Talking and listening to children, especially children who are struggling to make sense of illness or a life-threatening event, has been a lifetime pursuit of psychiatrist Robert Coles. As a keynote speaker, Coles shared the insights he gained from Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old who in 1960 was ushered by Federal marshals through thousands of jeering segregationists to become the first black child to integrate a New Orleans school.
Watching Ruby for signs of breaking under stress, Coles wondered why she had stopped one day, seemingly to talk back to the mob. "I didn't talk to them," she said. "I talked to God." At Coles' prompting, she disclosed that she had indeed prayed for her taunters because "they needed praying for." Why should she be the one to pray for them, Coles inquired. "Because I am the one who hears what they are saying," she replied.
The ability to connect herself to a moral tradition of forgiving one's enemies was not Ruby's inspiration, Coles said, but came from her parents and grandparents, who, although illiterate, had told her stories from the Bible and shared with her their moral values. Coles used Ruby's story to illustrate his point that education must combine a moral as well as a cognitive component. "Education that is connected only to factuality is a deficient and flawed education," Coles said. "You and I know that the children we teach today often lack what Ruby had—moral literacy."
Reminding educators that history has proved that educated minds can be capable of obscene hatred, he called for an emphasis in education on "thinking that connects with doing."
Giving examples from his classroom experiences with Harvard medical students and with the inner-city 4th graders he teaches several days a week, Coles sympathized with educators who grow tired of "trying to connect" with their students. "How do we reach the heart so that the mind will become awakened?" he asked.
Breaking down the barriers can only be done by "going for the contact" through sharing stories, art, and our own moral passion, Coles said. "The way we learn is when our heart is in what we are trying to learn.
"Let us try to impart to our children not only factuality but a perspective of how important it is to know and understand others, reach out, to put yourself in others' shoes, walk as they walk, and feel their pain. That is our challenge."
As a child she didn't speak for six years. Now a nationally known author, acclaimed lecturer, and Poet for the President, Maya Angelou began her keynote address by singing to her audience.
The words of the old slave song "I won't turn back, I'm gonna run on and see the end" bespeak "a chore for the educator, curriculum advisor, principal, and teacher," she told the capacity crowd. "More than anyone else, teachers must be the lifesavers, the lovers, the encouragers.... Many people who reach out to you will only have you. It's too much of a burden, yet there it is—your charge—to encourage our young men and women to see what the end is supposed to be."
Wiping tears from her face that belied her calm voice, Angelou told of being raped at age 7. She explained how, having spoken the name of her rapist and then hearing of his violent death, she decided in her child's logic to "leave her voice" and never speak again. If not for her grandmother and her beloved Miss Flowers, and the poetry Miss Flowers induced her to read aloud, her silence might have lasted a lifetime.
The tragedy of her self-imposed silence led her to resolve not to be limited by the prejudices or wrongs of others. "I will not have my life minimized nor narrowed down by someone else's ignorance or someone else's guilt," she said.
Weaving in African-American poems, by turn she amused her listeners with her wit and moved them to tears with her emotion. Angelou ended her speech with a song she had written for Roberta Flack called "Take Time." In introducing the song, she said, "I give you this song, but remember: Life is the most precious gift.... Let us as educators live so we will not regret years of useless virtue and inertia and timidity. Let us live so that in dying each of us can say, `All my conscious life and energies have been dedicated to the liberation of the human mind and spirit.'"