Abstract

At no other time has the keen search for common humanity, and the practice that follows such an assumption, been as urgent and imperative as it is now. In the era of globalization, the cause and the politics of shared humanity face the most fateful among the many fateful steps they have taken in their long history. For all its flaws and inadequacies, Korczak’s practice of engaged conversation of partners who in the course of talking and listening help each other into equality may be seen, after the years, as a laboratory in which the roads to humanity had been experimented with, researched, and mapped. To say that Korczak added a few (even a crucial few) weapons to our pedagogical armoury while recommending to decommission some others means to grossly underestimate the significance of his legacy. Korczak wished to protect children’s dignity not for the sake of the happy childhood alone, but also for the sake of those adults in whom children would eventually turn. Children’s dignity is the childhood of human dignity. Human dignity has no other childhood and nowhere else to take root, grow and self-assert.