with an ideal character, or have an ideal character hidden inside them which is gradually clogged by successive layers of old newspaper. Some of them they put on themselves, others are stuck on them by other people. At the age of eight or nine there are still a lot of gaps in the paper, and nowhere is the paper very thick.

I think that at the age of sixteen or fifteen anyway, a lot of the paper is torn off, and is gradually replaced by fresh paper with a different story on it. When a boy leaves school he sets about wrapping himself up in completely blank paper in a desperate attempt to disguise his youth and lack of experience, so making himself into an uninteresting dummy. At the age of twenty-two or three he emerges in a complete papier-mâché armour which is dinted only by the fiercest of blows.

I should draw attention to the fact that I myself was still in the middle of the second-last stage, being only twenty years old at the time. These are not the thoughts of an older person looking back, but the thoughts of a person in the thick of it. However, I went on to forget all that, and only came back to similar ideas much later.

(b) More than thirty years later I was a teacher at Sands School. One day three girls stole all the money from the school office and took the bus to the nearest town to catch a train to York. At the booking-office the clerk explained that they did not have enough money, so they asked for tickets to Brighton. The clerk became suspicious and called the police, and latter I had to fetch the three girls from the police station in my car. On the way back I stopped in a lay-by and tried to discuss what had happened with them. It was completely impossible. They cursed and swore and said they hated the school, they hated their fellow-pupils, they hated their parents and everybody in the world except each other. I could not get anywhere. So I drove them back to the school, and the leader of the group announced that she would call a school meeting, because otherwise I would tell a lot of filthy lies about them and what they had done. Everyone came to the meeting, and she calmly told them exactly what she and her two companions had done, and then asked, “Do you want to chuck us out?” At first the other children were angry, not so much about what they had done as about their indifferent and shameless attitude. Then one teacher commented that it was not sensible just to be angry, and it would be better to ask questions and listen. For the next hour the adults hardly said a word. The children asked the culprits why they had done it all, listened to them and commented and in the end asked “Do you want to stay in this school?” All three said yes. A few conditions were imposed, and the whole thing was dealt with.

I, an experienced adult, had not been able to find any way out. The less experienced children had understood the situation better and found an honest, generous solution.