Legal Protections for America's Young Treasures

School Administrator, May, 1997 by Charles D. Gill

Twenty-five years ago I participated in a special educational tour of what was then the U.S.S.R. with American and Soviet educators. The pre-detente Soviet Union of 1972 was a foreboding place and our visits to schools in its largest cities and Siberia made many impressions upon me.

The most memorable occurred in the Armory Museum within the walls of the Kremlin. I was awestruck by the enormity and splendor of the treasures there. The golden carriages of Catherine the Great and the jeweled tiaras were eye-boggling. I remarked to my omnipresent in-tourist guide, Boris Somanov, that I was truly impressed with their national treasures. He immediately corrected me. "Oh no, these are not our national treasures, our children are our national treasures."

I am afraid that for all our pious platitudes about loving our children and how they are our future, we Americans still do not treat our children as the national treasures that they are. We treat them as property rather than people. And we treat them badly at that.

We have 40 million children in America under the age of 10. Both conservative and liberal researchers predict dire consequences for America if we do not take a different tack, make a paradigm shift or find a new answer. John DiIulio a professor at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, warns we soon will be facing the "super predators." James P. Corner, the pre-eminent Yale child psychiatrist, contends we are losing this generation of children, and "we are creating a powder keg."

Capacity For Change

As public school leaders, you can be in a vanguard of a movement to change all that. You are potentially the most powerful group of your size in America.

You are the only group that has direct daily influence on the lives of nearly every single child in every town, city and county in America. You are the only group in America that has direct contact with every parent in America.

All of you know about the developmental needs of children. You know the realities of being a child in contemporary America. Because of your experience and leadership, you have the capacity to become "armed and dangerous" on behalf of our national treasure--our children. You are "armed" with knowledge and "dangerous" because you can put that knowledge to work in the political arena.

AASA's dynamic executive director, Paul Houston, really set the stage for this essay with an observation he made last year. He noted, "Our institutions are much better at providing a rear-view mirror than at providing shining headlights toward the future." And so, colleagues, I am suggesting you join in the forefront of a movement that will make that paradigm shift and supply a new answer. Join with other professional groups that approve the possibilities of creating a children's amendment to the U.S. Constitution!

Already, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Nurses Association, and the National Education Association, which has drafted its own bill of rights for children, have welcomed this exploration.

Eighty nations now provide specific protections and rights for children in their national constitutions. The word "child" does not appear once in the U.S. Constitution.

Three monumental social changes occurred in the first 200 years of American history. Each produced a radical shift in the relationship of people to their government. Each extended new protective status and rights to people living in America. The first was the Bill of Rights. The second was the abolition of slavery. The third was women's suffrage.

All moved us closer to the idea of a viable democracy. All also were accomplished by amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which reflected society's evolving obligation to protect and respect individuals. The infamous Dred Scott decision told us the fate of those not granted constitutional protection. Slaves, called "other persons" in the Constitution, were property, not people. Women were not full citizens. They could not own property, vote, serve on juries, or enter the legal profession.

Today only one group of "other persons" remains unprotected by the Constitution, corporations, governments, or courts in America. This group is children.

We need a single focus for children's advocacy in America. Presently, children's advocacy is a thousand shards of glass that lack political impact. One advocacy group deals with child poverty issues, another foster care issues, another early childhood education, and others with hundreds of splinters each with a specialized health care need.

Traditional advocates are really traditional beggars, each appealing to an unrealistic vision of man's inhumanity to children. Each shard of glass begs for its particular turf crumb from the legislative or corporate cake. None has the audacity, clout, or legal basis to demand a real slice of the cake. Children's concerns are simply not powerful issues in legislative bodies.

Present strategies never will change that. Children stand in the begging line with the highway paving program and a new basketball arena for the university. The highways and gyms always win.