From the Mouths of Babes--Talk of Family and Liberty

As a kindergarten teacher, Cherry C. Belanger is dedicated to the belief that kindergarten is more than just play.

Her pupils at the 54th Street School hold discussions on such concepts as the family and freedom, and even produce a newspaper called Room 32 A.M. News.

Of course, being kindergartners, they don’t write the newspaper--they simply contribute their thoughts once a week in class, and Belanger writes them down on a large sheet of paper. At the end of the school year, Belanger’s daughter transcribes these gleanings into a professional-looking newspaper on her Macintosh.

Belanger has sent me the 1992-93 copy. It isn’t exactly newsy, but it does indicate that kindergartners do something beside play Ring-Around-the-Rosie.

For example, from various editions we find them engaged in a variety of experiences: “We talked about shapes: triangle, rectangle, square and circle. We cut shapes out of magazines. . . . We made butter. Mrs. B. put cream in jars and then we shaked it and it turned into butter. . . . We made magic by putting two colors together to make another color. . . . We learned our ABCs. . . . Wednesday we went exploring to pick up leaves that had fallen from the trees. . . .

“We learned about tasting. We tasted sour pickles, sweet marshmallows, bitter chocolate, salty pretzels. . . . We learned about Jewish people who celebrate Hanukkah with a menorah. . . . We were talking about Mexicans, Asians, and Afro-Americans--we are all alike and different. . . . We learned about equal and one-half and one-third and one-fourth. . . . We talked about rhyming words. . . . We saw a chicken move out of the eggshell. . . . We learned about digital clocks. We learned about pennies and nickels. . . . We learned about North, South, East and West.”

So much to learn! I agree with Mrs. Belanger: That year before first grade should not be wasted. Kindergarten should be mandatory.

Even more revealing of how children understand their own cultural environment are the insights from a discussion of family--what it means:

“Family is when they barbecue for you in the back yard. . . . A family is someone that watches over the kids. . . . Daddy goes to work. . . . They can watch TV and they go somewhere.”

Evidently, at that age they do not yet realize the importance of family, though it is the very core of their lives.

I wonder how I might have defined family when I was 5: “Daddy wears a suit and comes home late. He smokes cigars. . . . My mother puts beauty clay on her face every afternoon and looks like a ghost. . . . My sister stays out late with boyfriends and my mother worries. . . . When you have an earache your father blows cigar smoke in your ear. . . . My mother cooks stew and bakes apple pies.”

More revealing of children’s grappling with abstracts are the comments inspired by a discussion of liberty: “You can do free things. . . . You can go anyplace you want to go. . . . You can go play outside while Dad works in the garage. . . . You can say what you want to say. . . . You can go to the grocery store. . . . Freedom is somebody lets you go. . . . You can go anyplace you want to go.”

In the nature of things a child is not free. So his idea of freedom is naturally to go where he wants to go and do what he wants to do. Of course we know that the world is full of perils, and that children can’t be free. Nevertheless, that is a pretty good definition of freedom--”Somebody lets you go.”

Evidence that students far beyond kindergarten are trapped in the thickets of the English language comes from Laurie Anderson of Palos Verdes Estates, a writing aide and tutor at a suburban high school.

Anderson collects student bloopers and publishes them at the end of each semester for the amusement and edification of the staff. Examples gleaned from her latest summary:

* “Hubris is arrogance, or being conceded .”

* Hamlet’s father was “so fowly murdered.”

* “He is a self-sufficient man who knows how to deal with the riggers of life.” (Well, our lives sometimes do seem rigged).

* “Has our society today given television a bad wrap ?”

* “What started out as an exploration of the Pacific Ocean . . . became a circumcision of the world.”

* “Napoleon struggled with gorilla warfare.”

* Of “The Scarlet Letter”: “Hawthorne uses a minor character to inflict psychological terrier . Dimmesdale wore a hair pin shirt and torched himself physically. His once honorable reputation was scared .”

Since half of us are functionally illiterate (according to recent studies at Princeton), we are hardly in a position to laugh at high school students for their occasional blunders.

Though we have circumcised the globe, we still don’t know the difference between lay and lie . And I don’t know the difference between errant and arrant.

Oh, well, to aire is human.