NAME: Vivian Gussin Paley
BACKGROUND: After writing nine books on hurtful school behaviors such as ethnic and gender discrimination, Chicago author, lecturer and former kindergarten teacher Vivian Gussin Paley turned to classroom interaction in her newest book, “The Kindness of Children” (Harvard University Press, $18.95). As in her previous books, Paley draws primarily from her experiences teaching kindergarten at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and from visits to classrooms in the United States and abroad. In her current book, she witnesses an act of kindness at a London kindergarten that she labels “Teddy’s Story,” which she takes with her to classes in such divergent locales as Chicago, New York City, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Luxembourg. The telling inspires other acts and stories of kindness. Paley will speak on “The Kindness of Children” at 7 p.m. April 27 at the College of Lake County as part of The Child Care Coalition of Lake County’s Community Education Lecture Series (tickets are $5 in advance, $8 at the door; call 847-604-4405 for information).
Q–Did you visit classrooms here and in Europe with the idea of looking for kindness for your next book or did you have other goals in mind?
A–I always have other goals in mind. The classrooms are almost at random. What takes me to other places, here and abroad, is that I’m invited by a university or teachers group to give a talk. Once I’m there, I don’t feel I’ve experienced a community until I’ve been in a classroom, particularly the early grades. I love demonstrating my favorite techniques of (child-authored) storytelling and (children’s) story-acting. It puts me on the same rhythm as the children. With older students in middle school and high school, I use the discussion format, more or less focusing on how children treat each other. What are the standards they have for inclusion, exclusion, etc.? The acts of kindness were there, waiting, as children responded by revealing the stories on their mind.
Q–Had you thought about the kindness characteristic or its opposite, unkindness, as underlying social problems?
A–All 10 of the books I’ve written over a period of 20 years have in some way or other defined personal experiences regarding social issues. Most revealed a degree of fairness. My first book, “White Teacher,” could have been called “Are White Teachers as Kind as They Could Be?” What I wanted to understand and want others to think about is, how fair a place is school? To what extent does each child feel, this is my home, my community, is it a fair and safe place for me? Each book explores that.
Q–How did you choose kindness as your title and theme this time? Why wait this long to put it into a title?
A–Its time has come. You cannot go into a classroom of young children without thinking about kindness. I don’t think I’m different. One of the first things a teacher comes to terms with is, is this a kind thing? Kindness was really part of everything I’ve written and part of every day in school. But sometimes something happens so that you see something in a new way, the “aha!” syndrome. It happened with the incident that begins the book, “Teddy’s Story,” which took place in a London nursery school. A child with multiple physical handicaps–in a wheelchair, wearing a helmet, speaking (haltingly) one word at a time– was a visitor. He was accorded the exact same interest, welcome and involvement by the children there as anyone else. Intuitively they pulled him into their play. As I’m witnessing this it occurs to me that, yes, this is what I’ve been seeing all my life. I was seeing a pure act of kindness. I was ready to give it a label. I couldn’t keep the story out of my mind. Everywhere I’d go, before I would know it, I was telling the story and children and adults were reacting to the story. (To me) it was, “Why have you been waiting this long to talk about something positive instead of all the negative stuff?”
Q–In telling of your Chicago experience (with a West Side honors English class interested in Paley’s writing techniques), a boy observes that kindness is fleeting and that anger quickly takes its place. But he also talks about trying to remember if he was kind when he was younger. Is it your observation that kindness is inherent in young children?
A–My feeling is that kindness is a very strong inherited quality in all of us. So, apparently, is the opposite quality. In younger children, if you see enough of them over time, you see more often incidents of empathy. You see them rushing to get a teacher if someone is in trouble or crying. Sure, they’ll grab others’ stuff and fight. But far more often is the pleasure they realize that comes from being able to include everyone. You see that all the time in preschools. Child-care teachers themselves emphasize these qualities. Very seldom do you see teachers of young children getting all goose-bumpy when someone knows the alphabet but rather when someone goes out of the way to be of help, particularly to another child who may not be as physically developed.
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Q–Then what? Does the quality disappear if it is not encouraged?
A–The adult world changes things. As we get into the middle and upper grades, children see that the thing that makes grownups happy is to be smart, fast and learn quickly, then there are prizes. Children see that certain attributes are more popular than others. That spins off into how they play with others. And by the way, children see relatively early in their grade school life they can get away with being mean. Adults will say, “Let them fight it out” or “She probably did something to deserve it.” When they were young, adults didn’t act that way. All of a sudden the world is more interested in how you hold the pencil than in your sharing the pencil. The highly competitive life does not draw as eagerly, as readily, upon these kindness instincts. When classrooms or families set up a competitive basis in terms of achievement, children understand what is going on. They get the message. The message can be that it is not acts of kindness that pay off and are talked about so much as achievement and popularity.
Q–Is kindness contagious?
A–Oh, yes. After telling a kindness story to a rather disheartened group of older students in Chicago, you have this woman in the class telling about jumping up and giving her seat on the bus to an elderly woman after someone on the bus reads out loud to the passengers the news of a mother gorilla in the zoo saving a small child. Stories about kindness bring out other stories about kindness. When the book came out I was invited to be on public radio call-in shows on the East Coast. In both cases the host was surprised, though I wasn’t, when people called in with their stories. He anticipated people calling in with the opposite stories. After all, this is what we read about in papers and never mind this Pollyanna stuff. But one caller after another told about acts of kindness of a child, a grandchild or someone they knew.
Q–So can kindness be learned?
A–Certainly we learn from the acts of other individuals how both attributes feel. . .this is how it feels to be treated kindly and how it feels when treated unkindly. When in an environment where kindness is uppermost in adult consciousness and is talked about and admired, this is the way the children will go. And if, by some miracle, this is consistently developed grade by grade, we really can have a different school environment.