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CONCEPT

Dom Sierot and the Inversion of Institutional Authority

The operational architecture of Korczak's Warsaw orphanage — parliament, court, newspaper — as the inverse of the algorithmically governed classroom, and the historical demonstration that institutions can be designed around children's agency rather than their compliance.

Dom Sierot, at 33 Chłodna Street, housed approximately one hundred children at any given time — orphans ranging from seven to fourteen, who arrived carrying grief, anger, and the wariness of children who have learned that adults cannot be trusted to remain. They were not, by any conventional measure, easy children to educate. Korczak gave them a parliament, a court, and a newspaper. These were not pedagogical decorations. They were institutional expressions of respect — structures built on the premise that children are capable of self-governance, capable of justice, capable of exercising judgment about their own community. The AI-mediated classroom of 2026 is, in structural terms, the precise inverse. Where Korczak's institution distributed authority to children, the AI-mediated classroom concentrates authority in the system. The comparison is not rhetorical; it is architectural, and it determines whether the institutions being built for children are making them into citizens or into something

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