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Show -·-~ OPINION MAGGIE GALLAGHER NATHENTOFF COMMENTARY COMMENTARY In the school uniform debate, it's all or nothing One of the ult~ate pioneers of news television remembered In New York City, controversy has But on the whole, for both moral erup ted over a new requirement, and financiaJ reasons, I would have backed by Mayor Giuliani, that local appreciated any proposal from the committees of parents and staffers elementary schools that might have must decide whether to adopt helped tone down or postpone the uniforms for elementary public sudden flaming in these kids of the school kids. human desire to judge one another As one of the milli ons of Spock based on the labels slapped on one's babies raised to value creativity, self- tush. expression and honesty in human At ot her e lementary sch ool s, relations, how do I £eel about the parents Like the idea of preparing the current drive to put kids back into kids for th e world of work, where uniforms? uniforms, not self-expression, are the I was probably in the fourth grade guiding rule of fashion. Adminiwhen my public school back in strators find dress codes a handy way Oregon dropped its ,.,--,......,,--=========,., o f keeping gang dress code under the insignia out of the cxtretne pressure of hallways. the times, but also Of course, not because o.f the 1969 everybody likes the Sup re me Court ruidea. This being ling that said dress America, a lot of codes might infringe • folks would like to on students' fre ehave ir both ways: speech rights. Encourage, but do At t he time, I not require, the remember approving school uniforms. of the measure. And Hence tlie emeri o the safe, ho m o gence of the somege no u s suburb in what oxymoronic wh ich my parents co mprom is e that ensc once d me and prevailed at many of my brothers and the N ew York City sisters, I can't say schools heretofore: that letting girls out "voluntary school of plaid skirts had uniforms." any ill effects on the Dorothy Gi-glio of educational environBrooklyn explained ment or the kids' how the plan has performance. worked in her area, where schools have Fa st-fo rward 20 years to New York adopted an official City: I'm a single uniform and parents mother of a fourthindividually decided grade boy in Park whether to put kids Slope, a racially and into it. financially mixed, upwardly mobile, "I threatened, I cajoled. It wasn't hip family type neighborhood. So worth the fight," she told the New why did the idea of school uniforms York Post. "I finally had to give in. I sudd e nly become so much more realized my son was a good student attractive to me as a parent? and that wearing a uniform wouldn't For me, the issue was p.ot so much make any difference in his schoolestablishing order in the classroom work." After a few months, she said, only as it was circumventing the estabLished pecking order outside it. a handful of students were still The kids in my son's class came wearing them, no doubt consigned to from a range of economic back- a purgatory of geekdom by their grounds; my middling salary as an peers. editor at a think-tank journal put me I hate to point out the obvious, but nowhere near the top of the list. My uniforms that are voluntary tum out son had reached the age in his life not to be uniform. A voluntary where he wanted to fit in with the 1.miform is going to be demoted from rest of the crowd, and suddenly that an expression of group affiliation to meant choosing the jeans, shirts and just another fashion statement of a shoes by the peer-approved brand particularly unattractive kind. names. Kids unsurprisingly prefer their Oh, I was.luckier than some: own peer-generated dress code. And Certainly I could afford what I parents prefer not to add t o their thought weie reasonable "needs," long list of things they have to fight and also had the willpower to beat with their kids about. back requests I just couldn't stomach (particularly the $1 SO Maggie Gallagher is a nationally syndicated columnist. tennis shoes). Like Justice Hugo Black, Fred Friendly always carried a copy of the Constitution in his pocket. He often gave it away, to be quickly replenished. Friendly was intrigued by its challenges as a persistently living document. When he was buried this year on March 8, two copies of th e Constitution were buried with him. A few hours later, David, one of his sons, said, "My guess is he's already given them away." Friendly saw himself as a t each er, exemplified by the CBS televisio n documemaries he produced with Edward R . Murrow, such as Harvest of Shame, which brought the bitter lives of .migrant workers into American living rooms across the country. Yet another example was their confrontation with Sen. Joseph McCarthy at a time when much of the nation, including the broadcast industry, was frozen in fear of the dangerously reckless senator representing Wisconsin. In a later part of his career, Friendly defied all the rating odds by creating a series on the Public Broadcast ing Service that consisted of conversations and arguments about The Constitution: That Delicate Balance. Those seminars, which w ere often repeated, reached millions of viewers. He aJso took the risk of asking m e to appear on a number of those seminars although he knew I was not a lawyer and that my knowledge of the Constituion was entirely self-taught. In 1966 Friendly, a passionate, impatient dispeller of ignorance, said: "TV is bigger than any story it reports. It's the greatest teaching tool since the printing press. It will determine nothing less than what kind of people we are. So if TV exists now only for the sake of a buck, somebody's going to have to change that." He and Murrow surely tried, but as an index of the shameless reality of current television priorities, Dan Rather told the New York Times that "before airing Mr. Friendly's obituary on March 4, there were voices at CBS that had argued against so much air time for a downer of a story about a man whose time had long passed. " Indeed, it is unlikely that Murrow and Friendly would be given air time at CBS now. Documentaries are as rare as regular and serious criticism of the press on commercial TV. I remember watching the FriendlyMuuow documentaries with their Utter lack of sho wbiz elements. After each program, L would hear, and sometimes be a part of, discussions in schools, workplaces and bars on what had aired. Friendly put aJI his bets on a faith "in the intelligence of ordinary citizens," as David Halberstam puts it. "He believed if you gave th em reports on difficult, troubling subjects, they would understand and this would be a better society." He was right, as Frontline on PBS continually verifies . And CBS's 60 Minutes, orchestrated by Don Hewitt, a FrienclJy disciple, keeps the faith. But at that same network, CBS killed a scheduled repeat of Roberta Baskin's documentary on the naked truth about th e abysmal working conditions of employ ees in Vietnamese factories making Nike sneakers and other expensive Nike merchandise. After all, Nike was a prominent sponsor of CBS's television coverage of the Olympics, and yo u may have seen its "swoosh" l ogo as an obligate to the reporting. For a long time, CBS News repo rters there were commanded to wear Nike parkas. Fred Friendly , nevei: known to curb his indignation at anyone polluting th e news, would have exploded at that one. I had Fred Friendly very much in mind a couple of months ago when I did two sessions on constitutional rights - particularly those of students- for publicschool children in Miami. T h ere were hundreds of youngsters, most of them black and Hispanic, in a large auditorium. As I was about to start the first session, a helpful teacher said, "You won't find this pleasant. Th ey care about music and clothes, but o n this subject, you'll be lucky to finish the hour. So if you don't expect much, you won't be disappointed." The students were hardly attentive at the start, but as we explored, example, the history of the Fourth Amendmenthow the colonists bitterly resented British troops searching their homes and persons at will- they became silent and leaned forward. At the end of each ho ur, the youngsters stood and cheered. They were cheering for themselves. "They discovered they were Americans," I told the surprised teacher, and I thought of h ow much I had learned from Fred Friendly that went into those sessions. Not only his constitutional knowledge, but especially his faith. . He also brought Supreme Court justices on his televised seminars, and they turned out to be quite h uman-and even vulnerable-without their robes, as they too shared his faith. for Nat Hento ff is a nationally syndicated columnist. |
