On the cover of the January issue of “Smithsonian,” magazine is a photo of a happy baby with devil horns holding a trident.
I hope the photo is doctored. I’ve known a few kids over the years, however, for whom it wouldn’t take much alteration.
The magazine article deals with the question of whether some children are by nature good or evil from birth. Researchers on several separate projects in the United States and Germany were surprised to find that children as young as 5 or 6 months old have a desire to be helpful and supportive.
The findings contradict a common, and more cynical, view that children are either blank slates or self-centered little creatures until adults can teach them to be good and cooperative.
“A child arrives in the world provisioned with rich, broadly pro-social tendencies and predisposed to care about other people,” the article stated.
The story brought to mind another incident involving children showing a natural predisposition toward pro-social tendencies, or just a desire to work together and be helpful.
It wasn’t a research project and the kids were older, but a few weeks ago, I saw another example of children taking their own initiative and showing their desire for cooperation.
Elberta second-graders put on a short classroom play. The props and settings were handmade from classroom materials. The performance lasted about 10 minutes.
I’d seen more high-tech special effects and actors with more experience.
What the cast lacked in training, however, they made up for in enthusiasm. The children threw themselves into the production, their teacher, April Paul, said.
The play was intended as a simple classroom project. The students, however, took the initiative to work together. They kept trying to find ways to improve the production, she said.
“They were amazing,” Paul said. “They would ask things like “is the sun out when this is happening? Should we paint a sun?’”
The children also helped select the play to be performed, picking “A Snowman for Mrs. McKay.”
The play is about a group of children who are concerned about a lonely elderly neighbor. To keep Mrs. McKay company, the children build her a snowman.
Children narrated the performance, acted the parts, announced scene changes and maneuvered scenery and props that they had designed and built.
We watched from the back of the classroom as pupils brought out paper recreations of a snowman in various stages of construction while other students hidden (well, almost hidden) on ladders overhead tossed shredded paper to simulate snow.
It occurred to me that unless they have visited other regions during the winter, these kids have never built a snowman or even seen snow on the Gulf Coast in their seven or eight years.
All in all, it was an impressive performance and I left feeling better than I have after seeing a number of professional productions that I paid to watch.
When I read about researchers at Yale, Harvard and Berkeley discovering an inner urge for children to cooperate and help others, I thought about a group of kids in Elberta.
Maybe it was just a short elementary school performance. Maybe that performance and the research is an example of how something good does lie at the heart of the human spirit.
Guy Busby is a writer living in Silverhill. He can be reached at email@example.com and at guybusby.com.