Irving Harris, the well-known businessman, philanthropist and child advocate, tells a parable about some people picnicking beside a river. Suddenly they see an enormous number of babies being carried down the river by the current. Their first impulse is to jump in and pull out as many of the babies as possible. But the kids keep coming, and the rescuers can't save them all. Finally, someone is smart enough to run up the river to see who is pushing them in.
Like most parables, this is rich in meaning. But Harris intends it as a comment on the way we handle the problem of disadvantaged children--particularly those born to unmarried mothers who may not have wanted them in the first place and who don't give them the nurturing children need. Our primary intervention is the education system. In "Education--Does It Make a Difference When You Start?" (Aspen Quarterly, Spring 1993)--and in an even more hard-hitting speech, "Primary Prevention vs. Intervention"--Harris calls this too little, too late.
Harris points out that we spend a great deal on education. Yet even middle-class children do not achieve at the same levels as youngsters in other industrialized countries, and disadvantaged children do much worse. In some cities, half the students drop out, and many who graduate don't have the skills to get a decent job or to benefit from college.
We hear many ideas about how to help the education system succeed with these youngsters. But even if we gave schools every imaginable resource, Harris says, it would still be like jumping into the water to save kids who are already drowning. We must go on trying, but we are kidding ourselves if we think that improving K-12 education is enough to solve the problem.
Research shows that the brain develops most rapidly during a child's first year. Babies who don't get the food and health care they need are likely to be slow to develop and may be permanently harmed-- long before they are old enough even to enroll in Head Start. Harris cites a study that found an astonishing 12 percent of preschoolers to be learning-impaired because of preventable causes like malnutrition, lead poisoning and abuse and neglect.
But a child's physical well-being is not the only issue. Babies need parents who make them feel secure and loved, and "a poor, single mother--especially a teen mother--who starts off with low self-esteem and lacks security ... may find it difficult to teach the baby, through consistent caring and interaction, that the baby is safe and loved." Youngsters who do not get this nurturing are likely to enter kindergarten unprepared--and begin a spiral of failure that lasts throughout their school careers and beyond.
These poor kids are not the only ones who pay for their lack of readiness. The kindergarten teachers Harris talked to said they could handle one such child without "shortchanging" the others, but if they had more than one, the learning of every child in the class suffered. This means we have an enormous national problem. In 1990, 28 percent of American babies--over one million--were born to unmarried women, many of whom were children themselves and had no job and no understanding of what it means to raise a child. By 1995, the figure will be one-third. In how many classrooms will all the children suffer because one child is not ready?
The consequences of ignoring these youngsters are frightening for the kids themselves and for the rest of us, but there is no magic bullet. We must begin working, Harris says, to create a social climate in which early sexual activity and childbearing are condemned instead of being widely accepted as they are now. And because he believes that children who are unplanned and unwanted are at greatest risk, Harris says that birth control information and abortions must be as readily available for poor women as they are for wealthy women. Taken together, these measures might reduce the number of high-risk babies to 500,000 a year.
We could then devote our resources to creating a system that would give these 500,000 children--and their parents--the help they need from the beginning of the children's lives. Such a system might cost $10 billion a year, but it is a fraction of what we now spend on education, and it would be much less than it costs to deal with the results of our continuing neglect.
As important as education is, Harris tells us, it cannot take the place of social policy in dealing with a million drowning children. There are people who will strongly disagree with Harris's plan, but his analysis of the problem--and of what we face if we don't deal with it--demands everyone's attention.