Understanding the world in which we live is a basic need that we all have in order to reach our goals and achieve happiness. To understand our world means to have a knowledge of society and to have a basic grasp of what it means to have responsibilities and rights. Empowerment of the members of society is best served when the individual citizen is nurtured in the knowledge of the law from an early age. In this curriculum unit we intend to explore the language of the law,
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with elementary school students, using as a particular focus the idea of the best interests of the child.
In family law, the standard guiding judges when deciding parent-child conflict is “the best interests of the child.” But is the law always interpreted in this way? This curriculum unit will take several themes related to the standard of “best interests of the child” and will discuss whether the interpretation of the law did indeed prove in the best interests of the particular children involved. For this we’ll discuss specific vases where the best interests of the children has seen a standard of a decision. It is also our intention to take some real cases, protecting the source of information, based on real experiences or taken from research, and to formulate a language reflecting the legal issues relevant to the student population.
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This language will reflect not only the classroom situation, in the sociological sense, but also the meaning of the law, and the possibilities of finding a deep understanding of the rights of a segment of the population, namely children, who, from time immemorial, have seen left aside by a culture which made them the property of adults, and a language created to protect them in the first place.
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At the present time a basic knowledge of the language of the law is practically nonexistent at the elementary school level.
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Further, language itself—in the context of the daily curriculum, that is, spelling, writing, grammar, speech—encompasses a number of quite complex and laborious tasks difficult for the student to master right away. In a bilingual class this problem becomes more compounded since the task is in two languages. Introducing a specialized language is a great challenge both for the teacher as well as for the students. But we might think that since English is in itself a specialized language for the student who is beginning to learn it for the first time, then why not teach it also as the language of the law, making sure students master the semantics, the syntax, the lexicon, the phonetics and the cultural context where this language becomes alive and makes sense? The language of science is another example of a specialized language where molecules and atoms, acids and bases are part of a vast discourse designed to make sense of a body of accumulated knowledge based on principles and laws, hypothesis and verifications, method and experimentation. In a way, in the case of the law, we have to invent a language and this is a difficult task, one that is worth taking. What is more, students have great fun making believe they are lawyers and judges. Very few like to take the position of the criminal and the accused. To assume that students cannot take on difficult tasks is self-defeating and unfair. To assume that they would fail before they try is simply violating their rights.
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Yet, there is practically little or no discussion about the rights of children in the classroom. This situation implies that children and early adolescent young people do not understand and do not really participate in the decision making process of the most important aspects of their lives.
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It also alludes to the fact that if they become participants, children are at a great disadvantage since the skills and knowledge of the law and its language are at best meager, insignificant and misunderstood. Let’s thing for a moment what would it be like if students in the elementary school level did not study the language of mathematics. Surely this type of student would not be able to survive in the present world. Since the law covers all aspects of our lives we can imagine how insignificant is our understanding of the legal world around us. There are many instances in our modern life and society where children have to be confronted with experiences demanding their participation directly or indirectly. A separation, a divorce or a custody dispute are some instances of participation where the role of children is still a gray area, and where their views and interests are not being heard properly.
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In special education interventions parents, social workers, nurses, teachers and administrators make decisions for students.
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Bilingual education has some issues where the participation of the students is not considered at all.
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In cases of juvenile delinquency we all feel a sense of loss, and participation of the juvenile is already in the other side of the law. “For many years juveniles accused of crimes were tried in the same courts and sentenced to the same prisons as adults.”
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At present, it is alleged that “Everything done during the course of a juvenile court proceeding, from arrest to disposition, is ostensibly being done with the best interests of the child in mind.”
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It stands to reason, then, that students ought to engage in activities that would help them learn the language of their rights and obligations. Society as a whole has much to gain from this learning experience.
It seems to us that the classroom is a natural environment where the concepts and language of the nurturing of the rights and duties of the youngest members of society could be presented in a practical and non-threatening manner and setting. This unit could be used in a bilingual as well as in a mainstream class.
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As teachers in the New Haven Public School System we find this curriculum unit to be a great opportunity to learn more about this fascinating subject and to be able to focus on a problem relevant to the students, a problem that the students could relate to, and could possibly motivate him or her to go in search of novel solutions.
Although students don’t interpret it as a very severe problem of the community or the country, drug trafficking, violence, teenage pregnancy, to name a few problems dealt with on a daily basis in the school situation, are endemic to the environment around the area of the schools serving these children. It seems to make sense to think about the role of language in this state of affairs. Students have adapted a ‘new language’ that deals with these problems not as items and deeds of social injustice, but rather as happenings to be amused about and things to laugh and make merry. Perhaps this humor is a weapon against a hostile environment. Just about every day we have been confronted by situations where some students speak and describe acts of violence and pain with confidence and theatrics. Perhaps this language, full of flavor and color, rich in adjectives and onomatopoeia, has come about in order to fill a vacuum left by the absence of a language that speaks of justice and rights.
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And perhaps because of this absence of the language of the rights that every child is entitled to, this language seems to grow and take its own rules. The merriment and theatrics of this young people, in expressing their daily encounters with life in the neighborhood, seem to grow with an echo, a hint, a tint of optimism, in spite of all the pain. It might be in this realization that students in the elementary school level, most of the time, bring into the classroom, mixed with their pain and shortcomings, a sense of hope and a renewal of life on a daily Harris. This could prove to be very useful in the classroom. The trick is to be able to identify this renewal of life in language, and then, to use it as motivator in the development of a coherent lesson to attain language sense. In our experience, when these young people open up to an adult, an adult who could be potentially harmful, they are demonstrating very basic human needs: the need to be listened to, and the need to be able to express themselves freely, the need to be able to tell you something and to know that you won’t betray them. Their need to communicate indicates a need to know their rights. A need to know their rights could only come about in the presence of self-respect and growth.
In many cases their need to communicate indicates, at the same time, a need to master a language. This is particularly the case with students who want to know and want to have legal solutions to their problems. We might very reasonably argue that this is not the realm of the educator. Critics may very well argue that the posture of the classroom teacher is to teach the abcs, and to go on with his or her business without sparking a situation that might rub the system in the wrong way.
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Some might say, let the social worker deal with this problem. Nonetheless the language that we are talking about is a language to be learned with discipline and an understanding of its grammar and its consequences. In other words, there is a right to learn this language and a responsibility in speaking it and sending it in a semi-logical chain. There is a linkage between the classroom, the curriculum unit and life in the neighborhood. Students who need to find solutions to problems concerning their rights need, before anything else, to learn a language of their rights. They need to struggle to learn the discourse of their rights. Thus, to understand a problem is to understand a language; a particular way of saying ‘this is what is happening to me, and this is the solution to my problem, because these are my rights and these are my limitations.’ In the absence of rights, as Judge Gills tells us, we must, we have to elicit a language of freedom.
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“Any lawyer will tell you that the “law governs us from womb to tomb,” from laws on abortion to laws on matters of inheritance.”
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If this is indeed the case, then, why is it that children are still looked upon as property and not as citizens with rights? As we said before, this is a situation with a historical background with deep roots in tradition. Its path comes from the code of Hammurabi over 4,000 years back, to the present state of affairs where the Constitution of the United States needs an amendment to permanently and officially protect the interests of children.
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Superior Court Judge Charles D. Gill has been working for years on the creation of an amendment to the United States Constitution. He believes that children don’t have any rights in this society and that statutory laws are subject to change at the whim of legislators.
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Further he adds:
“The best interests of the children,” that’s the term we spout. But in all of those situations, children come in dead last. It’s only talk. It has nothing to do with reality. I’ve just seen and read too much. I’m very angry.
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When we think about children we really think about family. Children by definition, in our culture, belong in the family. And the family has been undergoing great transformations. But in the 1980’s the nuclear family seemed to have been disappearing.
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There are many opinions on the cause of this phenomenon. One of them is “a changing ethos on the part of the Americans, whereby adults are starting to give priority to their own feelings and wishes over those of their children.”
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Another is the hardships of a changing economy. Whatever the outcome of a family dispute is, the children are the ones to suffer the most.
