This American Life; Cruelty of Children; Part 2

It's this American Life, I'm IRA Glass. Each week on our program, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and performers to take a whack at the theme. Today's theme is Cruelty of children, not cruelty to children, mind you, cruelty of Children. And our next story is by writer IRA Sher. And in it, the children are cruel and a mean spirited or typical way. But the effect of their actions constitutes a kind of cruelty. I was nine when I discovered the man in the well and then abandoned farm near my home when I was with a group of friends playing hide and go seek or something when I found the well and then I heard the voice of the man in the well calling out for help. I think it's important that we decided not to help him. Everyone, like myself, was probably on the verge of fetching a rope or asking where we could find a ladder. But then we looked around at each other and it was decided. I don't remember if we told ourselves the reason why we couldn't help him, but we had decided then because of this, I never went very close to the lip of the well or I only came up on my hands and knees so that he couldn't

see me. And just as we wouldn't allow him to see us, I know that none of us ever saw the man in the well. The world was too dark for that, too deep, even when the sun was high up, angling down the stone sides like golden hair. I remember I remember that we were still full of games and laughter when we called down to him, he had heard us shouting while we were playing and he had been hollering for us to come. He was so relieved at that moment. God, get me out. I've been here for days. We must have known we were children because he immediately instructed us to go get a ladder, get help at first afraid to disobey the voice from the man in the well. We turned around and actually began to walk toward the nearest house, which was Arthur's. But along the way, we slowed down and then we stopped. And after waiting what seemed like a good while, we quietly came back to the well, we stood lay around the lip listening for maybe half an hour,

and then Arthur, after some hesitation, called down, what's your name? This, after all, seemed like the most natural question. The man answered back immediately. Do you have the ladder? We all looked at Arthur and he called back down. No, we couldn't find one. Now that we had established some sort of a dialog, everyone had questions he or she wanted to ask the man in the well, the man wouldn't stop speaking. Go tell your parents there's someone in this. Well, if they have a rope or a ladder. He trailed off. His voice was raw and sometimes he would call. Just tell your parents. We were quiet, but this time no one stood up or moved. Someone I think little Jason called down. Hello. Is it dark?

And then after a moment, can you see the sky? He didn't answer, but instead told us to go again when we were quiet for a bit. He called to see if we were gone. After a pause, Wendy crawled right to the edge so that her hair lifted slightly in the updraft. Is there any water down there? Had they gone for help? Yes. She looked around at us and then she called down. Yes. They're all gone now. Isn't there any water down there? I don't think anyone smiled at how easy it was to deceive him. This was too important, isn't there? She said again. No, he said. It's very dry. He cleared his throat. Do you think it will rain? She stood up and took in the whole sky with her blue eyes, making sure, no, I don't think so.

We heard him cough in the well and we waited for a while thinking about him waiting in the well. Resting on the grass and cement by the well, I tried to picture him, I tried to imagine the gesture of his hand reaching to cover his mouth each time he coughed or perhaps he was too tired to make that gesture. Each time after an hour, he began calling again. But for some reason, we didn't want to answer that. We got up and began running, filling up with panic as we moved until we were racing across the ruts of the old field. I kept turning, stumbling as I looked behind. Perhaps he had heard us getting up and running away from the well. Only Wendy stayed by the world for a while, watching us run as his calling grew louder and wilder until finally she ran to Wow. And then we were far away. The next morning, we came back. Most of us carrying bread or fruit or something to eat in our pockets, Arthur brought a canvas bag from his house and a plastic jug of water.

When we got to the well, we stood around quietly for a moment listening for him. Maybe he's asleep when he said he sat down around the mouth of the well on an old concrete slab, warming in the sun and coursing with ants and tiny insects. Aaron called down and when everyone was comfortable and the man answered right away as if he had been listening to us the whole time. Did your parents get help? Arthur kneeled at the edge of the well and called Watch out. And then he let the bag fall after holding it out for a moment. Maybe for the man to see it hit the ground more quickly than I had expected. That, combined with a feeling that he could hear everything we said, made him suddenly closer, as if he might be able to see us. I want it to be very quiet so that if he heard or saw anyone, he would not notice me. The man in the well started coughing and Arthur volunteered. There's some water in the bag. We all brought something about.

We could hear him moving around down there. After a few minutes, he asked us when are they coming? What did your parents say? We all looked at each other aware that he couldn't address any one in particular. He must have understood this because he called out in his thin groping voice. What are your names? No one answered until Aaron, who was the oldest, said my father said he's coming with the police and he knows what to do. We admired Arron very much for coming up with this on the spot. Are they on their way? The man in the well asked. We could hear that he was eating. My father said, don't worry, because he's coming with a police. Little Jason came up next to Aaron and asked, what's your name? Because we still didn't know what to call him. When we were talking among ourselves, he had simply become the man. He didn't answer. So Jason asked him how old he was.

And then Grace came up to and asked him something I don't remember. Finally, we all stopped talking and we lay down on the cement. It was a hot day, so after a while, Grace got up and then little Jason and another young boy, Robert, I think, and went to town to sit in the cool movie theater. That was what we did most afternoons back then, after an hour, everyone had left except Wendy and myself. And I was beginning to think that I would go to be called up to us all of a sudden. Are they coming now? Yes. When he said, looking at me and I nodded my head, she sounded certain. Aaron said his dad is almost here. As soon as she said it, she was sorry because she'd broken one of the rules. I could see it on her face, eyes filling with space as she moved back from the well, you know, we had one of our names, she

said they're going to come to cover up the mistake, but there it was and there was nothing to do about it. The man in the well didn't say anything for a few minutes. Then he surprised us again by asking, is it going to rain? When he stood up and turned around like she had done the other day, but the sky was clear. No, she said. Then he asked again the coming you said Aaron's dad, and he shouted right. So that we jumped and stood up and began running away, just as we had the day before. We could hear him shouting for a while and we were afraid someone might hear. I thought that toward the end maybe he had said he was sorry, but I never asked Wendy what she thought he'd said. Everyone was there again on the following morning, it was all I could think about during supper the night before and then the anticipation in the morning

over breakfast. My mother was very upset with something at the time, I could hear her weeping at night in her room downstairs and the stubborn murmur of my father, there was a feeling to those days, months, actually, that I can't describe without resorting to the man the well, as if through a great whispering, like a gathering of clouds or the long sound, the turbulent wreck of the ocean. At the well, we put together the things to eat, we had smuggled out, but we hadn't even gotten them all in the bag when the voice of the man in the well sought out sharply, they're on their way now, on their way. We stood very still so that he couldn't hear us. But I knew what was coming and I couldn't do anything to soften or blur the words

of the voice. Aaron, he pronounced. And I had imagined him practicing that voice all night long and holding it in his mouth so that he wouldn't let it slip away in his sleep. Aaron lost all the color in his face, and he looked at us with suspicion, as if we had somehow taken on a part of the man. And, well, I didn't even glance at Wendy. We were both too embarrassed. Neither of us said anything. We were all quiet then. Arthur finished assembling the bag and we could see his hand shaking as he dropped it into the well. We heard the man in the well moving around. After ten minutes or so, Grace called down to him. What's your name? But someone pulled her back from the well and we became silent again today. The question humiliated us with its simplicity. There was no sound for a while from the well, except for the cloth noises and the

scraping the man in the well made as he moved around. Then he called out in a pleasant voice Aaron. What do you think? My name is Aaron, who had been very still this whole time, looked around at all of us again. We knew he was afraid. His fingers were pulling with a separate life at the collar of his shirt and maybe because she felt badly for him. Wendy answered instead. Edgar, it sounded inane, but the man in the well answered no, the man said. Little Jason called out David. No, the man in the world said the Aaron, who had been absolutely quiet, said Arthur in a small, clear voice. And we all started. But I could see Arthur was furious, but Aaron was older and bigger than he was and nothing could be said or done without giving himself his name away. We knew the man in the world was listening for the changes in our breath, anything.

Erin didn't look at Arthur or anyone, and then he began giving all of our names one at a time, we all watched him trembling our faces, the faces I had seen pasted on the spectators in the freak tent when the circus had come to town. We were watching such a deformity take place before our eyes. And I remember the spasm of anger when he said my name and felt the man in the well soak it up because the man in the well understood the man in the well didn't say anything now. When Aaron was done, we all waited for the man in the well to speak up. I stood on one leg than the other and eventually I sat down and we had to wait for an hour. And today, no one wanted to leave to lie in the shade or hide in the movie seats. At last, the man in the well said, all right then, Arthur,

what do you think I look like? We heard him call for a couple of times and then a sound like the smacking of lips. Arthur, who was sitting on the ground with his chin propped on his fists, didn't say anything. How could he? I knew I couldn't answer myself if the man in the well called me by name, he called a few of us and I watched the shutter move from face to face. Then he was quiet for a while. It was afternoon now and the light was changing, withdrawing from the well, it was as if the world was filling up with Earth. The man in the well moved around a bit and then he called Jason. He asked, how old do you think I am, Jason? He didn't seem to care that no one would answer or he seemed to expect that no one would. He said, All right, what's my name? He used everyone's name.

He asked everyone when he said my name, I felt the water clouding my eyes and I wanted to throw stones dirt down the well to crush out his voice. But we couldn't do anything. None of us did, because then he would know. In the evening, we could tell he was getting tired, he wasn't saying much and seemed to have lost interest in us before we left that day as we were rising quietly and looking at the dark shadows of the trees we had to move through to reach our homes. He said, Why didn't you tell anyone? Because didn't you want to tell anyone, perhaps hear the hesitation in our breaths? But he wasn't going to help us now. It was almost night then, and we were spared the detail of having to see read each other's faces. That night, it rained and I listened to the rain on the roof and my mother sobbing downstairs until I fell asleep.

After that, we didn't play by the well anymore, even when we were much older. We didn't go back. I will never go back. The man in the well by our sure originally appeared in the magazine's Chicago Review. It's his first published story. Act three, human nature. The view from kindergarten one on approach to raising children takes as its premise the idea that children are by nature little monsters whose destructive and selfish impulses have to be controlled with physical force if necessary. And so far in our program, we've provided, I think, a fair amount

of evidence to support this particular school of thought. We've heard so far about boys taunting other boys in a cruel sort of survival of the fittest. We've heard about children leaving a man to die in a well and so far, unlike. Let's change things up a little bit. I want to tell you about an experiment done in a kindergarten classroom by a teacher named Vivian Paley. And it was an experiment to make children less cruel to each other. Pelley is the author of many books about education, including one about this classroom experiment, and she's a MacArthur genius grant recipient that she's embarrassed whenever anybody actually says that is part of her credentials. And until recently, she was a kindergarten teacher at the University of Chicago Lab School and she got the idea for her experiment when one day it occurred to her how often she had children in a classroom. Tell each other, no, no, there's no room here for you to play with us. No, I promised I would play the next sixteen games with someone else. No, we're already playing. You can't join it.

No, you cannot play with us. And it was the same children always who were made into the outcasts by kindergarten. Play says a ruling class starts to form among children. Certain kids notify others of their acceptability and certain kids are told they're unacceptable over and over and over again. And she points out that hitting a name calling are not allowed in school. But for some reason, this still is. It's every day it suddenly came to me that this hidden curriculum has taken over. It's almost as if we're teaching children for an elitist life of bosses. Of course we weren't. We were trying our best to dissuade them. Often you would put your foot down. Teachers do it all the time.

I'm going to have to insist that you let Johnny play. And before you know what, the play area would empty, the kids would stop playing. Yeah, the cruelty of the children's behavior. It seemed clear enough if adults went around telling each other, no, you cannot sit with us, you know, no, we do not want you here. No, you have to go away. It would be clear that this is not the way to act. And so Vivian Paley proposed to her students, said they have a new rule in the class. She wrote it up in front of the room. You can't say you can't play. That is, if someone wants to join your game, you have to let them. And their initial reaction, disbelief. Both the ones who did the rejecting and the ones who were already used to being rejected could not see how such a plan could work.

They understood the language. They understood what I was saying. But their amazement and distrust and fear that they would not be able to handle what it was that I was talking about, the play would be spoiled. It was very apparent. It wasn't exactly sure what she should do. And so I'm seeking some sort of input. She turned to the older children at the school where she taught she visited all the grades from first grade through fifth grade and explained her proposed new rule. You can't say you can't play and asked the children if they thought it was fair and if they thought that it could work. And interesting. What she ran into was a kind of pint sized version of, you know, not in my backyard, you know, not not with me you don't. Third and fourth or fifth graders said the proposed rule might work with those kindergarten kids because the kindergarten kids are nicer and they're more willing to

accept rules from the teacher. But they said kids their age at their advanced age are already way too mean with each other for this ever to catch hold. And they had a kind of nostalgia, even even in third and fourth, fifth grade, a kind of nostalgia. And we talk wistfully about the days when they themselves were nicer back in kindergarten, from grade to grade going up, they were more and more convinced of two things that it. Couldn't work, it was against human nature, but they all seemed to feel that it could have gone differently at a younger age when children said that that it didn't seem natural. A lot of the argument just came down to the whole point of play was that they want to play with their friends, that it's an extension of friendship.

Right. And let me ask you to read from the book you recorded and then transcribe the conversation you had with the children about this. Let me ask you to read at the bottom of page 19. Right. This is one of the first formal discussions we have on the issue of you can't say you can play. And this Angelo, who was about to speak, is certainly one of those who is not only feels himself, but is often rejected. Angela, let anybody play. If somebody if someone asks Lisa But then what's the whole point of playing Nelson? You just want Cynthia. Lisa, I could play alone. Why can't Clara play alone? Clara is one of the other children who was often rejected, often rejected, and goes and sits in her cubby. Right, Angelo?

I think that's pretty sad. People that is alone. They has water in their eyes. Lisa, I'm more sad if someone comes that I don't want to play with a teacher who is sad or the one who isn't allowed to play or the one who has to play with someone he or she doesn't want to play with. Clara, it's more sad. Or if you can't play. Lisa, the other ones are the same sadder Angiulo, it has to be clearer because she puts herself away in her cubby and Lisa can still play every time. Lisa, I can't play every time if I'm sad. One of the children you talk about a lot in the book is this girl who you call Lisa. And when you put the rule into effect the first day, Lisa, you say she said she pouts. It's not fair at all. I thought we were only just talking about it. Right. I just want my own friends. What if someone is a nice and hits me? And then the discussion, you said, well, you know, we have a rule about hitting and then Lisa is not impressed with this. And she said, there's some people I don't like.

And then there's this really amazing moment where Angela says, you right here. Angela says with that emotion, you don't like me. And everyone looks at him as if acknowledging the sad truth of his statement. Yes. What happened once the rule kicked in? How much did you see Lisa resist? I mean, what what finally happened within a week, it was as if this had always been the way life would be. And she was it was a tremendous event for Lisa. And if I may add parenthetically, it's not in the book, but all the years later, whenever Lisa, the child I call Lisa, met me in the hallway. She would always stop and ask me, how is the rule doing and give me an example of something she had done that showed she was still trying to follow the rule. The last time I met her was in the grocery store with her mother

and she said, Mrs. Paley, it's still pretty hard for me, but I know I can do it and I always try. And her mother nodded and said she really does. You know, Vivian Paley, back when her class was debating new rules, she wondered, can you really legislate this type of morality? Can you order people to be kind to each other, not to exclude others? Is there not, she wrote, a natural desire to include certain people and exclude others. And she says it wants to put the new rule into effect. There was a palpable sense of relief in her class, as if they'd been rescued from meanness. The children were grateful for a structure to let them feel good about themselves and each other.

Her book, You Can't Say You Can't Play, it's published by Harvard University Press. Why are you smiling when you're smiling? When you're smiling, when you're smiling small? And when you love and your love. When the sun comes shining through, when you're crying, you bring on the right side of this world, you'll be happy when you're smiling, keep on smiling. I know. Yeah, let's go. Our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself with Peter Clowney, Alix Spiegel and Delores Wilbur, contributing editors Paul Jacket and the fabulous Margay Rochlin, special thanks to WBO are in Boston for recording OraSure. Torrumbarry rattles for music helped today to stories on stage where David Sedaris read his story. I like guys produce your stories on stage is Kathy Tallangatta.

They supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council and the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. If you would like a copy of this radio program that only cost you ten dollars, call us at WBC in Chicago. Three one two eight three two three three eight zero again three one two eight three two three three eight zero. And have you emailed us are your special computer friend. Email us at Radio Adewale dot com radio at Welcom. Funding for this American life has been provided by the John D. and Catherine T.. MacArthur Foundation, Elizabeth Cheney Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the members of WPEC Chicago WBC Management Oversight by Tori Malatya. I'm IRA Glass. Sitting down three times a day for a heavy Greek meal became an exercise akin to packing a musket back next week with more stories of this American life.