a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Every five years, countries signatory to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child are evaluated by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, an international group with rotating membership, collaborating with UNICEF.  Signatory countries are required to submit documentation on their efforts to PROVIDE for, to PROTECT, and to encourage the societal and eventually political PARTICIPATON of children—the “3Ps” organizing the Convention’s 52 Articles. The Committee reviews the national documentation and then recommends specific further efforts, following guidelines developed in work done since 1989 to implement the Convention world-wide.

In 2008, the UN Committee sent the British Labour government–the Gordon Brown “New Labour” government– a critical report containing 150 recommendations. Imagine, 150 tasks on the to-do list!  It urged the British to do everything from banning corporal punishment to raising (from only 10 years old! 8 in Scotland!) the age of criminal responsibility. They were to reduce the number of children given custodial sentences –that is, dumped in juvenile detention centers—and the number denied the statutory right to education.  Summarily, the report criticized a “general climate of intolerance and negative public attitudes towards children” in the media and throughout British society.  Childism, prejudice against children, the report was saying without having a word to say it, was rampant in Britain. Things are not better now with an “austerity”-oriented Conservative-Liberal coalition trying to handle Britain’s financial crisis on the backs of its children and young people. Already, university students  are protesting the huge proposed increases in their fees.  That’s a hopeful sign, I think,  that their elementary schools, treated with Thatcherite austerity in the 1990s,  did not demolish them!

“You know,” Christine remarked to me as we were watching the

British student protesters on the BBC evening news last week,  “I did six years of university education and medical school in the 1960s without every paying a penny. Entirely free –and free for any young person in New Zealand who could sit the qualifying exam and win a place. And I never took that gift from the tax payers for granted; it really made me into the kind of doctor they needed and deserved  –and got for free because they paid their taxes for their medical care as well.”

“I have never understood it,” she went on,  “when I hear Americans say that

people who scramble their way out of poverty and make a lot of money should  then

“pay back” to their communities in recognition of their good fortune, helping others out of poverty. They should not have been in poverty in the first place! The people who get their philanthropy should not need it! The whole concept is skewed!”

I told her that I –an American—could not agree more. And we both agree with the Committee on the Rights of the Child, which has tasks other than chastising laggard states. It keeps a world-wide data-base; issues summaries on “best practices”; co-ordinates with UNICEF  and the World Health Organization to plan responses to crises, emergencies, and epidemics involving children and to prevent further ones; convenes conferences to bring together officials from all the signatory countries in order to continue developing international standards and strategies and urging everyone to meet the “Millenium Goals” of ending child poverty around the world.  But no American representatives are involved in any of this activity, because the United States of America is one of only two countries in the world that is not signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The other is Somalia, which has not had a legitimate government since 1989. As a quip around the UN goes: the Somalians  have not signed because they have no government, and the Americans have not signed because they do.

If the United States were a signatory, it, like Britain, would have gotten a very poor report card even before the current economic crisis. Year after year, however, UNICEF, although it sends no report card to our truant country, has shown America the place it occupies on all kinds of rankings: from infant mortality to reported child abuse cases to teen pregnancy numbers, school drop-out rates; from achievement on literacy and numeracy measures to quality of fitness and sports and “cultural enrichment” programs, to success on child poverty reduction measures. America has been sinking all over this map in the last decades, but its media have let the American people know, basically, only one American failing:  how quickly we are sliding down the school evaluation rankings. Everyone laments that we used to be known as having the finest public schools in the world, a distinction social democratic Finland now holds. But while the media are generally neglecting  the bigger comparative picture, they are also ignoring the “general climate of intolerance and negative public attitudes towards children” throughout American society, which the media by and large reinforces.

The news of America’s race to the bottom in the school rankings fuels the crazy efforts being made to “fix” and privatize our schools so we can stay competitive.  The news is also taken as a challenge by many of the audaciously hopeful  “Yes, we can!” professionals who have signed up for the ridiculous “Race for the Top” arranged by the Obama administration and its Department of Education.  Schooling is approached like the Olympics –it’s a battle for the gold.

American governments since the 1980s have not had the benefit of UN mentorship over children’s issues, including schooling.  But they have heard from the Washington D.C. based Children’s Defense Fund  (CDF).  Terrible to think that our children need to be defended, but they do and the CDF does that by keeping statistics and issuing, in effect, report cards to policy-makers. It is our own little Committee on the Rights of the Child. A large network of other children’s defense advocacy organizations has appeared in the last decades, too, in the absence of government concern for children, or, in the presence of active government hostility toward children. The Children’s Rights Movement, so active world-wide, is growing –slowly–in America. The ACLU now has a children’s division. We have Teaching Tolerance programs in schools, developed by Southern Poverty Law –although SPL focuses on racism effecting our children and does not yet teach children about the intolerance that is childism.  Now that the crisis of the public schools has gotten to a do or die point, volunteer organizations to PROVIDE for the schools, PROTECT them, and encourage their PARTICIPATION in national life  have appeared. We have the Forum for Education and Democracy, Educators for Social Justice, Parents for Public Schools. (You can visit the website of boldapproach.org and look around.)  And some organizations, like Global Partnership for Schools, have made a business of school renovation or “turn around.” There’s money to be made by private companies from  repairing the effects of privatization…

America’s problem is not that we don’t have excellent children’s defenders and advocates and educators who understand quite well the meaning of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the importance of public schools. And its not that we don’t have brilliant contributors to the field of Child Development, including some of those –now elders–who helped draft the 1971 Comprehensive Child Development Act. Our problem is, I think, that our talented not-for-profit people are working in a “general climate of intolerance and negative public attitudes towards children.” They are working against a

huge upsurge in childism.

Institutions dedicated to children’s rights and institutions trying to apply the science of Child Development have been on the defensive since that early 1970s moment in America. But what is it that caused a nation with a basically progressive attitude toward children from about 1900 until about 1970 to abandon it, to become childist?

While I was researching a book about childism that I am now getting ready for publication in 2011, I read an article written in 1973 by two social workers. They were noting that each American President who had addressed a once-a-decade White House Conference on Children between 1910–that was Teddy Roosevelt—and 1960 –Dwight Eisenhower, had stressed that a healthy nation is one that puts its children first, providing  for them carefully and giving them the best public education it can muster. By the 1960s, the majority of Americans were apprised of the basic insight from Child Development that the support given by government to children must begin in early childhood, not at age 6.

Richard Nixon came along as the odd guy out. In his 1970 speech, which announced the end of the White House Conferences on Children and their replacement by conferences in the individuals states, he privileged national economic stability, not the health and education of children. He argued for workfare –not welfare—and for supporting businesses and the married employed, not helping the unemployed or those in need of the “Aid to Dependent Children,” first offered by the National Security Act of 1935. The reversal was dramatic. Something fell out of our sense of common responsibility for the nation’s children.

In their introduction to The Century of the Child: Progress and Retreat  (issued by the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, 1973), June Axinn and Herman Levin wrote this: “The years 1900 to 1970 were marked by a shift from mass care [ie., asylums, orphanages, detention centers] to individualization of services to children, a shift from the obligations of children and the rights of parents to a concern for children’s rights and parental duties. Simultaneously, the shift resulted in growing governmental responsibility for children, an acknowledgement of a responsibility for the protection of all children, black and white, rich and poor alike, in all circumstances that touch upon their ability to use their physical, mental, and social potentialities to their own fullest advantage… The view now appears to be that societal stability rather than the development of a child’s individual potential is of prime importance. There is a fiscal and ideological retreat from what might have been a century centered on children…”

I find it inspiring that these social workers could see so clearly what was before their very eyes –while now, forty years into the shift they were noting—people can hardly see it at all. But that is how it is with a prejudice: it legitimates discrimination, it makes disrespect and denigration normal, it rationalizes failures to feel common commitments to the common good as successes for particular favored groups or for some vague “social stability.” A prejudice, unchecked, becomes like a spell, the new normal.

Childism is a prejudice that attacks a basic principle –one that was clearly articulated when the republican form of government first emerged in the West in Greece. It was the principle without which no democratic –republican with a small “r”– government can emerge, or survive. “The parent gives the child the greatest gifts,” Aristotle wrote in his Nichomachean Ethics (7.11.2), “its existence, but also cherishment and education (trophes kai paideias); and because the child receives, it owes the parent honor and helpfulness.”

If things get turned around, and parents –adults—issue a command like “Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother” without saying that fathers and mothers are to be honored and helped after having done right by their children, nurturing them well and educating them well, then the natural, human duties and obligations, rights and responsibilities, cycle is ruined. The children will not grow up healthy and well-educated and able to honor and help their parents and their society.  There will always  be disputes about how best to nurture and educate children –at the time Aristotle articulated the principle , he was advocating for a kind of public education against a group of Athenian patriarchs who wanted a version of home-schooling, and nobody was talking about educating girls. But such disputes only turn hostile toward children when the principle is abandoned, or attacked.