America’s children, families and education - 4 October 1991

There used to be on our television channels, most of them all across the country, a 10-second message, not a commercial, but what's known as a public service message, the sort of thing put out, I suppose, in most countries by some department of the government or by a charitable outfit of philanthropy, the sort of brief message of in the form of a warning that we now get from public health departments about for instance, Aids or smoking.

This one, I can't remember who paid for it just flashed on the screen late in the evening and said simply, "Do you know where your child is tonight?" It was a constant item several years ago, when the cities were first reporting a plague of muggings. It now seems like a very long time ago, when muggings were the only anxiety. Today, of course, it's muggings, assault, drugs.

Americans always thought of themselves especially close to their children from birth on. I remember how shocked they were years ago, and they'd still be shocked, when they heard about the English upper-middle-class system of sending boys away to school at the age of seven, eight, nine; and once I recall when the British television version of Tom Brown's School Days was shown here. Whereas a British audience might have enjoyed it as a rollicking juvenile melodrama, an astonishing number of Americans if their protesting letters were anything to go on, looked on the film as a sort of adolescent horror film, they didn't know who to think worse of: Flashman – was it the bully and his sneaky cohorts – or the invisible parents who sent their boys to such a school at such a tender age?

Well in the past month or so, we've had a public orgy of concern for American children first for the state of their education, then for the poverty of one in four, then for the sexual habits of teenagers starting at the age of 11. You may possibly recall two summers ago, when we heard the results of the first surveys into the welfare state of American public and that's public education that President Bush jumped onto the nearest podium to announce that he was at that moment declaring himself to be the education president.

He ceased the title because these first alarming surveys came out during a Republican administration and the Democrats had leaped to the conclusion the charge anyway that the Republicans were to blame on the old opposition principle that anything that happens during a given four year term is due to the man in the White House. The Republicans have loudly lamented for at least 70 years that Democrats are the war party, because Woodrow Wilson was in the White House when America went into the First World War. Franklin Roosevelt into the Second, Truman when Korea exploded and it was Kenneth Hugh who got involved in the Vietnam war and Lyndon Johnson who lost it, Democrats or Desert Storm by the way is different. President Bush had the wisdom to put it up to the United Nations and the political skill and persuasiveness to get the UN's sanction for it.

Anyway, President Bush started two years ago, to take the ball away from the Democrats in the struggle over education. He made his claim to be the education president before a conference of the governors of the 50 states and he promised to commission a study of American elementary and secondary education in order to define the problem, to quash the rumours or justify them.

Well the report came out this week; its main findings are that the 1970s saw a long decline that during the '80s things improved but not enough to warrant much self-congratulation. Girls are noticeably better at reading than boys, in science and mathematics youngsters between nine and 12 do just about as well as the same ages did 20 years ago, but 17-year-olds don't do nearly as well as 17-year-olds in 1970. Throughout a huge report, you keep reading: good, better, improved and declined, but there's no concrete standard quoted to help you know better than what? However, we can ask better than whom?

And the answer is practically no other developed country, in science and mathematics the Japanese are top of the class followed by the Swedes, the German in reading and composition – Americans are very nearly at the bottom of the class. These odious comparisons have been well publicised because one of the aims that Mr Bush has been announcing for sometime now is to make American students the first in the world by 2000 AD. In fact, Mr Bush has been so busy on platforms, school rooms, in press conferences swearing that America's going to be the best in nine years time. He's not had time to say "first, let's get good". However, the commission, the panel who made the study has put the damper on that odd form of boasting by listing each of the so-called goals that all students be confident in reading, science and maths. That in maths and science in particular, American's must be top dog that every adult American be literate and have the skills to function as a citizen and worker that means they can understand a ballot form and have mastered some elementary trade or craft.

Well, the panel says, "all these goals are impossible to achieve by the year 2000" and it's no wonder when you pick up along the way such frustrating information as that one American child in four lives below the poverty line, that about 80% of elementary school graduates cannot be trusted to add up correctly a bill in a shop or a restaurant. And the whole study is haunted by a reality that mocks the myth, which throughout the past 40-odd years, television has so firmly planted in the American consciousness, I ought to say television advertising.

The myth is the picture we see in the ads by day and by night of the typical American family. Until about 10 years ago, it consisted of mother, father, a boy and a girl: white mother, father and two adorable children. Now much of the time you get a black mother showing her attentive little girl, which box of suds cleans whiter than white and a black father accepting is son's word about a new crunchy crackly cereal. We've not yet got to commercials of a white father, black mother and one indeterminate child. It's impossible, I believe, to underestimate the effect of this symbolic family on the lives, the imaginations, the social opinions of most of us, of politicians more than most. I had the feeling all through the Reagan regime that when he talked about the American family and its values, what he had comfortingly at the back of his mind was this happy brood, handsome white father, pretty white mother, jolly bouncing children, usually two, as the song said, "we'll raise a family, a boy for you and a girl for me". And back when Ronald Reagan and I were dating the girls – not together – and whirling them through a foxtrot or the Charleston that song was the biggest hit of the year.

Well, the fact is, the fact has been for 30, 20 years at least that there really is no typical American family. If you do a massive statistical study and look at averages and means, you'll wind up with something meaningless like one half married men, one married woman with two and one eighths brown children.

Forget what's typical and consider what is normal in different places, different neighbourhoods. In the inner cities, 65 black mothers in a 100 have one, two or three children and no father in sight. One black child in two is illegitimate of all races/colours. Today, one birth in eight is to a single woman, I think it's the same in Europe in the UK. One American child in four lives below the poverty line. Now of course these and similar shocking figures, shocking to my generation and the one after, tend to come together and greatly distort the picture of society as a whole. After all, well over 70% of Americans marry and, presto, have legitimate children.

Oh, by the way, I shouldn't say that – it's forbidden language, it passes judgement. You have to say out of wedlock, which is the way some very distinguished women movie stars, writers, rockers, whatnot choose to have their children. But there's another simple figure that came out this week. On the heels of the vote of the New York City's Town Council to distribute, without anybody's permission, condoms free to all high school pupils who request them. This is the end of a long campaign, one over the firm opposition of the Catholic Church and of many parents who are now busy filing lawsuits. It's a vote, which after much furious debate and agonising is really a response to the stark facts of sexuality amongst schoolchildren.

From studies made in many city high schools, New York it seems is not particularly profligate or advanced or whatever you want to call it, but there's quite a bit of sexual activity among 11- and 12-year-olds, by the mid-teens something like 30% of the girls and 60% of the boys. The figure is new but it will be used to confirm the city council in its decision and it's a dreaded one, it shows that Aids is now beginning to afflict the teenage heterosexual population, something the doctors have been saying wasn't likely once chance in a million.

The national centre for disease control in Atlanta Georgia has just published this dire news, still small but the percentage infected has gone in 3 years from .4 to 1.8. We're an awfully long way away from Peter Pan and even You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

At the end of this gloomy tunnel is there no light for the great majority, for the people who after all and even in a recession fill more jobs than there have been in American history – 104 million. Well, yes there is dazzling light about to blaze out in Las Vegas, Nevada next week they will break ground on yet another new resort, it will have the world's largest hotel over 5,000 rooms at record cheap prices, the biggest known casino, a sports arena as large as Wembley, a theme park as grandiose as Disneyland and this whole enterprise is intended not for roustabouts or free-wheeling gamblers, but for the American family trade and they claim the best equipped, the most elaborate childcare centre in the world.

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