The Radical Present: Janusz Korczak’s Challenge to Developmental Models of Children’s Rights

Although participation theory and ‘evolving capacities’ frameworks enrich children’s rights discourse, they retain developmental hierarchies that defer meaningful rights until capacities emerge, obscuring children’s present entitlement to dignity, agency and culture. In particular, scholarship on Article 5 and Article 12 frequently preserves an adult–child hierarchy that positions childhood as preparation for adult citizenship rather than recognising children as bearers of present dignity. Janusz Korczak’s pedagogy offers a radical alternative: unconditional children’s rights grounded not in future potential but in present being. Through analysis of Korczak’s inversion of developmental hierarchies, his democratic institutions that realised genuine power-sharing and his insistence on children’s rights to cultural expression even in extremis, this article demonstrates how Korczak both shaped and exceeded contemporary children’s rights frameworks. Korczak’s philosophy challenges scholars to confront the extent to which prevailing commitments to children’s rights remain compromised by future-oriented instrumentalism that treats childhood as means rather than end.