Content area
Full text
Many of us in this country are inclined to attribute our contemporary interest in children to the development of psychoanalysis-its interest in the early years as decisive in shaping later behavior. Moreover, a pediatrician-writer such as Benjamin Spock clearly did owe much of his popularity to the manner in which he could draw upon Freud's work in such a way that ordinary parents could be the beneficiaries of a body of knowledge otherwise inaccessible to them. But there is another tradition of interest in children, no less important, though less known to Americans-the European passion for education reform that goes back to the work of Johann Pestalozzi in the 18th Century and was certainly evident in the work of the 20th-Century Polish physician and writer, Janusz Korczak, most of whose books and essays have not been translated into English.
Korczak was born Henryk Goldszmit in the late 1870s. (The exact year of his birth is unknown.) His father was a well-known Warsaw lawyer who belonged to a community of assimilated Jews-a liberal intelligentsia caught between a desire to be thoroughly Polish and an awareness of the special problems the 19th-Century Jews of Eastern Europe had to confront: centuries of unyielding anti-Semitism that even wealth and education...