OK, two questions: why be cheerful and what is the value of innocence?

The first question begins with the enduring impression I have of my father-in-law in his final years and months, while he was much reduced by open heart surgery, followed by a stroke from which he struggled mightily to regain his mobility and then a second stroke that further diminished this proud and dignified man to a daily struggle of short triumphs on his walker.

In the back hall of the summer house on the island, we had installed an electric chair lift. Although there were rooms downstairs that could easily have been converted to a bedroom for him, he wanted to sleep in his bedroom upstairs where he could see the harbor when he awoke each morning.

Each night after dinner and dishes, which he would often help wash by leaning unsteadily into the sink, he would then scrape, scrape, scrape on his walker through the back hallway to the lift, ride the chair upstairs where another walker awaited him for his long walk down the hall to his bedroom. There he might listen to Puccini arias or Diana Krall, a torch singer, before he fell asleep.

The next morning, he would reverse the process, taking two hours to unlimber himself enough to get out of bed, dress himself and retrieve his walker for the long trip down to the kitchen. In the back hallway, he would stop at the entrance to each of his grandsons’ bedrooms to say good morning, although they were all since long gone into their far away lives.

That was cheerfulness. To which he, in a sense, had no right.

He had lost two daughters to tragic illnesses in the prime of their lives; and he himself spent most of his last decade watching his own physical capacities diminish bit by damning bit. He had spent most of the past decade of his life serving as bilge pump and anchor for other family vessels that threatened to sink under the weight of their own griefs. And yet he remained cheerful, determinedly so. Was it just a show? What was real? And what was he trying to prove to us?

Now let’s wind back to the earliest years of childhood to address another existential question, which came up at an education presentation the other day. How early in a child’s development should teachers introduce the harshest lessons of life? Is the old pedagogical rule of thumb “no tragedy before 4th grade” still valid? 

This question came up because the Island Institute recently received funding from the National Science Foundation to test a new model for how students absorb ideas about science in K-8 school settings.

The project seeks to test a teaching model based on students asking questions about their local environment and using interactive, real-time technology to help them find answers.

The project is called Weather Blur and it links kids in the K-8 schools of Chebeague and Long Islands in Casco Bay with a pair of similar sized schools on the island of Sitka, Alaska along with local teachers, scientists and fishermen who are cooperating by providing supporting observations, data and scientific rigor. The general question is how can students translate something they see everyday (weather) into something they cannot — climate change? (N.B.: many adults are also woefully inadequate to this task.)

Whoa! The immediate and obvious question we asked the educators who are leading the project is whether teaching about climate change has sparked controversy among any of the many scores of parents or participants involved? The answer to that question is, surprisingly and simply, no. Deeply divided ideological opinions about climate change seem to be more of a Washington-based phenomenon than a curse abroad in the land—at least in Maine and Alaska.

But the educators mentioned that they would not be showing the catastrophe film The Day After to second graders, for instance, in which a tidal wave from the melting of the Arctic ice sheets engulfs Manhattan. A widely employed pedagogical principle is “no tragedy before fourth grade.” In the aftermath of the Newtown tragedy, not to mention what school children in such places as Syria and Timbuktu are going through, is this rule of thumb realistic or only devoutly to be wished?

This is like the cheerfulness question. What good does it serve to remain resolutely cheerful in spite of the obvious pain and suffering all around. What good does it do to have children remain relatively innocent, at least through their eighth year so as not to overwhelm them with more of a sense of powerlessness than they already have? 

I have no idea if the stories of maintaining a sense of willful cheerfulness at the beginning and end of one’s life story are related. Does an innocence maintained throughout childhood carry over into cheerfulness as one approaches the December of life?

I have no idea. But instinctively, we sense that both innocence in children and cheerfulness in elders are qualities that are both rare and precious. In Tibet they say, “The joy of a king is no greater than the joy of a beggar.” Maybe the joy of a child is no greater than the joy of an old man.

Philip Conkling is president and founder of the Island Institute in Rockland, Maine.