A little watered wine for the kids in the lower grades, sherry as well as tea at school functions, "practice drinking" in the college years—so goes Harvard Psychiatrist Morris Chafetz' proposal for what he holds would be a valuable addition to the curriculum of U.S. schools. "I would provide students with group experiences in drinking," he told a Conference on Alcohol and Food in Health and Disease at the New York Academy of Sciences last week, so that they might "familiarize themselves with their own reactions to alcohol and learn the signals that portend an unhappy drinking experience for themselves or their peers."
Chafetz, who also directs an alcohol clinic at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital, wants to show students "how different the reponse will be when drink is sipped slowly rather than gulped; how different the response will be when drink is consumed with food and while sitting in a relaxed atmosphere, in contrast to drinking without food and standing in tense circumstances; how the use of alcohol provides meaningful experience when partaken with another, while a drink alone is as uncommunicative as talking to oneself; and how intoxication is sickness and not strength."
But why should schools do the job? "We have tried Prohibition and it failed," says Chafetz. "We have tried campaigns of slogans and they have failed. We have tried educational programs based on fear of alcohol and they have failed." And although the best place to teach children the dangers of alcohol is in the home, "parents are too confused and too guilty about their own drinking practices to transmit anything beyond their own ambivalence." So that leaves the schools. "As we have reduced the rate of accidents in a high-incidence group of traffic-accident-prone individuals by driver-training programs, perhaps we can lower the incidence of unhealthy alcohol use." The 14-to-16 age period, he believes, is when the most can be done to check any tendencies toward alcoholism.
In France, where kids barely out of diapers often start taking a thimbleful of diluted wine, Chafetz' proposal would stir only some Gallic shrugs, but most Americans popped a gasket. Did he not know, asked one of his listeners, that drinking is illegal in most schools? The beverage laws, scoffed Chafetz, "are absurd." "Alert your school boards to the dangers of this program," cried Mrs. Fred J. Tooze, president of the W.C.T.U. Mrs. Jennelle Moorhead, national president of the P.T.A., called the idea "outrageous." Iowa Governor Harold E. Hughes, who freely admits to an alcoholic past, said he was "1,000% against the idea. Children should be taught the dangers of alcohol but not how to use it," he said. New York Psychiatrist Abraham Perlstein, who has studied the problem of drinking by juveniles, offered another perspective. Teaching children how to drink, he argued, would neither increase nor decrease alcoholism; it would merely prove ineffective. In Perlstein's view, emotional disturbance, not alcohol itself, is what creates alcoholics.