Could we retire the term “role model” after a spring in which baseball players and parliamentarians are the latest failed examples? At U.S. congressional hearings into steroid use in the major leagues, politicians, who probably think they are role models too, asked a lineup of superstars: Do you think you are a role model? And the severely unrepresentative athletes, whose lives incarnate nothing that normal people can identify with, each solemnly accepted the burden.

Up here, Ed Broadbent and others said teachers must fear to take their kids into the House of Commons during the sponsorship uproar because the members, who ought to be role models, are so fractious. But what makes anyone think athletes and politicians should be role models? Ballplayers play ball, MPs make laws. Just what do they think a role model is?

The term was coined 50 years ago by U.S. sociologist Robert Merton, who had a knack for lingo (“self-fulfilling prophecy” was his, as was “deviant behaviour”). It became common in educational theory in the 70s, referring to individuals whose lives managed to exemplify the ideals they advocated. You couldn’t expect kids to do something that was merely described; they had to see what it looked like. So the obvious role models were those instructing the young — parents and teachers — who ought to actually embody the values they teach. The concept went with the era, when people said things like: “The personal is political,” and “How can we change the world if we can’t change ourselves?”

Somehow, since then, the notion got conflated with heroes. But heroes can’t be role models, they’re too extraordinary. In the old days, they founded nations (Moses, George Washington) or saved them (Nelson at Trafalgar). Because of their grand stature, they had grand flaws. The greater the man, the greater his perversity, says the Talmud (I translate loosely). So Moses, who was too quick to anger, was punished by not being allowed to enter the promised land.

Even trite modern versions, such as sports heroes, do extraordinary deeds such as smashing records. As a kid, Wayne Gretzky may have dreamed of being Gordie Howe, but his role model was his dad Walter, an extraordinary, ordinary guy. Anyway, the scaled-down heroes of sports and entertainment can’t be real role models because you don’t know them as you know parents and teachers, even if relentless media exposure creates a false, dangerous sense of familiarity.

This confusion seems to me connected to the recent, distressing reports about bullying. It sounds different from earlier forms, beyond the insertion of cyber, though it’s hard to say exactly why. But I assume that events such as bullying in the world of kids always reflect, in some way, relations between that world and the world of adults. I don’t just mean with individual adults such as parents, I mean with the adult world. We don’t get off the hook because they’re concentrating on each other.

So, in the 50s film Rebel Without a Cause, the adult world is stupid, uncomprehending and oppressive, which gives the kids something clear to reject. In the 60s film Lord of the Flies, barbarity breaks out among the kids when the adult world goes missing. When that world reappears, so does an order, along with a reduction in violence and in the fear it is based on. In the 80s film The Ice Storm, you get a sense of what happens to kids when the adult world is present, but doesn’t behave in a very adult way, whatever that means. I’d say “role models” was a reasonably good idea, when it referred to real, present adults. But that adulthood is what seems to have come into question.

Or maybe I’m just reacting to having seen the latest kids’ blockbuster, Madagascar, the most brazen example yet of a kid film that is massively preoccupied with the adults in its audience. (Sly asides, references etc., and the way the stars in it pitch their voices, I thought, toward adults.) What are kids to make of this kind of adult and the subtle invasion of their world? It’s the exact opposite of Bugs Bunny cartoons. Those were originally made for adults, and shown alongside the newsreel and double feature. But kids cunningly took them over as their ownâe¦

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.