Kindergarten Isn't Enough

Robert Fulgham in All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten offers the following pearls.

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school.

These are the things I learned:

Share everything.
Play fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don't take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.
And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.

Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

I never went to kindergarten, so perhaps I missed some of these life lessons. But I also suggest that most people learn a lot more than what kindergarten teaches, and wisdom is a slow, long, and hard slog. Here are some non-kindergarten life lessons from Sloan Wilson, the author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit:

1. Beware of people who are always well-dressed
2. The hardest part of raising children is teaching them to ride bicycles. A father can run beside the bicycle or stand yelling directions while the child falls. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom. The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard.
3. Children go away and live their own lives, starting when they are about eighteen. Parents who accept this as a natural part of the order of things will see their children surprisingly often.
4. Friends are fun, but they are more dangerous than strangers. Strangers ask for a quarter for a cup of coffee, while friends ask for a thousand dollars, no questions asked. Some friends also have a roving eye for your wife and your daughters.
5. Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.
6. When things break around the house, call a handyman. No intelligent man is capable of fixing anything, unless he has made home repair his business.
7. Either afloat or ashore, it is normal for everything to go wrong. No one should be surprised or unduly upset by foul-ups. They are a basic part of the human condition.
8. Many children should be treated as adults and many adults should be treated as children. Age has every little to do with capabilities.
9. Liquid shoe polish doesn’t work.
10. When I was young I was briefly interested in politics, but politics soon board me. I was interested in business for a long while but business eventually bored me. Religion I never understood at all. Although it may sound sentimental, the only meaning I have found in life has been in my wife and children. Without them, I would be in more despair than a bankrupt millionaire.