In front of me on my perpetually messy desk is a photograph of Kamato Hongo, who was born Sept. 16, 1887, in Kagoshima, Japan. When I first saw the photo, during a slide show the other day at the Meriden senior center, I couldn't tell what I was looking at for at least a few minutes. It was like those three-dimensional puzzles that were popular in newspapers several years ago. You had to hold the pattern in front of your nose and stare at it for a while until the "hidden" image revealed itself to you.

In the black-and-white photograph, Kamato has her head turned to a shoulder. Her heavily wrinkled face, crin-kled eyes and tongue-filled, tooth-empty smile add up to one of the most convincing expressions of pure joy I've ever seen in an image.

Kamato is one of 50 supercentenarians, people who have lived to 110 or longer, featured in a 2005 book cele-brating the later years of human existence, called "Earth's Elders: The Wisdom of the World's Oldest People."

When writer and photographer Jerry Friedman visited Kamato's household, there was a banner hanging near the door announcing her as the oldest person in the world. She was born on a small island that had no electricity, no cars or streets. She lived through the Russian-Japanese war of 1894, and another war between those two nations in 1904. And, of course, she made it through the Second World War, and recalled hiding underground during the air raids from American B29s.

Every day, when her 7-year-old great-granddaughter returned home from school, her first impulse, after drop-ping her books, was to hug Kamato. Friedman suspects that there is something in this routine that helps explain Kamato's longevity.

Who knows? There's certainly more than one explanation behind a long life. The ability to avoid letting worry take control is a common thread revealed in the book.

During the presentation at the senior center, Julie Evans Starr, the executive director of the Connecticut Com-mission on Aging, observed that the elderly tend to be regarded with more reverence in other cultures, such as Japan's. She'd like to see Friedman's efforts emulated in public school classrooms. But instead of traveling the world, grade school pupils could gather stories from their communities, she suggests. Evans Starr is just starting to have discussions with school districts about the initiative.

Now I happen to think there is reverence for the elderly in American culture. I've known many people who loved their grandparents to pieces. But popular culture, marketing and other influences tend to segregate and isolate age groups. Television advertising, for example, tells you that when you're young you should drink beer and when you're old you should take medication.

So there's certainly room for improvement when it comes to bringing the elderly "back into the folds of our lives," as Evans Starr put it.

While the grade school proposal is worth pursuing, I can't help thinking that it highlights a major weakness in the No Child Left Behind law. Schools in less advantaged districts can hardly afford such initiatives, regardless of the educational value, unless there's a direct connection to meeting performance standards and avoiding the punishments that could result from being labeled a failing school.

Simply put, the law has been taking initiative out of education. That's perverse, when you think about it. Learning, after all, is about a lot more than checking the right box on a Mastery test.

There ought to be a way of making the wealth of knowledge and experience garnered during a long life accessible to the very young, who face the increasing potential of very long lives themselves. Neglecting the opportunity is failing to take advantage of wisdom right here in the community.

jkurz@record-journal.com

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