One of my chief inspirations in my teaching philosophy is not, strictly speaking, an academic, but I venture to call him an expert philosopher of education nonetheless. Fred “Mister” Rogers, creator and host of the children’s television show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood from 1968 to 2001, exemplified gentleness and espoused a philosophy of emotional literacy. As Rogers said to the US Senate Subcommittee on Communications in 1969,
We deal with such things as the inner drama of childhood. We don't have to bop somebody over the head to make drama on the screen. We deal with such things as getting a haircut, or the feelings about brothers and sisters, and the kind of anger that arises in simple family situations. And we speak to it constructively. [...] This is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying, ‘You've made this day a special day, by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are.’ And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health. I think that it's much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger -- much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire.
I have encountered a concept non-academically called the Two Rogerses principle of masculinity. I once had a philosophy professor sum up one way of doing virtue ethics as “pick somebody you want to emulate, and emulate them” – the most famous example being the concept of ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ The Two Rogerses principle is a simple matter of virtue ethics in that sense: consider, on the one hand, gentle children’s television show host Fred Rogers, and, on the other hand, Marvel comic book and movie superhero Steve Rogers, better known as Captain America, who frequently uses his great strength to defend the weak and to defeat bullies and Nazis and is often held up as an exceptionally moral voice among superheroes. If neither Mr. Rogers nor Captain America would do whatever you’re thinking of doing, don’t do it; that thing is probably toxically masculine, not healthily masculine. (There is, of course, a great tension between Fred Rogers’ oft-stated distaste for violence in children’s entertainment on the one side, and Steve Rogers’ habit of solving problems with violence on the other. I focus my own emulation on Fred Rogers – ‘Are you being the kind of person Mr. Rogers knew you could be?’ has for years been a core component of my ethics – but I suspect that Steve Rogers would find a more receptive audience in today’s schoolchildren.)
See Also: Vogt, G., & Monroe, A. (2021). What Mister Rogers can teach us about teaching. The Phi Delta Kappan, 102(8), 46–51. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27083858
