Last week I went to my niece’s school. We made pine cone turkeys in kindergarten and wrote a poem in second grade. I never attended kindergarten so if all we really need to know was learned there, I had to learn it on my own. They are valuable lessons. Here is a copy of Robert Fulghum’s things he learned in kindergarten.

ALL I REALLY NEED TO
KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN

(a
guide for Global Leadership)

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.

[Source: “ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN
KINDERGARTEN” by Robert Fulghum.  See his web site at http://www.robertfulghum.com/