The biggest terror for many little children is getting lost. They'll go somewhere with their mother or father and when they look around mom or dad will be gone. In the classic happy ending, the parent appears and hugs the child, and they go home together. But for many of the kids in our society who are lost because they are not getting the support they need from adults, there won't be any happy ending.
This is especially likely for kids in homes where they suffer violence and abuse from the adults who are supposed to be caring for them. Or where a single parent is so distracted with worry and work that the children don't get the emotional and moral support they need to grow into strong and confident adults.
One answer often proposed is mentoring, one-on-one help from adult volunteers who take needy youngsters under their wings and attempt to turn their lives around. Mentoring appeals to people of many political stripes. Conservatives favor it because they see voluntarism as a way of solving social problems without involving government (and spending a lot of money). So do liberals who believe that communities can and must take responsibility for their own problems. But The Kindness of Strangers: Adult Mentors, Urban Youth and the New Voluntarism (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993), a recent book by Mark Freedman, raises serious questions about using an ad-hoc approach to deal with this enormous social and human problem.
For one thing, Freedman points out, there are never enough volunteers. Furthermore, most mentoring programs are run on a shoestring so they don't have the staff to make careful matches between mentors and youngsters. Nor can they provide mentors with the training and follow-up they need. Given these limitations, mentoring is as chancy as a blind date-- and no more likely to lead to the lasting and solid relationship these kids need. Many kids pull the plug because a couple of outings a month with a stranger from another world are not enough to overcome
their uneasiness and distrust. Many mentors find they can't really fit mentoring into their busy schedules. Others give up because it is so hard to get through to their kid. (This, of course, gives a youngster who has probably already been failed by adults another experience of how worthless he is.) At best, a commitment of four hours a month for a year or so, which is the average, will not turn around many lives.
Freedman's suggestion is that we look at existing institutions, like
schools, where possibilities for mentoring arise naturally. Teachers and other school personnel don't have to be parachuted into students' lives; they know these kids and work with them every day. And the personal concern mentors feel for the youngsters they work with is a natural extension of the teacher-pupil relationship rather than the kindness of a stranger, which must often seem rather artificial.
The problem is that schools are not organized in a way that gives teachers and students a chance to develop close and caring relationships -- and they don't have the resources to do it either. Elementary school children spend one year with a teacher -- just long enough to start feeling comfortable -- and then they move on to new teacher. After elementary school, they often have a different teacher for every subject.
Why shouldn't elementary and junior high school students stay with the same group of kids for three or four years? Why shouldn't there be a team of teachers and paraprofessionals, and why shouldn't the class be broken down into small groups so each group can work closely with a teacher-- and get to know one another? In high school, mentoring could be carried on by programming small weekly seminars, which would continue -- same teacher and same kids -- throughout the students' high school years. Or all these changes could be carried out in smaller schools or schools within schools, where students and teachers start out with a better chance of knowing one another.
These ideas are sound in educational as well as emotional and moral terms. Students who are connected with another adult, and with one another, are less likely to drop out. And they are more likely to work and shape one another up -- and thus to enjoy a measure of success in school work.
Mentoring can fill an important need for the many youngsters who have no close or caring relationship with an adult. But we are kidding ourselves if we think we can make a dent in this enormous problem with ad-hoc arrangements. We should stop working around the edges of the main institution concerned with children -- the schools -- and concentrate on making our schools moral communities. It can be done.