Preface
\n“I would like to apologize to the 3rd grade children at the Herzl School in Haifa. My daughter,\u00a0Martha, goes to school there, and I read Childland to the children in her class. I need to\u00a0apologize because afterwards, when I was walking down the street and met some of the\u00a0children, I had a grownup face on. They saw me while I was making a grownup face, and I\u00a0couldn\u2019t take the mask off and smile at them.<\/p>\n
That grownup who forgot to laugh and smile doesn\u2019t make that face on purpose. When\u00a0he was a little boy, if he had known that one day he would scare children like that, he would\u00a0have been angry at himself and would have promised himself that he would be nice to\u00a0children when he grew up.<\/p>\n
Sometimes when I meet you on the street, I only realize later that I disappointed you by\u00a0being a grownup. But when I read Childland to you, the gateway opens up and I become a\u00a0child again.
\nSo again, I apologize on behalf of all the grownups who have never apologized to a\u00a0child, but who always ask children to apologize. Forgive them, because they have forgotten\u00a0what it\u2019s like to be a child, and will probably never remember.
\nMartha always says to me, \u201cDaddy, why are you so serious and not smiling?\u201d But even\u00a0she\u2019s getting tired of saying that, and I think she\u2019s given up hope, like other children have, of\u00a0ever being able to see everything I\u2019m feeling inside by looking at my face, like you can with\u00a0children, and of me smiling at her like a child.
\nSome children think that when you grow up, they take you into a secret room and teach\u00a0you secrets that you can use against children, like how to always beat them when you play,\u00a0and how to scare them, and they make you swear never to tell these secrets to children. But\u00a0what really happens is that other grownups tell you things \u2013 grownups who you want to like\u00a0you. But they tell you without using words. And things said without words are stronger than
\nthings said with words. So I\u2019d like to tell you a secret, children: what you see is only a mask,\u00a0it\u2019s not real. That\u2019s just the way a grownup\u2019s face is.
\nA wall is being built up around Childland. Every day another row of bricks is added on\u00a0and you can see less and less. When the wall gets as high as your eyes or even higher,\u00a0Childland suddenly disappears and you can\u2019t remember it anymore. And then you don\u2019t even\u00a0know that you\u2019re inside a cage and can\u2019t see what\u2019s outside. At first, you still try to\u00a0remember, but the sunlight makes your memories fuzzy. At night, though, when it\u2019s dark and\u00a0you can\u2019t see very well, Childland sometimes comes back to you. That\u2019s the way it is, there
\nare some things that are actually easier to see in the dark.
\nWhen I read this to my other daughter, Bartha, she told me to change it and leave out the\u00a0apology, because apologies are for grownups. She said that instead I should just write that I\u00a0didn\u2019t mean to make a grownup face. But Martha, who is a little older, told me to leave in the\u00a0apology”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Preface “I would like to apologize to the 3rd grade children at the Herzl School in Haifa. My daughter,\u00a0Martha, goes to school there, and I read Childland to the children in her class. I need to\u00a0apologize because afterwards, when I was walking down the street and met some of the\u00a0children, I had a grownup face […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2180,"parent":114,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-book.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-117","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n