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School Review.
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BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Universityof Chicago
explain why food programs meet with resistance and why they
are so inadequately administered by the school systems.
The answer is, I believe, that those who institute and ad-
minister the programs, well motivated as they are, do not create
the emotional climate that would assure their success. Because
somebody is hired as a cook and accepts the job because he or
she needs the money does not mean that this person likes to
prepare and serve meals to others, least of all to rambunctious
children.
Let me illustrate by a situation that exists in a school with
which I am familiar. The school is only about a decade old,
quite new as school buildings go. But its kitchen is not much
larger than the rather spacious one in my home. In this kitchen,
where meals are prepared for 400 children, the stove, re-
frigerators, dishwashing machine-everything-is much larger
than in my home, which leaves very little space for the cook and
her two helpers to work. As much as she may have been origi-
nally motivated to prepare good, attractive, and nutritional
meals, the daily struggle with impossible working conditions
has aggravated the cook, annoyed her, made her short tem-
pered. Only rarely do the children get meals they really enjoy;
most of the time they are served things, like gooey beef, which
young children typically do not like though they contain all the
desirable nutritional elements. Worse, they are served by a cook
who is often so angry that she practically throws the food at the
children. She does not talk, but screams at them for the slight-
est reason. If a child arrives at the pay station without his
money because, for example, an older brother or sister has it,
she bawls him out: "Why isn't he here? Why don't you stay in
line with him?" And she sends him back. For everything the
back from one shift and another getting ready for the next. He
arranged for some large tables to be set up in the rear of each
classroom and some blankets to be provided. He then encour-
aged the children to lie down for naps whenever they felt like it.
A fine idea, but the teachers resisted, fearing that the example
of the sleeping child would demoralize those who still paid
attention, would interfere with the learning of those who lost
out on listening to the teacher by sleeping. It took the superin-
tendent many weeks of hard work to persuade the teachers.
After that, throughout the school day several children slept in
each class. Others who had never attended began to come to
school because they found there more restful sleep than in
their trailer homes. After he had won the positive cooperation
of the teachers, absenteeism dropped from the old rate of
nearly 50 percent to less than 10 percent. More important, the
morale among the children and among the teachers improved
greatly. And while the children were, on the average, academi-
cally two to three years behind their chronological age, after a
year of this new arrangement there was no longer more
academic retardation to be found in this group of deprived
children than in the well-established middle-class neighboring
Seattle school system. Thus, letting children sleep in class was
not only good for their physical health but was an outstanding
academic success. Severely deprived children performed, be-
cause of this program, as well as nondeprived children. But it
worked so well not because the opportunity to sleep had been
added to the class routine. It worked because the teachers had
become convinced that the new system could help them to
teach and maintain discipline. They had become convinced be-
cause special efforts had been made to win them over
-necessary efforts, though the teachers had been convinced
that children need sleep, as our present teachers are convinced
that children need good nutrition.
Another example will help to point out how, while teachers
accept the importance of a new function added to their load,
their efforts will fail without the proper psychological prepara-
tion. When sex education was added to the program of many
schools, there was little question that it was desirable for the
children. But, while teaching materials and courses of study
group nearly all children raised their hands. She did not ques-
tion them any further because she did not want to make them
self-conscious about it, which speaks well of her sensitivity to
her children's feelings. I encouraged her to go back to her class
and, instead of just stressing the desirability of having orange
juice for breakfast, discuss with the children the economic
difficulties which make it very hard for many parents to pro-
vide the kind of nutrition that they would like to offer. Thus to
what she had been teaching originally, good nutrition, she now
added discussions of the difficulties which parents encounter in
providing it for their children. I further suggested that after
adding this elaboration of the economic and psychological is-
sues to those already in the curriculum on nutrition she might
then ask children, individually and privately, when they had
last had a glass of orange juice for breakfast. The problem
approached in this way revealed that, while most of them had at
one time had a glass of orange juice, none of them in the class
had it regularly for breakfast. One youngster, for example,
explained that he had raised his hand because indeed, last Eas-
ter, he had-once-had orange juice for breakfast.
can feel that this is a good world, will we feel that it is worth-
while to come to terms with its demands. But the teacher ex-
pects the children to have such convictions long before they
have learned to make them their own. She is critical of their
wastefulness, which only reinforces their conviction that "there
isn't enough, and we'd better grab it now."
At the Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago there
is a tremendous waste of food. It took many months of patient
teaching to convince the cooks and helpers that it is so impor-
tant for emotionally, and often also physically, deprived chil-
dren to be able to waste and to have their wastefulness posi-
tively accepted, because it is for them such an important testing
of whether this is a friendly or an unfriendly world. After they
understood they no longer minded the children's wasting large
amounts of food, though they had to economize in their own
families. We all can accept such behavior in others only after we
have really understood its causes and its consequences, but we
cannot accept it just because we are told to do so.
takes its meals with the patients. While such practice obviously
presupposes a change in attitude of the staff, which should not
be overlooked in the effectiveness of such eating together, the
fact that patients, staff, and doctors eat together, and eat the
same fare, immediately reduced the levels of tension, the po-
tentiality of violent outbreaks. And this not just at mealtime but
all during the day and throughout the institution. Now, the
teacher's taking her meals with the children also presupposes a
change in her inner attitude; but this change, I believe, is the
precondition for helping children learn to feel satiated, and
with it to learn in general.
Of course, for some time they will waste food, and some may
gorge themselves so that they throw up. But when handled
correctly, this will be a most important lesson in how beneficial
it is to learn controls, and not only for the rare child who
stuffed himself so fast and furiously that his stomach revolted,
but even more for the other children who watch it and whose
natural disgust will teach them control more than any verbal
teaching could. But for them to learn this lesson the teacher
must not be disgusted; she must use the event to help the sick to
feel better and to point out that, while gorging oneself is under-
standable when one is deprived, controlling one's desires is to
one's advantage.
I think the school day in our inner-city schools should begin
not with the Pledge of Allegiance, but with a hearty breakfast,
eaten in class, with the teacher. Eating together is what makes
for allegiance between people, and eventually to one's country.
Nothing is more divisive than when people eat a different fare,
in different rooms, the one of inferior, the other of superior,
quality. But this is exactly what is typical in our schools at lunch,
and it is the school cafeteria where most discipline problems are
born.
I could cite innumerable examples of children who for years
were unable to learn anything in school but who began to learn
while they were hand fed by their teachers. The person who
feeds us is simply the first teacher in our life and remains our
best teacher later on. But a few will have to do as one nonreader
did. He had to hold food in one hand while holding the flash
card in the other before he could begin learning to read be-
cause, as he said, "Food is the only good thing in life and only if
I get more in one hand can I learn more [meaning reading]
with the other."
The degree to which very deprived children will experience
food as a symbol of all pleasure, instead of just nourishment, is
typified by the statements a perennial truant made during our
early efforts to keep him in school. "You know," he said, "I'm
one of those people who has to eat. Sometimes when I've just
eaten a lot, I run out of the room and I get hungry again and I
want some more food. And then, a little later, I'll need more,
even before it's time to eat again. I just like to eat; I just have to
have food around."
Food is thus what first attaches many truants to the school;
the security of a regular food supply is the great domesticator.
Some children who became runaways as soon as they outgrew
their infancy were first able to accept school on such a basis.
So closely and intricately interwoven into a single strand
within the individual are both our physical nature, which re-
quires food, and the nurture which we call intellectual de-
velopment, that it will not do to keep them separate. The dis-
tinction between physical and emotional need, between body
and intellect, is, in reality, a false one. Although schools are
concerned with the children's intellectual development, the two
are not separable, certainly not in the actual life of the indi-
vidual. Piaget, the foremost student of the child's intellectual
development, makes this point as explicitly as Freud, the
foremost student of emotional development would have made
it: "There is never a purely intellectual action; numerous emo-
tions, interests, values intervene-for example, in solving of a
mathematical problem. Likewise, there is never a purely affec-
tive act, even love presupposes comprehension." Thus, Piaget is
convinced that "there is a close parallel between the develop-
ment of affectivity, and the intellectual functions." So we can
understand why many a child who cannot count just by looking
at how many cookies are on the table will know whether there
are enough to go around. And I have taught more children to
count by counting pieces of candy than in any other way. It is
the oldest mathematics, and still the most effective.
Food, for children, is the main source of security. If we want