A grainy, black-and-white photo of a man in a military coat strolling through Warsaw’s streets with a line of kids has been making the rounds in some academic circles. It was taken sometime in the early 1940s. Janusz Korczak was that man. The kids came from his orphanage. They were moving in the direction of Treblinka. Someone had offered him a way out. He declined.
A room is often silenced by that image or the narrative that surrounds it. However, the silence is rarely followed by agreement among early childhood scholars. It’s a thoughtful, sometimes contentious, sometimes intimate debate about Korczak’s true beliefs, his methods, and whether or not his legacy has been idealized beyond its usefulness. Perhaps no figure in the history of early education causes as much conflict over interpretation.
This makes the choice made by OMEP to focus its 78th World Assembly and Conference on his work seem either extremely courageous or extremely thoughtful. Most likely both. The theme of the conference, which will take place in Korczak’s native Poznań, Poland, in July 2026, is “When a Child Speaks… Korczak’s Inspirations for Education and Children’s Rights.” Selecting a single historical figure as an anchor is never neutral for an organization that encompasses dozens of nations and educational traditions.
Scholarly disagreements are real and should be taken seriously. According to one perspective, Korczak was a visionary democrat of childhood who argued that children should have respect, involvement, and true agency in addition to care decades before the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. At his orphanage in Warsaw, he oversaw a children’s parliament. A children’s newspaper was published by him. He maintained that a child is a person who is fully present in the present rather than a future citizen who is waiting to grow up. Even now, a lot of educators still find that framing to be truly radical.
Some are more cautious. Some academic circles seem to believe that Korczak has been absorbed into a sort of hagiography, transformed into a symbol so refined that the true intricacy of his techniques is obscured. His concepts were created within a particular historical period, cultural setting, and child demographic. Critics contend that incorporating them entirely into modern policy runs the risk of conflating inspiration with instruction. It’s difficult to ignore how much of this debate revolves around a deeper disagreement about whether historical figures should be viewed as frameworks or as mirrors as you watch it unfold across conference papers and journal footnotes.
Both appear to be desired by OMEP 2026. The conference’s structure, which is based on seven thematic axes, such as children’s rights, empathy-based pedagogy, sustainability, and the role of teachers as human rights defenders, reads less like a celebration and more like an effort to put Korczak’s theories to the test against the realities of the twenty-first century. The conference frames these forces as the new context for his old questions: war, displacement, digital culture, and ecological anxiety. Poznań is presumably expected to determine whether that context clarifies or complicates his relevance.
Additionally, there is a pre-conference event that merits consideration. Members will travel to Treblinka on July 13th to plant trees in the “Korczak Forest,” each tree bearing a quotation that represents a national OMEP committee. Part memorial, part political statement, part group act of meaning-making, it’s a unique gesture for an academic gathering. Whether such moments enhance or avoid intellectual engagement is still up for debate. However, it implies that the organizers are aware that this is more than just a pedagogy conference. The topic of the conference is moral inheritance.
This may be the reason for the intense ongoing discussion about Korczak’s legacy. Really, it’s not about him. It concerns what educators think they owe kids, as well as whether the field has the guts to continue posing the question rather than merely providing a tidy response.
