Continued from the previous post ...

Half a century before the rest of the world started thinking in such terms, Dr. Korczak was declaring the "Rights of the Child".

From the Janusz Korczak Communication Center, here is a partial list:

The child has the right to love.
The child has the right to respect.
The child has the right to optimal conditions in which to grow and develop.
The child has the right to live in the present.
The child has the right to be himself or herself.
The child has the right to make mistakes.
The child has the right to fail.
The child has the right to be taken seriously.
The child has the right to be appreciated for what he is.
The child has the right to desire, to claim, to ask.
The child has the right to have secrets
The child has the right to "a lie, a deception, a theft".
("... A child has the right to lie, to outwit someone, to coerce, to steal. This doesn't mean that he always has the right to lie, outwit, coerce and steal.
If a person didn't have a single chance as a child to pick out the raisons in a cake and pinch them a bit in secret, then he isn't honest; he won't be honest when his character has been formed....)
The child has the right to respect for his possessions and budget.
The child has the right to resist educational influence that conflicts with his or her own beliefs.
The child has the right to protest an injustice.
The child has the right to respect for his grief.
The child has the right to die prematurely.
("The mother's profound love for her child must give him the right to premature death, to ending his life cycle in only one or two springs . . . Not every bush grows into a tree."

From the Biography:

We walked to the place where they had been herded, naked, in rows of five onto a narrow fenced-in path-the "Road to Heaven," as the Nazis called it-that led to the gas chambers. We stared at the black stones over the pit where bodies were burned on the huge iron "roasting racks."

We passed a tall stone monument honoring the dead from Warsaw. The seventeen thousand rocks stood at attention like ghostly sentinels in that ghostly garden as we reached our destination, the one rock that bore a personal name:
JANUSZ KORCZAK ...
AND THE CHILDREN

If you're in London, visit the exhibit. If not, read the book. If you're human, honor the man.

Betty Jean Lifton, for those few who aren't familiar with this remarkable woman, is, "... a writer and adoption counselor, who is one of the leading advocates of adoption reform. She is an authority on the psychology of the adopted child, birth parents, and adoptive parents, as well as the complexity of search and reunion."