Kindergarten Lessons, Updated

John Kass News ^ | 11/1/2026 | David Bittinger

[simpson96]

Robert Fulghum’s 1988 book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten sold over seven million copies, staying a best-seller for two years. It adapted simple truths taught to schoolchildren into lessons for grown-ups. One example: An adult might read a kindergarten instruction to “Put things back where you found them” as a reminder to respect orderliness and shared spaces. Other lessons included “Play fair” and “Don’t hit people.”

Fulghum’s primer on standards of behavior and values already seems quaint. If you’re old enough to recall those traditional standards, you know they’ve since gone the way of printed newspaper subscriptions. Sometimes they seem to have gone the way of video stores.

Could such elementary lessons be updated for our time? I have a few suggestions, more complicated than Fulghum’s, as 2026 is more complicated than 1988. They might benefit people whose education on basics is shaky, a population that’s grown since 1988.

That ranges from post-kindergarteners, college students, and aging PhD candidates to poorly educated politicians. For instance, you might have wondered about the current mayors of Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles, whose reading skills seem limited.

New York’s mayor is a special case. Seems like he’s trying to reverse the surrender of the Soviet Union 35 years ago. Congratulations to New York for its international scope, bringing the Red Square to Times Square.

Being a Woman or a Man Is Not a Matter of Choice

If your birth certificate identifies you as a male but you feel you are something else, for instance a ruby-throated hummingbird, you will not magically become that something else. Nor will you attract the companionship of other hummingbirds

Respectful Boys Don’t Take Advantage of Girls’ Athletic Realities or Right to Privacy

Should athletes with male bodies shift from unsuccessful competition against other males to easily defeating female competitors? Should those boys smilingly undress and watch mortified girls undress in their locker rooms? (In 1988 such locker room intruders would have been arrested, not awarded trophies.)

Don’t Discriminate Against Any People, Even White People

Once upon a time –- say, 1988 –- decent people could simply oppose all racial prejudice. Then leaders of the identity-politics party began oddly pushing discrimination against white-skinned people in education and employment (promoting this discrimination as “diversity”). Oddly — because that party’s original southern faction was white people. And their demand to continue owning black slaves led to a Civil War costing over 700,000 American lives.

Eight months after losing that war, the Democrats’ southern faction transferred its racial attentions to forming the Ku Klux Klan. A century later, one of the Klan’s former “Exalted Cyclops” became a powerful U.S. Senator. At his death, his Senate buddy colleague Joe Biden, now Vice President, delivered a reverent elegy.

Identity politics’ house of mirrors reflects ever-stranger race consciousness. In a bizarre psychodrama, devout progressives became so disturbed that two of their young white female devotees impersonated non-whites. (See “Rachel Dolezal.”)

Criminals Do Not Play Nice

Repeat criminals repeatedly play not nice. In one-party cities, some Democrat officials believe criminals deserve repeated opportunities. The election victories of many of these Democrats have been sponsored by a multi-billionaire whose sympathies are with the criminals, like a grade school recess monitor who sympathizes with the playground bullies. Who is this sponsor / recess monitor? (Hint: First name is George, and he’s no George Washington.)

If You Hate the Country You Live in, Move to a Better One.

This is easy and recommended for enraged young people who demand progress. Just move.

Some of the ragers never stop shouting about how evil the United States is, how much they hate its type of government and economy. Their sympathies are with sanctuaries of the left like Gaza and Cuba.

Unlike the United States, such sanctuaries don’t have millions of people spending years trying to immigrate to them, so they should appreciate your immigration. Once there, you can promote your cherished policies that haven’t received enough support in the United States, like transgender bathrooms and drag queen story hour and death threats against political figures you don’t like.

Move and experience what you’ve been advocating. Many Americans will be happy you’re there.

Your School Shouldn’t Be Closed Just Because a Teachers Organization Wants It Closed

This was a painful lesson of COVID hysteria. The education of millions of children was damaged needlessly because a labor union demanded schools stay closed. Children were far less vulnerable to COVID than to having their education stunted by school closures.

Teachers’ unions are to teachers as insurance companies are to doctors. (I’ll refrain from adding “or as the mafia is to neighborhood businesses.” That’s too harsh.)

Don’t Murder People You Hate, Even If You Feel Motivated by a Noble Reason

The most progressive ideologues have been reconsidering their position on the death penalty.

Back in olden times (ca. 1988) shooting a hated figure to death in cold blood was recognized as assassination. In 2024-2025, the most progressive thinkers began balancing this recognition with social justice. Even narrowly defined, this ideological judgment has already been imposed on two Americans, and the U.S. president only narrowly avoided it.

Use Your Indoor Voice, Even When You Disagree

The first amendment is deliberately broad. It does not prohibit public screaming or mobs chanting “WHADDA WE WANT….” Politicians also have an absolute first amendment right to shout speeches with staged profanities to prove they really are as tough as the other party.

Also hard to listen to but completely legal are guitar-led protest songs adapted from anthems that folkies stopped singing 40 years ago. Now they’re sung by college truth squads and government payrollers, typically in several different keys at once.

Dear progressives: Just try to limit the painfulness of your vocalizing, please? You know, Peter, Paul & Mary weren’t tone deaf.

Worship Any Faith or Don’t, But Don’t Worship Government

Religious freedom in America is a secular blessing. You can be a devout believer or a universalist doubter, and you won’t be arrested.

One caution: The human heart hungers for ultimate truth. Religious belief satisfies that hunger for many, but if such beliefs don’t work for you, you can thank the separation of church and state enshrined in our law by Thomas Jefferson.

Just don’t make government your ultimate truth.

Almighty government is the trap door of the left’s promises. If you don’t know Orwell’s novel 1984, you really should read this profound fable about the pitiless god of government.

Ask the freethinkers still alive in Russia, Cuba, China, North Korea, or certain theocratic countries about ultimate government truth. Or try asking the Democrats, always crusaders for government power. They’ll give you a happy Kamala word salad answer.

Communism Has Always Been Evil and Still Is

Read up on the history of the first communist ruler, Russia’s Vladimir Lenin, who wrote that socialism is a useful introductory phase to communism. Learn about the two communist rulers who each slaughtered more millions of innocent civilians than fascist Hitler: Russia’s Stalin and China’s Mao Zedong.

Growing numbers of unhappy young people now vote for closet communists. The closet cases sometimes give the game away by “saying the silent part out loud,” as New York’s now-Mayor Zohran Mamdani did in rallying a group of young comrades in 2021, enthusing about Karl Marx’s ultimate goal of “seizing the means of production.”

Don’t know what they plan to seize? If “Democratic Socialists” become sufficiently powerful, you will eventually find out.

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[ComputerGuy]

I don’t think civility came natural to me. I had to be taught.

[FatherofFive]

Worship Any Faith or Don’t, But Don’t Worship Government

Except Islam, which is not a religion.