Katz – communication

I was visiting a class where the children, these were five year olds, the task of the morning was to cut pictures out of the advertising section of the Sunday paper. Cut them out, if they were objects that began with the letter ‘T’, and then to paste them on paper so this was a sort of way to study the alphabet or something silly. Anyway, two boys, quite bright little boys were working at the table and they were cutting out things and then they were pasting, and one boy grabbed the glue from the other boy. So the first boy said “Hey wait a minute I’m not done yet,” and he sort of yelled and complained, and the teacher turned to him, turned to the two boys and said, “We don’t do that in this school,” and I said to her, “We just did”. And so that’s another one of my sort of major causes is don’t speak phony to children.

A lot of teachers say to children “You need to turn around,” they don’t need to turn around, say “I want you to turn around”, there’s nothing wrong with that. They don’t have to like it, just be straight, and honest.
Or another one is “You need to sit still.” Well, most young children don’t need to sit still, but you may want them to, and it’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about that until I was visiting, actually a school in Portugal, and the teacher would say things like that, and it was just, would say, “Please turn around” and there wasn’t a problem, she just said it straight, but we tend to use a lot of phony talk with children.

And I’m not sure exactly why, we want to be nice I suppose, I don’t, I don’t know the exact thing, and I was, last
December, I was working with teachers in China, and they have forty children in a class. Forty. One year-olds.
Forty – two year olds in a class, forty – three year olds in a class, and I was trying to find out how many adults, usually one assistant. But it’s a culture in which the adult authority is never questioned, never has been, by the adults or by the children, so the adults don’t apologize, they wouldn’t use phrases like ‘We don’t do that,’ they would say, ‘I don’t want you to do that,’ and then move on.