The Kindness of Children - Hardcover

Paley's method is to weave intimate stories about her story-filled classroom. The vignettes that result are ideally suited to her subject. Her classroom scenes, by capturing with precision the 3-foot-high child's-eye view, bring down to earth what risks sounding like a romantically sweeping credo about salvation through narration. Actual kindergartners swapping tales makes for more interesting and credible confusion than that. In Paley's pages, the familiar chatter of childhood becomes a quilt, scrappy but well sewn together, of journeys into a world that bewilders but also beckons children to join it...In "The Kindness of Children", Paley...showcases a collection of...polished gems about children's "spontaneous acts of goodness," which she has gathered and retold as she goes about her emeritus career of lecturing and visiting schools. The tales in themselves are often quite moving--the paraplegic boy radiant at being included in a pretend game of "store"; the tough boy who whispers saving advice to a child on the brink of collapse; the girl who is suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of generosity on a crowded bus.--Ann Hulbert "New York Times Book Review "

Visiting a London nursery school, Vivian Paley observed the schoolchildren's reception of another visitor - a handicapped boy named Teddy, who was strapped into a wheelchair, wearing a helmet, and barely able to speak. A predicament arose, and the children's response offered Paley the purest evidence of kindness she had ever seen. Recounting similar stories of kindness by children, Paley's journey takes the reader into the different world of urban London, Chicago, Oakland and New York, and to a close-knit 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.