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The government should heed the words of children’s rights pioneer Dr Janusz Korczak.

Dr Janusz Korczak refused many offers to save himself and leave the Warsaw Ghetto. Instead, in 1942, he led 200 orphans onto the train that would take them all to their deaths in the gas chambers of Treblinka. According to psychotherapist Sandra Joseph, who has researched Korczak’s life, his aim was to ensure that the children would retain some faith in human goodness.

Joseph is the editor of A Voice for the Child: the Inspirational Words of Janusz Korczak. Writing in the current issue of Young Minds magazine, she describes a hugely impressive individual. He was the founder of a children’s newspaper, The Little Review, and the original source of ideas for what subsequently became the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Born in Poland in 1879, Korczak was a paediatrician and a renowned writer of fiction. He was the director of two orphanages, and lived in the attic of one, devoting a day a week to abandoned street children. Each was run on progressive lines. His children’s court was presided over by a child judge, and adults and children were treated as equals. Korczak envisaged that within 50 years each school would have a court, teaching respect for the law and the importance of human rights.

Joseph recounts how he gave a lecture to medical students in Warsaw. He brought a four-year-old boy from his orphanage and, speaking softly so as not to further alarm him, he showed his students the boy’s heart in the X-ray laboratory.

“Don’t ever forget this sight,” he instructed. “How wildly a child’s heart beats when he is frightened - and this it does even more when reacting to an adult’s anger, not to mention when he fears being punished.”

One student said: “We did not need to be told any more - everybody will remember that lecture forever.”

Korczak believed that children should be appreciated for who they are, not what they will become. In these competitive times - accentuated by Estelle Morris, the education secretary, who announced last week yet more divisions within the education system to enlarge the gap between success and failure - Korczak’s thinking and the value he placed on widening democracy to include the young deserve to reach a much wider audience in the UK.

So it is good news that The Institute of Education is to host a conference on this extraordinary man next March.

- For information on the conference, contact info@ioe.ac.uk