DecidingToBeBetter.com Blog

Today’s reading comes from Chapter 1 of the book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten:

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I
learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school
mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday School. These are the things
I learned:

• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don’t hit people.
• Put things back where you found them.
• Clean up your own mess.
• Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
• Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
• Wash your hands before you eat.
• Flush.
• Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
• Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
• Take a nap every afternoon.
• When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
• Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
• Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
• And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned–the biggest word of all–LOOK.

Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love
and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult
terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or
your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world
it would be if we all – the whole world – had cookies and milk about three
o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or
if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where
they found them and to clean up their own mess.

And it is still true, no matter how old you are – when you go out into the
world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

– Robert Fulghum

In his chapter entitled “deep Kindergarten”, he expands on the meaning of the things we learn in Kindergarten:

We are sent to school to be civilized—to be introduced to the essential machinery of human society. Early on in our lives we are sent out of the home into the world. To school. We have no choice in this. Society judges it so important that we be educated that we must go. It is the law. And when we get to school we are taught the fundamentals on which civilization rests. These are first explained in language a small child understands.

For example, it would do no good to tell a six-year-old that “Studies have shown that human society cannot function without an equitable distribution of the resources of the earth.” While this statement is profoundly and painfully true, a child cannot comprehend this vocabulary. So a child is told that there are twenty children and five balls to play with; likewise four easels, three sets of blocks, two guinea pigs, and one bathroom. To be fair, we must share.

Likewise a six-year-old will not understand that “By and large it has been demonstrated that violence is counterproductive to the constructive interaction of persons and societies.” True. But a child can better understand that the rule out in the world and in the school is the same: Don’t hit people. Bad things happen. The child must understand this rule is connected to the first rule: People won’t share or play fair if you hit them….