Janusz Korczak_The Child's Right to Respect_En

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The Child’s Right to Respect
All of this does not constitute a clearly defined educational method. One could
possibly term Korczak’s education as an open educational system in contrast to
other more closed traditions at that time. I think that there is a distinct parallel with
how the Convention on the Rights of the Child today stresses freedom of thought
and speech for children. In How to Love a Child, in a note added to the second
edition, Korczak wrote:
… primary and irrefutable right of children is the right to voice their thoughts, to
active participation in our considerations and verdicts concerning them. When we
have gained their respect and trust, once they confide in us of their own free will
and tell us what they have the right to do – there will be fewer puzzling moments,
fewer mistakes.
Experience from everyday teaching often forms the starting point for Korczak’s
texts. The meeting between the doctor and the patient, between the educationalist
and the child, must be based on respect for the child’s situation at the time in
question:
A hundred different hearts beat under shirts of the same sort and in each case there
are individual difficulties, individual exertions, individual sorrows and troubles.
A hundred children – a hundred beings who are human – not at some time in the
future, not just tomorrow, but now ... right now ... today.
Korczak’s picture of everyday life in orphanages is a corrective to the educational
vision, often with a self-ironical undertone. What does the job of an employee in a
children’s home normally involve?
A caretaker of walls and furniture, of order in the playground, of clean ears and
floors; a cowherd seeing to it that the herd does not annoy adults in their work and
at play; a keeper of torn pants and shoes and a stingy server of meals; a guardian
of adult privileges and an indolent performer of unprofessional whims.
Korczak’s cutting words on the adult role in traditional education is tempered,
as I see it, with a dash of melancholy. The burdensome external conditions will
always require some form of supervision. But if we let such aspects dominate and
corrode the content of education, this leads to oppression of the children. And this
is what Korczak found in contemporary education. In contrast to an oppressive
educational system, Korczak placed children’s rights – the right to speak and the
right to be listened to – as central elements of his teaching.
As early as the 1910s, Korczak linked this work form in the small “child republic”
to his first attempts in the large international community to produce a declaration
on the rights of children:
If I devote a disproportionately large amount of space to the court, I do this in
the conviction that the court can contribute to children’s equality, can prepare the
way for a constitution, can force a declaration on the rights of children. Children
possess the right to have their problems dealt with seriously and thought through
in a just manner. Until now everything has depended on the teacher’s goodwill,