Janusz Korczak_The Child's Right to Respect_En

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The Child’s Right to Respect
The work of many years has made it increasingly obvious to me that children
deserve respect, trust and kindness. Their good sides emerge in a continual
atmosphere of sensitive openness, of happy laughter, of the first fumbling attempts
and surprises of simple and artless subjects of happiness. Such work is stimulating,
fruitful and agreeable.
On the other hand, his demands for respect for the child also included an ethical
and political demand:
We compel children to shoulder mankind’s responsibilities tomorrow, but give
them none of the human rights today … were humanity to be divided into adults
and children and life into childhood and adulthood, we should discover that the
child occupies a very large part of the world and of life. But we … are incapable
of seeing the child, just as we earlier could not see women, peasants, oppressed
social groups and oppressed peoples.
Korczak’s plea for children’s right to respect was grounded in his humanist view,
and was manifested in his urgent questions to us about justice, equality and the
shouldering of responsibility. His whole life presents us with a challenge to act,
for the good of all children.
Korczak worked for the Modernity project. He was one in a long line of socially
and educationally dedicated doctors who invested their professional skill to reform
society.
According to some researchers’ views on modernity there is a lack of personal
morality in modern and post-modern society. There also seems to be a distorted
communication between different roles within a person and between persons.
But Korczak’s commitment to the Modernity project to build a better world was
subordinated to the commitment and personal moral conduct of the individual. It
was not the party or the big projects that were the centre but the individual.
One of Korczak’s fundamental ideas seems to have been the opposite of the
separation of roles in modernity; he stressed integration of roles, the relationship
between educational theory and practice, the relationship between children and
staff. Korczak’s life work contained many levels of formulation integrating his
different roles as a doctor, educator and author.
Professional ethics was central to Korczak’s work. Reverence for life and respect
for the individual were two fundamental principles with Korczak. He espoused
ideas usually to be found in the humanist tradition, but gave them a personal
application in the way he related to children.
Science and technology do not appear to have had a natural advantage over ethical
principles in Korczak’s education. He gives prominence to ethics, underlining his
strong emphasis on personal responsibility.
When you read Korczak you discover a paediatrician working for the Modernity
project, but in his own way. You discover a human-oriented approach to education
where the growth of the individual, personal moral conduct and communication
between staff and children are key educational goals.