All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Robert Fulghum, 1986
★ 4.00 from 25k ratings on Goodreads
A minister’s short, funny essays on how kindergarten rules—share, nap, hold hands—keep applying to adult work, government, and family life. The essays move in a warm, witty, unhurried voice, mixing childhood memory with hopeful wonder and occasional sharp notes about war.
Feels like wonder, hope and joy. About love, memory and war.
Who it’s for
You may enjoy these pieces if you like short, funny reflections that find large lessons in ordinary routines and family life. Some readers find the same simplicity trite or self-satisfied, so the gentle tone may wear thin if you want more bite.
Why read it
It offers a quick, humane way to revisit the rules you learned early and see how they might apply to adult work, government, and family.
A page from the book
A weapon that falls as crayons instead of death.
Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A Beauty Bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air — explode softly — and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth — boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn’t go cheap either — not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination instead of death. A child who touched one wouldn’t have his hand blown off. What readers say
Readers often describe being charmed, amused, and inspired by the simple life lessons and childhood nostalgia. Others found the same simplicity trite, self-satisfied, or boring, so reactions split between warmth and skepticism.
Robert Fulghum.Fulghum was a Unitarian Universalist minister and teacher before this book made him a bestseller; the title essay began as a one-page statement of belief.
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More by Robert Fulghum
Όσα χρειάζεται να ξέρω τα έμαθα στο Νηπιαγωγείο
Robert Fulghum, 1986
A minister who worked as a bartender, ranch hand and singing cowboy argues that sharing, napping and cookies with milk are the whole of ethics.
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Questions readers ask
- Is All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten for me?
- You may enjoy these pieces if you like short, funny reflections that find large lessons in ordinary routines and family life. Some readers find the same simplicity trite or self-satisfied, so the gentle tone may wear thin if you want more bite.
- What is All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten like?
- The essays move in a warm, witty, unhurried voice, mixing childhood memory with hopeful wonder and occasional sharp notes about war. Feels like wonder, hope and joy. About love, memory and war.
- What should I read after All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten?
- If you liked All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, try The Joy of Sex (Alex Comfort), Travels with Charley (John Steinbeck) and A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway).
A taste of the feed
Every generation mistakes its childhood for a better world.
Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.
Travels with Charley · John Steinbeck
The cost of becoming conscious of your own gift.
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
A Moveable Feast · Ernest Hemingway
There is a kind of crying that only happens where nobody can hear it.
Everything else about the three-years-ago scene was different, though. That time, I was not in Rome but in the upstairs bathroom of the big house in the suburbs of New York which I’d recently purchased with my husband. It was a cold November, around three o’clock in the morning. My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and—just as during all those nights before—I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and confusion and grief.
Eat, Pray, Love · Elizabeth Gilbert
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