A cooperative preschool is a school that is owned and operated by the parents who enroll their children. And I’m not talking about symbolic ownership, but actual legal ownership.
Typically, we would enroll 65 or so families each year, and they would become 65 equal owners of the school, with me, the teacher, being the only paid employee. Everything else that goes into running a school was done by the parents. Parents took on all the administrative work, they handled enrollment, gardening, repairs and maintenance, purchasing, food prep, field trip planning, photography, custodial tasks, and anything else that needed to be done.
When decisions needed to be made, it required the parent community to come together to discuss, debate, and, when consensus was impossible, to vote.
And as the only paid employee, I had, in a very real sense, 65 bosses. They hired me, they evaluated me, and they could, if they so desired, fire me.
Now, I imagine there are some of you educators out there thinking, “No way! I could never have 65 bosses!” I get it, but for me, it never felt that way.
You see, the part of being a cooperative that I came to value above all else, was that each family was required to provide me with an adult, one day a week, to serve as an assistant teacher. That’s right, one day a week, the parent or caregiver came to school with their child to serve under my supervision.
I often think the world would be a better place if more institutions or enterprises worked as cooperatives. I mean, the owners are also the customers and the employees. As customers, the motivation was to get your child a high quality preschool education at the lowest possible price. As employees, you wanted a satisfactory workplace. And as owners, you wanted a business that operated on sound financial principles.
But it was more than that. Every preschool becomes a community, but in a very real sense, a cooperative becomes a community of families, not unlike a tribe or village or neighborhood.
This is the kind of community humans have evolved to live in. For 99 percent of our existence we were hunter-gatherers living in communities of 20-200, closely-related individuals. It’s only been relatively recently that we’ve begun to aggregate ourselves into larger populations. Many of us have adapted, of course, but for many of us, and especially for young children, smaller communities like the one we created in our cooperative – or like those still found in some neighborhoods or churches or other affinity groups – are our most natural learning and living environments.
That’s my aspiration for this podcast: to become a kind of community for early childhood educators, parents, grandparents, and other caretakers of young children. And my hope is for it to be a community that takes play seriously!
Some of you may already know that I’m a married man. My wife and I have been together since 1984 – married since 1986. That’s nearly 40 years! So, you know, woo hoo! Our only child, Josephine, was born in 1996. When she was in kindergarten, I was talking with the head of her school about community. He said something that has stuck with me: “The sign of a healthy community is how quickly newcomers are brought into the center.”
We’ve all been part of – or tried to be part of – communities that seemed to resist our efforts to take part. Maybe there are too many rules – written and unwritten. Maybe the community is clique-y. Maybe there are divisions and divides that make it impossible to navigate. These are unhealthy communities. I’m hoping that the community that forms around this podcast can be the kind that brings newcomers immediately into its center.
That doesn’t mean that we all have to agree with one another. I mean, I have a few hard lines, like no violence, name-calling, or threats, but when it comes to young children, our adult roles, community, and what it means to be educated, I hope there will be room for everyone.
Another thing you might know about me is that my wife and I have produced global online early childhood education summits called – get ready for it – Teacher Tom’s Play Summit. A couple of years ago, I was interviewing an Ojibwe educator named Hopi Martin. He asked me to imagine a burning campfire around which people, including you, were sitting. If someone wanted to know more about that campfire, they could ask you to describe the fire. You might talk about the color, the intensity, the way the wood is stacked, what kind of wood you think it is, the smoke, the heat.
But that’s just the fire from your perspective. If this person really wants to understand that fire, they would have to ask the person sitting next to you to describe it, then the next person, then the next. They would have to do this all the way around the circle until, finally, they had learned about the fire from all perspectives. But even then, Hopi said, they wouldn’t have the full picture of that fire until they asked the birds in the trees . . . Until they asked the trees themselves . . . Until they asked the worms underground . . .
I love this metaphor because it makes it clear that there is always something more to learn because there is always another perspective to consider. It has allowed me to see that when someone disagrees with me, they aren’t my rival, but rather my teacher. Every time I can see the world from another perspective, my own perspective, my own ideas and knowledge get bigger.
In our preschool, this phenomenon came up every year around Easter when the children would debate the details of the Easter Bunny. Some thought the bunny laid eggs. Some thought chickens laid eggs and the bunny just painted them. Some thought the Easter Bunny was a normal sized bunny. Others thought it must be extra large. Some thought there were multiple Easter bunnies. Some thought the Easter Bunny was a girl . . . And, of course, there was always at least one Jewish child who insisted, “Your parents are lying to you!”
These debates could get intense – as debates about faith often do. Sometimes there was even yelling to the point that it sounded a lot like our adult political debates. And like our adult debates, at the end of the day, I don’t think anyone had changed their mind. In fact, most of them become even more convinced of their beliefs.
But that’s not the point. No one’s minds have changed, but what has changed is that now each child can look around and think, “I believe what I believe, but that friend believes something else.” “That friend believes bunnies lay eggs.” “That friend doesn’t believe in the Easter Bunny at all.” As individuals, none of us may have changed, but now, since we both shared and listened to all the perspectives, we have a bigger and more accurate picture of who we are as a community.
And then, the best part, is that the children do what we adults have forgotten how to do. Once the debate is over, they all go outside and get back to playing with each other within the context of this bigger idea of who we are.
I want Teacher Tom's Podcast to be like that campfire or those Easter Bunny debates, which is why most of the episodes will be about me stepping back and sharing the microphone with someone else.
I will be starting off by interviewing people I already know, people with interesting perspectives, people who I hope will help expand your perspective. But if there are people you want to hear from . . . Or people you think I’ll benefit from speaking with . . . Or topics you’re interested in hearing about . . . Shoot me an email (TeacherTomHobson@TeacherTomsWorld.com) and let me know.
Let’s grow our ideas together!
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Teacher Tom's Podcast is on the air! In these first three episodes I talk with Dr. Denisha Jones, "Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent, and founder of Free Range Kids Lenore Skenazy. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.
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