Children should be seen and not herded.

From Alfred’s journal

The school group came through the park at ten, two dozen of them in yellow vests, and I watched from the sycamore while the woman at the front counted heads every forty feet. One boy stopped at the drain grate because something down there was shining. He got four seconds before a hand arrived on his shoulder and moved him along, and the shine stayed down in the dark unexamined. I used to think the counting was the whole job, that a keeper of small things is measured by whether she comes back with the same number she left with. Children should be seen and not herded, I wrote, and then sat there a while feeling unfair about it, because she did have a road to cross and a bus idling. Still, the boy looked back twice.