'There are no children – there are people'
Janusz Korczak's educational theories, disdain for the vulnerable, and respect for power.
As a college sophomore, I spent a year reading Rousseau’s Emile. Each week, eight of us would meet in the basement boardroom of the political science department. One political philosophy professor and seven students drawn from across years and disciplines, some already graduated. These meetings invariably involved snacks (usually a bowl of candy commandeered from the desk in the office), excruciatingly close reading of the text, and even closer scrutiny of our respective early educations. During these long Monday afternoons, I started to think of education as something unavoidably political. By extension, I’ve come to think of educational theories as a genre of political theory.
Insofar as they are concerned with directing the children’s development in a certain way, educational theories include (implicitly or explicitly) a view of human nature and of what is good for human beings. These theories also tend to contain (explicitly or implicitly) a vision of human flourishing (or at least of normal human development).
If we read these theories with an eye to the assumptions their authors make about human nature and the good, we can see how they are shaped (positively or negatively) by contemporary and earlier political discourses, practices, and theories.
My preliminary reading about modern Yiddish culture and the Yiddish language movement directed my attention to debates over the language of instruction in the Jewish folkshul. Though my research focuses on works written in Yiddish, I became curious about what other educational theories circulated in Eastern Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century. This led me on a day-long course of Googling.
Call it attentiveness to context or propensity for distraction that led me to the educational theories of Janusz Korczak — the pen name of the Polish-Jewish caregiver, doctor, theorist, and author Henryk Goldszmit.
Korczak was born in Warsaw. As a son of Maskilim, he received a secular education in gymnasium before studying medicine at the University of Warsaw. He also studied at the underground Flying University. Upon graduation from the University of Warsaw, he became a paediatrician and started to write books for children. By 1911 and 1912, Korczak had shifted much of his attention to working with orphans and developing educational theories.
Around this time, he established Dom Sierot, an orphanage for Jewish children at 92 Krochmalna St. in Warsaw. Dom Sierot was often described as a sort of children’s republic, replete with all the expected trappings – a parliament, a court, a newspaper. The newspaper was published as a weekly supplement to the interwar Polish-Jewish daily Nasz Przegląd.
Though Korczak’s educational theories are deeply political, he was an unwilling partisan. Neither Korczak nor his thought fit into the neat boxes of political allegiance that we love for their simplifying power. This frustrated his contemporaries. Socialists and communists accused him of being reactionary because he was not active in party politics, while conservatives accused him of harbouring socialist sympathies. Hebraists and Yiddishists bemoaned his insistence on writing in Polish rather than a Jewish language. Though not a Zionist, Korczak visited Kibbutzim in Palestine. According to biographer Betty Jean Liffton, the rise of nationalism in Poland prompted him to consider continuing his work in Palestine and settling there. But he remained in Warsaw on the conviction that ‘one has to remain at one’s post till the very last moment’. After the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, he couldn’t have lifted even if he wanted to.
Korczak had more than one chance to escape. First, the Polish resistance offered him refuge on the Aryan side of the Warsaw ghetto wall. He declined. Later, the Nazis liquidated the ghetto. The inhabitants of Korczak’s orphanage-cum-republic were sent to Treblinka. On the way to the death camp, an SS officer familiar with Korczak’s children’s books offered to help him. Again, he refused. He chose to go with the nearly 200 children in his care to the gas chambers. He went with these children into the ghetto, and he left with them. ‘You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this’, he said.
Eyewitnesses recall this scene that has since inspired films and novels. Joshua Perle recollects:
Janusz Korczak was marching, his head bent forward, holding the hand of a child, without a hat, a leather belt around his waist, and wearing high boots. A few nurses were followed by two hundred children, dressed in clean and meticulously cared for clothes, as they were being carried to the altar.
A fellow teacher, Michal (Misza) Wróblewski — the only teacher to survive the orphanage deportation to Treblinka — later remarked that all of these tributes would have perplexed Korczak:
You know, everyone makes so much of Korczak’s last decision to go with the children to the train. But his whole life was made up of moral decisions. The decision to become a children’s doctor. The decision to give up medicine and his writing career to take care of poor orphans. The decision to go with the Jewish orphans into the ghetto. As for that last decision to go with the children to Treblinka, it was part of his nature. It was who he was. He wouldn’t understand why we are making so much of it today.
This moral sense and feeling of personal responsibility underpinned Korczak’s educational theories.
One might expect an educational theory to begin with children, but Korczak’s starts with adults. He recognized that the difficulties unique to childhood are multiplied by, and often the result of, the behaviour of adults. Adults have many bad habits concerning children.
Among these habits, for Korczak, is the tendency to see childhood as something other than an essential part of human life. Childhood is not a separate state, a waiting period before the real life of the adult future begins, but a critically important stage in a continuous human life. Nor is it a short stage, especially for a child.
The years of childhood are long and important ones for a living being, for a person (Janusz Korczak, A Child’s Right to Respect, translated by Sean Gasper Bye, 27. All subsequent quotations taken from the same source).
Nor, Korzak insisted, is childhood a realm partitioned off from the problems and conflicts of the so-called ‘adult world’. Children share in the difficulties of their parents. Like adults, they suffer and seek respite from poverty, illness, and grief.
Children make up a large percentage of the human race, the population, the nation, its inhabitants, our fellow-citizens – they are permanent comrades. They have been, will be, and are (27).
In addition to sharing the problems of human life, Korzak recognized that children have concerns particular to their ‘class’ as well as individual concerns.
Children are rational beings, intimately familiar with the requirements, difficulties, and obstacles in their lives. What is called for is neither despotic command, nor imposed discipline, nor untrusting control, but tactful understanding, trust in experience, cooperation, and coexistence (30).
Korzak saw what many adults refuse to see with a studied stubbornness – that adults depend on children. The relationship between adults and children is one of mutual vulnerability and dependence.
Are we so gullible as to consider the caresses with which we torment children to be kind? Do we not understand that in cuddling a child it is we who cuddle up to them; helpless, we hide in their embrace; we seek protection and escape in hours of homeless pain and derelict abandonment; we burden them with our sufferings and yearnings. Every other caress, if not fleeing to our child and begging for hope, is shamefully searching within them and arousing sensual feeling. I hug because I am sad. You can have it if you give me a kiss. Selfishness, not kindness (26).
Adults would be able to see all this, he thought, if they stopped interpreting the behaviour of children through a veil of narcissistic myopia that made normal behaviours look like defiant slights. Being upset with a child for acting like a child always reveals more about the character of the frustrated adult than it does the character of the child. Why shouldn’t a child cry when upset, be angry when wrongfully punished, or refuse to follow senseless rules?
Children are not fools, there are no more idiots among them than among adults. Bedecked in the crimson robes of age, how often we thoughtlessly, uncritically impose impossible demands. Often reasoning children stand amazed at our malicious, geriatric, sneering stupidity (30).
Children, he insisted, were entitled to be what they are – children – and must be understood on their own terms:
Researchers have declared that a fully-grown person is driven by reason and a child by impulse; an adult is logical while a child is caught in misleading flights of fancy; an adult has character, an established moral countenance, while a child is tangled in the chaos of instinct and craving. They investigate children not on their own terms, but as baser, weaker, and poorer psychological beings. As though all adults were learned professors (46).
He insisted that it was time for adults to ‘renounce hypocritical longing for the perfect child’ (47).
Though Korzacs theory has an account of natural human development at its core, he acknowledges that the environment in which a child grows plays an essential part in their development. This environment is not limited to the home and the school. The child’s social world includes more than their family, classmates, and teachers.
They may be filthy, untrusting, alienated from others – but they are not bad. It is not only the home that provides models for children, but the entryway, the corridor, the yard, and the street as well. They speak in the words of their surroundings, they state their views, rehearse gestures, follow examples. There is no such thing as a pure child – each one is tarnished to one extent or another (39).
The entire social world is their world. If they find that this world is not a home, we can see that ‘their angry rebelliousness is justified’ (42). Rebellion and tears may be signs and symptoms of alienation. Both may be a protest against the world that is not a home for children (or adults, for that matter).
Children compel us to pay attention to them; the only moments we notice and remember are when they bother and disturb us. We do not see when they are calm, serious, focused. We disregard the sacred moments when they talk to themselves, to the world, to God. Children are forced to hide their longings and urges in the face of mockery and harsh comments, to conceal their desire to understand, not to disclose their resolution to better themselves (36).
Korzsac recognized that the social world of children is ruled by despotic adults taking advantage of their relative strength and experience. ‘Has history ever known such tyranny?’ Korzsac asks (38).
In itself, the standard treatment of children is unkind and an unjust infringement of what Korzsac considered to be the ‘rights of children’. But it has even more sinister consequences. This brings us to what I regard as Korzsac’s most pertinent insight: Our standard treatment of children encourages a habitual disdain for the vulnerable, while the child’s experience of powerlessness generates crude respect for power.
Miscellany
Here are some articles related to diaspora I read over the past couple of weeks that I thought were particularly good.
First, Charlotte E. Rosen’s review of Joshua Leifer’s recent book Tablets Shattered — ‘Acting Jewishly During a Genocide’:
In the end, Tablets Shattered engages in offensive religio-ethnic purity tests, bizarrely attempts to (re)smuggle a Völkisch pro-Israel politics into US leftist organizing, and offers a set of conclusions that knowingly misreads Jewish history. It is a book riddled with contradictions, unsupported proclamations, and though often draped in respectable or tactically vague language — ethically disturbing stances.
Second, Joseph Grim Feinberg’s ‘No one agrees on what “Jewish values” are. That’s why they matter’. In this short article, Feinberg — co-author of the Declaration of the Independence of Diaspora — argues that it is better to contest Zionism on the basis of values rather than on the grounds of identity.
Third, an interview with Shane Burley and Ben Lorber about the need for a leftist analysis of antisemitism and about their new book Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism.
Also, as always, I recommend listening to the new episodes of The Jewish Diasporist: