Mysteries the Moral Life of Children

By John Leo

If the world offered Oscars for interviewing children, Anna Freud would win for lifetime achievement, Art Linkletter would walk off with the trophy for most tots questioned, and Harvard Psychiatrist Robert Coles would be hands- down, standing-ovation winner of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He might also win the Dino De Laurentiis plaque for epic production. To date, Coles has spent 28 years toting notebook, crayons and tape recorder around the world, attempting to glean moral and political insights from children, an effort that now runs to seven books and more than a million words.

What to make of this extraordinary labor? Coles is an erudite, fiercely moral man. But he is not a gifted interviewer, and, judging by his books, rapport with children does not come easily. His interviews feature the usual dutiful responses of youngsters to earnest adult interrogation. The long set speeches that his children give are cobbled together from fragments of speech, and Coles is honest enough to admit that the process is apt to make an interviewee sound like a miniature version of the author. In his pages, Coles- like Irish children offer much the same insight as Coles-like Eskimo children: there is good and bad in everyone, and that is the way of the world.

Inevitably, a million-word enterprise involves a certain amount of recycling. Ruby Bridges, the courageous black child who integrated a New Orleans school in 1960, appears in one of the five volumes of Coles' Children of Crisis series, in one of the two volumes of his Women of Crisis books and in The Moral Life of Children. Once again, Coles gets very little out of an extraordinary child who smiled serenely at those who spat on her and prayed each night for her tormentors. His principal reaction is bewildered admiration. A Mississippi black woman tells her daughter that people of every hue are a mixture of good and bad, and the good fights the bad in politics all the time. Coles is again deeply impressed: "Such a moral and theological analysis of political life is worthy of Reinhold Niebuhr."

Coles has a nettlesome habit of segueing into awe at the exact moment that analysis is desperately needed. He devotes 22 pages to a stoical chicano girl named Marty, whose father and brother were killed by a drunk driver. Writing of Marty and another brave child, Coles declares, "One can only try to fathom how children like those two have managed so far to do as they've done. One thereby nudges theory toward human experience, hoping that the latter brings the former to life, and the former helps arrive at a persistent, comprehensible aspect of the human scene." In other words, the development of a moral life is certainly complex and so far seems to be an unfathomable mystery.

Why this insight should require seven books is another mystery, at least for those who believe that readers are capable of arriving at non- comprehension on their own. Coles' distaste for ideas and intellectual analysis is profound and usually presented in his books along with the belief that truth will somehow radiate out of unexamined statements by children. Coles seems to think morality is the indefinable and unpredictable result of simply making decisions. A footnote says, "I can only get a bit mystical here, summon the notion of action as 'transcendence,' and, admittedly, risk murkiness and evasion." But why pass along such confusion at book length? As the author writes at one point, "I am, yet again, coming up with nothing very startling."