Leo R. Sandy

Feeling cared about is perhaps the most important thing a person can experience. I still remember how my grandmother, an immigrant from Finland, cared about me and how much a role that played in my listening to her and believing what she said. That was over 50 years ago. For example, during the McCarthy era, she said not to believe what McCarthy said, and that the Russian people were good despite their lousy government. When I watched TV and saw the U.S. cavalry repeatedly killing native American Indians, she told me that Indians were good people. After that, westerns were never quite the same. Because of her, I have never allowed anyone else to define my enemies for me.

Care leads to trust, and trust in and from others leads to self-trust and self-reliance. Children heed what adults tell them when they know that the adults have their best interests at heart. This has profound implications for education but care may be one of its most glaring missing elements. I can remember, as if it were yesterday the four teachers who cared about me in my early schooling. They were both loving and strict - an essential combination of caring. It would have been nice to remember more teachers like this. One important aspect of caring is that it must be felt by the children. For example, in one school I taught in, the teacher across the hall was constantly telling the children she cared about them yet they acted out frequently. I was tempted to tell her to stop telling them and start showing them. Words are poor substitutes for actions.

Nell Noddings, author of The Challenge to Care in Schools said that “the main aim of education should be a moral one, that of nurturing the growth of competent, caring, loving, and lovable persons”. However, “at the present time...our main purpose is...a relentless — and... hapless — drive for academic adequacy... The current emphasis on achievement may actually contribute to students’ feeling that adults do not care for them”.

We never think about taking money out of the bank when our account is empty but we have no trouble asking children to produce more and more without putting anything into them such as love, care and support. Children are often treated more like objects than people. No wonder why so many act out and drop out of school. Too often schools, and even teacher training programs, try to substitute methods for relationship. Likewise, many parents try to replace relationship with technique looking for the latest punishments. All the punishments and rewards in the world will never take the place of spending enjoyable time with significant others.

Too often control is the major focus of teaching and parenting rather than influence. For example, teachers and parents who help children internalize values, develop self-control and postpone gratification build a rich inner life for children. These adults model desired behavior and rely on communication skills and the adult-child relationship to develop children. These adults build trust so that children come to trust in their own sense to do what’s right. On the other hand, when adults emphasize control and rely on punishments and rewards, children may be left with an inner emptiness that they may later try to fill with alcohol, drugs and sex. These adults don’t trust children and the children come to distrust their own judgments. Influential adults use terms like “coach”, “guide”, and “teach” while controlling adults talk about “reining in”, “keeping in line” and “managing.”

When we emphasize only intellectual achievement rather than developing the whole child, we inhibit the development of other areas such as social, emotional, physical and spiritual. The result is undeveloped people. Noddings pointed to German education in the years preceding World War II and how the rise of Nazism with its moral depravity could not be checked by the emphasis on intellectual development. For Noddings, “A real change requires a radical transformation in goals or ends, not simply in means, and the American public has never really understood a call for radical changes in ends...Classrooms should be places in which students can legitimately act on a rich variety of purposes, in which wonder and curiosity are alive, in which students and teachers live together and grow... (and where) people...would live nonviolently with each other, sensitively and in harmony with the natural environment, reflectively and serenely with themselves.”

Noddings sees care as needing to pervade the entire educational environment. “Education should include care of physical self, the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual aspects of self, something about the human longing for god or spirit, something about life cycles and stages, practice in caring, sustained conversation and mutual exploration with an adult, interpersonal reasoning, constructive opposition, understanding of self and others as well as the nature of groups, interpersonal skills, effective communication skills, the ability to examine the effects of their own lives on others, moderation, the ability to relate to nonhuman life and our moral attitude toward animals, cultural evil, a skeptical view of history, about occupations, a chance to listen to several sides, an appreciation for plant life, and the dangers of extremism.”

When care becomes a focal point in parenting and education, Noddings says that we will see the positive results: “healthy family life; happy, healthy children; cooperative and considerate behavior; competence in the ordinary affairs of life; intellectual curiosity; openness and willingness to share; a confessed interest in existential questions; and a growing capacity to contribute to and thrive in intimate relationships.”

Noddings believes that we are currently on the wrong path. “Instead of promoting schooling as the road to higher economic status, we should promote it as the path to wisdom. Instead of painting a hierarchical picture of success in terms of money and power, we should discuss success in terms of loving relations, of growth in individual capacities, of lasting pleasure in various worthy occupations, of satisfying connections with living things and the earth itself. In the past few decades we have prostituted schooling, and it shows in everything from our overemphasis on achievement scores to our concentration on credentialing for ‘good’ jobs”.

I sometimes wonder what children think when they hear our elected officials talk about an “adequate” education. It’s hard to imagine that this would translate into feeling cared about. In the richest country in the world we can afford to care a lot more than we do. So far we have chosen not to. Leo R. Sandy is professor of counselor education at Plymouth State University and a consulting school psychologist.