Lessons Through a Child's Eyes
by Alvin P. Sanoff
Robert Coles, one of the world's leading authorities on race and poverty, will never forget the day that changed his life. At the time, Coles was a young psychiatrist at an Air Force base in Mississippi trying to decide what to do when he returned to civilian life. On his way to a medical meeting in New Orleans, Coles became ensnarled in traffic. When he asked a policeman what was going on, the officer pointed at a nearby school. Coles got out of his car and saw a mob screaming at a six-year-old black girl whose name, he later learned, was Ruby Bridges. "I couldn't get that picture out of my mind," he recalls.
A few months later, after gaining the support of NAACP officials, he went to the house where Ruby lived and knocked on the door. He told Ruby and her parents that he was a doctor who wanted to find out how children integrating the schools got through the problems they were facing. Throughout 1960, Coles (no longer in the military) met once or twice a week with Ruby and three other African American children who were integrating the New Orleans schools under court order. He talked with the youngsters and asked them to draw pictures of their experiences, while drawing right along with them to make them feel more comfortable. This pioneering technique, which helps children express their inner thoughts and emotions, became standard practice in clinical research around the world.
The kids' artwork offered insights into how they viewed the world. Coles found that Ruby "drew white people larger and more lifelike" than black people. When drawing herself, Ruby's face sometimes lacked features, while those of the white girls never did. Yet Coles found that the youth and their families were remarkably resilient. "You learn lessons from terrible times," Ruby's father told him.
Coles' experiences in the South proved to be a launching pad for an illustrious career. An educator and author of more than 60 books, he has traveled to the hollows of Appalachia, migrant worker camps, and other places where children faced hardships. No matter where he went, he found that kids were quick to adapt to stressful circumstances.
Coles' training as a psychiatrist, which focused on psychopathology, did not prepare him for the strengths he found among the children and their families. "When you are trained to find trouble and instead you see considerable ingenuity, resourcefulness, and stamina, you are the one who ends up learning lessons," he says.
Since the '60s, Coles has been on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. In 1973, he won a Pulitzer Prize for the first volume of his series about ordinary children facing extraordinary challenges called Children of Crisis Volume I: A Study of Courage and Fear (Little, Brown and Company, 1967-1977).
Coles examines the cultural impact of the rock star in Bruce Springsteen's America (Random House, 2003), in which he says Springsteen is in the tradition of American writers such as Walt Whitman who were inspired by the lives of ordinary people.
Today, at 74, Coles spends much of his time working on Doubletake, the magazine he created. It brings together an eclectic mix of nonfiction, fiction, and photographic essays that document ordinary people's lives.
Moving ahead, Coles is completing his latest book, Teaching Stories, an anthology of literary writing about education that he used in a course at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Due to be published by Modern Library in August, it includes work by authors not typically encountered in education schools, such as John Cheever, Leo Tolstoy, and Toni Morrison. He says they offer insights into behavior that elude "the generalizations and formulations that some of us in the social sciences offer."
His next book, scheduled for publication in 2005, is based on the popular Harvard undergraduate course he taught, "The Literature of Social Reflection." Facetiously called "Guilt 105" by students, the course emphasized the importance of living a life of moral concern, and covered writers such as poet William Carlos Williams and novelist Walker Percy.
As Coles reflects on how America has changed since the Supreme Court put an end to "separate but equal," he exudes optimism. "The nation has steadfastly moved in often undreamed of directions," he says, citing the appointment of Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Coles, who volunteers at schools in Boston and Cambridge, has observed that African American students are very aware of these high government officials.
Coles knows that serious social problems continue to afflict the nation, but says that today "black youngsters no longer have a sense of absolute restriction and confinement." Coles still values the picture-drawing technique he used with Ruby so many years ago. But now the pictures are different. "I've had kids draw pictures of African Americans and say that someday that imaginary person would become president. It's a remarkable change."
Al Sanoff is a freelance writer and a former editor at U.S. News & World Report.
