You Know . . . Like Life Itself

Awhile back, a friend texted me a word with a definition. It was a word I'd never heard before, one that applies, in particular, to early childhood education. It was a delicious, juicy word full of meaning and nuance. I fully intended to use it here on the blog, but now I can't find the message and, of course, I don't remember the word at all. It might have started with the letter "e".

I'll bet, however, that I'd recall it this morning had he spoken it to me instead of texting it, especially had it been part of a face-to-face interaction, used in a sentence, delivered with hand gestures. 

In human development, gesture known to precede language. For instance, long before a baby can talk, they have already learned to, say, point at an object, to which the loving adults in their lives respond by naming the object. They point at a dog and we say, "That's a doggie!" Those who study these things say that when we do this, we greatly increase the likelihood that this word will enter the child's vocabulary. 

Before the development of the Phoenician alphabet which was the first to assign specific sounds to specific symbols, there were hieroglyphics or pictograms. These were likewise used to convey and preserve information, but they weren't necessarily read in a linear fashion, nor did each symbol represent a sound as much as a complex of ideas. "Reading" pictograms is not an exact science, but rather a process of interpretation. One of the most famous poems in history is Wang Wei's "Deer Park," written in ancient Chinese pictograms some time in the 700s CE. This is one translation by Gary Snyder:

Empty mountains;

no one to be seen.

Yet -- hear --

human sounds and echoes.

Returning sunlight

enters the dark woods;

Again shining

on the free moss, above

But there are thousands of "translations" out there, some of which create entirely different meanings and moods and perspectives because each of the pictograms used in the poem have a multitude of ways to interpret them . . . You know, like life itself. 

Whereas our phonetic alphabet strives for concrete and narrow meanings, with as little room as possible for equivocation, this type of alphabet is more impressionistic and holistic, allowing room for interpretation, or, if you will, perspective. Pictograms convey a fuller sense of how things feel and move, opening things up where our alphabet is an attempt to lock things down. The Phoenicians were great traders and commerce was boosted by the precision of their invention, but the adoption of it for everyday uses, eventually killed off these older ways of writing.

When I consider human gesture, especially hand gestures, I like to think I'm getting a glimpse into the minds of pre-phonetic alphabet humans and they look a lot like the minds of our pre-literate children. Gesture is also impressionistic and holistic. When we say the word "water," for instance, we convey the thing itself, but when we accompany that word with a hand gesture -- making waves, for instance -- we evoke the thing itself more fully. When a baby points, we often interpret that as "What is that?" but we know, that a point may simultaneously mean, "Look at that!" and "I see that," and "I want that," and "Why is that?" and "I'm delighted by that!" and "I'm in the world with that," and, really, an infinite number of things that can't be put into words . . . You know, like life itself.

In her book The Extended Mind, science writer Annie Murphy Paul urges us to take gesture more seriously, that it's not just "hapless 'hand waving'," but rather a vital part of how we know and learn. Just as a baby's pointing comes before language, "people's newest and most advanced ideas often show up first in their gestures; moreover, individuals signal their readiness to learn when their gestures begin to diverge from their speech. In our single-minded focus on spoken language, however, we may miss the clues conveyed in the other mode. Research finds that even experienced teachers pick up on less than a third of the information contained in students' hand movements."

She goes on to write that this suggests "the startling notion that our hands 'know' what we're going to say before our conscious minds do, and in fact this if often the case. Gesture can mentally prime a word so that the right term comes to our lips. When people are prevented from gesturing, they talk less fluently; their speech becomes halting because their hands are no longer able to supply them with the next word, and the next. Not being able to gesture has other deleterious effects; without gesture to help our mental processes along, we remember less useful information, we solve problems less well, and we are less able to explain our thinking. Far from tagging along as speech's clumsy companion, gesture represents the leading edge of our thought."

Like hieroglyphics and pictograms, gesture encompasses so much more than mere words. I'm convinced that literacy as we narrowly define it, has made it impossible for most of us to fully appreciate the fuller, deeper communication that happens through gesture. In the process of learning one thing, we left another way of understanding our world, something wonderful, behind. But it still lives in our pre-literate children. Through them, we have access to this original way of being in the world, a way of being, in fact, that is shared by the rest of the animal, and perhaps plant, kingdom. I worry that in our current rush and crush to force literacy on children at younger and younger ages, we are not only robbing our children of seeing the world in this impressionistic and holistic way, but we are preventing ourselves from "remembering" that it is all too magnificent to be put into mere words . . . you know, like life itself.

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We live in a world of fear around allowing children even a modicum of risk in their play. If you're interested in providing the children in your life a summer of outdoor play (and beyond), please consider joining the 2024 cohort for my 6-week course Teacher Tom's Risky Play. In it this course, we will explore how we can, even in today's fearful world, offer children the kind of playfully risky childhood's they need and deserve. To learn more and to get on the waitlist, click here.

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 You Go Outside You'll Find that Today is a Day of Awe and Wonder

With each passing generation, we are spending less and less time outdoors. There was a time, not very long ago, that we all understood that we needed, every day, for many hours a day, to step out from under our ceilings, to be free of our walls, to escape from the straight lines imposed upon the world by humans, and bathe in the undulations and curves of the natural world.

At the same time, the world is demanding that we engage in more and more abstract thought. The gathering and hunting lifestyle for which we've evolved called for what those who study these things call "passive attention." As we move through nature (without our devices, of course), our attention is more easily brought into the present, where our thoughts tend to drift easily from object to object and from topic to topic in an effortless way. This makes perfect sense because our ancestors needed to remain aware of their surroundings: to become lost in thought while, say, in a jungle or savannah greatly increased the odds of becoming a predator's meal. Engaging in, say, mental mathematics meant missing out on those berries or nuts. In other words, Homo sapiens that were unable to allow their thoughts to attend to the sounds, scents, and sights of the world around them, to enter a state of what psychologists call "soft fascination", did not tend to survive long enough to procreate. In other words, except in certain, relatively rare circumstances, too much abstract through could be deadly.

This is why we tend to grow restless and increasingly distracted when we've spent too much time indoors. Multiple studies have shown the mental benefits of getting outdoors. Doctors in South Korea, the UK, and other places are prescribing "forest bathing" to their patients. A twenty-minute walk in a park has been shown to improve children's concentration and impulse control (both of which are required for engaging in abstract thought) as much as a dose of Ritalin.

Anyone who has spent time with young children have seen the effects of moving from indoors to outdoors. It's like pushing a mental reset button. And by now, everyone in our field, even those who continue to, misguidedly, impose academics on young children, should be well-aware of the mountains of data telling us to get children outdoors, preferably in natural spaces.

In my conversation with author and parent educator Maggie Dent on Teacher Tom's Podcast we discuss the current mental health crisis that is impacting even in our youngest citizens. She asserts that a big part, perhaps the most important part, of any cure must be getting our children playing in the natural world. In nature their play becomes more imaginative. It's while playing in nature that they most naturally practice being resilient, where they develop their fine and gross motor abilities, and where they most easily enter into what state of soft fascination which is what science journalist Annie Murphy Paul refers to as the brain's "default mode network."

But what stuck me most in my conversation with Maggie was her assertion that "nature offers awe and wonder."

Psychologist and author Dacher Keltner has studied awe and wonder. His bestseller is called AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and how it Can Transform Your Life. He tells us that the experience of awe is like pushing a reset button for the brain. It makes us more curious and more likely to rethink what we thought we already knew. When we find ourselves in the presence of something bigger than ourselves we become less self-centered and more inclined to feel connected to other people and the world, which is, at the end of the day, what stands at the core of mental health: connection.

And while I'm sure that it's possible, under just the right conditions, to experience awe while indoors, the most reliable source of awe is nature. Maggie tells the story of ducking under a tree with her grandson to escape a sudden rain storm and how he spent 45 minutes immersed in a self-directed, free-form study of "fronds." The word awe tends to evoke mighty mountains, vast oceans, and the night time sky, but it is also found in fronds and twigs and pebbles. It's located in birds and bees. It's there, just awaiting our passive fascination to be struck by it in the wind, the rain, and the clouds. Indeed, what is more awe-inspiring than an hour lying in the grass, eyes closed, just listening?

Today, June 20, 2024 is the summer solstice, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, the longest day of the year. It is an event that has awed us since at least the Neolithic era, but probably even predates that. Humans have expressed our awe in celebrations and monuments. Just because science has explained it, doesn't mean it isn't any less awe-inspiring today, although most modern humans will spend this day, this day of days, indoors, completely unaware of this magnificent, brain-enhancing thing. No wonder so many of us, including our children, feel so disconnected.

The solstice officially occurs at 1:50 p.m. PST. I plan to be outdoors at that very moment. Perhaps you'll join me.

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Another thing Maggie and I discuss is the vital importance of risky play to the development of young minds and bodies. Nature is not only the source of awe, but also offers many of the "just right" risk taking opportunities they need to develop into curious, resilient, and courageous humans. Sadly, as Maggie points out, we live in a world of fear around allowing children even a modicum of risk in their play. If you are interested in providing the children in your life a summer of outdoor play (and beyond), please consider joining the 2024 cohort for my 6-week course Teacher Tom's Risky Play. In it this course, we will explore how we can, even in today's fearful world, offer children the kind of playfully risky childhood's they need and deserve. To learn more and to get on the waitlist, click here.

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!

"Disrespectful" and "Destructive" Children

Not long ago, I was tagged in a Facebook thread of teachers complaining about the behavior of their students. I only spent a few minutes scrolling through the comments, but most of them seemed to be coming from middle school teachers in public schools who were accusing the kids of being disrespectful and destructive. Some even provided photographic evidence of vandalism and general disregard for property.

"Uncaring" and "disconnected" parents seemed to be receiving most of the blame with the Covid pandemic coming in a close and intertwined second. Unaddressed mental health challenges were mentioned as a cause as was our namby-pamby society in which adults are no longer allowed to hit children to "teach them respect." In fairness, there were a few commenters who pointed their fingers at modern schooling itself, but they were few and far between. A huge percentage of these teachers asserted that they were quitting their jobs as soon as possible.

I clicked away after a minute or two, however, in part because I've been trying to remain conscious of my online scrolling behavior, but mostly because my personal focus is preschool-aged children, not middle schoolers.

In my conversation with author, educator, and parenting and resilience specialist Maggie Dent for Teacher Tom's Podcast she made the off-hand comment, "Teenagers are preschoolers on steroids." She not called the "queen of common sense" for nothing!

In preschool, we say that behavior is communication. If a preschooler behaves disrespectfully or destructively we would immediately assume that they were trying to tell us that they're sad, afraid, confused, overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, or otherwise dysregulated, and it's our job, as the adults, to try to figure out what it is they are telling us. Their family life might well have something to do with it. For instance, it's quite common for a formerly single child to engage in selfish behavior while adjusting to a new baby at home. Maybe someone in the family has lost their job. Maybe there are marital problems. These kinds of things impact teenagers as well. 

In my experience, most troubling behaviors have their roots in something going on at home, but it would never occur to me as a preschool teacher to blame parents. 

When I think of the behavior of these young teenagers, most of whom are at an age that traditional cultures consider to be adults, I wonder if maybe they're the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. These teachers seemed to be insisting that this kind of behavior is relatively new, that it didn't used to be this way. These teachers seem to be reporting from all corners of the country. Now, granted, this Facebook thread, like all gripe-fests, is a self-selected group which is not inclusive of those who are not experiencing challenging behaviors or who feel on top of things, but this isn't the first time I've heard about rising disrespect and destructiveness. 

Maybe these children's behavior is the tip of a much larger iceberg. Maybe the disrespect and destructiveness isn't isolated to middle school classrooms. Indeed, it's quite clear that it isn't. Some days it feels as if the entire world is behaving like these middle schoolers.

Young children who behave disrespectfully, I've found, are the children who are treated disrespectfully by the adults in their lives. Young children who behave destructively, I've found, are the children who feel they have little choice in their lives, who feel trapped or caged or otherwise un-free to engage the world in personally meaningful ways.

One of the reasons I strive to stop scrolling is because too much of what I find there is disrespect, destruction and finger-pointing. It's not just middle schoolers, it's all of us. Perhaps not you or me, but our behavior as a culture is communicating, and what I hear it saying is "I am human, too!"

What I've found with preschoolers is that disrespect and destructiveness tends to disappear when I stop trying to control them and instead make the effort to listen to what their behavior is communicating. Often, all it takes is that, listening. When I listen, I understand that these children are only asking for the same thing all of us are asking for: to be allowed to pursue a life of meaning and purpose in a reasonably safe environment of respect. When we don't get that, we often respond with disrespect and destruction.

When I listen to young children, more often than not, I hear myself, and that is where understanding begins.

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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 It's Something Worth Knowing, It Will Go Viral

I don't know where the pogo sticks came from, but two appeared on day on the playground. I imagine that we had benefited from someone's garage or cellar purge. When I first spied them, I tried one out, something I've done a handful of times in my life. I didn't succeed in achieving a single bounce, although there have been times in my life when I've managed as many as a half dozen. 

I wondered if the children would even know what they were, but one of the cardinal rules of young children in groups is that if one child knows something, they all know it. So all it took was for one child to say, "It's a pogo stick," then explain how they had seen one work and the knowledge went viral.

The One Laptop Per Child organization demonstrated this phenomenon back in 2012 when they left boxes of tablet computers in remote Ethopian villages. Within four minutes, illiterate children had figured out, together, how to power them up. Within days, they were customizing their desktops. Within weeks, they were using the installed apps and singing along to videos. Within five months, they were hacking the Android software. All without instructions or teachers. This is how learning through play works and why few things impede learning more than the "keep your eyes on your own work" mentality the pervades standard schools: it makes children dependent upon the adults rather than one another, which is the most natural way for humans to learn new things.

Pogo sticks may or may not be more complex things to learn than those tablets, or maybe there are just more distractions on our playground in Seattle than in an Ethiopian village, but for several days, the kids, despite understanding the concept, still had not succeeded in even a single bounce. Then one day, a couple girls determined that they were going to figure it out. They knew they couldn't get started bouncing on their own, so they tried working together, with one holding the pogo stick upright for the other, but the weight was too much. They tried leaning the pogo stick against the wall of the playhouse to keep it upright as they climbed on, but this too failed. They tried rallying more children to help hold it upright, but then it was too crowded for anyone to climb on. They considered the mental experiment of digging a hole into which the pogo stick could be "planted," but recognized that it would be impossible to bounce properly in a hole.

"Maybe you could use this," suggested a boy, offering a length of rope. After considering it, the girls decided it was worth a try. I couldn't imagine how they would manage it, but that's not my job, so I moved along to loiter with intent elsewhere. When I later returned to the pogo stick experiments, they had tied one end of the rope to the top of the playhouse and another around the trunk of a lilac at the top of our concrete slide, with the pogo stick dangling, upright, in the middle. As one girl steadied the rope, another climbed onto the pogo stick and, Holy cow! She bounced four or five times before toppling over. 

By the end of the day, several of the children had discovered pogo stick success, using this training device invented by children for children. It's incredible hubris when adults to assume that children need us to teach them things. What they need most from us is freedom, time, and other children with whom to collaborate while the adults loiter with intent. And if it's something worth knowing, it will go viral.

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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 Story of Right Now

I was sitting on a table near the entry to our playground. It's a spot at the top of the hill that forms our outdoor space and serves as a nice perch from which to observe the entire playground. Usually, I try to just observe, to make a study of my fellow humans.

A two-year-old came up to look at me, perhaps to make a study of me, not smiling, not talking. I smiled at her, but echoed her own wordlessness. She then went to sit on a nearby flight of stairs. I began to tell her story aloud.

"C is sitting on the stairs."

She stood up. I said, "C is standing on the stairs." She sat down. I said, "C is sitting on the stairs." We did this for a few cycles. Soon, as always happens when we start narrating the stories around us, a couple of other kids wanted to also be protagonists in the story of right now.

"Y and S and C are sitting on the stairs."

"Y is standing up. S and C are still sitting."

"Now S and C are standing up."

"Now Y and S and C are all standing up. They are all smiling." The girls turned to one another, smiling.

We did this for awhile, with the girls delighting in the story they were making together. They began to lie down on the stairs. I said, "S is lying on the stairs. Y is lying on the stairs. C is lying on the stairs. All of the girls are lying on the stairs." They giggled together then stood up, then sat down, then lay down once more as I told their story. Others began to join us. Before long we were a story with a half dozen characters and almost as many observers.

Some of them starting running down the hill and back. Others began to sit or lie or stand in other places: on the ground, on the wheelbarrow handles, on a pile of wood chips. I told the story as I saw it unfolding, sticking as strictly as I could to observable facts, describing what their bodies were doing, using their names, and describing their expressions. They sometimes looked at me, but mostly they made studies of one another, their fellow humans.

The profession usually calls it "sportscasting" or "narrating," and I use those terms as well, but most of the time I just think of it as telling the story of the children as they create it. It's not my story or your story; it's our story, and it's the story of right now.

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I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast . . . In this episode, Dr. Denisha Jones, director of Defending the Early Years and I discuss how schools tend to kill curiosity and how play-centered learning in preschool is the anecdote for all children. As Denisha says, "Play serves diversity because there is no one way to be or learn . . . Play is the embodiment of learning and development coming together." To listen to our full conversation, click here for Teacher Tom's Podcast, or find us wherever you like to download podcasts.

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!

True, But Not Useful

My wife's former business partner was fond of an expression that I've adopted because it covers so many things in life: "That's true, but not useful." 

In his case, it referred to anything, no matter how insightful or interesting, that could not be practically applied to challenges and opportunities at hand. It was an effective way to move things along, which is important in a business where time is money and all that. That said, I'm not a businessperson and while I value efficiency when it comes to things that I'd rather not be doing (e.g., folding laundry) if this blog proves anything about me it's that I very much enjoy thinking about ideas, and often the more "useless" the better. I will warn you before you read any farther that what follows is as useless as it gets.

Case in point: I've recently been thinking about the challenge of defining play, which is an important topic for anyone researching this universal urge, but not particularly useful for those of us who simply need to know play when we see it. On a day-to-day basis, when pressed, I might define play using some version of "self-selected exploration, discovery, and invention." This is inadequate, however, for someone attempting to put together a proper study or experiment. 

Psychologist and evolutionary biologist Gordon Burghardt, in his book The Genesis of Animal Play, proposes that a behavior can be called play when it meets the following five conditions: it must be "nonfunctional"; purely voluntary; clearly unlike the animal's typical behaviors; involve repeated behaviors, with modifications; and can only take place when the animal is safe, well-fed, and healthy.

There is plenty to quibble with here, but one thing I find particularly useless, and therefore worthy of idle speculation is the distinction he makes between "exploration" (which is part of my own knee-jerk definition) and "play." In a nutshell, Burghardt asserts that exploration is asking the question, "What is this?" Play asks the question, "What can I do with this?"

How can you separate the two? I mean, after all, isn't the process of answering the question "What can I do with this?" also one of trial-and-error exploration?

That said, ever since I came across this distinction I've found it creeping into my own thinking about play. For instance, even if we stipulate that exploration isn't play, but rather a precursor to play, we cannot also conclude that exploration leads inevitably to play. Sometimes the exploration leads to pain (e.g., pricking your finger on a rose thorn) or fear (e.g., a growling dog), which generally puts the kibosh on any subsequent play, at least in that particular area of exploration. I've witnessed countless children walk away from the workbench upon encountering the business end of a hot glue gun.

Indeed, pain and fear as a result of exploration means that the "animal" is not, in that moment, feeling particularly healthy or safe, which in turn means, according to Burghardt's definition, that it cannot be play. 

But how does risky play fit into this? After all, wrestling (or play fighting) is often identified by researchers as the most universal form of play, yet pain and even fear are inevitable aspects of that particular play activity. In fact, part of the allure of play fighting, or climbing to great heights, or achieving great speeds, or getting lost, or using potentially dangerous tools is testing oneself against pain and fear, risking it. Some children a lot of the time and all children some of the time, experience feeling unhealthy and unsafe while continuing to play in risky ways.

And that brings me to another condition of Burghardt's definition: it must be voluntary. Is it significant that the pain and fear that exists right at the edge of so much of what we call play (including social-emotional play) is there with the full knowledge of the player? A child might not know in advance that falling on pavement is painful the first time they do it, but by the tenth time, certainly they know that scraped knees and elbows are aspects of, say, running in the parking lot. The first fall might simply be exploration, but the rest of the falls, even by Burghardt's definition, are play: play undertaken with fear perched on their shoulder. So, if I were allowed to tweek his definition, I'd say that play can happen under conditions of being unsafe or unhealthy, but only if the risky behavior is entered into voluntarily.

I also wonder if play must be defined through observable behavior, or movement. I get why someone studying play in animals would want to make movement a defining characteristic because, after all, it isn't possible for us to base science on speculations about another species' internal state. That's hard enough when trying to understand humans who can, at least to a certain extent, self-report their thoughts, feelings, and motivations using language. But as someone who enjoys playing with ideas, I know that it's possible to play without exhibiting movements or behaviors that could be considered playful. I can't be the only one who likes to sit and just let my mind wander. Just this morning, I sat on my front porch as the sun rose. It was nonfunctional, voluntary, unlike what I do throughout the rest of my day, and I was well-fed, safe, and felt as healthy as a 62-year-old man can feel, but my movements as seen from the perspective of an outsider amounted to little more than turning my head, breathing more deeply, and occasionally tipping my coffee cup to my lips. Nevertheless, I feel like I was playing. I might not have been asking the question, "What can I do with this?" but I was definitely playing with the question, "What is the meaning of this?" Is that play or something else?

I'm likewise not so certain about the word "nonfunctional." As Burghardt uses it, he means behavior that does not obviously serve the animal's need to survive or reproduce. But given that play has been part of animal existence for, literally, billions of years, evolutionary orthodoxy would identify it as essential for survival, if not reproduction, even if we aren't entirely sure of the why or how.

Where I seem to be landing in this completely self-indulgent and not useful blog post (I'll leave it to you to assess whether or not there's any truth in it), is that play is voluntary (although I prefer the term "self-selected") and it is unlike what we normally do. The rest is open to interpretation.

I warned you at the top that this post would not be useful, but now that you're here at the bottom, having joined me for a few minutes, I have a question for you: Is it possible to define play as anything we choose to do that is true, but not useful? 

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I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast . . . In this episode, Dr. Denisha Jones, director of Defending the Early Years and I discuss how schools tend to kill curiosity and how play-centered learning in preschool is the anecdote for all children. As Denisha says, "Play serves diversity because there is no one way to be or learn . . . Play is the embodiment of learning and development coming together." To listen to our full conversation, click here for Teacher Tom's Podcast, or find us wherever you like to download podcasts.

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 Allows Us to Direct Our Own Evolution

Ethologists are zoologists who study the behavior of animals in their natural habitat. They study orcas in the ocean, not Sea World. They study cheetahs on the savannah, not in the zoo. This makes sense. When we study animals in captivity most of what we learn is how that species responds to captivity. As writer and filmmaker Carol Black points out in her brilliant essay A Thousand Rivers, much of the data we collect on human learning has come from studies of children in schools, which is to say, children in captivity.

This question of "captivity" hangs over much, if not most, of the so-called science of learning. After all, virtually all of our children spend most of their lives in the captivity of schools. It's uncomfortable to think about, but it doesn't require a cynic to recognize that schools and prisons have a great deal in common. The inmates are under constant supervision by superiors who are empowered to punish them if they step too far out of line. Their daily schedules are proscribed. They spend most of their time indoors. They cannot leave or opt out or choose to do something other than what they're required to do.

We try to make ourselves feel better about it by telling ourselves the story that it's a benign captivity, one that is "for their own good," but there is no doubt that if left to their own devices, most of our children would choose to spend their time playing, preferably outdoors. In other words, they would choose the opposite of captivity, which is liberty. We all would.

From the perspective of ethology, the only way we will ever understand human learning is to study humans who are at liberty, which is to say, while at play.

There can be no doubt that this urge to play is an adaptive trait, one that is essential to human survival. As journalist David Toomey puts it in his new book Kingdom of Play:

At present, evolutionary biologists do not know that a master gene enabled and orchestrated play, much less which master gene. Neither do they know where or when play began. They have no map, no cladogram, depicting the evolution of all animal play. But they know that play has a history stretching back hundreds of millions of years, and that its roots, that hypothetical suite of master genes, may be older still. Play has endured the formation and reformation of continents, three ice ages, and two mass extinctions. So they — and we— can be certain of one aspect of play. Whatever its adaptive advantages, they are worth the trouble. Nature takes play seriously.

Since we have, for better or worse, chosen to raise our own young in captivity, if we are to likewise take play seriously, we are best served by turning to ethologists, who, as Toomey puts it, "believe that innovative play might be a means by which an animal gains a measure of control over its own evolution."

Evolution is generally thought about in terms of random genetic mutations and law of the jungle consequences, and that obviously still plays a significant role, but it seems that the existence of play allows us to consider evolution from a new perspective. Looked at this way, we see that evolution takes place as a process of living things playing with their environment. When they learn something from their play that enhances their life — e.g., makes it easier to get food, more likely to reproduce, or simply brings joy -- they then teach what they’ve learned to others through role modeling. Over time, natural selection favors those who are best able to take advantage of this learning, so they are the individuals whose genes are the ones that are more likely to be passed along to future generations. And those are the genes, whether or not we know exactly which ones they are, that favor play.

For anyone versed in classic evolutionary theory, this is a bit mind-blowing. After all, this means that animals, through play, are capable of liberating themselves from the forces of natural selection, and to at least some degree direct them. But this kind of liberty is not possible for an animal held in captivity.

Modern school thwarts play. Indeed it often punishes play. Schooling replaces our children's natural urge to direct their own learning through play with a curriculum that determines, in advance, what they will learn, how they will learn it, and according to what schedule. As Dr. Denisha Jones, director of Defending the Early Years, tells us in our conversation about "liberation pedagogy" on Teacher Tom's Podcast, "A system that determines what you will learn kills curiosity" and curiosity is the driving force behind play. And as Denisha tells us, "Play is freedom. Play is liberation."

In the early years, many of us strive to create programs that free children to play, to provide them with a natural habitat for learning. This means that we are in the vanguard of understanding human learning. We are the "ethologists" specializing in our own species because we are among the few who live amongst free humans. There is a societal tendency to pat us on the head and patronizingly praise us for doing "such important work," but what they mean, most of the time, is that they're glad we're willing to muck around amidst the pink eye, diaper changing, and temper tantrums, so they don't have to. But this is simply evidence of how little we, as a culture, understand about learning, and it explains why they're unwilling to listen to us when we tell them about play and liberation.

It's from this perspective that we can see that it's not just our children we keep in captivity, but also ourselves. We live in a world that doesn't understand play at all, that denigrates it, that commodifies it, that relegates it to recesses, weekends, and two-weeks of paid vacations.

When I'm with liberated children, however, I find myself, for a time at least, swimming with the orcas, running with the cheetahs, and playing with the children. I'm liberated. And I know that I am in my natural habitat. 

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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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The Only Course of Study Worth Pursuing

The problem I have with machine learning (what technologists have arrogantly labeled artificial intelligence, or AI) is that much of what it's attempting to do for me is take over processes like writing, researching, and making art, things that I choose to do for pleasure. As at least one wag on the internet has joked, I need AI that will do my laundry, windows and floors, so that I'll be freed up to write, research, and make art.

Machines are brilliant tools for doing mind-numbing, time-sucking projects like crunching large data sets or calculating with massive numbers. I'm going to assert that's what most of us want from machines. We want them to, without complaint or procrastination, handle the tedium and repetition so that we can get on with the stuff that makes us come alive. Educators worry about how their students are using AI in their school work. I would say that the very fact that mere machines can do the work they are assigning to kids, is more a critique of standard schooling than the kids, who are, after all, just using machines to do what they do best -- mind-numbing, time-sucking work.

Machines are designed to do our bidding, but human beings have evolved to their own bidding, their own thinking, their own learning.

Neuroscientist Patrick House writes, "Human infants have major learning advantages over robots as they age because they do not have to learn how to learn efficiently but come, in a sense, preprogrammed with all the rules needed to grow from a single cell into a denuded, smartly learning primate. You could call your lifetime of experience your age -- or you could call it your age plus three billion years." 

Theoretical physicist and philosopher Carlo Rovelli writes, "Scientific thinking makes good use of logical and mathematical rigidity." The same could be said about AI. "(B)ut this is only one of the two legs upon which its success has been built. The other is the creative liberty taken with conceptual structure, and this grows through analogy and recombination . . . An electromagnetic field is not a field of wheat; Einstein's slowing-down of time is not the one that we experience when bored; there is nobody pushing and pulling where Newton's forces act. But the analogies are manifest. Making an analogy involves taking an aspect of a concept and using it in another context, preserving something of its original meaning while letting something else go, in such a way that the resulting combination produces new and effective meaning. This is how the best science works . . . I think that this is also how the best art works. Science and art are about the continual reorganization of our conceptual space, of what we call meaning. What happens when we react to a work of art is not happening in the art object itself . . . it lies in the complexity of our brain, in the kaleidoscopic network of analogical relationships with which our neurons weave what we call meaning. We are involved, engaged . . ."

If educators really want children to "do their own work" we have to stop assigning them crap that mere machines can do, and probably do better at that. What our minds have evolved for over three billion years is to derive joy from creating "new and effective meaning," be that through art, science, or whatever. This is what play is all about. This is why children never tire of playing in varied and beautiful environments. Play is the urge to make connections, to discover, and to invent. Play is how we give ourselves purpose and life meaning. 

I was recently a speaker at a large education conference in Kazakhstan. The theme was AI. One morning I breakfasted with a fellow presenter who is a professor at a major US university. We began sharing stories about our respective undergraduate experiences and connected over how we had done our research in actual libraries with old-fashioned card catalogs. Today, research for most people is a sterile Google search, but this physical process of hunting for information in library stacks was a full-body experience. Just thinking about it, evokes the smell and sound of this kind of research. Sometimes the book you were looking for had been checked out, so you did the next best thing, which was to scan the shelves looking for something similar, something that you could connect to your pursuit. Often, after reading the specific article you'd sought out in a periodical, you would flip through the rest of the magazine, randomly accessing information that you didn't even know you wanted or needed. More often than not, this process, one completely divorced from the sort of mathematical and logical rigidity of machines, transformed my thinking about the topic I'd chosen to explore, sending me down avenues that at least felt like I was exploring something new under the sun. My heart would beat a little faster in these moments of creative liberty, of analogy, of recombination, as I created new and effective meaning.

The papers that resulted from this process might not have always received the highest grades. Of course, because I had done the research and constructed my own analogies, the work was nevertheless deeply and personally meaningful. A bad mark simply meant that the person doing the grading didn't get what I did. Even Einstein or Newton had their doubters at first.

Obviously, preschoolers aren't writing papers, but they are, as they play in varied and beautiful environments, researching in the real world, involved and engaged with their full bodies that house brains with three billion years of experience. They are engaged in the only course of study worth pursuing: the process of making the world personally meaningful. 

The rest I gladly leave to the machines.

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I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast . . . In this episode, Dr. Denisha Jones, director of Defending the Early Years and I discuss how schools tend to kill curiosity and how play-centered learning in preschool is the anecdote for all children. As Denisha says, "Play serves diversity because there is no one way to be or learn . . . Play is the embodiment of learning and development coming together." To listen to our full conversation, click here for Teacher Tom's Podcast, or find us wherever you like to download podcasts.

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!

Why Hazel Couldn't Sit Down for Circle Time

When we sat down for circle time, three-year-old Hazel didn't sit. Or rather, she would lower herself to her knees until she was moved to speak, whereupon she would leap to her feet and pace as she spoke. At first, some of the adults reacted to her like a distraction, urging her in whispers to "sit on her bottom." She would comply with a quizzical expression, but the moment it was her turn to talk, her body simply could not remain still.

One of the lessons of schooling is that children must learn to sit still. Indeed, this is one of the main things elementary schools want from preschools: children who are capable of sitting, eyes forward, listening. Quite often, this is the explicit reason parents give for holding their child back from kindergarten for an extra year: their child just isn't "ready" for all that stillness. 

Hazel was an important teacher for me. When we allowed her to pace, she was thoughtful and articulate, but on those rare occasions when we succeeded in getting her to remain seated, she simply couldn't participate beyond simple yes-or-no answers to direct questions, and even then her mind seemed like it was elsewhere.

A lot has been said about our brain's prefrontal cortex. This is the seat of our "executive function," which is the part of our brain that keeps our impulses (like popping to our feet) in check. It is also the part of the brain responsible for intellectual functions (like speaking articulately). I wasn't aware of this at the time, but obviously Hazel's prefrontal cortex was not up to simultaneously controlling her strong bodily impulse to pace while also sharing her ideas, opinions, and stories. Indeed, Hazel's urge to move was likely an important aspect of her intellectual process: she needed to move her body in order to think more clearly.

The school-ish myth that children must be still in order to concentrate is simply not supported by scientific evidence. In her book The Extended Mind, science journalist Annie Murphy Paul, writes, "(W)e believe there's something virtuous about controlling the impulse to move . . . What this attitude overlooks is that the capacity to regulate our attention and our behavior is a limited resource, and some of it is used up by suppressing the very natural urge to move."

Study and after study in recent years have clearly demonstrated that the human brain's capacity for thought is greatly enhanced by movement. "Parents and teachers often believe they have to get kids to stop moving around before they can focus and get down to work," says Paul, "(A) more constructive approach would be to allow kids to move around so that they can focus."

Like with most things that science "discovers," this is a truth that we've long known, and that our schools, in their abiding concern with control-over-learning, have straight-up ignored. By all accounts, the Ancient Greeks like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle did most of their teaching while strolling outdoors. Many of those we hold up as Western culture's greatest thinkers -- Einstein, Darwin, Woolf, Nietzsche, James -- were famous walkers. In her book Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit (a great thinker and walker in her own right) enthuses about the enhanced mental capacity of "the mind at three miles per hour." 

Embodied thinking isn't just for young children.

Paul writes about a study published in 2018: "(T)hey asked groups of volunteers to solve a set of math problems in their heads while staying still, while remaining relaxed "but without substantial movement," or while moving slightly in a rhythmic pattern. All the while, the participants' cognitive load -- how hard their brains were working -- was being measured . . . Subjects' cognitive load "considerably increased under the instruction 'not to move'" . . . Of the three conditions, the requirement to remain still produced the poorest performance on the math problems . . . "Sitting quietly," the researchers conclude, "is not necessarily the best condition for learning in school."

Or, I will assert, anywhere. My tendency to fidget in meetings used to embarrass me, but now I understand that when I bounce my leg or tap my fingers or play with my hair or doodle or repeatedly shift my weight, what I'm doing is enhancing my ability to concentrate. If it was socially acceptable, I would pace like Hazel.

At Woodland Park, we agreed to let Hazel pace during circle time. The control-freak caution that this would encourage all the other kids to imitate her proved partly true, but in a fascinating way. The main thing that bugged the other kids about her pacing was that she would often block their views. The kids decided that our circle time rug should have various zones. Up front, near me, was the "lying down zone." Next came the "sitting on bottoms zone," followed by the "knees zone," the "standing zone," and then, in the back, the "jumping up and down zone." It took a few days, but before long we had settled into a wonderfully active and intellectually profitable pattern, one quite suitable for the kind of embodied thinking that humans do best.

But, of course, in the very back there was a zone behind the jumpers for Hazel, who continued to pace, doing her best thinking at three miles per hour.

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I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast . . . In this episode, Dr. Denisha Jones, director of Defending the Early Years and I discuss how schools tend to kill curiosity and how play-centered learning in preschool is the anecdote for all children. As Denisha says, "Play serves diversity because there is no one way to be or learn . . . Play is the embodiment of learning and development coming together." To listen to our full conversation, click here for Teacher Tom's Podcast, or find us wherever you like to download podcasts.

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!