Wallace is a freelance writer and poet. In this essay, Wallace explores Ha Jin's meditation on what children are taught and what they really learn.

From the time a child is very young, everyone&mdas; parents, teachers, other children&mdas;tries to teach him or her something. The things others say don't always make sense to a child; sometimes the message gets horribly scrambled in translation. Children are further confused when parents, teachers, and other children offer wildly different opinions on the same subject. And then there's a whole other category of information for children to deal with: things that nobody tells a child but that they can't help seeing&mdas; the way people really act despite what they say, the way things really are despite what people claim. In Ha Jin's "In the Kindergarten," originally published in The Bridegroom (2002), Jin meditates on what children are taught...