You Can't Get There on a Treadmill

Not long ago I spent time with a man who does not have children, doesn't want children, and, in fact, told me, "I don't even like being in places that allow children."

For people like us, it's an outrageous thing to say. I wanted to ask, "Who broke you?" but instead I just asked, "Why?"

He answered, "Because they're always moving."

Well, he's right about that, at least compared to adults: young children do move far more than most adults. Not only that, they run when they could walk. They jump, they climb, they wiggle, clap, dance, balance, and swing even when there is no obvious reason. Studies find that young children engage in moderate to vigorous physical activity, on average, for three hours a day. By the time they're teens, it's down to less than one hour. 

This discrepancy is typically dismissed as developmental. Childhood is the time for play and play usually involves movement and lots of it. But humans aren't the only animal that plays. Indeed, play seems to be universal, at least among higher order animals, but no other species of which I'm aware has such a movement gap between juveniles and adults. This probably has to do with the fact that wild adult animals must spend a large percentage of their waking hours hunting and foraging, whereas modern human's tend to earn their living in increasingly sedentary ways.

Sadly, this doesn't just hold true for adults. Children today spend far less time in physical activity than we did as kids, but the gap between adult movement and child movement hasn't narrowed. In other words, as a species, we simply aren't moving as much as we once did.

The impact on physical fitness is obvious, but it goes beyond that. As neuroscientist Patrick House writes, "This must be the ultimate purpose of consciousness: to control a body." Cognitive philosopher Andy Clark says we have inherited "a mind on the hoof," brains built to hunt and forage, to think and react while moving about an environment. 

Today's world increasingly demands the opposite. As play-based early childhood educators, we are among the rare professionals who actually spend our days "on the hoof," but the rest of the world is fighting their bodies into chairs, training themselves for long hours on screens or in cars. 

We try to correct for this with the modern invention of "exercise," an idea that emerged from the idle rich of previous centuries, movement strictly for the sake of fitness. Back then they took "constitutionals." Today's idle middle class jumps on a treadmill.

Rebecca Solnit writes in her book about walking, Wanderlust: "The treadmill is a corollary to the suburb and the autotropolis: a device with which to go nowhere in places where there is now nowhere to go. Or no desire to go: the treadmill also accommodates the auto mobilized and suburbanized mind more comfortable in climate-controlled indoor space than outdoors, more comfortable with quantifiable and clearly defined activity than with the seamless engagement of mind, body, and terrain to be found walking out-of-doors."

Treadmills are now regular features in our public schools.

Those of us who come from the world of play, of self-directed learning, tend to criticize the increasingly academic nature of schooling as "developmentally inappropriate," usually meaning "cognitively inappropriate." But it's equally inappropriate in that the way this type of curriculum is delivered requires young children to fight their bodies into chairs, and rein in their mind on the hoof. We are literally dumbing our children down in order to "prepare" them for their sedentary future.

We cannot separate our minds and bodies. We have inherited a mind on the hoof and when we are not allowed to move, our body-minds rebel by becoming flabby, stiff, distracted, anxious, hypertensive, diabetic, and depressed. There are few modern ailments, physical or psychological, that aren't connected to lack of meaningful movement.

"For my part," writes Robert Lewis Stevenson, "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."

This is our heritage as a species, a mind on the hoof. Movement is not only our native language, but it is the universal language. Attention during action is our natural state. To move is the great affair. Movement literally defines life. And here we are, as a culture, attempting to become a strange kind of creature on this planet, one that is so sedentary that we even find the movement of others annoying.

Reacting to Stevenson, poet Diane Ackerman writes, "The great affair, the love affair in life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between."

And you can't get there on a treadmill.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Play is How Children Practice Making Real Decisions

I was feeling cruddy, so I was curled up on the sofa watching baseball with a single light turned on and a window open to cool my low grade fever. A moth was attracted to the light. It flapped furiously, bouncing against the bulb. Occasionally, it would lurch away from the light, returning seconds later, wildly. Once it plummeted to the coffee table where it flipped and flopped before righting itself to return to the light that irresistibly drew it. Its frenzy increased, carrying it off into the dark and back again. Then one time it didn't return. I later found its lifeless body floating in our dog's water dish.

I wondered if this was a metaphor for life in the vein of Macbeth's "sound and fury, signifying nothing." It sometimes seems that way, but I couldn't make myself identify with the moth, as sorry as I was that it lost its life in pursuit of . . . Well, whatever it was pursuing. No one knows for sure. We call the phenomenon phototaxis. Moths are positively phototactic: it's an instinct, an imperative. That moth had no choice but to fly, manically, at that light bulb.

Humans, on the other hand, have choices, or at least the illusion of choices, which means that we, unlike that moth, rely more on decision-making to determine our actions. Of course, we do have our instincts as well, but we have evolved the ability to override them, to alter them, to control them in ways that moths cannot. At least that's how it seems to us. Which means that we have, in at least some cases, replaced the imperative of following an instinct with decision-making.

This still doesn't mean that we won't still wind up floating in the dog's water dish. The difference, is that when we do, we have arrived there via "bad choices" rather than, as did the moth, because it had no other choice.

I tossed the befouled dog water into the garden. As I refilled the dish with fresh water I wondered if maybe the moth had the better deal in life. If we're all going to end up in the water dish anyway, the moth got there without the stress of making all those decisions, of learning to override, alter, or control its instincts, and there is no shame or guilt in its demise, because, after all, it simply had no choice.

One of the grails of early child childhood education is to develop children's "executive function," which is, essentially, the ability to make decisions. When a two-year-old hits another two-year-old, we don't see this as an intentionally harmful act, but rather the result of impulsiveness. We then work to "teach" that child to make a different decision next time, which is to say, override their instinct, to engage in what we used to call self-control. I can't help but think, however, that much of the time we aren't teaching them to make a different decision as much as we're expecting them to replace one imperative (their instinct) with another (our command). This is explicitly what we do when we train our dogs: we don't expect them to make decisions, but to obey us rather than their inner compulsion to bite, bark, or jump up.

Some make the argument that this is our only choice until our children are developmentally ready to make their own decisions. The theory is that we gradually allow them more and more agency until some day they are an adult with the freedom to make all their own decisions, for better or worse. I get it, there is a certain comforting logic to it, but again, I worry that what we are doing in this case is conflating actual decision-making with having internalized our commands. I wonder if this doesn't explain why so many young people leave the family nest only to "lose control" for a few years, making all manner of bad decisions. Neuroscientists suggest that this is because their brains are not yet fully formed, that the pre-frontal cortex, the seat of executive function, is not fully developed until they are in their mid-20's. 

Or it could be that too many children in our modern world are growing up in environments in which the opportunities for true decision-making are increasingly rare. The pre-frontal cortex doesn't develop in a vacuum, but rather as a result of the environment in which it is developing. Executive function, like with any other aspect of human endeavor, needs practice, and lots of it, in order to develop properly. This is why young children need play and lots of it. It's while playing, freely, that children get to practice making real decisions both large and small in a relatively safe environment. They will make mistakes, of course, but as adults it's not our job to command them into the "right" decision, but rather to allow them to experience the natural consequences of their bad ones. Naturally, we prevent them from flying into the dog's water dish, but we must still allow them to explore whatever light they are attracted to, to learn about it, and to make decisions about it.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

The Universal Language

"Plants tell their stories not by what they say, but by what they do. What if you were a teacher but had no voice to speak your knowledge? What if you had no language at all and yet there was something you needed to say? Wouldn't you dance it? Wouldn't you act it out? Would your every movement tell the story? In time you would become so eloquent that just to gaze upon you would reveal it all. And so it is with these silent green leaves."

I'm inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer's way of understanding plants, one that is grounded both in Western science and ancient wisdom. Our assumption is that plants cannot communicate with us, let alone "speak," even as most of us accept that they can, in their way -- through pheromones, chemical compounds, electrical signals, vibration, and other means we do not fully understand -- communicate with one another. And, of course, we understand that fruits and flowers are intended, at least in part, to connect plants with animals, including humans, who tend to respond in ways that support the plant's propagation, but does that really count as communication?

How we define communication makes a difference. Our doubts about plant communication tend to revolve around whether or not there is a conscious purpose behind the message being sent, but is purposefulness necessary for it to be communication? I mean, plants clearly send messages, other plants receive those messages, and then there is a response to those messages. Defined this way, conscious purpose is not necessary for communication to have happened, although some Western scientists are now starting to wonder (catching up with indigenous traditions) if plants actually do possess something resembling consciousness, even without the sort of brain-like structure found in animals.

Of course, the definition of consciousness is also open to debate. As is intelligence. Not to mention that there are many who believe that the "free choice" humans believe we possess is in fact an illusion; that we simply act according to the dictates of evolution, much the way we assume "decisions" are made by plants and "lower order" animals.

Kimmerer asserts, "Plants teach the universal language."

"Intuition has a maligned reputation as one of the lesser kinds of reasoning," writes neuroscientist Patrick House, "but is, in fact, second only to consciousness itself as the mammalian brain's greatest feat. Intuition is the reasoned product of a lifetime of careful, metabolically expensive observation. It is the output of the brain, never the gut . . . Nearly two-thirds of the brain's neurons are devoted to prediction and feedback so that the brain can learn and update the validity of previous predictions." But most of this happens off our consciousness' radar.

Intuition is akin to instinct and stands outside of conscious thought as the product of our subconscious mind. It causes us to move or act, which are signals that communicate through what we know as non-verbal communication. Psychologists and police detectives are among those that understand that words may lie, but our bodies, like the stems and leaves and roots of plants, tend to "reveal all." Sure, we can lie with our bodies as well, but that takes a conscious effort, and the moment we let our mind's drift, our bodies go back to truth-telling.

Our babies are born without words, but we all understand that they come into the world communicating, reaching out for the connection that will bring nourishment, warmth, relief from pain, security, and love. Signals are sent, received, and responded to. This is communication.

Play is another or those words or ideas that eludes definition, but it's through attempting to observe, or gaze upon, play that I come to most fully understand the children in my life. Play, like all movement, is an aspect of the universal language. We tend to say that behavior is communication when the behaviors are challenging for us, but as the plants show us, it is all eloquent communication, revealing far more truth than words ever can. Indeed, the vocal-learning region in our brain is contained within the regions concerned with movement: language is a mere and meager subset of all that we do and communicate.

Children, like plants, like all living things, answer questions by the way they live. And as Kimmerer says, "(Y)ou just need to learn how to ask," which requires us to observe and reflect. This is why I say that early childhood educators are at least as much researchers or scientists as we are "teachers." When children play, they are, like plants, responding to the world around them, and what they are telling us is often difficult to put into words. But that doesn't mean children aren't supremely eloquent, only that words are too crude to translate it.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Children are Not "Blank Slates"

You often hear young children spoken of as "blank slates." As parents and educators, as adults who are presumedly "full slates," our job is then to get to writing -- or even, to somehow encourage them to write -- in order to correct their proverbial blankness.

But no one is ever a blank slate. Life is an immersive experience. Our minds are never blank, nor are they ever full, from the moment we're born (and likely before) until the day we die (and perhaps afterwards).

Certainly, a two-year-old perceives the world differently than a sixty-two-year-old, but that difference, as implied by metaphors like "blank slate" or "empty vessel," is not ignorance. 

Is the seed ignorant? Of course not. Seeds have the "wisdom" (for want of a better word) to "decide" when to germinate. You may quibble with my choice of words (wisdom, decide), but researchers have found what they call a "decision-making center" in dormant seeds that is capable of communicating and integrating information about temperature, moisture, sunlight, and their own hormones in order to make a decision about when and whether to germinate. Insect eggs, larvae, and pupae, likewise, show wisdom. Human development is no different. Being a two-year-old is essential to becoming an adult, just as being a seed or being an egg is essential to becoming a plant or an insect.

I recently came across a video of an educator testing a three-year-old on school-ish things like letter, number, and color recognition. The kid seemed to be enjoying himself, although we all know that there were others who found it tedious or even painful, they just didn't make the cut because, to a school-ish adult, those children are "behind" or "uncooperative" or "unmotivated." 

What if, however, we understood these children to be like seeds? Does anyone think that testing the seed helps it grow? And even the most accomplished gardener can't convince a seed to sprout leaves, flower, or fruit before their time. Oh sure, there are hothouses and other artificial growing environments, but we all know that plants raised this way either must spend their lives in the hothouse or perish. And isn't that exactly what our standard schools are: hothouses in which we vainly hope to one-up Mother Nature?

A good gardener, like a good parent or educator, knows that their job is to prepare the conditions for growth, to protect them as they grow, but it's the seed's job to do the growing, not according to our designs, but nature's. Seeds, like our children if we would just allow them to "decide" for themselves, already know what to do.

"Perhaps the mind is not merely a blank slate upon which anything may be written," writes naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch in his book The Voice of the Desert. "Perhaps it reaches out spontaneously toward what can nourish either intelligence or imagination. Perhaps it is part of nature and, without being taught, shares nature's intentions."

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

If We Want Children to Read for Pleasure

My family moved to Athens, Greece when I was in 4th grade. This is when I first became aware of Scholastic Books. Mom let my brother and me order as many books as we wanted and so month after month, I would receive a stack of cheap paperbacks that I would then consume before the next Scholastic brochure arrived. I'm sure that at some level her motivations were educational, but I think the main point was that we were living in a country in where the media was in a language we didn't understand, and she wanted us to be at least minimally entertained.

I don't specifically recall many of the books, but there was an engrossing one about the Bermuda Triangle and another aspirational one about high school football. My lifelong fandom of The Who started with a very sanitized band biography. And I really got into Eric von Däniken's pseudoscientific theories about space aliens having visited earth in ancient times. In other words, none of it was great literature, but I didn't care. I was reading for pleasure.

When the books arrived, I would stack them on a table in my bedroom, then move them to another stack as I completed them. I might not remember much of the content of these books, but I've never forgotten the feeling of accomplishment upon reading the final words on the final page. I would close the back cover, then hold the finished book in my hands for a time to reflect on the world in which I'd recently dwelt. I still do that.

As George R.R. Martin, the author of The Game of Thrones books, put it, "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, the man who never reads lives only one." That's how reading has always felt to me. It means entering the imagination or intellect of another human for a time, hanging out, discovering a new perspective on the world. It's different than watching a TV show or a movie, which, for all their merits, are collaborations that require far less involvement from their audience. You can fall asleep and the movie still makes it to the end. Reading a book to the end requires effort.

One of the most important reading journeys of my life was Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, a dense, difficult work, translated into English from the original German, written by  a very smart man. I struggled to concentrate, I read and re-read sections, even entire chapters as I found myself losing focus. By the time I got to the middle chapters in which opposing philosophers -- Settembrini and Naphtha -- engage in long-winded and convoluted debates on topics I didn't really understand, let alone care about, I began to despair. In frustration, one morning, I started reading the book again from the beginning. In the afternoons, I would pick up where I had previously left off, so that I was, in effect, reading the book twice at once. Reading in this way, I was finally able to "get" the book: it's architectural, intellectual, and artistic beauty became clear to me, but it was only accessible through sharing the "ordeal" with the characters. There are those who insist that it's "no sin" to put down a book that bores you, and I have left some books unfinished, but I've also learned that many of my most profound reading experiences -- Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Middlemarch -- involved some slogging and plodding alongside the characters in order to get to endings that, and I quote my father-in-law on this, "move my soul."

I'm currently on a reading tear, having finished four books, back-to-back, in which there was no slogging at all -- A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch, Φ (Phi), Guilo Tononi, The Voice of the Desert, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw (a play, but it reads like a novel). Each one of these books was, in its way, a page turner. I couldn't put them down, nor did I want them to end. 

The latest edition of The Atlantic includes a story entitle "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books." The reporting is mostly anecdotal, but the university professors interviewed are raising concerns that many incoming students are incapable of reading entire books. The article blames technology and the pandemic, but mostly points the finger at the fact that fewer and fewer middle and high school educators are teaching "whole texts," opting instead for excerpts, short stories, and anthologies . . . Of course, they say they are doing this because kids today are too distracted.

Oh, I want to jump on this bandwagon so much, but when I look back on my own history as a reader, my school reading was a separate matter. Of course, I read The Lord of the Flies, A Catcher in the Rye, and The Old Man and the Sea, like most former public school students my age, and I didn't hate them, but it was the reading that I did outside of school that made me a reader. Reading what other people assigned to me was always a slog, and not the self-selected kind.

I want to castigate those teachers who don't expect their students to read entire books, but I also believe it's wrongheaded to think you can spark a love of reading whole books without simultaneously granting children the freedom to choose what they will read. That's what those Scholastic Books (and libraries) did for me. I also read The Hardy Boys and the entire Wizard of Oz series, books that today might be labelled "young adult," a category that at least one expert in The Atlantic article seems to dismiss.

What my Mom understood was that it's the reading that's important, even if it isn't all Jane Austen or Toni Morrison. Any book can become a slog when it's being "taught." I have no doubt that the Harry Potter books will soon find their way onto reading syllabi, if they haven't already, and that will effectively kill them as pleasure reading for an entire generation.

If we want kids to read books, we have to let them be in charge of the books they read. Our local library used to "challenge" kids to read 25 books during the summer. It didn't matter what kind of book and the results were self-reported. The reward? A coupon for a scoop of ice cream at a local parlor. I took great pride in finishing all those books . . . And while I enjoyed my ice cream, that wasn't what made me spend so much of my summer break curled up with books.

I have no doubt that smartphones and whatnot are distractions from reading, but there have always been easy distractions competing with books. I mean, we had the whole of outdoors and all the neighborhood children available to us, which, if we allowed the same free access to today's children, would, I'm certain, be a much bigger lure than any screen. But books actually brought us inside, even on our holidays, because our schools hadn't yet ruined books for us. Books weren't mere schoolroom resources, but rather doorways to freedom.

From the article: "Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader's own. 'A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics . . . Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges our sympathies.' . . . Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey: they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-call deep reading -- sustained immersion in a text -- stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not."

This is why it is important that we read books, entire books, but none of us like reading books we did not choose for ourselves. 

As preschool teachers, most of us read dozens of entire books nearly every day. Children bring books to us, asking us to read them aloud, and we do, and they don't let us get away with only reading an excerpt. They want, as they should, the whole thing. This is the way preschools prepare young children to become readers. Sadly, our elementary, middle-, and high schools have become so obsessed with teaching "academic skills" that they have come to approach books in the same way: not as world's to explore, but as just something else on which children will be judged. That's why the students in the article might be able to "decode words and sentences," but still don't know how to enter into a book, let alone finish it.

If we are serious about raising children who read whole books, we have to let them choose the books they will read, for pleasure, and without judgement.

I'm reminded of an exchange in Shaw's play. A character asserts, "My experience is that one's pleasures don't bear thinking about," to which another character replies, "That is why intellect is so unpopular."

Indeed, I fear that we have systematically removed pleasure from reading by turning it into an academic exercise. That is why it's so unpopular. 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

A Motivation Problem

I've told this story before, but it bears repeating.

I once randomly met a teacher from a local high school at a social event. I knew that one of my young relatives, then a 15-year-old, attended the school, so naturally I mentioned him.

The teacher shook his head, then said, "I worry about that kid." 

I didn't know the boy well, but I'd been seeing him at family gatherings two or three times a year for over a decade and I'd never noticed anything to worry about. Yes, he was a bit "nerdy," but in the absolutely best sense of that word. I knew him as a boy of passions. It seemed like each time I spoke with him he was enthusiastic about some new hobby or other -- outer space, collecting knives, electric trains, bicycles, playing guitar -- all self-motivated. He was, in a nutshell, the type of kid this play-based educator didn't worry about in the least.

When I asked his teacher for more, he answered that he was "too quiet" and "shut in," that he didn't seem particularly engaged with school, and that he had a "motivation problem."

I countered by telling him about the intellectually curious boy I knew.

"I had no idea," the teacher said, "I wish he'd open up to me!"

As luck would have it, I saw the boy a week or so later, I shared what his teacher had told me, saying, "I think he just wants to know the real you."

The boy grimaced. "I don't want my teachers to know anything about me. If they know what I like, they'll use it against me." He explained, "Whenever teachers know what a kid likes, they try to take it away and use it as, like, a reward for good grades or something." 

In my own mind, I added, Or threaten to take it away as a punishment. 

It was a keen insight. I didn't try to talk him out of it.

I was reminded of him yesterday when a reader commented on one of my posts from earlier this week. Her son's IEP (Individualized Education Program) calls for regular "movement breaks." She's recently learned that his teachers were dangling these mandated breaks as a "reward" for completing this or that assignment. Now, I don't know the law where she lives, but in many places an IEP is a legal document. Withholding movement from anyone should be criminal, but in this case it very well might be.

And lest you think this is a one-off, every day young children are having their recess time -- their free movement time -- taken away or curtailed for the very same reason. One of my former preschool students had his "outdoor time" revoked because, as his teacher said, "He won't sit still in class." Movement is not a choice. It's a necessity. There has never been a scientific study done that finds that holding a body still improves cognitive function. Indeed, the research finds just the opposite: every human ever tested thinks more clearly while their body is in motion. An educator who restricts a child's movement isn't after thinking, they're after obedience, which is thinking's opposite.

As my young relative figured out for himself, standard schools are so addicted to rewards and punishments that they are "worried about" self-directed learners. They are so committed to carrots and sticks that they simply can conceive of a child who is motivated from within. Our schools are so afraid of children actually thinking for themselves that they treat even that -- free thought -- as a kind of stimulus-response behaviorist tool. Once you've obeyed me, I'll let you think. When I ring this bell, you will drool.

What an incredible waste of childhood. What an incredible waste of life. The last time I touched base with my young relative he was off on his motorcycle for a weekend of rock climbing with his girlfriend. 

I've never taught a child who was not a self-motivated learner. I've never been tempted by rewards and punishments. Our play-based preschools are models of the way schools could be. 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Allowing Ourselves to Be Awed

Yesterday morning, a pair of well-fed coyotes trotted past my open door, no more than 10 feet from where I sat writing a blog post. They didn't turn to look my way, although they must have smelled my presence. It was only after they passed out of sight that I noticed the shouting of the ravens, a half dozen or more, working together to drive the intruders away.

I hear the ravens every morning during these spring days. They're always going on about something, but I guess I've learned to ignore them because even as they sounded the alarm about predators in the neighborhood, I didn't take note until the danger was literally upon my doorstep. Indeed, I really only attended to their cawing once the coyotes, the danger, was gone.

Or not gone. They had passed from my sight, but I knew they remained nearby because the ravens' intensity didn't abate. Not only did I hear their raven voices, but also the fierce flapping of their wings and the frantic scratching of their talons on my roof as they took turns dive-bombing the canines who must have been along the side of my house without windows. Then one of the coyotes reappeared, not running, but definitely hurrying, once more passing where I sat without looking my way, ravens with wingspans as wide as the coyote was long chasing after it.

It's peak nesting season for the ravens. There is a nest in a tree outside my backdoor. They have been exhibiting courtship and territorial defensive behaviors for months now, all of which they do noisily, which probably explains why I've learned to ignore them.

The ravens, of course, were protecting something far more important than mere territory. They were protecting their loved ones. My heart, of course, was with them.

Shortly after the coyotes had been driven off, I pulled our dog away from the remnants of what I took to be a rabbit not far from the front door, bits of fur still clinging to it. Maybe the ravens weren't protecting their young. After all, if there are any fledglings, they're at the top of a tree, out of the reach of any coyote, which, of course, the ravens knew. Any danger to their young will come from above -- a hawk or a mocking bird. Maybe, after all, they were harassing the coyotes for a share in the kill. 

The local rabbit population has been robust this spring, which would explain the arrival of coyotes, who normally avoid our dog-infested neighborhood, to thin the herd.

The cycle of life is as brutal as it is beautiful.

I've shared in this post a few "facts," but most of what I've written here is what George Bernard Shaw called metabiology. I've engaged in speculative reason about animal behavior from the perspective of a man sitting on a sofa. A proper scientist would likely be disappointed with me as I've cobbled together a story about nature that borrows from observed phenomenon, of course, but also includes such non-scientific concepts as "loved ones," "brutality," and "beauty." But I've gone even more off the rails than that: I've engaged with the mystique of nature.

"Just as the realm of speculative reason lies beyond the facts of science," writes naturalist and author James Wood Krutch, "so also, beyond the realm of speculative reason, lies the realm of emotion. To me that realm is no less important than the realm of fact or the realm of speculative thought, though to discuss what one experiences in the realm of emotion one must either depreciate it and explain it away, as the pure rationalist does, or one must accept what one can only call the mystique as opposed to the rational of the human being's intercourse with the universe around him."

Krutch wrote this some 70 years ago. He wrote in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, blending science, personal experience, speculation, philosophy, and emotion, to create an understanding of nature that places awe, joy, and beauty at the forefront. He writes, "If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either."

It's a perspective that borders on what "pure rationalists" mock as pantheism, a belief that the unity of the universe is, for want of a better word, god. 

I've had the privilege of having spent thousands of hours observing and playing with children in natural places, not to mention amongst the cedars, lilacs, insects, raccoons, squirrels and other living things that shared our urban playground. We even once had a bald eagle devour its prey in some overhead branches, showering us with what I believe were pigeon feathers. There amidst the children, I experienced the "mystique of intercourse with the universe," the joy, the awe and wonder, the beauty, which includes likewise those things we sometimes mistake for brutality.

It's only when modern humans are involved that brutality comes into it. The eagles and coyotes may kill, but when they do they are culling the weak, the aged, the sick, and unborn. Our human sadness is mitigated when we know that this ultimately strengthens the herd, helping to insure that the strongest genes survive and that suffering is minimized. They take only what they need for this day. Then the ravens and other scavengers ensure that nothing of those sacrificed lives is wasted. That bit of bone and fur was gone when returned to look for it a few moments later. 

Modern humans, however, shun the "easy prey," opting instead to hunt and kill the strong, weakening the herd, while often taking much more than they need. That is brutality. 

It is the brutality of a consumer society, one that attempts to exist outside the cycle of life.

One of our modern heirs to Krutch, Leopold, and Thoreau, is botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer who writes, "In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness."

That is what I witness when I'm with children in nature: fullness, gratitude, contentment. Our schools are products of a consumer society and as such the self-styled rationalists, the people who never enter the realm of the mystical, insist on the strictly "practical" -- ciphering and spelling and shaping proper letters. As Krutch puts it, things confined exclusively to that which is 'relevant to the child's daily life.'" This too is a brutality, a severance, one that leads inevitably to emptiness. The economy might need that, but human beings do not.

"Perhaps the mind is not merely a blank slate upon which anything may be written," writes Krutch. "Perhaps it reaches out spontaneously toward what can nourish either intelligence or imagination. Perhaps it is part of nature and, without being taught, shares nature's intentions.

"How could the part be greater than the whole? How can nature's meaning come wholly from man when is is only part of that meaning? . . . Only in nature do we have being." And the simple beauty is that all we need do to satisfy our emptiness is to open our doors, go outside, and allow ourselves to be awed.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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