Wallace is a freelance writer and poet. In this essay, Wallace explores Ha Jin's meditation on what children are taught and what they really learn.
From the time a child is very young, everyone&mdas; parents, teachers, other children&mdas;tries to teach him or her something. The things others say don't always make sense to a child; sometimes the message gets horribly scrambled in translation. Children are further confused when parents, teachers, and other children offer wildly different opinions on the same subject. And then there's a whole other category of information for children to deal with: things that nobody tells a child but that they can't help seeing&mdas; the way people really act despite what they say, the way things really are despite what people claim. In Ha Jin's "In the Kindergarten," originally published in The Bridegroom.....
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