The kindness of children

Vivian Gussin Paley

Visiting a London nursery school, Vivian Paley observes the schoolchildren's reception of another visitor, a handicapped boy named Teddy who is strapped into a wheelchair, wearing a helmet, and barely able to speak. A predicament arises, and the children's response - simple and immediate - offers Paley the purest evidence of kindness she has ever seen. Paley's journey takes us into the different worlds of urban London, Chicago, Oakland, and New York City, and to a closeknit small town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Her own story connects those of children from nursery school to high school, and circles back to her elderly mother, whose experiences as a frightened immigrant girl, helped through a strange school and a new language by another child, reappear in the story of a young Mexican American girl. Thus the book quietly brings together the moral life of the very young and the...

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