The lessons that I took as a teacher in Rodez, he said, have outlasted everything else, all the twists and turns through my history. The ideas that I developed are in fact one idea, he said: Children will choose love over brutality, if given the chance. Adults will do the same, if given the chance. All acts of savagery originate with authority, he wrote. The work to be done, he told them, is a refusal of savagery.
