Vivian Gussin Paley, a former kindergarten teacher, is the winner of a MacArthur Award and of the 1998 American
Book Award for Lifetime Achievement given by the Before Columbus Foundation.
Review
"In this book about the kindness of children, witnessed by Paley in classrooms from a remote rural community
on Lake Superior to London, she captures the urgency and precision in the stories they tell in her program...Paley
tells these stories to her 97-year-old mother, who likens them to Hasidic storytelling, in which the author recounts
stories of holy men doing mitzvoth or good deeds. 'Children are eager,' Paley writes, 'to take part in another's
stories so that they may fill in the empty spaces.' Paley is a fine writer who has learned in her life of observation
how to let the subject drive the story and how to be a vulnerable player as well. It's hard to live up to the sheer
nobility of children, but Paley is its scholar."
--Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"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
"Vivian Paley, an author and former kindergarten teacher whose latest book, The Kindness of Children, is an
exploration of children's impulsive goodness, contends that although each child comes into the world with an instinct
for kindness, it is a lesson that must be reinforced at every turn."
--Barbara Mahany, Chicago Tribune
"Paley, the author of numerous popular books and the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, tells stories
about children that will make you see kids in a new light. This book is filled with evidence of the surprising
goodness of little boys and girls. A delightful read."
--Susan K. Perry, L. A. Parent
"Vivian Gussin Paley's The Kindness of Children is the kind of book that once occupied a place on student
teachers' shelves, where now you find only textbooks about the mechanics of the craft. It starts with an encounter
in a London nursery between the children and a visiting child who has a severe disability. They display astonishing
kindness, not to say inventiveness, in the way they include him in their play. Through the rest of the book the
author tells how she went from town to town in Britain and the US, telling the story and receiving a host of interesting
and moving reactions. This is one for half-term, a recharger of spiritual batteries."
--Gerald Haigh, Times Educational Supplement [UK]
"This book will appeal to those who have followed Paley's writing throughout the years, and to teachers and
professionals who work with young children. It reveals the important ways in which children can have an impact
on our lives. It is also an important reminder, to all of us, of the power of mitzvot, good deeds, and the wonderful
things that can happen with an act of kindness."
--Harvard Educational Review
"Whether she's reflecting on a rural Michigan boy who pretends for an entire year to be a truck or talking
with her mother, who delights in making a new friend at the retirement home, Paley is a thoughtful reporter and
commentator on human interaction and its inevitable sidekick, emotional growth."
--Mercury News [San Jose, California]
"[Paley] is surely one of our best teachers, one who has never stopped learning."
--hipMama.com
"In this enchanting and edifying book, [Paley] revels in what she has seen happen in schools when she has
given children the chance to make up stories and have their classmates dramatize them. Paley observes: 'these spontaneous
storytellers create little homes for one another where everyone can imagine playing a role and no one is left out.'
Using a variety of the children's tales as examples, the author celebrates the ability of kids to create moments
of happiness and hopefulness for each other."
--Spirituality and Health Online
"[The Kindness of Children] is a subtle, psychologically and imaginatively rich guide to one of the important
ways in which children learn how to be more fully human: namely, kindness. Paley, a former kindergarten teacher,
a MacArthur Award recipient, and the prolific author of many books about children and education, describes how
very young students transform themselves and one another by taking in, narrating, and sometimes dramatically acting
out tales of kindness and other acts of goodness."
--Kirkus Reviews
Harvard University Press Web Site, September, 2001
Summary
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.
In subsequent encounters, "the Teddy story" draws forth other tales of impulsive goodness from Paley's
listeners. Just so, it resonates through this book as one story leads to another--taking surprising turns, intersecting
with the narrative unfolding before us, and illuminating the moral meanings that children may be learning to create
among themselves.
Paley's journey takes us into the different worlds of urban London, Chicago, Oakland, and New York City, 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. Thus the book quietly brings together the moral life of the very young and the very old. With her characteristic
unpretentious charm, Paley lets her listeners and storytellers take us down unexpected paths, where the meeting
of story and real life make us wonder: Are children wiser about the nature of kindness than we think they are?