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He prized gentleness and kindness, but Fred Rogers
was a stubborn
advocate for children — and his
message continues to shape early
education.
Harvard Graduate School of Education
The Fierceness of
Mister Rogers
By Grace Tatter
October 25, 2018
The tinkling piano that signaled the start of “Won’t You Be My
Neighbor,” the cozy sweaters, a warm smile: everyone remembers the
gentleness of Mister Fred Rogers, and his Neighborhood, the ultimate
safe space.
But fewer people might remember that Mister Rogers deployed that
gentleness to be radically honest with generations of children about
topics that can be difficult to discuss, including death, bigotry,
divorce, and anxiety.
Rogers’ fierce respect for children was the topic of an Askwith Forum
at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on Wednesday. Nicholas Ma
(College ’05), a producer of the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,
joined HGSE faculty members Stephanie Jones, Junlei Li, and Richard
Weissbourd for a screening of the film and a conversation about Rogers’
legacy, the staying power of his messages about kindness and
acceptance, and the state of children’s media today.
Difficult Conversations
Rogers, who was trained and ordained as a Presbyterian minister, rarely
shied away from speaking to children about the issues of the day,
issues that continue to be relevant.
In the first week of his long-running show, in 1968, amidst social
movements for racial and gender equality, Rogers featured a storyline
about King Friday XIII, who established a border guard and built a wall
around his kingdom to prevent change. “Down with the changers,” the
King cried — “We don’t want anything to change!” Over the course of the
week’s five episodes, a peaceful balloon campaign persuades him to take
the wall down.
When Robert Kennedy was assassinated, Rogers rushed to produce an
episode ahead of the memorial service that talked directly to children
about assassination.
“He wanted to put the special out before (Kennedy’s) memorial service,
so that families could feel comfortable engaging their children in the
grieving and mourning process,” said Li, who was the director of the
Fred Rogers Center before his appointment at Harvard this fall.
While Rogers, his Neighborhood, and the Land of Make Believe are
objects of nostalgia — the show always had a sepia-toned feel to it,
even when it was on the air — the series was actually forward-looking
and hopeful about the possibilities for humankind, Li said. “The
neighborhood actually came in close to war, in some of the episodes,
but somehow people figured it out…. It’s a world that never (was), but
Fred dreamed and asked why not, and that’s a forward-looking question.”
Ma said that people have turned out to the film about Rogers in droves
— it was a summer box-office hit — not only because of nostalgia, but
because of a desire to live out Rogers’ empathic philosophy in their
own lives.
“We’re at a moment in time where we’re looking for this kind of balm,
that reminds us that there is goodness in the world and that there is
commonality between people,” he said. “And the fact that [the film]
affects audiences from St. George, Utah, to Cambridge, Massachusetts,
with the same kind of vigor, to me is incredibly inspiring. It means
that we do have common ground to build on, even if we can’t articulate
it to each other.”
Taking Time
One feature of Mister Rogers’ world — setting it apart from other
fictional universes on children’s television — was its slow pace, at
odds with the bam-pow rhythm of the superhero cartoons that he competed
against. Rogers would set a timer for a minute to just see how long a
minute felt. He would calmly feed his fish, saying nothing. And
children would watch.
“Fred often said that he strived to understand the deepest needs of
children, and then he strived to meet that,” Li said. “There’s a
difference, I think, between finding out what another human needs and
trying to satisfy what they want.” Children and grown-ups alike may
crave fast-paced action, he said, but we all need slowness to listen,
look carefully, and learn.
Li said he once found a scrap of paper on which Rogers had written, “I
believe in the power of smaller of things.” Li advised educators to
take that message to heart.
“I think sometimes the world has a way of making us think if we’re in
the helping profession, if we’re helping children, we need to do
something big, spectacular, transformative, and that’s the only way
that counts,” he said, but in fact, children learn volumes from the
smallest interactions — how we greet them, how we address them when
they are sad.
Mister Rogers and Masculinity
It wasn’t just the pace of the show that set it apart from other
children’s programming. Mister Rogers and the characters who inhabited
the Land of Make Believe were also exceptionally nice. Part of what Ma
and the documentary’s director Morgan Neville hoped the film would do
is to promote the idea that such kindness should not be exceptional,
nor should it be associated with naivete or, for men, be considered
“unmanly.”
“We as individuals need a shot in the arm that we have goodness within
us that we can bring in the world,” Ma said.
He wondered if two of the prevalent myths about Rogers — that he was
gay, and that he was a Navy SEAL with several kills under his belt —
arose because of America’s complex ideas about kindness and manhood.
After all, any man as nice as Mister Rogers must not fit the
mid-century stereotype of masculinity.
Weissbourd noted that in his research with Making Caring Common, he has
found that men can sometimes tune out when terms like “empathy” and
“listening” are used to talk about the importance of caring, but they
can be more engaged by terms like “courage” and “respect.” But
ultimately, men and women alike count Rogers as a role model.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re male, female, whether you’re watching
it when you are three, or caught a glimpse of it when you were 30 as a
parent … if you open up yourself, you’ll hear it,” Li said. “[Mister
Rogers] had hundreds and hundreds of episodes, but he had one message:
that each and every one of us is capable of loving and capable of being
loved.”
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