"Children are not the people of tomorrow, but people today. They are entitled to be taken seriously. They have a right to be treated by adults with tenderness and respect, as equals. They should be allowed to grow into whoever they were meant to be - The unknown person inside each of them is the hope for the future."
"Whatever has been achieved through pressure and violence is unstable, unreliable and incorrect."
Janusz Korczak (Henryk Goldszmit, 1878–1942) is one of the cleanest EII cases among major twentieth-century moral figures, so much that it's hard to write anything to confirm the type, so self-evident it seems (at worst, there's possibly a light LSE accent supporting the institutional-administrative work, but really, the "canonical" EII is already relatively high in workaholism, the whole dual pair is notable for the whole work-for-the-sake-of-society-and-others mentality). The conscientious commitment to a single moral project across an entire adult life proves that.
The EII pattern shows itself first in the sustained involvement with a specific, defined community of vulnerable people. Korczak was a trained pediatrician with a successful Warsaw practice when he took over a Jewish orphanage in 1912. The decision was made on EII grounds: the children of the Warsaw poor needed care, and his medical career was less morally urgent than the orphans were. He held the post for thirty years, until the children and he were transported together to the death camp. He never seriously revisited the decision. Organizing a life around specific moral relations and absorbing whatever costs those relations require is definitely a type marker.
His "Children's Republic" is another telling point. Korczak ran the orphanage around the dignity and rights of all its members, not merely the authority of its director. The children had a parliament, a court, and a newspaper. They published their own paper (Mały Przegląd). The pedagogical principle Korczak stated in The Child's Right to Respect (1929) and How to Love a Child (1919) is the EII moral principle applied to children: that the child is a full person now, not a future-adult to be shaped through authority. "Children should be fully understood... must be respected and loved, treated as partners and friends... one ought to behave towards each child as a respected, thinking and feeling human being."
Your typical EII influences others mostly through quiet personal example and principled conduct, and less through prophetic preaching, theatrical performance, or charismatic mass leadership (not that the type is incapable of it, but that stuff is definitely more EIE territory). Korczak's radio broadcasts as "the Old Doctor" attracted older listeners along with the children at whom they were aimed because, as a description has it, of "his way of talking, his honesty, and the easy way he expressed himself." His books rarely go into "manifesto" mode. The plot of King Matt the First is a lesson to children about making responsible choices (as Wikipedia sums it up, "he tries to read and answer all his mail by himself and finds that the volume is too much and he needs to rely on secretaries; he is exasperated with his ministers and has them arrested, but soon realises that he does not know enough to govern by himself, and is forced to release the ministers and institute constitutional monarchy; when a war breaks out he does not accept being shut up in his palace, but slips away and joins up, pretending to be a peasant boy – and narrowly avoids becoming a POW... finally, he is overthrown by the invasion of three foreign armies and exiled to a desert island, where he must come to terms with reality – and finally does.") His biography of Louis Pasteur stresses both his relationships with others — parents, teachers, schoolmates — and his relentless drive to help people, a quality an EII certainly respects.
Even his polymathic qualities represent the focus typical of the EII temperament. Korczak was at one time a physician, an educator, a journalist, a novelist, a writer for children, and a radio personality. However, unlike an IEE's exploration of a wide array of disparate disciplines prompted by intellectual curiosity, in Korczak's case, all of the above endeavors were subordinated to one and the same goal. His radio program as "the Old Doctor" extended his pedagogical voice to a wider audience but kept the same teacher-to-children register, with a touch of gentle moralism.
The unbending, to the point of a certain viscosity, persistence of his life is another point. The orphanage was run continuously for thirty years on the same principles. Through the First World War, Polish independence, Nazi occupation, he kept the same methods, in the style of an "IJ" rational-static temperament. This fits the EII durability in moral commitment. The type finds it difficult to switch causes, and often doesn't even want to much.
A closest colleague's commentary on Korczak's decision not to abandon his children is the most accurate single statement available about EII character at the highest pitch. Misha, a Jewish teacher who had trained with Korczak, said: "Everyone makes so much of Korczak's last decision to go with the children to the train. But his whole life was made up of moral decisions. The decision to become a children's doctor. The decision to give up a full-time medical practice and writing career to take care of poor orphans. The decision to go with the Jewish orphans to the ghetto. As for that last decision to go with the children to Treblinka, it was part of his nature. It was who he was. He wouldn't understand why we are making so much of it today."
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