How to Love a Child
One of the few truly smart things I’ve ever done as a parent and educator was to read Janusz Korczak. If you’ve never heard of him, you can learn about him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_Korczak
Korczak was an educator, a parental figure for hundreds of orphans, and a fierce and inventive proponent of children’s rights. (Here’s a Possible I’d like to put in everybody’s Flook deck: “Find and read Korczak’s novel Katjus the Wizard (1933), a story similar to, and in many ways more interesting than, Harry Potter.”)
Korczak is probably most famous for refusing offers of sanctuary and choosing instead to die alongside the children in his charge when the Nazis sent them all to be murdered at the Treblinka concentration camp in 1942. The children in his life were his compatriots.
His radical views on the rights and personhood of children led him to call for a Magna Carta of Children’s Rights. He worked with the kids in his orphanage to engage with them in their world: he helped them develop their own parliament, court, and newspaper. Perhaps the most radical premise of his work was that a child is a complete person, not a future person or a potential person. Different from an adult in many ways, but an equal nonetheless. When I read his book How to Love a Child (1919), this was one of many paragraphs that shook me in the early years of parenthood and in my career as an educator:
In what way is the child as a spiritual order different from ourselves? What are its characteristics and wants, what are the hidden possibilities unnoticed by us? What is that half of mankind [sic] like which lives together and alongside us yet in tragic disunion? We make that half shoulder the responsibilities of men [sic] of tomorrow while giving it none of the rights of men today. (p. 147)
And then, in one sentence, he described the implications for education of children’s subordination to a future personhood: “Today it is the factory siren that weighs upon the spirit of education.” (p. 148)
The prototype for Flook emerged from conversations with my 12-year old. In the initial days of pandemic quarantine, I could hear sirens in the widespread panic in the adult world about how to manage our children in the absence of traditional schooling. I wanted to find a way to liberate my family from rigid adherence to a schedule, and the inevitable imposition on our parent-child relationship of a cop-deviant relationship. I wanted to find a way of noticing those “hidden possibilities” and wants in my child.
As I developed a range of Possibles for my child, Korczak’s principle – that the child is an entire person, right now – guided my imagination. The result? Surprise and discovery for both of us. But, and this to me is very important, the final design of Flook is not just for children. Because it’s built on a concept of the child as a whole person, it’s filled with hidden possibilities for us all.
— Bruce