I’m thinking about children during this era of the coronavirus and Donald Trump, and all the reasons there are to worry about them. The news warns about the human costs of remote learning: isolation, social deprivation, the dangers of excessive screen time to brain development. Taking into account disparities in at-home conditions, such as adequate access to laptops and reliable Wi-Fi, the intermittent shuttering of in-person education stands to gravely exacerbate economic inequality, with children of color paying the heaviest toll, while an overriding effect of this traumatic era on children across the board may be what is termed a learning deficit.
But I also wonder if, beyond these lamentable circumstances, young people are learning some extremely valuable lessons. I’m thinking specifically of first graders, who are young enough to be impressionable yet old enough to grasp the essential meaning of the broad experiences they are both having and witnessing. Are they learning formative lessons that, long ago, my generation initially missed out on? Lessons that humankind is desperately in need of?
I entered the first grade in 1949. Leaving aside the limiting educational aspects of the era (overcrowded classes, mindless discipline, rote learning), the larger point concerns the culture, the nation, and the world into which I was being initiated. It was a world of postwar America triumphant. The United States was not only the most powerful country but also the most virtuous. In that double claim—power linked to virtue—lay our true distinction.
And that superiority didn’t just pertain at the national level. As first graders were programmed to see it, the adults in our lives were uniformly trustworthy: parents were reliable authority figures; teachers were potentates of the classroom—their word was absolute. The world was ordered as tidily as the new suburban lawns sprouting everywhere.
Or, at least, it was if you were white and middle class and male. My school was in Arlington, Virginia, a place still tied more to Robert E. Lee than to the D.C. commute. It was a parochial school, but legally segregated. That the experience of Black Americans went largely unnoted by whites in most parts of the country at that time is an essential part of the story, but that excluding filter is precisely what enabled the perception of America as virtuous and all-powerful. That twin nobility was captured in the slogan “For God and Country,” or, as we Catholics preferred, Pro Deo et Patria.
Another child likely entering first grade around that time was Joe Biden. (He and I differ in age by two months.) His world, even in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was probably much like mine. His family, too, was Irish-Catholic-American and almost certainly would have taken for granted the God-and-country orthodoxy. It was a dependable belief system that, suddenly, we needed more than before, because, just as that first-grade year began, children learned that the world was full of danger.
We didn’t yet have a television in my house, but I remember the bread-box-size Philco radio from which the word came that the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic bomb. (The explosion had occurred in late August, but President Harry Truman made it public only in September.) The apocalyptic buzz sparked by Joseph Stalin’s startling achievement was my initiation into the cult of the evening news. The era’s mantra of terror was “the Reds have the bomb,” and, emboldened by it, at the end of our first-grade year, they had come after us in a faraway place named Korea—my generation’s first war. This enemy was especially dangerous, children were told, because Asians did not value human life as much as we did. This absurd claim was seriously offered as another example of American moral superiority.
That us-against-them bipolarity became the structure of both international relations and our sense of ourselves. If the infamous, generation-defining, under-the-desk atomic-bomb drills were scary, they served to indoctrinate kids not only in Soviet turpitude but also in the fantasy that nuclear war could be survived. That notion, in turn, justified our nation’s nuclear posture. Their bomb was evil. Ours was good. For fifteen cents and a box top from Kix cereal, General Mills would send you your own Atomic “Bomb” Ring.
Then, at the end of my childhood’s decade, in 1960, the United States, led by President Dwight Eisenhower, was caught lying. The Soviets shot down an American airplane over their territory, which U.S. authorities claimed had been a weather plane that flew off course after suffering difficulties. When Moscow, charging espionage, produced a captured C.I.A. pilot, Francis Gary Powers, and the wreckage of his U-2 spy plane, our shock was complete. Wasn’t the difference between the Reds and us the fact that they always lied, and we never did? Eisenhower’s deceit was an epiphany: the chill wind of realpolitik foretold the end of what we’d been taught since first grade.
The discrediting of our absolute faith in American moral grandeur defined my generation’s coming of age. The next, seismic jolt was the murder of President John F. Kennedy, a flashing light of mad violence that warned of successive seasons of tragedy. They ran for decades: the brutality of the sixties (dogs loosed on protesters in Birmingham, further assassinations, the Vietnam War), the lies of the seventies (a war needlessly prolonged, Richard Nixon’s politics of deceit), the rampant inequalities set loose in the eighties (Ronald Reagan’s fetishizing of the one per cent). What had filled our heads in my generation’s first grade was the kindling, fuel, and matches for the moral and political conflagration that followed on that grandeur’s being debunked—the conflagration that burns hotter now than ever.
Today’s first graders know nothing of the grand illusions of my childhood. Those myths of national nobility do not exist for them. Their school experience is defined not by absolute authority figures in the classroom but by overwrought teachers trying to handle the demands of virtual instruction. Children are on the front lines of the pandemic, and they know it: arguments about their schooling—in person? virtual? hybrid?—have become flash points. At home, they may sense the fear and disorientation of parents dealing with job stresses, if not the stresses of joblessness. They may have family members who, unvisited and alone, have died of the virus. When children venture out of the house, wearing masks, they are encouraged to avoid encounters, whether with strangers or neighbors. There are now more than three hundred thousand COVID-19 dead; first graders are learning to count, and they understand that it’s a very big number.
Meanwhile, these children have only really known a Presidency of absolute falsehood and bullying. Lying and bullying, of course, are the first offenses against which the young are firmly instructed—and now they learn that millions of Americans are O.K. with both. They have seen Black Lives Matter demonstrations celebrated, and derided. If they are well fed at home, they likely know (from ad-hoc school food programs) that some of their classmates do not have enough to eat. They know, in sum, that the nation into which they are being initiated is deeply flawed.
Yet children are seeing other things, too. Their teachers show up; maintain their essential equilibrium; and find ways, even on Zoom, to let pupils feel their dedication and support coming through the screen. Many parents are working from home on, say, a laptop in the kitchen, and their children watch them finding all kinds of ways to cope—a first glimpse of the effort it takes to keep a family afloat—while getting day care covered, meals prepared, and stories read at night.
My memories of postwar childhood in America won’t match Joe Biden’s in the particulars, but he has undergone his own version of our generation’s transformation. And he knows that today’s children are challenged in ways that we were not. As President, he will be able to depend for instruction on the present education emergency from, among others, his wife, Jill Biden, who no doubt grasps its scale. He can learn, too, from the Vice-President-elect, Kamala Harris, whose experience of American reckoning was shaped not only by being younger and a person of color but by being the child of parents who took her to its protests and demonstrations.
But the most valuable lesson could come from the children, who may well be ahead on the curves that matter most: the moral and the political. The virus has rampaged around the globe, and that amounts, in effect, to this generation’s first geography lesson, bringing home in a way that is unique to it the truth that Americans are like people everywhere. The virus knows nothing of nationalism. Mortality is in the air: there are first graders everywhere on the planet, and they breathe it. When these children are adults, they will ask one another, “Where were you during the COVID-19 pandemic?” They may recognize one another, beyond nationality, as the pandemic’s children.
Today’s American first graders, therefore, may be preparing for the long-overdue embrace of an unprecedented American vision: one that sees this nation as a part of a collective of human beings struggling to do their best for one another, no matter who we are or where we come from. What could the old, quite dangerous myths about American exceptionalism mean after this?
