To approach children’s rights from the perspective of Janusz Korczak (whose birth name was Henryk Goldszmit), we must throw out a number of preconceived ideas, clichés and biographical errors; some of them stem from the destruction of the city of Warsaw and the restriction of researchers’ freedoms during the Communist period, and some of them stem from the especially difficult emotional context linked to Korczak’s death in Treblinka, which made him a hero and a martyr. The first biography devoted to him, written by Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczakowa[1], appeared in 1949. But as soon as it was published, her book Janusz Korczak was withdrawn from bookshops. When changes in the political context enabled her book to be republished, Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczakowa explained in her 1959 opinion piece “About Janusz”, that “the officials in charge of publishing and national education irrevocably described Korczak’s books as harmful and useless. […] My book, which dealt with Korczak’s life and was published in 1949, suffered the same fate as all his work”[2]. Right from the preface, she draws attention to the pitfalls of the legend that began to be woven around Janusz Korczak on the day of his last march to the Umschlagplatz[3], the fabric of the hero and martyr tending to obscure the man:

The conflict between the real life of a human being and the legend is a dangerous one. Especially when the legend is as imposing as that of the death of Janusz Korczak and his two hundred children […] The fire that ravaged his town and his community swallowed up almost all the copies of his books and the immense documentation he had collected over the years. All that remains are a few books and a handful of friends and colleagues.

These books and these people can now undertake a difficult and demanding dialogue with the legend. And they have a duty to do so[4].

Thanks to the colossal editorial work begun in 1977 by Hanna Kirchner, Alexander Lewin and Stefan Wołoszyn, we can now nuance Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczakowa’s comments. Their annotated collection of Korczak’s Works, the first volume of which was published in 1992, now consists of fifteen volumes in twenty books, and its publication is not yet complete[5]. The material collected in volume 13, published in 2017 under the title Theory and Practice. Pedagogical articles (1919–1939)[6], sheds new light on Korczak / Goldszmit’s approach to the concept of child protection and children’s rights. Finally, with the publication in 2023 of the book Another Side of Korczak by Bożena Wojnowska, which organises and synthesises the bulk of the commentary and research that accompanied the publication of the Works, we are finally in a position to interpret more accurately what Korczak meant by children’s rights.

A fertile socio-cultural soil

Another Side of Korczak[7] provides a clear picture of the environment in which Korczak evolved, whereas various other biographies devoted to him have distorted his complex identity by making him alternately a Pole or a more-or-less assimilated Jew. One of the most important theses of Bożena Wojnowska’s book is “the parallels between the cultural model of the Polish intellectual, a model that Korczak revered from his youth, and the cultural model of the Jewish reformist, based on the emancipatory aspirations of the Haskala”[8]. Taking this dual cultural influence into account allows us “to situate the theme of ‘the child’ more precisely in the context of the emancipation movements of the time, and in particular the self-emancipatory aspirations of the Jews, who were demanding the right to self-determination”[9].

Henryk Goldszmit was born in Warsaw around 1878[10] into a progressive Jewish family that was linked to the Haskala movement. At that time, there was a climate of social oppression due to the Russian Empire’s occupation of that part of Poland. According to Wojnowska:

The Haskala movement set itself the goal of modernising the Jewish community internally and enhancing its place in the society and culture of the countries in which Jews settled, advocating for the reform of Judaism and disseminating secular knowledge. […] The Goldszmit family joined the ranks of Warsaw’s Jewish intelligentsia, more and more of whom were embracing the Haskala experience, which consisted of rebuilding their own community, but in a country that was politically enslaved and strongly marked by societal divisions[11].

As a result, Henryk Goldszmit and his sister Anna received a secular education in several languages[12], excluding Yiddish because of their parents’ desire to break with traditional Judaism. Although secular, this education was nevertheless imbued with Jewish values, such as love of one’s neighbour, a commitment to helping orphans and poor people, and a sense of individual and collective responsibility for repairing the world. Haskala advocates for the right to self-determination and stresses the importance of education as a vehicle for change: “The idea of the duty of intellectuals towards the wide circle of ‘unenlightened brothers’ took shape: they had to be educated, taught citizenship, relieved of religious superstition and educated in tolerance”[13]. Józef Goldszmit (Henyrk’s father) and Jakub Goldszmit (Henryk’s uncle) published biographies of famous Jews in Polish, as well as articles aimed primarily at the Jewish community but also at Poles who wanted to learn more about their neighbours[14]. In response to the Polish positivist milieu’s proposals for assimilation, the progressive Jews called for rapprochement and dialogue, and for respecting each other’s cultural differences, to open up exchanges of experience and build a partnership. On their part, the Polish intellectuals were also fighting for the right to self-determination and for national and social emancipation.

In 1885, Jadwiga Szczawińska[15], a teacher and campaigner for women’s rights and social rights, set up a clandestine university for women in Warsaw – the Flying University – whose professors included some of Poland’s best intellectuals and scientists. The courses soon opened up to male students, who enrolled to supplement the mediocre teaching provided by the Tsarist University in Warsaw: the institution where Henryk Goldszmit, as a young writer with a passion for education, was studying medicine. The Flying University, which he joined, was characterised by “scepticism towards the so-called laws of History, which went hand in hand with the affirmation of the free will of individuals”[16]. The university operated in small working circles, where, in a closeness made stronger by clandestinity, students rubbed shoulders with eminent and radical figures including the pedagogues Jan Władyslaw Dawid and Wacław Nałkowski, the feminist sociologist and economist Zofia Daszyńska-Golińska, and the pedagogue and children’s rights activist Stefania Sempołowska[17]. These teachers imbued their pupils with “two essential moral imperatives: the need to respect the dignity of every human being, and the obligation to show solidarity with those in need”. This led to “a new generation of Poles” emerging that was made up of “independent thinkers, committed and creative”[18].

Without ever joining a political party[19], Henryk Goldszmit became actively involved in a social movement supported by organisations such as the Warsaw Benevolent Society and its free libraries, the Holiday Camp Society, the Orphan Aid Society and the Warsaw Hygiene Institute. For Goldszmit, “the ideas that emanated [from the Flying University] strengthened the knowledge of activism and social responsibility acquired at home, intensified non-conformism and the feeling of disagreement with reality, as well as the desire to break away from the status quo”[20].

Poles and Jews were united by this social movement, because “the common element […] was the project to modernise thought and society by ensuring and strengthening collective identity. On the Jewish side, it aimed to prevent the community from dissolving in the ocean of followers of other religions, and on the Polish side it aimed to defend Poland against Russian domination and denationalisation”[21]. On both sides, the emphasis was on the importance of education – for children and adults alike – underpinned by fundamental values such as love of one’s neighbour. This is a selfless and demanding form of love, as expressed by the philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Love:

Loving your neighbour may require a leap of faith; the result, though, is the birth act of humanity. It is also the fateful passage from the instinct of survival to morality. This is a passage that renders morality a part, perhaps a conditio sine qua non, of survival. With that ingredient, survival of a human becomes the survival of humanity in the human[22].

Henryk Goldszmit was barely 20 years old when, in 1899, under the pseudonym “Janusz”, he wrote a series of articles on childhood for the weekly magazine The Reading Room for Everyone. This included an article entitled “The Evolution of Love of One’s Neighbour”:

Children are not people in the making, they are already people in their own right. Yes, they are individuals, not dolls. We can speak to their minds, and they will respond. If we speak to their hearts, they will understand us[23].

Although Korczak would never depart from the postulate that the child is already a person in their own right, the posturing of the young paediatrician, tinged with positivist utopianism and Judeo-Christian charity, was to undergo a profound change in 1904 when he had his first contact with a group of children. He recounted this experience in 1918 in How to Love a Child. Holiday Camps:

I owe a lot to holiday camps. That’s where I got to know a class of children, that’s where I learnt, through my own efforts, the ABCs of educational practice. Rich in illusions, poor in experience, sentimental and young, I thought I could do a lot because I wanted a lot. My desire was to make these four weeks of camps for underprivileged children a real interlude of joy and gladness that no tear could tarnish[24].

Reality brought the young educator back down to earth on the first evening, when the children responded to his kindness with rowdiness and he lost his temper. He ended up grabbing one of the boys and threatening to make him sleep outside on the veranda. He describes what he subsequently learned from this:

Early in the evening of the second day, one of the boys came to warn me that the dormitory was going to be rowdy again, but that if I hit anyone again, they wouldn’t take it any more: they’d armed themselves with sticks.

I realised that children are a force to be reckoned with. You can make them loyal collaborators or you can discourage them through lack of respect. By a curious combination of circumstances, I was taught these truths with a stick.

The next day, during a walk in the forest, I spoke for the first time, not to children, but with children. I spoke with them not about what I wanted them to be, but about what they wanted to be or could be. I think it was then that I realised, also for the first time, that you can learn a lot from children, that they too make their own demands and conditions, and have the right to do so, that they can have their own objections[25].

A writer committed to the cause of children

The experience described above was not the first time that Janusz Korczak, who had been calling himself by his pen name since 1901[26], had come into contact with children in precarious situations. His first novel, Children of the Streets, is based on notes he had taken during his many visits to Warsaw’s slums. It tells the story of a wealthy man who sets out to rescue two children from the streets by showering them with love and kindness. However, one of the children chooses to regain his freedom at the expense of poverty, while the other, who remains in the rich man’s house, closes in on herself because: “you could only reach her heart with a love that was disinterested and sincere, not with a love steeped in a sense of duty and infatuation with an idea”[27]. Here, Korczak paints portraits of children who, despite their precarious circumstances, embody a dignity and integrity that the wealthy philanthropist lacked.

Korczak’s second novel, Child of the Drawing Room, was published in 1907 and solidified his reputation as a writer. In this book, the hero flees “the symbolic violence […] the bourgeois education that makes the child a hostage who is forbidden to go down the social ladder, whose childhood is stigmatised by intensive obligations and control concealed under a façade of social and family benevolence”[28]. In this revolutionary novel, which combines autobiography, fiction, poetry, theatre and journalistic notes taken on the spot, Korczak presents a vision of a society with all its contradictions, deviancies and madness, in which the only guarantor of human dignity is the child. Korczak denounces the passivity of the privileged social classes, who bear responsibility for poverty and the evils it engenders, but without ever idealising his characters or reducing them to the role of a victim waiting to be rescued.

A few years earlier, Korczak’s friends, who were well aware of his literary talent, expressed surprise that he had chosen to study a different subject. Korczak replied that “literature is just words, while medicine is deeds”[29]. In reality, he managed to pursue these two activities in parallel. His life is an example that is difficult to match when it comes to commitment to the cause of deprived children and victims of violence – not only in terms of the energy Korczak put into it, but also in terms of his intellectually intransigent stance on how to live out this commitment.

It was also in 1907 that the Orphans’ Aid Society entrusted Korczak with the project of opening a modern orphanage for Jewish children in Warsaw. But just a few months after the orphanage was officially opened, the First World War broke out and Henryk Goldszmit, a doctor, was sent to the front.

Whenever he could, Korczak went to help in orphanages and children’s refuges in the Kiev region, where he was posted from 1914 to 1918. It was during this period that he wrote a text that would become the reference book for anyone interested in Janusz Korczak: How to Love a Child (1918), written on numbered scraps of paper “in a field hospital under the roar of cannon-fire, during the war, when the precept of tolerance was no longer enough”[30].

Working at the centre of this humanitarian tragedy, the young doctor denounced the appalling fate of children in wartime. Yet none of this is apparent in the pages of How to Love a Child: Korczak endeavours to depict an ordinary childhood, that of a human being who comes into the world in circumstances and in an environment that are a priori favourable, where material conditions are not a factor. This may come as a surprise. One could reduce the author’s approach to a need to flee from the unbearable horror of reality. But Korczak never ran away from these horrors, even – and even more so – in humanity’s darkest hour. He had planned to write this book before the war began; placing the dignity of the child at the heart of everything was therefore an act of resistance.

            It is in How to Love a Child that we find his call for a universal charter of children’s rights:

37. Be careful. Either we come to an immediate agreement, or we leave each other forever. It will take some effort of will to call to order any thought that would like to escape or evade, any floating feeling.

         I appeal to the Magne Carta Libertatis [sic] on the rights of the child. There may be others, but I have identified three fundamental ones.

1. A child’s right to die.
2. The child’s right to live in the present moment.
3. The child’s right to be what the child is[31].

Very few publications devoted to Janusz Korczak and children’s rights mention this first right: the right to die. This formulation, although it provokes deep unease, is understood in Korczak’s mind as the child’s right not to be afraid of dying – for Korczak is indeed targeting our own fears as adults, which, by way of the prohibitions we impose on children, end up extinguishing their vitality and their sense of freedom. A few pages further on, Korczak explains the mechanism by which parents and educators insidiously damage the child’s psyche, with real repercussions for the child’s life as an adult:

The fear for the child’s life manifests itself in the fear of an accident that would cripple that child, which awakens the fear for their health, from which arises the concern for hygiene… And here’s a new spiral: that of cleanliness and safety, which extends to dresses, stockings and shoes. It’s no longer about the hole in the forehead, but the hole in the trousers. It’s no longer about the child’s health, but about the health of our wallets.

It sets the wheels of our comfort in motion: “Don’t run like that, there are cars! Don’t run like that, you’ll get dirty! Don’t run like that, I’ve got a headache!”

And this monstrous machine works for long years to crush the will, crush the energy, wear the child’s strength to the bone. […]

Fearing that death would snatch the child from us, we snatch the child from life. Refusing to let the child die, we do not let them live[32].

This fear of death undermines children’s confidence in both themselves and the space in which they experience their grip on reality. Another mechanism destroys the child’s relationship with time: “Having grown up with a passive and destructive expectation of what is to come, we are constantly rushing towards a brighter tomorrow […] and when tomorrow arrives, we expect a new one”[33]. This attitude traps us and others in a constant state of expectation, to the detriment of the present moment: “Half of humanity does not yet exist”[34].

We are naively afraid of death, unaware that life is a series of moments that die and are born again[35].

Here, Korczak professes a philosophy of life that has immense repercussions on adult life and the very structure of society.

In the spirit of Korczak, the rights of the child “to die”, “to live in the present moment” and “to be what the child is” are part of the right to live in freedom enshrined in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “All human beings are born free and equal”[36]. The rights of the child form the basis of this, because human beings are born as children and not as adults. This is why Korczak questions certain paradoxical statements in the Geneva Declaration.

The Geneva Declaration: rights or duties?

Six years after the end of the First World War, at the General Assembly of the Orphans’ Aid Society in 1924, Janusz Korczak referred to the Geneva Declaration for the first time in the following terms:

Let us work in accordance with both eternal and traditional injunctions, and in accordance with the modern Declaration of the General Council of the International Save the Children Union.

The various points of the Declaration read as follows:

“The child that is hungry must be fed”.

“The orphan and the waif must be sheltered and succoured”.

“The child must be the first to receive relief in times of distress”[37].

By using the term “injunctions”, Korczak emphasises that ensuring the protection of children has always been one of the duties of adults. It is an injunction addressed to everyone – parents, educators and ordinary citizens – and consequently to the State. “Children make up a large percentage of humanity, of the population, of the nation, of its inhabitants, of our fellow citizens – they are constant companions. They have been, they will be and they are”[38]. Children are part of human society; therefore, they are co-owners of everything we have received from previous generations. They need protection because “an unjust force rules the world. Whoever can, plunders and steals. Women are harmed ‘because they are women’, Black people ‘because they are black’, Asians ‘because they are yellow’, Jews ‘because they have bad noses’. Workers, peasants, the blind, hunchbacks, old people and children are mistreated”[39].

As the son of a lawyer, Janusz Korczak attached great importance to the laws, charters and regulations that formed the cornerstones of the self-management system at his two orphanages[40]. As a writer, he was aware of the weight of words. In 1929, in The Child’s Right to Respect, he criticised the Geneva Declaration: “The Geneva legislators confused rights and duties. The tone of the Declaration is one of solicitation rather than requirement; it is an appeal to goodwill, a request for benevolence”[41]. He criticised not only the lack of material resources allocated to childcare, but also the semantic confusion between rights and duties: by equating child protection with the rights of children rather than with the duties of adults, this distorts the very meaning of children’s rights:

Our preoccupation with providing for children’s material needs has totally cut us off from an understanding of their value, their rights and their strength[42].

To paraphrase Marta Rakoczy, this confusion has given rise to a policy of protection and care that is opposed to the policy of respect that was so dear to Korczak. The policy of care presents the child solely through the prism of lack: as an incomplete, fragile and vulnerable being, and therefore a powerless one. As Rakoczy writes:

The weakness of the child, constituted as an a priori of child protection policy, carries the risk of depriving the child of their free will. The more the care and protection of children are seen as essentially positive values, the greater the weakness attributed to them [children]. The greater the weakness attributed to children, the fewer opportunities they have to deal with their own flaws and weaknesses. Yet Korczak believes that the ability to recognise and remedy one’s own mistakes is fundamental to the development of political life[43].

The decision-making power of children

Fifteen years after the Geneva Declaration, Korczak drew the following conclusion:

Politicians and legislators try cautiously and make mistakes. They consult each other and make decisions about the child, but who would be naive enough to ask children for their opinion and consent? What would a child have to say? And the child trots off, dejected, with a schoolbook, ball or doll. The child senses that something important and serious is happening above them, without their participation, something that determines right and wrong, punishes and rewards and breaks[44].

Korczak worked with children who had suffered various traumas, and he saw their ability to make decisions, to “take charge of their lives”, as a path to recovery. He saw children not as weak, but as individuals who have a right to be vulnerable and who deserve respect for their shortcomings and recognition of their qualities. In this way, each child is treated as a unique individual, with their own characteristics and abilities, who can make a valuable contribution to social life, earning the recognition of others. It is respect for children’s weaknesses, and therefore for their strengths, that Korczak calls for in The Child’s Right to Respect, published in 1929. Respect for the child’s ignorance, tears, failures, and the difficult and demanding work of a growing body. In 1929, in the second edition of How to Love a Child, Korczak added the following commentary to chapter 37, in which he had sketched out the Magna Carta of children’s rights: “Since then, these ideas having crystallised in my mind, I believe that the first and indisputable right of children is that of expressing their thoughts and of participating actively in our reflections and judgements concerning them”[45].

 At a time of democratic enthusiasm in a country that had just regained its independence, Korczak introduced children to politics by creating the character of Little King Matty, who follows the path from tyrannical child-king to responsible leader. In this way, he raises (for adults) the issue of children’s participation in public debate in matters that concern them:

The ministers bowed their heads; Matt had never before given such a long and fair speech. It was true: children were citizens too, and therefore also had the right to govern. But how? Could the children manage it? Weren’t they too stupid?

The ministers couldn’t say that children were stupid, because Matt himself was a child. Never mind, let’s give it a try[46].

Democracy is a fragile system with many enemies, and Matt’s attempt ends in failure. But mistakes and failures are treasures in Korczak’s eyes, because they have great educational value. To describe all the participatory systems that Korczak, Stefania Wilczyńska[47], Maria Falska[48] and the children in their care experimented with on a daily basis deserves an article in itself. These systems, which took a variety of forms, aimed to create spaces, not only within the orphanage but also in public life, where children’s voices would be taken into account. Korczak wanted to free children from the feeling of powerlessness, because “the feeling of powerlessness engenders respect for strength. […] We teach by our own example to ignore the weakest. Bad school, dark omen”[49].

A winning drawing in the competition to illustrate the Geneva Declaration[50].

A century later, where do we stand in our understanding of children’s rights? The Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 20 November 1989[51], marks an important turning point, because it is a legally binding document. It raises the question of the best interests of the child and defines the child as a subject of law. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to apply the Convention due to criticism from representatives of adultism, who believe that it is necessary to instil a sense of duty in children before granting them rights, which leads to rights being seen as privileges that a child must earn. The Convention is not without inconsistencies, either. Grzegorz Kasdepke, one of Poland’s most popular children’s authors, makes this point with humour in his book I’ve Got the Right! Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Children’s Rights but Were Afraid to Ask, first published in 2007. In the preface, Kasdepke stages a dialogue between himself – the author who is beginning to write the book – and his son, Kacper, about the difficulties that arise when discussing children’s rights. This helps us to understand how the Convention eludes children and draws our attention to the fact that this text, despite the intention of making children actors in their own lives, is above all a debate between adults:

         […] how do you write about children’s rights without scaring adults?

         – Scare the adults?! Kacper was stunned.

         – Yes, I sighed. Some people say that children are too spoilt and that we should talk less about rights and more about duties.

         – Erm… Kacper grimaced.

         – You know… I cleared my throat. Maybe there is some truth in that. But duties are one thing, rights are another.

         And I launched into a frenzied explanation to the effect that children’s rights in no way undermine the authority of parents, guardians or teachers. On the contrary, children’s rights are on their side! Because, for example, only parents can decide what a child can believe in, not the government of the country in which the child lives. And so on and so forth.

         – Do you understand? I asked enthusiastically.

         – More or less, growled Kacper[52].

 

Indeed, while the Convention on the Rights of the Child grants the child their place as a subject of law, it also creates confusion in that it “associates in the normative discourse rights and duties which, in certain articles, become indistinguishable from each other. This is particularly obvious in the article on the right to education, which is also an obligation of the child”[53]. For example, the terms “States Parties recognise the right of the child to education”, “encourage”, “ensure” and “promote” in Article 28 are followed in Article 29 by three instances of the terms “the development of respect for” and “the preparation of the child for responsible life”, which subjugate rather than subject the child[54]. This ultimately leads to a paradox: “You have the right to study!”[55]. In The Child’s Right to Respect, Korczak points out the contradiction already present in the Geneva Declaration: “we have forced children to do intellectual work”[56] – compulsory work, for which children are not paid. Korczak also drew attention to another danger of compulsory schooling, which places on the child “the heavy burden of reconciling the sometimes divergent interests of two parallel authorities. Conflicts between the family and the school overwhelm the child”[57]. In The Child’s Right to Respect, he criticises the fact that child protection, which is a duty borne by adults, is presented as a right of children. He denounces the insidious decline that consists of passing off as ‘rights’ the duties that are actually imposed on children. These inconsistencies, which continue to convey a model of paternalistic domination, do not escape the keen and vigilant minds of children, who are especially sensitive to feelings of injustice.

Children and teenagers are not spoilt, resentful or rebellious. These are risky times. The hypocrisy of the humanist discourse on freedom and benevolence has reached children’s ears[58]. It’s too late to hide from them the fact that beating them is against the law. They know it. They react in their own way: with scheming, with contempt, with little pranks that are meant to be mean, or they seek out those weaker than themselves to test their own strength. […] I’m watching the child’s case very closely, and that’s why I’m so pessimistic, which I think is unfortunately justified[59].

In Louise Tourret’s series of radio programmes Avoir raison avec… [Being right with…] devoted to Janusz Korczak and broadcast on France Culture in August 2024, Jodie Soret, Head of the “programmes, advocacy and public affairs” service at UNICEF France, admitted that “the way in which children’s participation is implemented today is a little empty, and the problem is that they can clearly feel this and therefore end up developing a form of mistrust towards participation processes”[60]. She went on to note that young people are indignant that their opinions are not taken into account, especially when it comes to climate change: “they feel they are being sidelined, when it is their future that is at stake and they should be the first to be listened to”[61]. Korczak was already sounding the alarm when he said that “the doubts and reservations expressed by children do not seem serious to us” while, at the same time:

We plunder the mountains, cut down trees and exterminate animals. Forests and wetlands disappear beneath our cities. We settle further and further away.

We have humiliated the world, subjugated the ore and the beasts, enslaved people of colour, crudely established international relations and placated the masses. A just world is still a long way off, and the ravages and neglect are only increasing.

The child’s democratic sense is clear and ignores hierarchies[62].

 

A pedagogue for adults

Janusz Korczak / Henryk Goldszmit was an active and renowned pedagogue. Today, he is seen primarily as a children’s pedagogue, whereas during his lifetime his educational activities were largely geared towards adults. From his first educational articles published in 1898 in the magazine The Reading Room for Everyone to the series of courses and lectures given at Maria Grzegorzewska’s State Institute for Special Education[63], via The Grant[64] and numerous oral and written public speeches, Korczak devoted an enormous amount of time to educating adults and future educators. In relation to children, he defined himself as “a father with all his faults: he never has time, he’s always upset about something, he’s tiring, he doesn’t know anything, he’s strict, but sometimes, rarely, he’s very kind, very wise, he knows a lot of stories, which he doesn’t always want to tell”[65]. Contrary to the widespread practice of the New Education at the time[66], as is still the norm today, he refused to theorise a method and warned against the ill-considered application of the systems that worked at the Orphan’s Home. In the summary of a series of courses[67] on participatory education, Korczak warned that children’s participation will be doomed to failure for:

as long as children have not obtained the respect due to them, as long as we do not recognise them as the experts of their own psychic states and the difficulties that may arise from them, as long as there is a huge gap between what we want and what they can do, as long as pretence and lies, coercion and oppression are not replaced by tolerance of their spontaneous development, in line with their real interests[68].

Some traces of Korczak’s courses and lectures remain, including the article quoted above and the brief summary of a course outline, The Rights of the Child as an Individual, with seven headings, the last of which is as follows:

7) The child’s right to democratic education. Individualism. Children for themselves. Privileged children, the darling, the confidant, the stooge. The suck-ups. Unbearable friends. Complaints. Sympathy and antipathy among children. Freedom of feelings. The educator as spokesperson for children’s rights[69].

Marta Ciesielska points out that:

This set of rights, singular in its original combination of generalities and micro-problems, can be read as an invitation to reflection, discussion, questioning and even the search for an informal and free language, because it does not shy away from colloquial, simple and expressive terms. To ensure that the topography of children’s rights is not confined to professional circles, but is truly inclusive, and that it invites general debate – in line with Korczak’s call for the democratisation of education[70].

Towards an overhaul of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child?

Janusz Korczak / Henryk Goldszmit was a committed and attentive advocate for “the right of children to have rights”[71]. He never shied away from controversy, never hesitated to initiate it himself, and was always ready for a debate. Yet he stood above all divisions, being “one of those rare beings who, throughout a lucid life, see the world from its centre, because they are at the centre of themselves”[72].

Korczak loved children as few of us are ready or able to love, but what he loved in children was their humanity. Humanity at its best – undistorted, untruncated, untrimmed and unmaimed, whole in its childish inchoateness and nascence, full of as-yet-unbetrayed promise and as-yet-unbetrayed potential. […] It would perhaps be better to change the world’s ways and make the human habitat more hospitable to human dignity, so that coming of age would not require the compromising of a child’s humanity[73].

Henryk Goldszmit, the child of a progressive Polish-Jewish family, a young student who rebelled against social and state oppression, a doctor and educator who devoted his life to protecting children without ever losing sight of their rights, was murdered in Treblinka.

Janusz Korczak, writer, thinker and adult educator trained by children, is still alive. This “mythical figure who cuts the world with the edge of a scalpel”[74] invites us to “rise to the level of children”[75] because we share this world with them. He asks us to put aside our attachment to “authority” and embrace what children have to offer. Korczak invites us to take the difficult path of questioning and rethinking. He asks us to rethink our concept of children’s rights because, as Manfred Liebel puts it: “If we understand the essence of children’s rights as the rights ‘of’ children, i.e. rights which they themselves can establish and implement (or which ensure that decisions affecting them cannot be taken against their will), then the history of children’s rights is still in its infancy”[76]. Working with children, valuing who they are, what they bring to us and what they teach us, is a civilisational choice that brings profound changes. Is this choice too difficult, too dangerous for our world?

Footnotes

[1] Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczakowa, Janusz Korczak (J. Mortkowicz, 1949). Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczakowa (1905–1968) was the daughter of Janusz Korczak’s friends and publishers, Janina and Jakub Mortkowicz. She was also the mother of Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, who wrote a biography of Korczak in 2002.

[2] Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczakowa, “O Januszu,” Przegląd Kulturalny, 19 (1956): n.p. Quotes from the following authors have been translated from Polish into French by Eliza Smierzchalska: Marta Ciesielska, Grzegorz Kasdepke, Janusz Korczak, Manfred Liebel, Piotr Matywiecki, Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczakowa, Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, Marta Rakoczy and Bożena Wojnowska. For the texts by Janusz Korczak, the translator has referred to the Works (Dzieła) (Warsaw, 1992–2022).

[3] The assembly point from which Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were deported to Treblinka.

[4] Mortkowicz-Olczakowa, Janusz Korczak, 8–9.

[5] Janusz Korczak, Dzieła, 16 vols. (IBL, Latona, 1992–2025). Hanna Kirchner (1930), Alexander Lewin (1915–2002) and Stefan Wołoszyn (1911–2004) were members of the Committee for the Celebration of the Centenary of the Birth of Janusz Korczak, of which Marta Ciesielska was appointed secretary. The publishing venture has been supported over the years by various Polish and international associations and institutions. In addition to the work of the members of the editorial committee, the Works (Dzieła) are the fruit of the collaboration of several other historians and researchers.

[6] Dzieła, vol. 13, Teoria a praktyka. Artykuły pedagogiczne (1919–1939) (IBL, 2017).

[7] Bożena Wojnowska, Inna twarz Korczaka: Szkice o dwoistej tożsamości (i nie tylko) (Austeria, 2023).

[8] Wojnowska, Inna twarz Korczaka, 7. Haskala refers to the Jewish Enlightenment movement led by the German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786).

[9] Wojnowska, Inna twarz Korczaka, 7.

[10] It is not known whether Korczak was born on 22 July 1878 or 22 July 1879. He himself was unsure of the year of his birth.

[11] Wojnowska, Inna twarz Korczaka, 23–25.

[12] Anna Goldszmit (1875–1942) was a sworn translator.

[13] Wojnowska, Inna twarz Korczaka, 25.

[14] Józef Goldszmit and Jakub Goldszmit, O prawo do szacunku. Wybór pism, ed. Bożena Wojnowska and Marlena Sęczek (IBL, 2017).

[15]Jadwiga Szczawińska-Dawidowa (1864–1910) married Jan Władyslaw Dawid, editor of the radical left-wing magazine The Voice, in which Henryk Goldszmit published several articles.

[16] Wojnowska, Inna twarz Korczaka, 102.

[17] Stefania Sempołowska, a teacher, writer, journalist and social activist, is an emblematic figure in the fight for children’s rights in Poland.

[18] Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, Korczak: Próba biografii (WAB, 2012), 88.

[19] Despite his closeness to left-wing circles, Korczak never belonged to a political party. In the 1930s, he was criticised for this by his former pupils, who were disappointed by his refusal to publicly support Marxist or Zionist struggles.

[20] Wojnowska, Inna twarz Korczaka, 94.

[21] Wojnowska, Inna twarz Korczaka, 26.

[22] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Polity Press, 2003), 78.

[23] Janusz Korczak, “Rozwój idei miłości bliźniego w XIX wieku,” in Dzieła, vol. 3/1, Na mównicy. Publicystyka społeczna, 1898–1912 (Latona, 1994), 223.

[24] Janusz Korczak, “Jak kochać dziecko,” in Dzieła, vol. 7, Jak kochać dziecko. Momenty wychowawcze. Prawo dziecka do szacunku (Latona, 1993), 220.

[25] Korczak, “Jak kochać dziecko,” 232 et seq.

[26] Henryk Goldszmit began publishing at the age of 18 in a number of educational, social and satirical magazines, using various pseudonyms. The pseudonym Janusz is linked to the articles dealing with childhood that were published in The Reading Room for Everyone, a left-wing educational magazine in which he was especially involved. In a literary competition, he used the pseudonym Korczak, the name of the hero of a Kraszewski novel, who represented the ideals of respect for others and cooperation between Poles and Jews that were so dear to the Goldszmit family. The pseudonym “Janusz Korczak”, which eventually replaced his civil name, was thus linked to Henryk Goldszmit’s desire to embody the fight to defend respect for children.

[27] Janusz Korczak, “Dzieci ulicy,” in Dzieła, vol. 1, Dzieci ulicy. Dziecko salonu (Latona, 1992), 192.

[28] Marta Rakoczy, “Prawa dziecka według Korczaka. Polityka szacunku przeciw polityce troski,” Dialog 6, no. 787 (June 2022), https://www.dialog-pismo.pl/w-numerach/prawa-dziecka-wedlug-korczaka-polityka-szacunku-przeciw-polityce-troski.

[29] Janusz Korczak, “Spowiedź motyla,” in Dzieła, vol. 6, Sława. Opowiadania (1898–1914) (Latona, 1994), 176.

[30] Korczak, “Jak kochać dziecko,” 113.

[31] Korczak, “Jak kochać dziecko,” 43.

[32] Korczak, “Jak kochać dziecko,” 46.

[33] Korczak, “Jak kochać dziecko,” 46.

[34] Korczak, “Jak kochać dziecko,” 46.

[35] Korczak, “Prawo dziecka do szacunku,” in Dzieła, vol. 7, Jak kochać dziecko. Momenty wychowawcze. Prawo dziecka do szacunku (Latona, 1993), 453.

[36] G.A. Res. 217 (III) A, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (10 December 1948), art. 1.

[37] Janusz Korczak “Sprawozdanie Towarzystwa ‘Pomoc dla Sierot’ za rok 1924,” in Dzieła, vol. 14*, Pisma rozproszone, Listy, 1913–1939 (IBL, 2008), 121.

[38] Korczak, “Prawo dziecka do szacunku,” 447.

[39] Janusz Korczak, “Nie wróżę powodzenia!” in Dzieła, vol. 13, Teoria a praktyka. Artykuły pedagogiczne (1919–1939) (IBL, 2017), 64.

[40] Orphan’s Home was an orphanage for Jewish children, and Our Home, run by Maria Falska, was  an orphanage for Catholic children.

[41] Korczak, “Prawo dziecka do szacunku,” 448.

[42] Korczak, “Nie wróżę powodzenia!,” 64.

[43] Rakoczy, “Prawa dziecka według Korczaka”.

[44] Korczak, “Prawo dziecka do szacunku,” 430–431.

[45] Korczak, “Jak kochać dziecko,” 43.

[46] Janusz Korczak, Le roi Mathias 1^er [King Matt the First], trans. Eliza Smierzchalska (Éditions du Rocher, 2017), 196.

[47] Stefania Wilczyńska (1886–1942), an educator, was Janusz Korczak’s closest collaborator. She was involved in the Orphan’s Home project from the outset, and she lived and worked there for the rest of her life. She too was murdered with the children in Treblinka.

[48] Maria Rogowska-Falska (1877–1944) was an educationalist who ran the Our Home orphanage for Catholic children, founded in 1919 with Korczak.

[49] Korczak, “Prawo dziecka do szacunku,” 430.

[50] The competition was organised by the Polish Committee for the Protection of Children, and the winning drawings were published in 1928 in the booklet Deklaracja praw dziecka w twórczości dziecięcej (Warszawa, 1928). The caption reads: “1. Drawing on the theme: ‘The child must be enabled to develop normally, spiritually’, by H.K., aged 11, a pupil at Bydgoszcz College”.

[51] G.A. Res. 44/25, Convention on the Rights of the Child (20 November 1989).

[52] Grzegorz Kasdepke, Mam prawo! czyli nieomal wszystko, co powinniście wiedzieć o prawach dziecka, a nie macie kogo zapytać!, 6th ed. (Wydawnictwo Literatura, 2022), 6–7.

[53] Rakoczy, “Prawa dziecka według Korczaka”.

[54] G.A. Res. 44/25, arts. 28 and 29.

[55] Kasdepke, Mam prawo!, 105.

[56] Korczak, “Prawo dziecka do szacunku,” 448.

[57] Korczak, “Prawo dziecka do szacunku,” 448.

[58] Emphasis added by the author.

[59] Janusz Korczak, “Dzieci-bóstwa i dzieci ubóstwa,” in Dzieła, vol. 13, Teoria a praktyka. Artykuły pedagogiczne (1919–1939) (IBL, 2017), 145.

[60] Louise Tourret, host, Avoir raison avec…, podcast, episode 4, “Janusz Korczak, l’invention du droit des enfants,” Radio France, 8 August 2024, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/avoir-raison-avec/janusz-korzcak-l-invention-du-droit-des-enfants-8142445.

[61] Tourret, Avoir raison avec.

[62] Korczak, “Prawo dziecka do szacunku,” 432 et seq.

[63] Maria Grzegorzewska (1888–1967), a doctor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and a close friend and collaborator of Korczak, headed the State Institute for Special Education from 1922 until her death.

[64] A support programme for young students that offered accommodation and food in exchange for a few hours of activity with the children. The Grant was primarily intended for future childcare workers who wanted to do an internship at the Korczak orphanage during their studies in Warsaw.

[65] Janusz Korczak, “Do nieznanego adresata,” in Dzieła, vol. 14**, Pisma rozproszone. Listy (IBL, 2008), 220.

[66] The New Education is a humanist educational movement that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and is based on the principles of active participation by individuals in their learning. Its best-known figures today are Maria Montessori, Ovide Decroly and Célestin Freinet.

[67] A two-year course for practising teachers at the National Education Office in Warsaw.

[68] Janusz Korczak, “Z zagadnień wychowania zakładowego,” in Dzieła, vol. 13, Teoria a praktyka. Artykuły pedagogiczne (1919–1939) (IBL, 2017), 220.

[69] Janusz Korczak, “Prawa dziecka jako jednostki,” in Dzieła, vol. 13, Teoria a praktyka. Artykuły pedagogiczne (1919-1939) (IBL, 2017), 314.

[70] Marta Ciesielska, “[Janusz Korczak] Prawa dziecka jako jednostki, opracowała Marta Ciesielska,” Przegląd Krytyczny 2, no. 1 (2020): 126, https://doi.org/10.14746/pk.2020.2.1.08.

[71] Bogusław Śliwerski, “Prawo dziecka do swoich praw,” in Prawa dziecka wczoraj, dziś i jutro – perspektywa korczakowska, ed. Marek Michalak (Biuro Rzecznik Praw Dziecka, 2018), brpd.gov.pl..

[72] Piotr Matywiecki, “Jak Henryk Goldszmit wychował Janusza Korczaka,” Midrasz: pismo żydowskie 12, no. 68 (2002): 17.

[73] Bauman, Liquid Love, 82–83.

[74] Matywiecki, “Jak Henryk Goldszmit,”  17.

[75] Janusz Korczak, “Kiedy znów będę mały,” in Dzieła, vol. 9, Bankructwo małego Dżeka. Kiedy znów będę mały (IBL, 1994), 185.

[76] Manfred Liebel, “Nieznane aspekty historii praw dziecka,” in Prawa dziecka w kontekście międzykulturowym: Janusz Korczak na nowo odczytany (Wydawnictwo Akademii Pedagogiki Specjalnej, 2017), 44.