All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

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 university mountain, but there in the sand-pit at kindergarten. These are the things I learned: Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule (treat the others as you would like them to treat you) and love and basic sanition. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

Take one of these items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your 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 three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankets for a nap. Or if all governments had 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 into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

Copyright © 1986, 1988 by Robert Fulghum.