[In the following review of The Moral Life of Children and The Political Life of Children, Postman demontrates how Coles goes beyond theory and facts to reveal the truth of his subjects.]

When I was in grade school, Christmas time was a problem. We were always made to sing those mysterious carols, and although "Jingle Bells" was a piece of cake, most of the canon was fraught with danger for a Jewish boy. Harold Goldstein and I figured out a way to defend ourselves. We turned the line "Deck the halls with boughs of holly" into "Deck the halls with rows of cholly," this last word being our rhymed distortion of "challah," the delicious Jewish bread served on the Sabbath. No one actually heard us do this. We believed Christian ears would not suffer our defiance lightly, and so we silently mouthed the words rather than utter them. When we had done this, Harold and I always exchanged the kind of glance that might have passed between Kim Philby and Guy Burgess in the corridors of Whitehall.

I do not know even now if we were making a political statement, a moral statement, or just being ornery. But if Robert Coles could have observed us, he would know. And if he didn't, he would at least be interested in the question. For there is no one who is more interested in what children say, sing, don't say or don't sing—and why—than Robert Coles. He is to the stories that children have to tell what Homer was to the tale of the Trojan War. And in more ways than one—all of which are richly exhibited in these companion volumes.

Indeed, it would have been only slightly pretentious if he had begun either of these books with the words "I sing the wrath of children," for his matter is the political and moral anguish of youth, and his manner is that of a singer of their tales. Though he may be called a child psychiatrist, and may even wish to be so known (would Harvard University grant tenure to a singer of tales?), he is at his best when he is listening to children talk, recording their talk and then transforming their talk into a kind of narrative poetry. He characterizes his work as "documentary child psychiatry," and with impeccable academic manners acknowledges the validity of the criticism (made by a colleague) that children do not talk exactly the way they do in his books. But the criticism is irrelevant. Dr. Coles is less a documentarian than a poet, which is to say, he is after the truth, not just the facts.

His quest is to learn something significant about how the political and moral consciousness of children develops. To get at the truth, he has made several odysseys—with his family and tape recorder—to places where there are serious problems and therefore where it is to be expected that children will have plenty to say about where they stand. Thus, Dr. Coles has ended up in South Africa, Brazil, Northern Ireland, Poland, Southeast Asia, Nicaragua, French-speaking Canada and certain troubled sections of America.

His method is to get to know children, ask them significant questions and let them speak. Much of each volume is taken up with what the children say, or, more precisely, what they mean to say. Dr. Coles is reluctant to offer elaborate or even well-organized interpretations of his protocols. He distrusts much of the conceptual baggage carried about by psychologists, especially theories about how moral or political sensibility comes into being. In The Moral Life of Children, he contrasts the words of Lawrence Kohlberg, Harvard's leading authority on moral development, with both the words and actions of Ruby Bridges, one of the black children who, at age 6 and in the face of abusive, even violent, resistance, initiated school desegregation in New Orleans. According to Mr. Kohlberg, Ruby would not rank very high on the scale of moral maturity; indeed, at her age, she is in a "premoral" state. In Dr. Coles's view, there is less wrong with Ruby's moral condition than with Mr. Kohlberg's taxonomy. "Her prayers," Dr. Coles remarks, "her smiles, were, I suppose, mere gestures, not the careful responses of a truly reflective person—a Cambridge theorist, for example. As for many other children we knew in the South, both black and white, I doubt they would fare much better in Kohlberg's scheme of things."

This is about as nasty as Dr. Coles gets in his rebuke of theorists, but he wishes to be very clear about the limits and prejudices of theory. "Moral life" he says, "is not to be confused with tests meant to measure certain kinds of abstract (moral) thinking, or with tests that give people a chance to offer hypothetical responses to made-up scenarios." Dr. Coles gets a little help here from his friends and teachers—for example, Paul Tillich, Anna Freud and William Carlos Williams—in finding support for his neglect of theory. He quotes each of them worrying about the academic tendency to submit facts to the sovereignty of inappropriate but deified theories.

Dr. Coles is sure that what one must do first is observe, and this mostly means to listen. When one listens, he believes, theoretical frameworks often seem to lie somewhere between aridness and irrelevancy. Here, for instance, is Ruby Bridges, speaking about the crowds who converged around her, screaming her death warrant: "They keep coming and saying the bad words, but my momma says they'll get tired after a while and then they'll stop coming. They'll stay home. The minister came to our house and he said the same thing, and not to worry, and I don't. The minister said God is watching and He won't forget, because He never does. The minister says if I forgive the people, and smile at them and pray for them, God will keep a good eye on everything and He'll be our protection." In the face of such awesome piety, theory must declare itself incompetent and remain mute.

Dr. Coles is convincing on the validity of his method and the value of his material but is less so on the distinction he draws between political and moral discourse. More than once while engrossed in the angry or frightened or puzzled outpourings of the children, I was not sure which of the two books I was reading. For example, Cathy, a Roman Catholic from Northern Ireland, has been told that the answer to the trouble in Derry is to bring in a few hundred Pakistanis. Then all the Catholics and Protestants would unite to hate the "Pakis" (as they are called). "Mummy," Cathy asks, "do you mean that the only way we can be nice to each other is to have people around we can point at and not be nice to?" Later, she addresses her father: "Would Jesus stand up for them [the Protestants] today? They've been bad to us, and they still are; we're 'pigs' to them, and they say so, and we are poor, and they own everything."

These remarks are quoted in The Political Life of Children, but as Dr. Coles is well aware, it is in the nature of the issues Cathy is trying to sort out that the moral and political are inseparable. The problem, therefore, of making two books out of one requires some ingenuity. Dr. Coles tries to solve the problem by focusing on issues of "character" in The Moral Life of Children and issues of "nationalism", in The Political Life of Children, and, I suppose, he does about as well as can be expected. In explaining why he was compelled to divide his study in this way, Dr. Coles says: "Nowhere on the five continents I've visited in this study has nationalism failed to become an important element in the developing conscience of young people…. Who can listen to children, of any nationality, and not hear the political superego constantly exerting its requirements upon eager and vulnerable minds?"

But if one expects Dr. Coles to assume an enlightened hostility to nationalism, one is in for a surprise. He does quote an articulate Belfast doctor's denunciation of nationalism as a "virus," and, possibly, Dr. Coles is temperamentally inclined to agree. The stories the children tell, though, lead him to a different conclusion. "Nationalism," he says, "encourages social commitment to a neighborhood, a willingness to exert oneself toward civic tasks. Nationalism also energizes the entire moral life of a child, his parents, his relatives—gives them all a structure on which they can hang a range of oughts, noughts, maybes, its."

One need not agree with this or any other generalization of Dr. Coles's to rank his book as a major contribution to our understanding of how children become socialized. Readers can draw their own conclusions from what the children say. But these books, like the "Iliad," are not about conclusions. They are about the myths, prejudices, worries and observations from which children generate their opinions and loyalties. "No one teaches children sociology or psychology," Dr. Coles remarks; "yet, children are constantly noticing who gets along with whom, and why." His tales are about what they have noticed, and how it affects them.

As a consequence, the books are written in a way that does not allow for a clear characterization of Dr. Coles's position. He does not start from a given point and progress to deeper and wider insights. Rather, he circles around certain themes, sometimes appearing to make a point but then quickly moving away from it. He is, as I say, a storyteller, and, as every storyteller knows, the characters must do the speaking. One might say of Dr. Coles that his process of inquiry is his result; his method, his conclusion.

There is, however, one conclusion that a careful reader cannot fail to draw; we are all amateurs in the task of socializing our children. Parents, teachers, clerics, even Cambridge theorists, may make their plans this way and that, and according to sure-fire instructions. But the oughts, noughts, maybes and its that count most in giving shape to a child's character and political loyalties appear to come from diverse and unexpected sources. Sometimes, as in the case of Ruby Bridges, the exhortations of a minister or a mother penetrate deeply. More often, it is the stuff of ritual, movies, television, the daily news—the unsystematized material of a child's symbolic environment—that will exert the most enduring influences. And even then, with results quite unintended. For it is repeatedly documented in these books that children are not empty vessels into which the content of culture is poured. Children are as much makers as receivers.

A case in point: Dr. Coles and a 14-year-old Georgia boy discuss the film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." The boy makes it clear that his loyalties are with the John Wayne character but not with the Senator, played by James Stewart. "They want you to be on the side of that Senator," the boy says, "and I'm not on his side. I mean, he was one of the good guys; he was the good guy. But who believes anyone like him is for real?" Those of us who worry about what a sequence of "Rambo" movies holds in store for the politics and character of our youth may thus take heart.

And we may also take heart from the fact that Robert Coles always seems to be traveling somewhere in the world listening to the planet's children, doing his deeply humanistic research. And that if we put aside our theories and preconceptions, he will tell us what is on their minds, and something about how it got there.