The Village It Takes

from 2007...  http://www.nd.edu/~areimers/VillageTakes.htm

The African proverb says, “It takes a village to raise a child,” and Hillary Clinton agreed.  Then Bob Dole said, “No, it takes a family.”    It was one of the few tolerably substantive disagreements to come out of the two conventions.  And so is born a campaign issue. 

Trying to be an intelligent voter, I have tried to think through this issue.   The conservatives seem to line up on the ‘it takes a family’ side, while the liberals opt for the ‘village’ side.  So I asked myself: Which side am I on?  And before I could answer, my wife said, “But we lived in a village.”  So, let me offer my reflections, based on my 3-years’ experience as a villager.

The village of Gisingen sits on the western edge of Austria, just across the Rhine River from Switzerland.  About 5,000 people live there, including some  “Gastarbeiter” (“guest workers”) from Yugoslavia and Turkey.  It is a modern village in an industrial democracy, but a village nonetheless.  Every morning, noon, and evening the bells of St. Sebastian’s Catholic church ring out the Angelus.  Right next to the church is the grade school, where the principal rings the bell twice each morning - first for kids to stop playing and line up, and next to move into the school.  The teachers all come from the village; they, too, shop at Schatzmann’s grocery or at the ADEG down the street.  The junior high children travel to school in gender-segregated fleets of bicycles that fill the one-lane roads.  Villagers belong to the village.  My youngest son’s former Kindergarten buddies will soon be serving in the same reserve unit of the Austrian army.  Then they will return to jobs in or near Gisingen.  And when they marry, they will begin families and send their children to the village school and those same teachers.

Life in Gisingen is uniform.  At Christmas, everyone bakes Lebkuchen.  Nobody holds a posada.  On Christmas Eve all the children go to the party at the church, while their parents set up the Christmas tree and the “Kristkind” (Austria’s answer to Santa) comes.  There are no school bands; the village has a band.  In the Alps, every village even has its own distinctive costume.

The village has standards of behavior.  It disapproves of  the villager who drinks too much or doesn’t maintain his property or is just - well - odd.   Of course, we were allowed to be different; after all we were foreigners.  And Moslem girls in the junior-high were even excused from gym during the ramadan fast.  But for the Austrians, each family has a reputation in the village, and a bad one can be hard to change.

The village it takes has a common life and shared values.  Those who don’t share its customs, religion, language, and values are outsiders.  To put it another way, village life is homogenous.  Diversity is not a village value.  The  village does not raise children to be creative or cosmopolitan.  A village can be tolerant of outsiders; Gisingen welcomed us warmly.  But it raises its children to be just like themselves. 

A village is small.  While everyone may not know everyone else, they can tell if someone is new in town.  Gisingen was our village - not the Republic of Austria.  And the United States of America, a giant nation of 250,000,000 people, stretching 3,000 miles across a continent, is certainly not a village. 

Now it’s a campaign issue.  But neither the Republican candidate or the First Lady has got it right.  If we really believe that it takes a village to raise a child, then the things that touch their lives must be kept close to home.  We will insist on local control of our schools, the kind of control where parents are actively involved and have a say about what happens in the school.  South Bend is not even a village.  Teachers and principals should be answerable to parent associations, and parents should be to schools answerable for the behavior of their children.  Raising children is a close-to-home kind of thing.

If it takes a village, then we need to encourage private schools - especially religious schools.  Villages share common values.  So children are best served by schools that reinforce parents’ values.

If it takes a village, we should lessen federal and state government roles in education.  Bill Clinton is not in our “village”; neither is Evan Bayh.   A practical example: if the “village leaders” - say, in Detroit - think it’s a good idea to experiment with single-sex schools to give inner-city children a chance, then Washington should not be involved.  Detroit’s citizens know better what their children need.  Let them try.

If we really believe it takes a village, we will be actively involved in our children’s lives.  Parent visitation day will not be the boring, lonely day it is for most public high school teachers.  We won’t tolerate the use of each other’s homes for after-school sex, drugs, and drinking.  We’ll “hold the principal’s feet to the fire” when we don’t like what’s happening in the schools, and then we’ll serve on the committee to help him or her make things better.  In short, we will be involved with our children and with the things that touch them.

Adrian J. Reimers

(published in South Bend Tribune , 1996)