The King of Children

     Sometimes when I'm walking through the halls at school, I feel like the Pied Piper.  I don't model myself after the evil one who steals a town's children because the government refused to pay a debt, but I do feel akin to a skipping flutist who is followed by a throng of energetic souls.  This week, it is all the more true, because at lunch time we slip from stage rehearsals back to my classroom and a group of wonderful and chatty seventh graders follows me with all their excitement and chaos.  I'm glad that my classroom isn't a mountain where rats have been hidden, but I'm even more glad that kids trust and follow me.

    Mike R is a colleague of mine, and we share a classroom.  I feel lucky to work with someone who is so devoted to children and to doing what is right for them.  We start the day off with discussions about what we can do to improve the world and what we have read about that sets our minds to wonder.  He is even more a Pied Piper than I am, true to himself, true to the children, and true to bringing out the best in situations.    He reminds me of a man I've been reading about from turn of the century Poland.  The man?  Janusz Korczak.

   
    It all started when I met with Peppy Margolis, the head of RVCC's Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.  All of a sudden, she burst out into an enthusiast frenzy.  "The King of Children! That's it! You need to learn about him!"

     Sure enough, she was right.   Mr. DeFina was the loving hope of my childhood (Mr. DeMonaco was more the court jester, truth be told...),  Mike and I are Pied Pipers of our current students, but for children and parents in Holocaust Era Poland, Janusz Korczak was an inspiration, a King of Children.

     Although he was on the career path to become a doctor, he jumped ship from his initial career plans and opened up an orphanage in 1912.  From what I've read about Dom Sierot, it had some of the philosophy of the Modern School Movement, although it was a little more socialist than anarchist.   At the heart of Korczak's belief was the premise that our society has two main tiers: adults and children.  These two tiers are in constant conflict, with adults destined to win because they have more power.  Furthermore, children eventually transform into the adults and forget what their role had been in their prior iteration.  Korczak wanted to remind adults about what it was like to be a child.  Therefore, he wrote a great deal for the grown-ups.  The text of Loving Every Child is available online, and I have provided a link for it.  His orphanage aimed to be a place where children and adults were not in conflict with one another, following the ideals that he expressed in his literature.

     In the orphanage school, children made the rules. They wrote the newspapers.  Adults modeled forgiveness and  encouraged freedom of expression, and this led to a fair court and a free press.  Korczak also modeled his own love for writing.  When times grew increasingly rough for the Jewish children of Poland, he asked them what they wanted to read about.  He wrote them books about wizards and friendship, helping empower them to cope through an early form of bibliotherapy.

      I've been reading Korczak's diaries of the years when he was with the orphaned children in the Warsaw ghetto.  The darkening atmosphere was very apparent and he has haunting imagery of people disappearing.    The diary stops abruptly just before he and the children were deported to certain death in Treblinka.  He was offered a reprieve, freedom, life, but he did not abandon his children.

    This is a trailer of a film about him.  There is real footage of ghetto life and it might be traumatic for some to watch.  However, it is a powerful four minutes.

     This is a play about Janusz,  It's well worth the read.  (Sigh, someone beat me to the task. Actually, there are several plays.  Here's another one.  

     I admire people who try to create a world based on their ideals.  On a smaller scale, I try to do so too.  But I'm saddened when the world gets in the way.  My dream has been to start a Children Center for the Creative Arts, where the goal is process over product.  (I believe that with a healthy process, product will come, and so much more!) There was a program like this when I was a child, and I would love to re-create it.  However, in this real world, such an idea is not economical.   I'm on to a new dream, one that I'm almost ready to share.  But I have years ahead of me.

   I'm so sorry that this man and his orphans didn't get the chance.