Building from Children'S Strengths

This essay discusses what the childhood perspective offers—and what we would lose were we deprived of it. In that context it discusses current threats to childhood and the effects of these threats on education; the strength and potential of our humanness, with special emphasis on children's own strengths as a basis for their education and the power of collective thought, cooperative action, and, above all, human warmth and affection for developing that strength and potential. The conclusion describes an education based on children's strengths as makers of meaning and knowledge, and ways teachers can learn to recognize and respond to these strengths.