When Being Nice Isn't Good
Teachers, confronted with the responsibility of keeping peace in a classroom, generally construct a set of norms and rules to ensure a civil, considerate, fair-minded, and orderly social environment. Many of the rules are summed up by what young children call "being nice": helping, sharing, taking turns; avoiding "being mean": fighting, bullying, and saying, "You can't play." The moral premise supporting such norms and rules is that all children, equally, deserve to flourish at school, that one child should not flourish at the expense of another, and that flourishing is compromised when children's feelings are hurt. It is this code of being nice and not hurting that I wish to explore.
Socialization into niceness starts early. Consider the following kindergarten scene. Three children are constructing a model city. When a fourth child asks to join, the leader of the three (let's call him Tactless) comments, "We don't want you to play with us, we don't like you, you always tell us what to do, you mess up our buildings, and then you lie and say you didn't." The excluded child (Rejected) pouts and complains to the teacher. She encourages a discussion between the two boys, but when Tactless remains adamant in his refusal—"I don't want him to play with us"—she reminds him, "Remember our rule, you can't say you can't play." The teacher has no doubt about her decision. Although she believes it's important for Tactless to voice his objections and for her to consider monitoring the children's play, in the final analysis Rejected must not be excluded. Avoiding that hurt vastly outweighs any complaints of Tactless, even assuming their legitimacy.
Children have absorbed the norm that it's wrong to say or do things that are hurtful. When Virginia Paley, the author of You Can't Say You Can't Play , asks kindergarten children for class rules (in her book Kwanzaa and Me: A Teacher's Story ), they call out: "[N]o fighting, no pushing or grabbing, you can't be nasty, don't be mean." On the positive side: "Be nice." "Ask people to play." "Be polite." "Say can you help people." When my graduate students recently asked their young students, "What does 'friend' mean?" many responded, "Someone who is always nice." "Someone who doesn't say mean things to you." No one, unsurprisingly, responded, "A friend is someone who tells you the truth, even if it is mean,...
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