Parenting lessons from teachers, heroes, and slackers
The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial
By Susan Eaton
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 416 pp., $24.95
Alternadad
By Neal Pollack
Pantheon, 290 pp., $23.95
Loving Every Child: Wisdom for Parents
By Janusz Korczak
Edited by Sandra Joseph
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 84 pp., $10.95
As the mother of two sons, I often wonder which parenting mistakes will resonate most. Even under the most ideal conditions, raising a child is hard. It takes patience and thought, and much of it is guesswork. These books offer markedly different yet valuable takes on what it means to raise a child.
First "The Children in Room E4." This lucid book recounts the history of a turbulent desegregation battle. Writer Susan Eaton intertwines two fascinating stories; one is the saga of a lawsuit, begun in 1989 in Hartford, and the other is the story of one elementary school class, the children in Room E4.
The lawsuit argued that the Hartford school district and its suburban counterparts had knowingly drawn rigid boundary lines, basically fencing in the disadvantaged urban students. This districting created an endless cycle of educational inequality for Hartford's minority population. Connecticut was "a responsible agency of school segregation." Eaton vividly renders the plaintiffs and their legal counsel.
But she makes another smart choice; she gives us Lois Luddy's class, the children directly affected by this transparent inequality. Luddy's students are by turns eager, frustrated, ambitious, insecure, and charming. And Luddy is the sort of teacher every parent hopes for: dedicated, stimulating, tireless, and perhaps quixotically optimistic. At every turn she is thwarted by the directives that come down from above, because in Hartford (as elsewhere), requirements shift with the political winds. As No Child Left Behind takes hold, testing becomes the new imperative.
Eaton offers a cogent argument about the way class and race matter in this country. And she makes crystal clear how hard it is for one tirelessly devoted teacher to make a real difference.
There are no true happy endings for the children in this story. Nor for the litigants hoping to upend the cycle of poverty and despair. Despite endless rounds in court, the Hartford schools still offer scant opportunity for the children they seek to educate. It's 2007, by my count a full 53 years since Brown v. Board of Education, yet Eaton makes a clear-cut case: Our public education system is still separate and unequal.
Some say it takes a village to raise a child; others believe that parenting is all about the home environment. And home's the setting for Neal Pollack's "Alternadad." This is a humorous, extremely readable memoir of fatherhood. Of course, it is a Pollack book, and therefore it's really his story. We begin with our hero, the single, carefree, and pleasantly wasted freelance scribe. He courts, then marries his artist wife , and they have a son. Then the real fun begins.
Here's how you train a junior Pollack. Left alone to baby-sit for an entire weekend, the author has an "aha" moment when he realizes "I had limitless chances to expose him to what I considered the finer points of childhood culture. By that, I mean that I wanted him to enjoy the things I enjoyed as a kid. But there was no reason that he had to consider this stuff dated. He didn't need to know that this cultural material had been made twenty to thirty years before he was born. He didn't even know what time was." So young Elijah is educated in pop culture; he learns that Ben Grimm is the Thing, and all about "Pee-wee's Playhouse," not to mention Monty Python.
Pollack makes a strong case for the importance of altered-state high jinks and rock music in the life of an Alternadad. Still, by the end even he has matured a tad, proving once again that being a parent can transform even the most stalwartly independent and charmingly adolescent of us.
And finally, we come to some old-fashioned wisdom , in "Loving Every Child," by Janusz Korczak. Korczak was a writer (" King Matt the First"), radio personality, educator, and pediatrician. Beginning in 1912, he ran an orphanage in Warsaw. He is probably best known for one of his final acts, a defiant march through the Warsaw ghetto with his charges. Korczak died with these orphans in the Treblinka gas chambers.
This book is filled with simple and commonsense truisms about child rearing. Korczak tells us, "The child's thinking is neither more limited nor inferior to that of an adult. It is different. The child thinks with feelings and not with the intellect. That is why communication is so complicated and speaking with children is a difficult art." Any parent who has tried to communicate with her own 2-year-old, or teenager, knows this.
There are gems in this slim book. My own favorite has a bittersweet flavor. For, as Korczak writes, "any child realizing my faults would be glad to change me, to make me better. The poor youngster cannot grasp the fact that my greatest fault is that I am no longer a child." Our children offer us the opportunity to be young again, if only for a moment. This is a wonderfully sensible and truly poignant book.
Naomi Rand is the author of "It's Raining Men." See "Shelf Life," Page E6, for information on a local appearance by Susan Eaton. 
