Education: Guns, Babies, Bellybuttons

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength. . . .

—Psalm 8:2

Twenty-six kindergarten kids at New York City's P.S. 90 got off their views on war & peace to U.N. Delegate Warren Austin (who promised to ponder them). Teacher Alma Haring, who sent him the message; set it all down just the way they told her..Excerpts:

"War is fighting. People hate and take people's clothes away. They should think not to make a war. They shouldn't have guns.... Why don't they love one another and help everybody? And make some buildings for families to have more cows and horses and lambs? And apple trees and pear trees and peach trees? And train the people to make things: to be a barber, and things like that. Please ask God kindly to make the children across the ocean, and the Americans too—every little boy & girl in every country—to make them better."

Six-year-old Jane Reis (rhymes with geese) of Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., is scarcely able to write her own name, but she had 16 "poems" published last week in the Saturday Review of Literature. Her mother had jotted down Jane's offhand utterings, proudly showed them off to friends. Professor Lionel Trilling of Columbia pronounced them good, got SRL interested. Sample:

Someplace, always, rounds have dimples in their tops like apples. My balloon has a gathered place. Apples are round and red sometimes. They start little on trees and grow up inside their skins like people. Ellen used to be an apple baby She's not red yet and on her big round tummy She has a bellybutton.