KEYWORDS:  Korczak, teacher training, educator, children-based approach, relationships. 

ABSTRACT: An author with many years of teacher training experience suggests a unique attitude to preparing future teachers and grounds it on the ideas of the renowned Polish humanist Janusz Korczak. This paper is one of the attempts to connect Korczak’s ideas with the current teachers training programs and to show how much they will benefit if changed in a

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Children don’t exist, they are human beings like us; but their minds have different scopes, they experience the world differently, they have different motives, different ways of displaying their emotions. Don’t forget we don’t know them.

Janusz Korczak

In this paper I search for Korczak’s ideas about educating children and their implications for training future and current teachers. Before I turn the attention of the reader to the implications, I first need to clarify what I mean by education or educating.2

The educational question, says the Dutch educational philosopher Gert Biesta, is not about effectiveness of learning and developmental processes, but about what are desirable educational outcomes and why we should strive to reach those goals? Biesta himself thinks the ultimate educational goal should be helping children to be in the world as ‘grown-up’ human beings, who can take responsibility for themselves, for others, and for the planet.

Educating children certainly is more than rewarding good and punishing bad behavior. This so called behavioristic approach keeps children dependent of adults’ approval and inhibits them to gradually develop ‘grown-up’ responsibilities, to make their own mature decisions and independent moral judgments.

‘Always be positive’ is another adage that does not stand up against real educational goals. Korczak, reflecting upon the relationship between children and educators, speaks about the ‘necessary fight’. He wrote: “Learn, show respect, believe! I don’t want to, cries the child’s soul. And yet, you have to smother this cry, because modern humans don’t live in the wilderness, but in a society. You will have to, otherwise it becomes chaos.“(Korczak, 1986, p.141).

Thus, Korczak as well as Biesta show us that an educator’s responsibility goes beyond short-term interests or outcomes, and it certainly goes beyond the interest of a particular child. In the way that ‘grown-up’ educators bring the new generation into the world, they take responsibility for the future society.

How to become an educator?

Every school year a new group of young adults, around 16-17 years old, starts their studies at a teacher training college, to become teachers at a primary school. In four years they switch from being educated by their parents, to become educators of schoolchildren themselves. Most of them are very much motivated at the start; they like children, they have a calling to work with the younger generation, and they look forward to teaching them.

But the question comes whether they really realize how demanding this job could be? Korczak once wrote: “Everything for the children, but what is left for me? Their knowledge, experience and moral insight increase; they gather their stocks while I suffer losses. How can I use the mental power that’s left as wise as possible, I order to survive” (Korczak, 1986, p.139). Korczak was very much aware of the huge amount of mental power that is needed to be an educator.

“Children are so spontaneous!” We often hear students say. But their first encounter with children in real classroom life can be disappointing. Children can be adorable, but -- just like adults -- also very tedious. Students, expecting only well behaving children, will soon find out how unrealistic their expectations were. But students who tend to blame children for the way they misbehave, instead of embracing the educational challenge, might become good enough teachers, although they will never become really good educators. “Educating children, Korczak said, “is only possible when we refrain from the deceptive longing for perfect children” (Korczak, 2007, p.168).

You can be a teacher with a head full of goals and teaching methods, trying to fully control all the outcomes of your efforts, but, as Korczak said, if you cannot deal with the unexpected, the unpredictable, you will become a tyrant for children (Korczak, 1990, p.14). Any real educator enjoys the adventure of surprises. When teachers allow children to surprise them, children feel safe and free to be what they are.  All efforts to fully control the educational process are in fact very un-educational! From the beginning of their training, future teachers should know it is no use to set standardized goals. Just observe, what every child is offering you, and offer him or her the right stimulation.

How much ‘fun’ is it actually to work with children? Korczak called them “... the robbers of your time, the tyrants of your patience...” What makes him an educator is explained in the words: “You struggle with them, but you know it is not their fault” (Korczak, 1986, p.132).

It would be wise if teacher trainers manage to help students in developing a less romantic and a more realistic idea about children. “They are just people,” -- Korczak would say. And because they need our help and support to come into this world, they have the right to be demanding. In teacher training programs students’ initial intention to please children and to be pleased by them, should be transformed into an attitude of being responsible for all of them with all their differences, and, as a consequence, for the world into which they bring them.

Teacher or educator?

For a long time the core business of teacher training was providing students with enough knowledge about the subjects to be taught in primary schools, such as mathematics, language, geography, etc. Didactics (how to teach those subjects to children) and psychology (the theory of learning and development) were also part of the teacher-training curriculum, but mainly served the purpose to make students teach better. But can we agree with the idea that teaching children is just to transmit knowledge to them? Can one ever become a good teacher without a profound knowledge and empathetic understanding of the ones he/she teaches? As we learned from Korczak (see the quote at the beginning of this article), it is certainly not easy to really know and understand children. “We don’t know the child. Worse, we know it from prejudices” (Korczak, 1986, p.172).

Most of the curriculum we offer children does not take children’s genuine interest into account. Moreover, teacher training generally does not encourage future teachers to listen to children, in order to learn what is really going on in their lives and in their minds.  The science of teaching is depersonalized in the last decennia. It focuses on the conditions (input) that bring forward the best outcomes (output) in the most effective way. As we have seen in a lot of ‘evidence-based’ educational research, the results are seldom reliable and repeatable. Why? Because this kind of research forgets about the main aspect of good teaching: relationships! Children flourish when a teacher believes in them. Teachers who understand what it is to be a child have better relationships with their children, and therefore, better results. Not only academic but also results on a personal level: children might become better human beings, real grown-ups, as Biesta would say, when they feel loved and accepted, instead of pushed, judged, and put into a constant competition with others.

Children’s development, particularly young children’s development, seems to profit to a great extent from warm, trustful relationship with adults, while stress and anxiousness inhibits their development (Shonkoff, 2012). Understanding ‘what works’ or not in classroom settings (Marzano, 2003) cannot happen without deep understanding of the effects of healthy or unhealthy relationships between adults and children.  In teacher training curriculum this aspect needs so much more attention than it has nowadays. What impedes our students at the teacher training level to accept this child or this child’s behavior?  What are their own experiences with being brought up?  What are the traumas they have to deal with, preventing them to really love others?  Are they fully present in the company of children, or do they mainly have their own interest in mind?

Projects in which future teachers are allowed to work with the good and bad memories of their own childhood, might prepare them better for the job than the training in how to use well-developed teaching strategies and methods.

In classroom situations teachers are definitely much more than just transmitters of necessary knowledge, and children are certainly much more than consumers of that knowledge. The quality of education depends highly on the quality of human relationships. It means that the most important aspects of quality are not the easy measurable ones.  

Understanding children

What is needed to develop good relationships with children? Korczak wrote already: “First understand yourself, before you try to understand children” (Korczak, 1986, p.126).  Indeed, like in any good relationship, it works better when you know yourself well. Understanding yourself, which also includes understanding the child within you, will lead to a better understanding of children. And a profound understanding of children will lead to the acceptance of every child as he/she is. Children are, just like adults, sometimes messy, impatient, shy, talkative, leaders, easy going, lazy, vulnerable, fast or slow thinkers. Real educators don’t want to standardize, but they treasure all those differences children display.  That is not always easy. For instance, children with an urge to move a lot (... like most of them...), or the very talkative ones, are usually quite annoying in a classroom setting. Not to speak about the ones with little or no motivation to learn what you try to teach them. But Korczak formulated, as one of the most importance rights, the child’s right to be the way he or she is. “You can’t turn an oak into a beech”, -- he wrote, -- ”or a messy person into a neat one.” Moreover, “the world needs children just the way they are” (Korczak, 1990, p.46).

Sometimes our students honestly tell you they have problems accepting a certain child, concluding the child won’t notice, “because I don’t tell him/her or show it.”  But children are very sensitive. They feel intuitively acceptance or rejection, and they will react accordingly. This sensitivity also means that children often know their teachers better than teachers know themselves. A young teacher might think he or she can play a role, pretending to be different or better than he/she really is. Korczak noted:  “It’s no use trying to hide your bad habits. You might succeed, but the more carefully you try to hide them, the more carefully children will pretend they don’t notice, they don’t know. They will laugh at you only behind your back, very secretly“ (Korczak, 1986, p.127-128).

Korczakian teachers remain their authentic selves in the classroom. They do not avoid conflicts, but they won’t deal with them in an unnecessary serious way; children are allowed to make mistakes, just like teachers themselves are entitled to make mistakes. A rather aggressive boy once told Korczak in an evaluative encounter that he had been fighting about twenty times the previous week. Korczak did not ask him to stop this but questioned: “What is your goal for next week?” The boy said, “not to have any fights.” In reply Korczak noted: “That might be too ambitious. Why don’t you try to only fight ten times? We can check next week if you succeeded.” The mistakes educators make are often due to idealism; they cherish very high ideals and children disappoint them, because they prevent them to achieve those goals. Once Korczak had a conflict with a boy in the orphanage. Korczak asked him to improve his behavior. The boy cried and said, “But doctor Korczak, it is not my mistake that you don’t like wild boys like me, but only softies... Ask a softy to become a wild boy, and he won’t be able to obey you either...” (Korczak, 1986, p.170).

In other words, Korczak turned the educational relationship into a normal human relationship without the usual adults’ top-down attitude. If students learn to make this mind switch, they will be able to help children to ‘be in the world’, as Biesta called it, as responsible ‘grown-up’ human beings.  

To train teachers in a more Korczakian way, students first will have to learn how to deal with all the very personal and, sometimes, confusing emotions that come with their new role as educators. And they should develop a deep understanding of what it means to be a child.

As for the teaching objectives, they have to stop thinking they can decide beforehand what should be taught, what will be learned, or what the outcomes of their professional teaching actions will be. They should, in other words, refrain from their traditional teacher’s role and learn to deal with uncertainties. In return, they will be awarded with a much more exciting job; instead of trying to think and work instrumentally, they will encounter lively, creative, active young human beings who will surprise and inspire them every day, and... who will love their teachers just the way they are, just like their teachers love them as they are.

Korczak and teacher training

What has Korczak to offer to schools and to teacher trainers? Korczak’s attitude towards schools was rather negative. He defined them as “soulless schools” which “with their asinine belief in dogmas (...) totally paralyze children’s initiatives and independence” (Korczak, 1982, p. 53).  Elsewhere he speaks about the ‘arrogant knowledge’ that turns schools into ‘dead institutions’ (Korczak, 1982, p. 60). It is clear that bringing Korczak into teacher training should be more than making students read books by or about Korczak, and ask them questions like, for instance, what are the three main rights of children Korczak formulated.

In fact, taking Korczak seriously means turning the whole teacher training upside down. Not the curriculum, but students’ experiences with children during their internship should become the center of their studies. The focus would switch from learning how to teach children to learning from children and with children.

Instructors at teacher training programs should stop judging their students. Because the process of getting to know oneself, to know children, exploring one’s own emotions, provoked by the encounters with children, (for instance joy, uncertainty, fear, etc.) cannot be graded with an A of D. It will be quite a shock, but the core business of teacher training -- the formation of educators instead of just teachers -- goes beyond any measurement. Even if we could measure and judge our students’ personal development, it won’t be desirable. Because it will keep students dependent of other people’s judgments. The traditional school-type approach, on a primary level as well as on a teacher training level, cannot bring about the grown-up educators we need in schools. And without grown-up educators we won’t be able to help children to enter the world as grown-ups.

What do students know about the world we will have to offer to children? Are they themselves interested in what is going on around them, or did they give up because it’s too complicated, or too boring?  The task for teacher trainers is to turn students’ indifference or ignorance into the feeling of connectedness and responsibility for the world in which we live. Part of being in the world as a grown up, is outgrowing your own selfishness, greed, indifference, and ignorance.

How can we help future teachers to feel connected with the society and the people around them? Definitely, not by keeping them within the walls of a school building.  They need to go out into the society, meet people in different circumstances, take part in and join any activities that are worthwhile.  In the famous Reggio Emilia approach to education even very young children learn to participate; they make new curtains for the theatre in town, they exhibit and sell their art in galleries in town, etc. The founder of Reggio Emilia, Loris Malaguzzi, was convinced this was the way to build a democratic society and to prevent dictators like Mussolini to take over again (Edwards et. al, 1998).

A Korczak Project

Structural changes, needed to train students in a more Korczakian way, are not easy to accomplish. School-type traditions are rather hard to change, because there is a whole lot of regulations and obligations in which individual schools or teachers have no saying. But we can also bring attention to Korczak’s ideas by means of a project about this inspiring educator.  

At the training institute where I taught, we took a month to prepare for a week-long Korczak project, together with students and some members from the Janusz Korczak Association in the Netherlands.  During the preparation stage we composed a booklet with interesting articles to read, and we developed the idea of how to study Korczak from different perspectives:

• Children’s rights
• Happy youth?
• Korczak and schools
• Korczak and childcare
• Educating children about war and peace
• Children and media.

Students could make a choice about what they were going to study, inside and outside the walls of the school building. They interviewed people in all those segments of the society, and came back with their findings. They tried to find out what Korczak could teach us in all those situations. The project ended with every group presenting what they learned and how they might be able to use all this in their own teaching practice.

We, teacher trainers, interviewed students about the relevance of their experiences in this week. Some students were enthusiastic; they learned to look at children differently; more as competent people and more as equal to adults. Others said teacher training should put more emphasis on educating children besides just teaching them. But a lot of students, although they considered that week meaningful, had a hard time working on the project. As one of them stated: “You suddenly have to start thinking!” This was not a compliment but a serious reproach....

Korczak wakes us, educators, up again and again. Some people like to be woken up, and take that opportunity to grow and develop new ideas, but others are easily scared by the consequences of rethinking what seemed right but turned to be not. It makes them very uncomfortable and insecure even to the extent they feel inhibited to grow and develop. I noticed this amongst students as well as colleagues.

In conclusion: Some concrete guidelines

As I showed in this paper, taking Korczak’s idea of children’s defense seriously means, we possibly cannot just do a week’s project and proceed to the order of the day. Korczak challenges us to profoundly rethink our practice.

I am going to conclude with a summary of consequences for teacher training practice; some concrete ideas and guidelines, hoping this inspires others to rethink their own practice.    

As we have seen, it is of utmost importance to really know children when you want to work with them. Likewise, it is also true, teacher trainers should know their students, their backgrounds, and emotions. Teacher trainers should really be interested in their students, should know what is meaningful to them, what frightens them or what makes their self-confidence grow. Only after establishing warm, personal relationships with students, teacher trainers will be able to support their students’ growth. “Don’t think you can be a fully grown-up educator with only a psychological bookkeeping in your heart and a pedagogical code in your head,”-- Korczak wrote, -- “but you have one great ally, a magic artist -- your youth...” (Korczak, 1986, p.127).

It is obvious that teacher trainers can help students to discover the child in themselves. In our teacher-training program we ask our freshmen to recollect their memories of their own youth. They use the diaries they wrote as children, or start diaries looking back on the child they were. In the beginning it is not easy for students to remember the things happening when they were young. But when we discuss all these life stories from other students in the group, slowly but surely, memories come back.

One day a student shared her fist love affair. She mentioned how terribly sad and lovesick she felt when the boy she loved moved to another town. Everyone, listening to her, felt her pain. Some cried. I asked her about her age when this happened. She was six! Suddenly the students realized that adults normally don’t take children’s pain and sorrow seriously. In his plea to take children’s sorrow more seriously Korczak said: “All tears are salty.”

The students promised each other not to play down on young children’s love affairs and love sickness in the future.

During internship in primary schools students keep a diary, writing down their true feelings about things happening, about their own uncertainty or triumphs, and their feelings of acceptance or rejection towards children.  After this internship we take time to discuss those experiences in small groups of students in order to help them understand and indicate what is written and to advise each other about ways to deal with all those different situations. Whenever theory is welcome for better understanding or for finding better solutions, a teacher trainer will provide this knowledge or tell students where to find it. 

Learning to observe and reflect on these observations should be an integral part of teacher training. The right attitude is making observations as objectively as possible, as a researcher. Korczak always said that he learned to observe thanks to his medical training. “I observe every small, seemingly unimportant detail with the discipline of a scientific thinker,” he wrote. “As a doctor I don’t know any minutiae. I observe carefully all that seems accidently or insignificant” (Korczak, 1986, p.169). This research-based attitude will prevent students from judging children too easily; it will also fight prejudices, make students curious to learn more about children’s background, and research the possible explanation for their behavior, and it helps students to understand children’s anger, fear or restlessness.

Korczak once said: “The difference between good and bad educators only shows up by the amount of mistakes they make” (Korczak, 1986, p.143).  I am convinced that all the knowledge, gathered by observation, will help educators to make fewer mistakes.

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References

• Biesta, G. J.J. (2006). Beyond learning. Democratic Education for a Human Future. London: Paradigma Publishers.
• Brouwers, H. (1994). Korczak en de Pabo; hoe word je opvoeder?(Korczak and teacher training; how to become an educator?) In: Görtzen, René (Ed.). Een mensenleven voor het kind (A human live for the child), Kampen: Kok. 
• Edwards, C., Gandini, L., & Forman, G. (Eds.) (1998). De honderd talen van kinderen (The hundred languages of children). Amsterdam: SWP.
• Hogeschool Alkmaar & Janusz Korczak Stichting  (1992). Janusz Korczak, leesstukken bij een project (aArticles to read for the Janusz Korczak Project), Alkmaar. 
• Korczak, Janusz (1985). Als ik weer klein ben (When I am little again), Utrecht: Bijleveld.
• Korczak,  Janusz (1986). Hoe hou je van een kind (How to love a child), Utrecht: Bijleveld.
• Korczak, Janusz (2007). Het recht van het kind op respect (The child’s right to be respected). Amsterdam: SWP.
• Korczak Janusz (1982). Begegnungen und Erfahrungen (Meeting and Experiencing) Göttingen.
• Korczak, Janusz (1990). Verteidigt die Kinder! (Defends children), Güterslohe: Verlagshaus.
• Marzano, R. J. (2003). What works in schools: Translating research into action. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
• Shonkoff, J. P. (2012). The lifelong effects of early childhood adversity and toxic stress. Pediatrics, 129, 232--246.