It seems very planned that the world conference on children’s rights will be held in Poland. It’s not because it’s easy or because the venues are great (though Poznań’s Adam Mickiewicz University is a pretty big stage); it’s because the ground itself has a moral weight that is hard to find elsewhere. This is the place where Janusz Korczak lived. Where he taught. That he wouldn’t leave the kids in his care, even at the very end of his life.
OMEP’s 78th World Assembly and World Conference will be held in Poznań from July 13–18, 2026. The theme of the conference, “When a Child Speaks: Korczak’s Inspirations for Education and Children’s Rights,” was not chosen at random. It was a sentence. For people who know Korczak’s story, it hits with a certain force.
Korczak worked as a pediatrician, author, and teacher. In the early 1900s, he ran an orphanage in Warsaw. He didn’t just care for kids; he argued, over and over again and against the norm of his time, that kids were full people who deserved respect, participation, and justice. Before the UN made the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, Korczak was already living by those rules in a Warsaw ghetto building that was too crowded. When the Nazis came to take the kids from his orphanage in 1942, he was given a safe way to leave. He said no. The father took his kids on a walk to Treblinka.
That story is still told by teachers all over the world for a reason. It’s not just the tragedy of it. It’s what the act showed about his beliefs. Korczak didn’t see kids as future citizens who should be cared for because of what they might become. He talked to them like they were real people, right now, in the present. That difference seems easy to make. In fact, it’s pretty radical, and in many schools today, it still hasn’t fully arrived.
“When a Child Speaks,” the theme of the 2026 conference, is both a tribute and a challenge. It asks policymakers, educators, and researchers from around the world to really think about what it means to listen to a child. Not as a friendly act or a way to teach, but because it is the right thing to do and a democratic duty. Korczak thought that kids’ words and silences have meanings that adults ignore or change the subject of too often. When you look at how most institutions still work, it seems like not much has changed in that area.
Poland wasn’t just picked as the host country for symbolic reasons, though that is important. On July 13, there will be a pre-conference event in Treblinka. There, OMEP national committees will plant trees in a “Korczak Forest,” and each tree will have a quote from the man himself on it. It is a solemn act, but it also has living roots that go into the same ground where history’s worst arguments about who deserves protection took place.
These points of view are important again now that the conference has happened. The world that OMEP 2026 is taking place in is not a stable one. There are wars, migration, rising inequality, and the weakening of democratic norms in many countries. Korczak’s ideas about compassion, fairness, and the worth of weak people were formed under a lot of stress. Part of the reason they work so well now, in 2026, is because of the background.
Some participants might come to Poznań mostly for the research sessions, the policy dialogues, the work on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG 4.2, which calls for all children to get a good early childhood education. Those conversations are very important. But underneath it all, the fact that Korczak was chosen to be the intellectual and moral leader of this meeting points to something deeper. Frameworks, statements, and goals are always being made in the world. People’s willingness to stop, pay attention, and take a child’s experience seriously is something it has a harder time getting people to do.
That’s what Korczak did. Poland is hosting this conference to remind people in the world of education that the idea didn’t come from a policy document. It all started with a man who believed that kids should be treated with the same moral respect as adults. As I watch this happen—teachers from dozens of countries getting together to go over that premise again—I can’t help but think that the location and guide were perfect.
