1.+MORAL+LIFE+OF+CHILDREN




 * PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT**

Robert Coles, a famous child psychologist who worked with students in the American South during Desegregation, comes from the psychoananalytic tradition in psychology. The psychoanalytic tradition descends from the work of Sigmund Freud and includes famous acolytes such as Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, and Carl Jung who all had an influence on mid-20th century American culture and society. The key of the psychoanalytic tradition is the development of the individual personality or "ego" in the conflicting push and pull between our desires/drives (the "Id") and social dictates about correct behavior (the "Super-Ego") or conscience. It emphasizes infantile sexuality and introduced concepts such as "anal retentive," "Oedipal complex," and "Freudian slips" to our general vocabulary. It can be contrasted with the "cognitive" tradition of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, who view child development as a sequence of stages from simple to complex that develop as individuals mature chronologically. Coles wants to examine how young children think about moral issues and what is their sense of "right and wrong." To understand what Coles is trying to communicate in this chapter and why some of it may be novel, it may be useful to summarize the basic tenets of these different perspectives before discussing the specific content of the chapter.

The "folk theory" of children and moral reasoning is that children are basically innocent, guileless, idyllic and simple. In many ways, the assumption is that children are like the children Jesus of the Christian New Testament implied when he directed his disciples to approach G-d as children. Children are pure goodness, think the best of people, and do not judge (much like your pet dog). They do not have adult problems, nor do they have the complex agendas or rationalizations found commonly in adults. They do not understand complicated things like "sex" or "violence" -- can't everyone share and be nice to each other. Implicit in this view is that children are not sophisticated enough to be bad. The religious story of Adam and Eve that equates sin coming into the world with knowledge parallels this view. Children are not knowledgable, and hence, not sinful, and hence not the subjects of moral analyses. I would say this perspective is more a projection by adults, whose lives feel complicated and difficult, onto children and the mythic yearning for simpler time of their youth: wouldn't things be simple if I were young again? It is probably not an accurate description of how young people actually think.

The cognitive perspective of Piaget and Kohlberg views childhood development as a sequence of stages that go from the simple and concrete to the complex and abstract. As the brain develops and our cognitive capacity grows, we are able to think in more complex and abstract ways. Specifically, at early stages infants and small children are highly egocentric because they are unable to separate their own selves from others, they proceed to simple rules like "an eye for an eye" before they can more to more abstract and complex moral codes. In our summer reading, Rafe Esquith uses a version of Kohlberg's stages of moral development as a classroom behavior framework. Implicitly, the message of cognitive theories is that more complex, abstract (rational), and sophisticated moral approaches are "better" than simple, concrete, or direct approaches. The other implication is that the processes of moral and cognitive development go in one direction over time. Perhaps not everyone reaches the highest stage, but one's progress is sequential and unidirectional. In sum, a cognitive, stage approach suggests that "smarter" people will be more "moral" people, whether because they are better informed or more capable of being neutral and disinterested in their moral judgments.

The psychoanalytic perspective of Freud and others is not about a moral or cognitive telos, but maintaining a proper balance between one's drives and society's demands. In other words, the goal is not sophistication, but to become "well-adjusted" or to use the Freudian term, to achieve "ego integration." As a result, there are no "higher" or "lower" levels, and everyone, from infants to adults, must deal with the conflicts that come from competing individual desires and societal demands. In addition, while individuals may seek to become well-adjusted and ego-integration, the possibility of ego-disintegration is real and possible, think of a "mid-life crisis" where one's sense of self can break down. In addition, events in our lives can challenge our tentative attempts to strike a livable balance.

Coles' criticism of cognitive approaches is the observation that there are many intelligent, highly sophisticated people who behave immorally and we should not conflate intelligence and integrity. His criticism of psychoanalytic approaches is that being "well-adjusted" is not enough to explain moral behavior. Acting morally may not make one comfortable, in fact, it can often be troubling because one is confronting difficult situations. In addition, many immoral people do not seem troubled by the consequences of their actions.

Coles observes. ..
 * **pg. 21. ". . . the moral texture of a life is, one suspects, not fully explained by a mere analysis of how the ego negotiates with the id and the superego. Nor is the ego or the superego . . . quite all we need to know in the face of specific dilemmas -- the ethical behavior seemingly 'backward' people display, not to mention the mischievous, sometimes deceitful, and certainly callous action that one can find in highly intelligent, well-educated individuals . . . A well-developed conscience does not translate, necessarily, into a morally courageous life."**

Coles presents us with two young students -- one black, one white -- to illustrate his point: Ruby Bridges and Hank, who are both involved in the event of the New Orleans & Atlanta's school desegregation. How each of them reacts and describes moral dilemmas in this environment provides a window into how young children approach moral problems. He begins with Ruby. A description of Ruby's family background The famous Norman Rockwell painting of Ruby Bridges and a photograph of her being escorted to school. The [|hanging of the painting in the White House]has recently sparked controversy. You can see the adult Ruby Bridges next to the President in the picture at the link. Ruby clearly faces an adverse social environment, but what is striking is her reaction: she prays for those persecuting her. What does this tell us about how she copes with stresses.
 * **pg. 22. ". . . one of the black children, who, at age six, initiated school desegregation in New Orleans against terrible, fearful. For days . . . that turned into months, this chld had to brave murderously heckling mobs . . . hurling threat and slurs and hysterical denunciations and accusations . . . she attended school all by herself for a good part of a school year, owning to a total boycott by white families. her parents, of sharecropper background, had just recently arrived in the great cosmopolitan port city . . . they were unemployed, and, like Ruby, in jeopardy; mobs threatened them, too."**
 * **pg. 22-3. "Still, Ruby persisted, and so did her parents. Ruby's teacher began to wonder //how come// -- about the continuing ability of such a child to bear such adversity . . . Perhaps she was 'denying her fears and anxieties; perhaps the strange calm in the face of such obvious danger represented a 'reaction formation' . . . '[The teacher said] she prays for those people, the ones in that mob, every night before she goes to sleep!'"**

Ruby's response:
 * **pg. 23-4. "'Yes I do pray for them . . . because . . . I go to church . . . every Sunday, and we're told to pray for everyone, even the bad people, and so I do.' She had no more to say on that score . . . When I did prod the child a bit, I got this evidence what I then concluded to be fearful piety: 'They keep coming and saying the bad words, but my momma says they'll get tired after a while and then they'll stop coming. They'll stay home. The minister came to our house and he said the same thing, and not to worry and I don't. The minister said God is watching and He won't forget because he never does. The minister says if I forgive the people and smile at them and pray for them, God will keep a good eye on everything and He'll be our protection."**

Coles interprets this response as a sign of Ruby's immaturity, blinding accepting what authority figures tell her and ignoring the reality of her hostile social environment. Was it just the instinctual response or defense mechanism of a persecuted people, Coles speculates:
 * **pg. 24-5. "Was she repeating in rote submission the cliches a long-impoverished and persecuted people had learned to rely upon -- the analgesic self-deceptions of those who, through no fault of their own, have never quite learned to think rationally, logically, or, as some of us would put it, 'maturely"? How well did she really understand what was happening to her city, to her neighborhood, to herself and her family?'**

Coles notes the difficulties of psychological and developmental theories to account for Ruby's thoughts and actions. ..
 * **pg. 25. "The more I tried to understand the emotional conflicts, the tensions and responses to tensions, the underlying motivations, and the projections and displacements; the more I emphasized the automatic or reflexive behavior of the children we knew, a consequence of their short lives, their lack of education, their limited cognitive development, their inability to handle all sorts of concepts and symbols; the more I read and commented on various developmental points of view, which emphasized stages and phases and periods -- and, of course, consigned elementary school children such as Ruby Bridges to the lower rungs of this or that ladder -- the more. . . the //acts// . . . the //deeds// they managed."**

Coles notes the contradictions of Ruby's experiences with a stage development framework of moral development such as Kohlberg's
 * **pg. 26. "I think it fair to say that a child such as Ruby was in 1961 (aged six, black, southern, of extremely poor background) would not be a likely candidate for the usual kind of moral accolades. She was not "mature." She was, no doubt, right smack in the middle of an oedipal conflict. She had, without question, the kinds of cognitive inadequacies we have all come to find important to remember -- and connect to the general (academic and social) behavior of the young. She was hardly a candidate for the higher level of performance, with respect to moral analysis, that Lawrence Kohlberg requires if he is to call one in possession of 'postconventional' or 'autonomous' moral thought . . . 'Moral development is therefore a result of an increasing ability to perceive social reality or to organize and integrate social experience. One necessary -- but not sufficient - condition for principled morality is the ability to reason logically (represented by stages of formal operations).**

Moral development (or tolerance) is believed to be higher among the more affluent and educated, i.e., the middle and upper classes. Poor, backward, children merely have myths, superstitions, and pieties. Coles turns to the case of young boy (age 14) who was a 'redneck,' not well-read, more interested in sports than school. He has none of the features or experiences Kohlberg presents as necessary for high-level moral action. However, Coles shows that Hank is able to make a high level moral judgment about treating a black boy his age fairly according to universal standards. He had no identification with the black boy, the victim of racial slurs; he participated in the abuse, but concludes that though, "[He] said, 'Go nigger, go,' with all the others. I meant it. But after a few weeks, I began to see a kid, not a nigger -- a guy who knew how to smile when it was rough going, and who walked straight and tall, and was polite. I told my parents, 'It's a real shame that someone like him has to pay for the trouble caused by all those federal judges.'" (pg. 27). Hank intervenes to stop an incident between his white friends and a black student. The key here is how strange all of them -- Hank, his friends, the black student -- found his actions. Upon reflection, Hank explains his change of views.
 * **pg. 28. "'I'd be as I was, I guess, but for beign there in school that year and seeing that kid -- seeing him behave himself, no matter what we called him, and seeing him being insulted so bad, so real bad. Something in me just drew the line, and something in me began to change, I think.'"**

Coles steps back and reflects that events, more than cognitive capacities, might define us more as moral individuals and notes the tension between theory and practice in this respect. However, this does not mean theory is useless and he gives an exegesis of Freud's essay [|On Narcissism] and about the child negotiates the transition from an ego-centric world without conflicts to negotiating control over others and one's own body, etc. Coles notes
 * **pg. 31. "It is not only a matter of 'right' as against 'wrong,' of 'conscience' in the vernacular sense. The superego has to contend with the disenchantment of self-love, with the child's increasingly critical eye, which responds to the vision of parents, teachers, friends; and with, not least, the self-judgment that naturally follows the experience of change -- in biblical terms the trek east of Eden. The ego ideal represents our effort to recover the past; we look upward, hoping to see what we once enjoyed so very much, a spell of uninterrupted sunshine. The clouds of later life prompt us to look, to keep looking with hope and anticipation (if with, too, an edge of anxious doubt) for that lost radiance."**

But the desire for simplicity and innocence runs into the countervailing pressure of social demands, creating moral "wear and tear" on the ego.
 * **pg. 31. "Meanwhile, we have to accommodate ourselves to the norms and values of the world we belong to. Not only must we measure up to the hopes generated by an early but increasingly challenged narcissism, to the dreams and values of the best side of our parents, to the grand and noble pieties of a more social nature . . . we must also deal with the hundreds of no's, many intimidating indeed, which gradually make us run for various covers or learn to take (adroitly or truculently) a stand. There is wear and tear in this life, and our sense of our worth reflects that inevitable moral strain we feel. Entire modes of existence turn out to be, on close inspection, a response of a 'personality' to various internalized psychological injuries: the superego registering its perceptions, and those perceptions calling for a day-to-day (protective) response."**

Coles digresses into a reflection of how religion informs our moral selves. For many black youth, raised in charismatic religions, the message was not "do what God asks, and all will be well," but that salvation is earned by struggles on earth. Hope, rather than a fantasy of innocence and simplicity, is rather a memory of expectation and challenge to accomplish things in the future. Moral energy comes from the knowledge that life will be hard and so the moral demands of the superego is not in conflict with the passionate urge of id. Coles argue that it is this union of the id (passionate idealism) and the superego (social recognition) that drives the moral choices of the young.
 * **pg. 35. ". . . the active idealism we see in some of our young takes place . . . when a beckoning history offers, uncannily, a blend of memory and desire; a chance to struggle for a new situation that holds a large promise, while earning along the way the approval of one's parents, neighbors, friends, and, not least, oneself. In psychoanalytic language, we might speak of an ego ideal given a new lease on life and reality, and now in extraordinary harmony with the often skeptical if not overbearing judgment of the superego. In the everyday language of our lives, the moral life gets a wonderful charge of energy: an old dream has become newly sanctioned by a fateful turn of history."**

Ruby Bridge's moral energy comes from her ability to link her personal situation to a larger social/transcendental goal. She writes, "'We inched a little closer to God, and because we did we became a little better ourselves!'" Coles than shifts the attention to Hank, a white child with a racist father and how he approaches similar questions and problems. Coles speculates that the father's heckling of a small child (Ruby) is a projection of his own self-loathing and disappointments onto a weaker person. Hank expresses bemusement about Ruby, not understanding why she seems to be a glutton for punishment. Coles suggests Hank comes from an abusive household where he, his siblings, and his mother live in fear of his father's alcoholism and the family's poverty. Do not wake an angry giants seems to be the watchword. Hank's father's treatment as a youth at a charity hospital seems to be key to understanding his psychology. First, it calls to attention his poverty (he can't afford a "real" hospital) and his fear of and antagonism for authority (doctors). It points to his personal failures as a father and provider and this seems to fuel his drunkenness and rage.
 * **pg. 38-9. "'My daddy says he was 'treated like dirt there,' and he swore on his mum's Bible that he'd never in his life go back to that hospital or any other one, and he says he'd rather die, right on the spot, when God wants him to die, rather than go 'expose' himself . . . to any doctors. If he gets sick, he tries to keep going. My mum says that's why he drinks a lot, so he wont' feel the pains he gets. His head is always hurting, He takes lots of aspirin, and lots of beer, and sometimes some rum and Coca Cola, his favorite thing to drink. When he gets drunk, bad drunk, he shouts at us. Sometimes he opens the window and he shouts, and we hear the neighbors closing their windows, but he doesn't pay them any mind, he just goes on hollering. It gets bad when //he// closes the window, because then he starts pounding on the [kitchen] table, and he'll say the doctors treated him like dirt, like shit, and if he was a man of money, they'd have been nice to him, and careful, and not make mistakes, and if he'd been colored, they'd have patted him on the head, and adopted him, like a dog who's your mascot, and he obeys your every wish, no matter what you say."**

Coles summarizes Hank's father's complex as follows
 * **pg. 39-40, 41. "Always there is the husband or father as a younger man, trying to get on, with the odds stacked against him because he is poor and has not had a chance to finish school; then he falls sick, ends up 'mutilated' . . . by doctors, and becomes thereafter a heavy drinker; and how his family has to endure his occasional assaults, even attempted beatings, not to mention his tough, unyielding thrusts, directed at . . . [a] list [that] can get longer and quite obscenely stated . . . I began to understand the themes central to this family's life - psychological experiences all its members had shared and which all of them regarded as highly charged. The linkages were rather apparent: poverty, occupational insecurity, limited possibilities for personal and economic advancement, the vulnerability that goes with illness, including exploitation of the body -- all these becoming connected to a sense that others, also vulnerable, like blacks, are getting out of hand, getting ahead, hence they present yet another danger in a world already fearful, threatening, even rapacious . . . The father's morality was hedged close by envy, resentment, and a despairing, powerless egoism."**

He is particularly unsympathetic to the suffering of blacks. Unlike his own problems, Blacks bring on their problems on themselves. The father only can understand his own suffering and distress, not others (=narcissism). This has an impact on how Hank develops and the problems his has in school. Coles explains:
 * **pg. 41. "This link in memory, between a family's spoken and listening life, between blacks and beatings of blacks and drinking and the experience of terror, gradually became part of a boy's moral awareness-- so that, at ten, Hank could be a strange mixture to his fourth-grade teacher: 'He's a very quiet boy most of the time. But he can suddenly erupt, and then he's almost a problem child. But he never does that, gets wild, here in class; it's always outside, during recess, or just before or after school, or during the lunch hour, that we hear Hank has gone and got himself into some real trouble. He's not a big boy, . . . [but] he ends up taking as much as he gives . . . But he doesn't seem as upset as I am, or the vice-principal!'"**

It also seems linked to Hank's interaction with others to make himself the victim and then blame others for how they treated him.
 * **pg. 41-2. "Hank had a habit . . . of teasing others, making snide remarks about them -- only to infuriate them, of course. The result: he became, time and again, a victim. When he'd been so treated by others, he quickly turned into a complainer. Why had others treated him so? Why did the teacher let such episodes happen? What is wrong with his friend, Jim, -- who never rushes to Hank's aid when 'they' go after him?"**

Coles discusses Hank's dreams of becoming a cowboy or a cop that seemed tied to his need for power and respect. He returns to Ruby and compares her with Hank to show how different the moral lessons children can learn can be
 * **pg. 44. "Moral development in children can be characterized not only by periods of moral stoicism . . . as in Ruby's demeanor, but also by extended stretches of moral stingines, amoral self-abosrption, even a persistent immorality that takes the form of spitefulness, rudeness, assaultiveness."**

Coles then goes on for a few pages comparing the loving, forgiving God of the Bible with the vengeful, judgmental God of the Bible. Children can learn either lesson. Note: //lex talionis =// eye for an eye. It is striking how Hank, a victim of his father's abuses, internalizes his father's view of the world:
 * **pg. 47. "'Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord' -- and surely none of us can take it for granted that such a belief is in any way workable. As Hank's father told Hank, and as he often told me, 'this is a dog-eat-dog world, and if you don't learn to bark, you'll just be muzzled, and locked up, and that's the end of you, and the next guy is laughing.' So much for the God of Love, for the ethic of personal forgiveness and charity! One hears Hank repeating those words, coming to believe them . . . ' If someone's going to use you, then you be ready! If they keep on trying to use you, then you be ready to get even, or strike them down! I head a kid say the other day that he'd always hit first, if the thought anyone was going to hit him eventually. I guess he's right; otherwise you're a sitting duck!'"**

Coles refers to Freud's paper "A Child is Being Beaten" which tries to explain why many adults fantasize about doing violence to children: "Freud's paper told us that a number of adults have long, maybe lifelong, ruminations involving the beating of children, and that such obsessive ideas are about sibling rivalry, to one or another aspect of the Oedipal drama and its guilt." (pg. 52). I think this is an interesting and provocative point and we should examine it a bit.


 * MOVIES AND MORAL ENERGY**

In this chapter, Coles addresses how children use fiction -- stories, pictures, and movies -- as a source of moral inspiration. In many ways, he is echoing the points made by Bettelheim in //The Uses of Enchantment//. Children might prefer different forms of communication -- drawing instead of talking -- and therefore can use different forms to articulate moral or ethical points and identities. In addition, Coles touches upon the "spectator" aspect of some of this form of communication, echoing the points that Neil Postman makes in //Amusing Ourselves to Death.//

At the beginning, he notes
 * **pg. 55. "I remember, while I was an intern, hearing Anna Freud tell a roomful of doctors how 'visual' children can be -- more interested, often, in seeing than in speaking. Certainly the southern children I met in the early stage of my research were not talkers. They were six and seven years old, and they were glad to draw pictures for me -- but they were even happier when I left them alone, to watch the 'pictures' others had done: cartoons, adventure films of various kinds, and movies, all on television."**

Coles describes how psychologists/psychiatrists can use movies as a projective technique to identify what is troubling a person or to uncover hidden parts of their identity. The key here is that the analysis uses to movie to understand the person, i.e., it is simply a window into the person's psyche and not the actual content of the movie itself that is important. The movie amplified a particular set of emotions, "in the saddle," as Coles puts it, and amplifies and manifests subliminal or suppressed emotions to be analyzed. Coles will later criticize this narrow use of movies and other media. The next few pages present two movies, //A Raisin in the Sun// and //To Kill a Mockingbird//, that were popular at the time of Coles research (1961-62) and compares various children's reactions to the movie that do not fit within the projective-interpretive frame mentioned above. The key is Coles' conclusion after detailing how the children interpret the conflicts and themes of the works:
 * **pg. 58. "I wanted to hear more about what was //actually// happening to this child. My training had taught that a cartoon or a movie essentially underlined or amplified an existing psychological reality -- reactions to fear or doubt, powerlessness, insecurity, precariousness, not to mention danger. Similarly with my adult patients: when they would mention a movie that had especially touched them, a movie they couldn't get out of the mind, I always tried (of course) to figure out why, and asked them to help me. If the movie was about the vicissitudes of love, there was for him or her had grown to be a burden, if not a disaster. If the movie was about someone who had gotten a raw deal, it wouldn't be hard for the patient and me to figure out what reasons prompted him or her to become so taken by such a film, so unable simply to forget it after an hour or two. The clinical line of thinking dominated my mind. The movies offer us just about all the emotions, I kept telling myself, and so it is to be expected that any visit to to a theater will put one or another emotion in the saddle. Still, my psychiatric duty was to direct attention to the life in question, rather than the film. If someone else's fantasy, rendered on celluloid, generates a responsive wave of feeling, then by all means the observer must take notice - but less of the film itself, or of what 'going to the movies' means, then of the person's (inner) predicament: what does X reaction to Y movie tell us about Z -- this man, woman, or child, whom I am now hearing, seeing?"**
 * **pg. 64,65. "These children became, in their own fashion, moral witnesses. They watched a movie, selected a segment of it for ethical analysis, ended up having an idea or two on what was right and wrong -- for themselves and others who were alive . . . All these children had in common not only a conscience that scrutinized carefully their family behavior, their reactions to parents, brothers, and sisters, and by extension, friends and classmates, but also (what else to call it?) a moral sensibility that, when provoked by artistic expression, responded with a personal statement. Such a statement itself is an artistic expression of sorts, an act of moral imagination."**

In his discussion of //To Kill a Mockingbird//, Coles notes that the figure of Boo Radley, not Atticus Finch, the protagonist of the movie and novel, drew the most attention from children and how it revealed their moral insight and imagination.
 * **pg. 68. "While the world, mostly, heeded this movie's explicit celebration of a lawyer's decency and rectitude (unavailing against a community's ingrained racism), Ruby was impressed by how a boy and girl roughly her age learn to distinguished between social appearance and moral reality. Interestingly, what caught Ruby's eye is now, more than twenty years later, the most arresting part of the movie for many viewers."**

Coles moves on t//o// the western, //The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance// to show another example of how children use movies to stir their moral imagination and their ability to make nuanced moral judgments. The 14-year old white boy describes the intentions of //Liberty Valance// as follows.
 * **pg. 72. "'I'm pretty sure the people who made the film wanted us to be on John Wayne's sid! I'm always on his side! But they want you to be on the side of that Senator, and I'm //not// on his side. I mean, he was one of the goody guys; he was //the// good guy. But who believes anyone like him is for real? He was Mr. nice, and you can't go wrong with a Mr Nice in a movie -- but he'd have been the one shot if Wayne hadn't been there. We're all supposed to admire the nice lawyer who we know is going to be Senator, because he was so modest and he didn't want to be a big success to people because he killed Liberty Valance. To me, the really modest guy is Wayne: //he// could have stepped up and told people that it was his doing. But he wasn't that kind of guy!'"**

Coles summarizes the conclusion he draws from how children interacted with these stories, suggesting that the exhibit complex and mature reactions to these plots, revising the traditional view of children and moral reasoning.
 * **pg. 75-6. ". . . a complexity of social analysis bespoke the presence of considerable moral energy in these viewers. They did not assert themselves, naturally, in a carefully reasoned and utterly coherent, consistent way. They equivocated, advanced ideas, . . . retreated to publicly sanctioned banalities . . ., and so hemming and hawing, expressed their perplexity, their mixed feelings, their confusion . . . It is a mistake, however, to regarded these children as mere moral puppets, driven by the workings of some contemporary sociodrama to hunt down cheap symbols in order to help express whatever psychological tensions were at work inside their heads. In the case of //To Kill a Mockingbird//, a number of boys and girls were inclined to emphasize childhood rather than race . . . In the case of //A Raisin in the Sun//, race could yield again (even in those children hard pressed by its consequences) to the quandaries of authority: Who has authority in a family, and who doesn't, and why?**

Coles continues in this vein:
 * **pg. 76, 77. "Perhaps the imagination is, again, the one required to some justice to us moviegoers: moral imagination as it is lent energy by that inert celluloid going round and round for a hundred minutes or so. After those eyes have watched . . . a film -- then the mind recover the remembered words, the scenes that engage with a person's own scene, his or her life-situation . . . There may well be a moment and longer of surrender: the 'passive' child (or adult) will be not match for the self-styled artists, the manipulative magicians who are 'doing' sound and lights, or coaching, cajoling, lording it over the actors and actresses. The passive response is not the only one available. We have it within our power, young or old, to attend selectively, to summon a sense of proportion, to call upon humor and common sense, to assume a varying or even quite insistent critical distance from the subject under scrutiny . . ."**

The following vignette where a teenage boy compares the "serious" world of school with the "fantasy" world of movies is instructive, especially for teachers to understand how some students approach their subjects and what distractions or competitors exist to formal education. Coles comments: He continues The next few pages draws out the moral messages in the original STAR WARS trilogy, but I think that this is quite dated. However, I think that the LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTER series have similarly fertile pastures to mine for moral messages that are buried within the broader narrative.
 * **pg. 77-79. "He found the ninth grade boring, and the movies a delightful alternative: 'I can go see John Wayne over an dover. Any western will do for me! Any western is better than sitting there in that class and listening to the teacher go on and on about prepositions an why algebra will make a difference in my life! I look at her, and she's so fussy about everything . . . This country was wasn't built up -- not out West, anyway -- by people who were worried about the semicolon! In a movie, you see people leveling with each other . . . You can't take a movie too seriously, though; I know. I forget a lot of the movie pretty fast! I know the Indians got a raw deal. But I don't think about that when I see the movie . . . I feel sorry for them. They got cheated. To me seeing a good western is like taking a vacation: you get into the swing of things, and you're right there while they slug it out. I don't try to remember my American History that she teaches us . . . But I don't forget my history, either . . . People don't give you credit a lot of the time for having your head screwed on straight! They say kids are influenced by this bad thing and that bad thing, and it's always the movies: they're not as good as Mark Twain, that's what the teacher says. But I'll bet Mark Twain might like going to the movies, if he was around, and he wouldn't think //they// are the reason people act bad. He said people were pretty bad back when he was around, and there weren't movies then."**
 * **pg. 80. "A young moviegoer can thus repeatedly expose himself to the excesses of a Hollywood genre -- sentimentality, violence, blatnat misreading of history, racial prejudice, simplemindedness -- and somehow emerge unscathed intellectually as well as morally. It can even be argued that he becomes stronger in both respects. True, film enables him to 'escape' to experience vicariously . . . But each movie helps him learn to sort matters out, stop and think about what is true and what is not by anymeans true -- in the past, in the present. This youth becomes stirred morally -- not simplistically . . ."**
 * **pg. 82-3. "We, who are older, worry, and ask: What //is// this all about? We forget, sometimes, our own childhood . . . We older people forget, too, how today's fantases become tomorrow's reality, the connections between any mind's imaginative constructions of our singular inventors, or our technology . . . Entertainment is an expression of our nature -- the creature who asks wher eand how and why and whither. Such curiosity is, of course, especially prominent among children, who know full well (and are reminded all the time) that they have a lot to learn. Nor is the knowledge they get going to be, as some scientific philosophers have put it, 'value free.' Anyone who ahs taught a baby of one or two where he or she might go and must not go, and why, know the linkage between exploration and morality . . . Those children had already acquired a notion of what is not allowable technologically."**

In the next few pages I think Coles is being a bit coy and vague and doesn't communicate his point well, in my opinion. To summarize in my own words, we can be too clever and read too much meaning into stories and therefore deprive ourselves of the underlying emotional or moral message. He notes how children, without adult guile, are able to do this better and can use stories as a way of provoking serious moral and intellectual thought. He finishes with the words of Ruby Bridges about how movies provoked her to think deeply.
 * **pg. 92. "'I went to that movie and afterward I kept thinking of it, thinking and thinking, and the next day it made me wonder what I should do, and would I be doing right or wrong.' This personal idiosyncratic reply, so patently, unashamedly moral in character, tells us what a movie can get going, but just as important, tells us that we all are -- as the saying goes -- children of light and children of darkness."**