Our Awesome Responsibility

The countries of France, New Zealand, Switzerland, Slovakia, Austria, Egypt, and the municipalities of Brussels and Quebec have defined animals as "sentient beings." This means that in those places animals are not property, but rather "legal persons." This designation allows humans to litigate on behalf of the legal rights of animals.

As a person who has known, intimately, several dogs and a couple cats, I can attest to their sentience and I have no problem with extending that recognition to the entire animal kingdom. That said, I "own" a dog, my wife and I have owned several, and it makes me wonder if in those places would my ownership, my property, be recognized.

Under US legal precedent there can be "no property in the body as such." As far as I know, this legal principle has only been applied to human bodies, but does the legal personhood of animals open the door to, say, making the farming of animals illegal? It's a classic slippery slope, but the truth is that human laws are always slippery slopes.

Property rights are widely considered to be "transferable rights to exclude all others from one or more use of a certain thing." In other words, if our bodies were considered property under law, if human bodies could be legally owned, then, by extension, slavery would be legal. Indeed, it was the recognition of Black people as "legal persons" (e.g., "sentient beings") that ended the cruel practice of slavery in the US. The fact that bodies are not property also means that our bodily rights are not transferable, which allows for the widespread illegality of prostitution. It likewise means that there are uses for which we can be legally forbidden to put our bodies, such as imbibing illegal drugs, committing suicide, or increasingly, having an abortion.

I'm going to assume that most people reading this are morally opposed to the notion of humans as property, but I wonder about my own body. Certainly, I own it, right? Legally, none of us own even our own bodies, although most of us believe we should have the "rights" of ownership over our own bodies. And indeed, many of us have signed legal documents that transfer our bodily rights to others under certain circumstances. My wife had power of attorney over her mother's property, including her body, during the final years of her life.

But that's different, right? Caring for others, be they elderly or children, isn't the same as ownership. But isn't it? So long as we stop short of abuse and neglect, those bodies legally "belong" to us. In this regard, those of us who care for others bear an awesome responsibility and we must remind ourselves, every day, that these bodies in our care, these legal persons, are not property.

From an Indigenous perspective, the original sin of colonizers was the concepts of property and ownership. Prior to their arrival, Native Americans considered themselves to be stewards or caretakers of land, animals, and plants rather than owners. The sin was in taking these living things, these legal persons, these sentient beings (and yes, there is a growing body of evidence that plants are sentient), and turning them into objects.

"You can't thingify anything without depersonalizing that something," wrote Martin Luther King, Jr. "If you use something as a means to an end, at that moment you make it a thing and you depersonalize it."

Philosopher Simone Weil defines "force" as anything that "turns anybody who is subjected into a thing."

We don't own our children, but we are responsible for them. We are their stewards and caretakers even as our world increasingly views them as things. Few admit it, but every for-profit education company thingifies children as a means to an end. Standardized testing likewise thingifies them, exploiting them as unpaid labor in test score coal mines. Indeed, much of what passes for "classroom management" or "punishment," to the degree that force or the threat of force is the fulcrum over which our levers work, objectifies children, turning them into something to be treated like property. Even when we turn them away from what they want to learn to focus instead upon what we want them to learn, we are, at one level, thingifying them. And if children object to any of this, if they assert their rights as legal persons or sentient beings, they are turned into things through force.

Our responsibility as stewards of children is an awesome one, made even more so as we consider these cultural forces toward objectification and commodification.

If I had my way, this passage from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet would be posted on every classroom or nursery wall:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

When we love them and let them play, we live up to our awesome responsibility.

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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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They Will Lose Their Ignorance and Innocence: It's Called Education

Awhile back I read the disgusting story of a police officer and his wife who were arrested for handcuffing and jailing his own three-year-old overnight, for two nights in a row, for the "crime" of soiling himself. Their defense is that it was their parental right.

Thankfully, Florida state law recognizes this as an actual crime. I suspect the parents, unless there is evidence of other abusive or neglectful behavior, will get off with a warning, perhaps a required parenting course, and maybe some sort of probationary period during which the appropriate state agency will keep tabs on them for a time. That's probably what's best for the whole family. Not only was that poor boy traumatized by his parents' actions, he likely feels responsible for getting his parents in trouble, the whole episode will remain with all of them for the rest of their lives, and, thinking rationally, it's probably best to allow them to deal with the natural consequences and move forward.

Of course, it's tempting, in anger, to want those parents punished more severely. How could anyone treat a young child like that? On the other hand, I'm confident there are others who feel that these officers were within their rights as parents and are outraged that the state would presume to step in to a "family matter." Indeed, these parents obviously felt that way. After all, as the father is quoted as saying, "it worked."

"Parent rights" stands at the center of much of the current controversy swirling around our public schools. The argument being used to ban books and speech is that parents have the right to protect their children's innocence about certain topics, especially with regard to gender, sexuality, and race. There are even some who don't want their child taught anything that smacks of social-emotional learning, sternly scolding that schools should stick to all-academics-all-the-time. And there are some who believe they have the right to jail their three-year-old.

My child is an adult now, but when she was young I also felt that, ultimately, my rights, as her parent, were paramount. I wasn't anti-vaccination, for instance, but I did ask our pediatrician lots of questions which resulted in delaying some and staggering others. I once had words with one of her teachers (firm but without involving his superiors) over what I saw as an inappropriate use of collective punishment. And in that same spirit I tried to respect the rights of other parents. When we invited another girl along on a family vacation, her father gave me long list of dos and don'ts as a condition of letting her join us, a list that contained many things I found ridiculous, but to which I nevertheless adhered. Although had one of those conditions been, say, to spank (or jail) her, I would have let him know that I wasn't going to do those things and let him be the one who told his daughter why she couldn't join us.

There is always a line. Jailing a three-year-old clearly crosses that line. When the line is crossed, the rest of us get to override the parents. The challenge is knowing where the line is drawn and we're not always going to agree on where that is, but let there be no doubt: there is a line beyond which parents lose their rights, even if they cross it in the privacy of their own home. We, as a society, through our institutions, get to decide when a parent has engaged in abuse or neglect. When that happens, the parents lose their rights.

The "parent rights" argument, as currently be used against our public schools, however, is an entirely different thing, although it's not new. Parents who exert their rights to "protect" their children from discussions of gender, sexuality, and race, are in a head-on collision with the rights of parents who see it as essential that their children be educated about those very things. On one side, parents say they are concerned that their white children, for instance, will be made to feel shame and guilt over discussions of our nation's history of slavery. They say that discussions of gender or sexuality will plant ideas in their children's heads, confuse them, and are an attack on their "innocence." On the other, parents are concerned that if these topics are excluded from classroom discussions, their child will grow up thinking there is something wrong with them unless they are white, straight, and identify with the gender assigned to them at birth. Our public schools are currently in the process of figuring out how to navigate this, just as the public at large is doing the same thing.

I was recently talking with my mother about her decision to put me on the bus when the courts ordered the desegregation of public schools in 1970. Most of my neighborhood friends, all white, were pulled from public schools and sent to segregated private schools, many of them citing their rights as parents. I recall a neighbor worrying that if her white child went to school with black children, he might grow up to marry one. Mom told me that she wanted her children to attend pubic schools because "you would be spending the rest of your life in public." She wanted us to learn how to live, work, and play in the real world. She was, and still is, a woman of morals and values, and she definitely wanted us to share them, she told us so, but she also knew that once we walked out the front door, we were in public where we would be not just be exposed to a diversity of people and ideas, but have to learn to share public life with them. When I heard things while in public, either from teachers, books, or other children, that unsettled my worldview, I would discuss them with my parents. They would tell me their views. I can't tell you how often Mom would start a sentence with, "Some people believe . . ." or "Some people don't think . . ." I'll never forget telling her about the Theory of Evolution, a scientific framework that continues to be vilified by many people. She said, "Well, I guess if that's the way God created the world, then who are we to say it's wrong?"

I'm old enough to remember when prayer was banned in school. Our teachers, from one day to the next, were no longer allowed to lead Christian prayers. This was, in part, a parent rights issue. Parents of non-Christian children didn't want their kids forced to pray Christian prayers. When this happened, my Christian mother told us that we could just say our own private prayers, shrugging, "Prayer isn't for showing off anyway. It's for talking with God."

My point is that when you send your child to public school, you don't lose your rights. No parents do. But at the same time, it's in the nature of "the public" to be diverse. Ideally, it's a place where individuals come together as a community that doesn't just make room for everyone, but is created by everyone. Within our own homes, within the confines of our chosen communities, we have the right to exclude people and ideas, but the very definition of "the public" in a democratic society means that our ability to exclude others is very limited. And as for lost "innocence," isn't that just another way of saying lost "ignorance?" 

I understand that in a diverse world, we all draw our lines in different places. In private, we have an almost unrestricted right to decide where those lines go, but the moment we step into the public, we are just one point of view in a world of points of view and it always means a loss of innocence. I'm often critical of public schools on this blog, and I remain so, but it was my experience in public schools combined with my relationship with my parents that taught me how to be myself in this diverse world, while at the same time allowing others to be themselves. My academic education may have been inferior, but my public education was unsurpassed.

Believe me, I understand parent rights. I value them. I strive to honor them. But unless you're prepared to be the jailor of your own child, they will lose their ignorance and innocence. It's called education.

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If we are going to provide our children with the kind of education they deserve while still respecting their rights, we must focus on creating a true give-and-take partnership with them, one that builds, rather than divides, community. If you're interested in learning more about creating a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For 20 years, I worked in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? Click this link to register and to learn more. This is a course that becomes even more powerful if the whole team does it together. Discounts are available for groups. Registration closes today at midnight, so now's your moment!

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!

"What are Your Goals for Your Child?"

I've asked thousands of parents the question, "What are your goals for your child?" It's something a lot of us ask at the beginning of a school years or when we are first getting to know a family. Far and away, the top answers are some version of, "I just want my child to be happy," or "I just want my child to love learning." These are the answers I expect, especially from first time parents. 

The good news is that their children already love learning, they were born that way, so no problem there. Our only job, and it's made far simpler by a play-based curriculum, is to do no harm.

Happiness is, of course, another matter. It's the only emotion that tends to disappear the moment you become aware of it. It's a tricky, personal, and ephemeral thing, something we spot in others, but when we ourselves are happy we daren't look directly at it. It's like those phantom movements in our peripheral vision that Icelanders say are the "hidden people," elves and fairies and whatnot, who flee when you turn their way. Because of this phenomenon, Aristotle asserted that the only way humans can ever know if they've lived a happy life is in hindsight, from the perspective of our death beds, looking back over it all. This, of course, doesn't mean that we ought not pursue happiness, only that we have to accept that the pursuit is the most important part of that project, which is, at bottom, what self-directed learning is all about: the pursuit of happiness.

So I have no problem assuring parents that their preschool goals will be met. Their children will continue to love learning because they will be free to pursue happiness within the context of a community. The problem is that we too often fail to understand that the love of learning and the pursuit of happiness must be ends unto themselves, not means to an end. It's when we attempt to wrangle these highest of goods into the service of some more prosaic result, like a grade or a score or a certificate or a job, that we begin to undermine the joy of learning, replacing it with the avoidance of corrective sticks. It's when we begin to make the pursuit of happiness into a hopeless chase after carrots that are always dangled just out of reach.

No wonder so many children wind up finding school to be a disappointment: it is the place where they are taught that learning is a chore and something like happiness must be found in the praise of adults.

"I just want my child to be happy." "I just want my child to love learning." Laudable goals, indeed, the highest. My goal for these parents is that they come to see that the only way to get there is to set their children free and to trust them to know what to do with their freedom.

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If you're interested in learning more about creating a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For 20 years, I worked in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? Click this link to register and to learn more. This is a course that becomes even more powerful if the whole team does it together. Discounts are available for groups.

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!

An Alternative to Assembly Line Education

The teacher . . . is not a machine which follows a certain syllabus, which has certain lessons to recite to the child, and too make him recite them back. She is a sensitive human being who works with her intellect, and loves her work. She is not helpless. She has faith in human nature and the child. She is calm and sure of herself, but not timid. She is not frightened or nervous or in doubt. She is armed with love and understanding.

Educator Maria Montessori wrote this over a century ago. She was part of a vanguard of philosophers, scientists, and innovators that included fellow pioneers such as John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Rudolph Steiner who were working during that era to understand what it means to treat children as fully formed, capable human beings, rather than as incomplete products to be manufactured along an education assembly line.

Tragically, this idea is still considered "alternative" despite over a century of science and experience supporting and expanding their work. Today our schools are more factory-like than ever, with children being subjected to standardized syllabuses handed down from on high and from which teachers mustn't deviate. Of course, the best of us do deviate, because we know, even as the curriculum writers do not, that children are fully-formed human beings. We deviate because we are sensitive humans who work with our intellect and love our work. We have faith in human nature and the child. This is what has made school at least tolerable for many, if not most, children.

Increasingly, however, policy-makers, largely ignorant of anything about children beyond the factory-model of schooling, seek to punish educators who do not mindlessly adhere to their manufacturing methods, methods that are explicitly inhuman, having been proven in commerce, but never in classrooms. In some places, educators are not even free to choose their own books, discuss scientific theory, or suggest that history is made of both greatness and horror. Some places we are even expected to set our intelligence aside and stick to scripts while being monitored and micro-managed. It would be one thing if these measures were based on scientific principles about how young humans learn, but instead, in many cases, they are being foisted upon school systems in the name of what "the parents" want.

Of course, this all makes it increasingly impossible for educators to love their work. We see this in action as more and more of us are opting out of this profession that we once loved. And for those who remain, it is becoming progressively more difficult to summon up the calm confidence that Montessori and others recognize as a central tenant of teaching.

I have never met a parent who did not want their child treated with love and understanding. I've never met a parent who wanted their child to be taught by a machine. But that is exactly what these education factory bosses are attempting to do to the lives of our children who have no choice about whether or not they will spend their days on these test score assembly lines. In fact, for many children, it is only their teacher's love and understanding that makes school tolerable. 

I've never met a parent who wants their child to suffer from anxiety and depression, yet that is exactly what is happening as even our youngest are expected to put their little noses to the grindstone.

I have been working with early childhood educators and with schools, both directly and indirectly, for over 20 years. We talk about children as fully-formed, capable human beings. We talk about their need to explore, discover, and think for themselves. We talk about the centrality of play to how we learn, especially in the early years. We talk about our faith in human nature. We talk about the importance of relying upon our own intellect and experience and meeting children where they are, rather than where some curriculum says they should be. And we always talk about love and understanding. We question and debate and think. Most of us are parents ourselves: this is what we want for our own children.

Sadly, despite the fact that educators and parents genuinely want the same thing for children, the politics around education has, in many cases, resulted in an almost adversarial relationship between early childhood educators and the parents of the children we teach. This is not good for us, the parents, or society, but it is particularly bad for the fully-formed, capable human beings we call children.

The longer I've done this, the more convinced I've become that if we are going to continue to do our jobs as sensitive human beings, with love and understanding, we are going to have to work to heal this unhealthy divide. Indeed, parents and early childhood educators are natural allies and if we can find a way to link arms, there is no power on earth that can stand in our way. And it starts, as it does with the children we teach, with our relationships.

This is why I developed my 6-week course entitled Partnering With Parents. I won't pretend that it is a panacea for all that ails us, but it is a way forward. Imagine what our world would be like if we could get educators and parents on the same page. Imagine a world in which both educators and parents knew that the best thing for children is love, understanding, and play. It can start with us.

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If you're interested in learning more about creating a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For 20 years, I worked in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? Click this link to register and to learn more. This is a course that becomes even more powerful if the whole team does it together. Discounts are available for groups.

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!

Communities of Mutual Concern

"We still had a blacksmith in our town in those days, if you can believe it." 

I was talking to the great grandfather of one of my students. Most of the time, the grandparents aren't much older than me, but here was a man 30 years my senior. I make a habit of talking to older people about their childhoods. I like seeing how they tend to light up. I learn about recent history through intimate stories, and I'm especially drawn to childhood memories. 

"My friends and I used to walk into town to watch him work. He opened his doors up wide to get some ventilation. They were like barn doors. There was a counter, then behind it was the fire and the anvil. We boys would stand in the doorway to watch. Sometimes he'd come out and talk to us. His arms were like this." He showed me with his hands, then chuckled, "At least one of them was. And he was always covered in soot and sweat. For a long time, I wanted to be a blacksmith when I grew up."

Another grandparent told me about how she used to go around to the back of a neighborhood ice cream parlor where the woman who worked there would secretly give her free samples and where they would often talk "about this and that. All kinds of things. She was like having a grown up sister."

John Holt wrote in his book Escape from Childhood: 

"Children need many more adult friends, people with whom they may have more easy relationships that they can easily move out of or away from whenever they need to or feel like it. Perhaps they found many of those in extended families, among various grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, and so on. Perhaps they found them living in smaller communities, villages, or towns, or neighborhoods in larger cities. But these communities, in which people have a sense of place and mutual concern, are more rare all the time, disappearing from country as well as city. The extended family has been scattered by the automobile an the airplane. There is not a way to bring it together so that children may live close to numbers of older people who will in some degree have an interest in them and care about them."

The scattering of our villages, through automobiles and airplanes, yes, but also through an economic system that demands more and more from adults during what are the typical child-rearing years, is something that concerns me a great deal. If caring for children is among the most important projects of any human civilization, and it is, then how can it be that we're tending to increasingly push children away from the center of life, cordoning them off in "schools?" If the pandemic has showed us anything, it's that the primary reason schools exist anymore is to get the kids out of their parents' hair so they can get to work. 

We know we all need the kinds of connectivity, the kinds of relationships of trust and kinship that can only be found in a community, village, town, or neighborhood, yet most of us start our days by sending the parents into one corner (work) and their children into another (school), one serving economic necessity while the other is left in a hothouse of like-aged children. On top of that, our automobiles and airplanes continue to scatter our small nuclear families far and wide, leaving the rest of our villages -- grandparents, aunts, uncles, and the like -- far away, only accessible by appointment. There are no longer opportunities to stand in the blacksmith's doorway or learn about life from an ice cream scooper. 

This was always my vision for the Woodland Park Cooperative School, a place where families could convene, where both children and adults could forge friendships with one another. Over the years, when I've written here about our preschool, I've focused mostly on the children, avoiding using photographs that show too many adults, but I'm showing a distorted picture of how our community really works. Visitors who see us up close and in person have always remarked on the number of adults around the place. At any given moment children might be playing with one another, but there are others "playing" with adults: cheek to cheek in the garden, tasting the cilantro blossoms from a plant that's gone to seed; working together to get a snack on the table; wondering together about where that jet in the sky is headed. These are often real friendships by anyone's definition of the word, easy relationships formed for a day, a week, or a year. There are always some children who feel so connected to "Paul's mommy" that they ask for her when they arrive. There is disappointment when "Sarah's daddy" isn't there that day and joy at being reunited when "Kisha's grandma" is there.

We know there is something broken in society. We want to blame the press, social media, video games, politics, or declining morals. We all know we are divided, that we are lacking connection and community, even as it continues its long, slow disappearance over decades. We too often believe, I think, that this break up of villages is the effect of some greater cause, but I find myself wondering if it's the other way around. Maybe it was our choice, as a culture, to scatter ourselves that came first. But whatever the case, I think it's clear that a return to the village, in whatever contemporary form, is the balm and cure we need.

I have seen that our preschools can, at least in part, serve the role of community based on mutual concern. That, at least, is much of the thinking behind my course, The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents (see below). We can't all be cooperative schools, but we do stand in a unique position to bring children, parents, and even grandparents together by placing our children at the center of our lives. As John Holt points out, children need this, but it doesn't take much reflection to realize we all do. Children, families, and educators: I can think of no better foundation upon which to build our future villages.

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If you're interested in learning more about creating a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For 20 years, I worked in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? Click this link to register and to learn more. This is a course that becomes even more powerful if the whole team does it together. Discounts are available for groups.

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!

With Parents as Our Allies

By nature, I consider myself an introvert, so when our daughter was born, I happily stepped into the role of stay-at-home parent. Of course, I looked forward to the "parenting" part, but I equally, and a bit secretly, embraced the "stay-at-home" aspect of the job title. As I held my newborn, I imagined our cozy life, snuggling, puttering around the house, eating snacks, reading storybooks, and playing in the garden. My homebody self imagined a kind of utopia effectively walled-off from the rest of the world where my wife, the extravert, would go off into the world to slay the dragons, while the two of us nested, unmolested, at least for a time, by the stresses of being out in the world.

And it was something like that at first, but among her first sentences were, "Let's go somewhere" and "Let's do something," a clear indication that she was her mother's daughter. I took this to mean that she was asking me for preschool, but when I ran the idea by my wife, she said, "No. She has a stay-at-home parent. Why would we send her off to be raised by strangers if we don't have to?" She had a point, but just in case, I ran the idea of preschool by my mother, who said, "Why would you do that? She has you. Besides, once their gone they're gone. Keep her at home as long as you can." Another compelling argument, but I there was still my mother-in-law, but she too gave it a thumbs down and no wise person defies the three most important women in their life, so it was on me, the introvert, to cobble together the social life our 18-month-old clearly craved.

This primarily involved going to lots of neighborhood playgrounds and other places where young children gathered. One day, I got to chatting with the mother of a son who was only a little older, and I shared my story. She said, "I know how you feel. I'm a stay-at-home parent, but we've enrolled in a cooperative preschool two mornings a week." It turned out that instead of dropping him off, she attended preschool with him. That's all I needed to hear. When I ran this idea by my triumvirate of beloved women, they approved, just so long as we both went.

And so I discovered cooperative schools, places where the families own the school and serve as assistant teachers. For the next three years, we went to school together, and where I got to work alongside a master teacher by the name of Chris David. When it came time for our daughter to move onto kindergarten, Chris urged me to consider staying behind and become a cooperative preschool teacher, and that's when Teacher Tom was born and where I've been for the better part of the past two decades.

Every preschool becomes a community of children, but a cooperative, in a very real sense, becomes a kind of "village" organized around the all-important project of raising children, including parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and caretakers brought together in the context of community. It reminds me as much as anything in the modern world possibly can of the neighborhood in which I grew up, a place where parents sent their children outside to play, confident that they would create their own social lives simply by living amongst the people, both old and young, that we found there. The kind of place where we learn to teach, care for, support, and love all the children, and to, in turn, trust the other adults in that role with our own children. It's not an accident that the parents at Woodland Park are refer to it as "the community" more often than as a school.

As a teacher, I might have valued my cooperative community more than I did as a parent. At any given moment there were 5-10 of these "amateur" teachers with me, bound together by a culture of learning and care that we were creating together day-after-day. I cannot imagine doing this preschool thing any other way, surrounded by parents who are my colleagues, supporters, and allies: a village raising children.

This isn't the experience of most educators. Indeed, too often parents show up in preschool settings as adversaries instead of allies. They show up as "customers" and critics, mettlesome dilettantes, and people whose phone message, "We need to talk," sends our hearts into our throats. Others come off as disinterested and dismissive. This is not how it should be. Parents and educators are natural allies in that we all want what is best for the children, yet we too often find ourselves feeling that parents, at least some of the parents, are in the way or behaving in ways that undermine our good work. They challenge us about such bedrock things like play-based education, discipline, risky play, mess, and a host of other aspects of our professional work, often demanding we do things that we know are not in the best interest of children.

For the past 20 years, I've been working in a place that puts this tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. I'm proud to announce that I've assembled what I've learned into a 6-part course called Partnering With Parents in which I share my best thinking on how to make allies of the parents of the children we teach. (Click this link to learn more.)

Most of us don't live in the kind of villages envisioned by the proverb, but that doesn't mean our children don't need them. We may never again be free to send our children out into the neighborhood to play, but we can do the next best thing by making our preschools into places not just for children, but for families. This is how we make the villages our children need. 

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It takes a village to raise a child. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For 20 years, I worked in a place that put the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. I've assembled what I've learned into a 6-part called Partnering With Parents in which I share my best thinking on how educators can and should make allies of the parents of the children we teach. The 2024 cohort for this course begins next week. Click this link to register and to learn more. Discounts are available for groups.

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!

Election Day

It's Election Day here in the US. 

It should be a national holiday, although not necessarily to give every working person the time and space to go to the polling place to cast their ballot. Early and mail in voting has given most of us the flexibility to vote from home on our own schedule. It should be a holiday because it's a day to celebrate.

When I was in college, one of my summer jobs was working for the Oregon State Public Interest Group (OSPIRG), a consumer rights organization founded by the political activist Ralph Nader. We were paid minimum wage (which was under $4 at the time) to go door-to-door, canvassing for donations and memberships. We travelled around the central part of the state and I found myself knocking on the doors of all shapes and flavors of my fellow Americans. If you know anything about the Reagan era and/or Ralph Nader, you might think that I tended to do better with so-call "liberals," and I did, but I signed up plenty of "conservatives" as well. Most of my conversations on people's doorsteps were civil, friendly even. Our big initiative at the time was passing what we called "The Lemon Law," meaning that if the new car you bought had to be repaired more than a certain number of times (I think it was three) in the first year it could be labeled a "lemon" and the buyer was due a full refund. Everyone liked that idea.

This period of my life greatly shaped my political values. This is when I learned that democracy was neither easy nor tidy, and, to be honest, no one has ever suggested it should be. I learned that very few of us are purely dogmatic in our ideas, values, and beliefs; there are always, if you get curious, nuances. This is when I learned that most of us are frustrated with the flaws in our political system, wish we had "better" choices, and hope that we can somehow get to a place of peace and prosperity. I learned that when it comes to community (and also, interestingly, persuading strangers to part with their money) listening is far more important than opining. 

Every now and then, I was invited in for a sit and a deeper conversation. This put a crimp in my productivity, but I never declined. At a ranch house outside of Bend, Oregon, I ate sponge cake and drank tea with a tough-as-nails widow who told me I was the same age, and "just as misguided," as her beloved son. I left with her signature on my $1 donation list and a promise that she would pray for me. In Coos Bay, an aging hippie musician whose claim to fame was that he had played with Country Joe and the Fish, gave me a tumbler of straight rye whiskey, then called his wife in to perform a set of original songs. I left, quite tipsy and done for the day, with $30 (the price of membership for the couple) and his new CD full of pro-union songs.

One of the most significant changes since the early 80's when it comes to politics is the advent of the internet. The ability to find like-minded people, no matter how few or far between, is both a blessing and a curse. Of course, it's wonderful for connecting and organizing marginalized groups, but at the same time, it also traps too many of us inside self-contained bubbles, targets for misinformation, and rarely interacting with those outside. Humans have always had a tendency toward tribalism, and the internet has accelerated that to the point that far too many of us see our neighbors, our actual neighbors, the people who live next door to us, as enemies. 

This is the real tragedy of this era. We may disagree with our neighbors, but we can't allow ourselves to see them as enemies. We fight enemies. We create community with neighbors, even if we disagree with them. And creating community, like any form of self-governance, is messy and difficult. That doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. It doesn't mean we can stop listening. Indeed, listening is the superpower that allows even the least among us to change the world.

My time working for OSPIRG was impactful, but even more so was my two decades working in the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool. For those who are unfamiliar, a cooperative school is one that is owned and operated by the parents who enroll their children. This means that the parent community is responsible for everything that goes into making a school operate, from the administrative to the janitorial. The parents even worked with me as assistant teachers. Whenever there were important decisions to be made or challenges to be addressed, it required all of us, as equal owners, talking and listening. We gathered together at least once a month, often more, to hash things out. It was often emotional, messy, and fraught. Every now and then, someone would storm off, but for the most part, we just kept talking and listening, talking and listening, talking and listening. This is what self-governance looks like.

I'm aware that we live in divided times and I'm not above getting sucked into it. I've done plenty of ranting (sometimes even here on the blog) over this or that plan, policy, or pronouncement. But the reason that this is a day for celebration is that despite its messiness and difficulty, despite the fear and anxiety, this is a day upon which we attempt, yet again, the outrageous experiment in self-governance. 

Yes, there are bad actors in this process, people who lie, manipulate, and propagandize. Yes, it would be tidier and "easier" if we just had a strongman dictator to get those damned trains running on time. Yes, the internet has divided us up into warring tribes. And yes, this time, like every time we go to the voting booth, might be the last time, but so far, no matter how messy and difficult, we've come through.

But today is a holiday for me because it is the only day truly devoted to the collective us. When the dust settles, we will have winners and losers, but today we are striving, one vote at a time, to figure out this historically brave experiment in self-governance. 

In many ways, this is why I work with children the way I do. I want them, even as young as two and three, to experience what it means to take part in the talking and listening that characterizes any strong community. It's why I have always had an open door for parents and siblings and friends and others to join us. It's why I insist that the children make their own, not rules, but agreements with one another. It's why I strive to not command children like a dictator, but rather offer informational statements, statements of fact, that allow them to think for themselves. It's why I want them to know that it is not just their right, but their responsibility to question authority and speak up about their opinions and beliefs. And it's why I value listening even more than talking. This is the promise of community and, in a larger sense, democracy.

We're going through a tough time right now as a nation. My wife and I have a joke that we tell one another whenever the going gets rough: "This is the critical phase." It always makes us laugh because it's always true. Life with the other people is always messy and difficult. It's always a tough time. As the 17th century philosopher, physicists, and inventor Blaise Pascal wrote, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." Indeed.

Election Day is the day we celebrate the blessing and the curse that none of us can sit quietly in a room alone. It is a celebration of the messy and difficulty, of the outrageous, pie-in-the-sky proposal that we the people can govern ourselves.

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Our preschools can be models of what it means to be self-governing, especially when we expand our idea of our community of children to include their families. If you're interested in learning about what you can do, right now, to create a learning village that parents not just support, but help create, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For the over 20 years, I've worked in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? Click this link to register and to learn more. Discounts are available for groups.

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!

Changing the World One Preschool at a Time

Polar bear cubs stay with their mothers until they're two and half years old. Dolphin calves need maternal care for 2-3 years. Orangutan infants continue nursing for six years, the longest period of dependence of any species other than humans.

For us, this period during which our survival depends on care and attention from adults is, at minimum 10 years, although in modern society we set the legal age at 18, and for many of us, it extends even longer. 

Some scientists theorize that this is because our species has so much to learn in order to function, but I'm suspicious of that. One of our great prejudices is that we are somehow more intelligent, or that human social life is so much more complex than other species. The more I learn about other species, however -- not just mammals, but reptiles, birds, mollusks, and even plants -- the more I'm convinced that there is no hierarchy when it comes to intelligence or social complexity.

Another theory is that we have a longer period of dependence because we have longer lives: the process of growing up is just stretched out proportionally because we're going to, on average, live seven or eight decades. And it's true that, say, orangutans tend to only live to be 50, but elephants have a similar lifespan to humans and their young only have a 2-3 year period of dependence. There are several species that live for hundreds of years (whales, sharks, clams) with much shorter childhoods, while there are many more that can live for thousands of years (trees, sponges, fungi) with no childhood to speak of. There's even a jellyfish that is biologically immortal, reverting to its polyp state once it reproduces in order to do it all over again. Most of the longest lived species actually have no apparent period of dependence.

Our own period of dependence hasn't always been as long as we make it today. Our daughter was bat mitzvahed at 13, which is the traditional Jewish age of adulthood. Indeed, throughout traditional cultures, 12 or 13 is a common marker between childhood and adulthood, although few of us would think it wise to really stick to that in our modern world. There's no reason that children this age wouldn't be capable of functioning as adults, except for the fact that modern human culture is simply too dangerous to leave them on their own. There are just too many broken adults who want to prey on them. Other species don't have to worry about the predator from within. 

On the other hand, looked at another way, in other long-lived social species, like elephants, whales, and orangutans, one could argue that the period of dependence is never over. They rally to one another's aid throughout their lives. They protect, feed, and care for one another, not because they are parents, but because it's the most important thing their species does: care for one another.

I'm going to assert (without complete knowledge) that humans are the only social species that has forgotten that. As psychologist and researcher Alison Gopnik says, caring for the young is the principle purpose of every civilization. I would extend that to all people, not just the young. And with humans, as with other species, even those with relatively short lifespans, the responsibility is too much for one or two adults. It truly does, as the African proverb has it, "take a village to raise a child."

Over the past couple of centuries, humans, and especially those of us living in Eurocentric cultures have moved young children farther and farther from the center of society, until we today find them growing up in virtual isolation from the rest of the world. From a young age, we wall them off into "pink collar ghettos" to spend their days in crowds of like-aged colleagues in the care of professional caretakers and educators. And because most people outside those walls have little or no regular interaction with young people, their needs are rarely considered. Indeed, young children are forbidden or frowned upon in much of the modern world. As a corrective for this, I've always been an advocate for "place based learning," which means taking children out into their world: walking the neighborhood, visiting local businesses and institutions, traveling around by bus and other forms of mass transit.

I'm always struck by how work-a-day adults react to finding children in their lives. Make no mistake, many are delighted to suddenly find themselves, say, surrounded by excited four-year-olds on their morning commute. But many more move away. They draw their shoulders to their ears and scowl in judgement. These children, these young humans, these fellow humans, are viewed as loud, disgusting, ignorant intruders.

I can't help but compare this situation to that of other "outsider" populations who have historically been ghettoized. They have a right to exist, just not where I am. Am I exaggerating? Maybe a little, but it's something we need to think about. When we isolate children from society, we are likewise isolating society from children, which means we are robbing ourselves of the caring-and-being-cared-for give-and-take that characterizes every other long-lived animal culture. I can think of no better explanation for the breakdown of our "village." I can think of no better explanation for the intensity of our political divisions, for school shootings, for our mental health crisis, for the general rudeness and incivility that is making cynics of us all.

On one preschool field trip, we were transferring onto Seattle's Link Light Rail at the Westlake station in the heart of downtown, a place where children are rare during the workweek. As we entered the station, a man stood leaning against a wall smoking a cigarette. One of the kids said, loudly enough for the man to hear, "Look Teacher Tom, that man is making a bad choice!" The smoker stopped mid-puff, dropped his cigarette onto the pavement, and crushed it out with his heel, saying, "You're right. It is a bad choice." And then, when he noticed the kids were all now peering at the butt he'd dropped, he picked it up and tossed it in a trash can. Then the man said, "Thank you."

I've always known that being with young children makes me a better person, if only because I feel compelled to role model the behaviors that I want them to see as normal. I imagine that this man, in the presence of children, found it not just easier, but imperative to make "good choices."

Being in the company of young children tends to make adults more creative, more likely to try new things, more accepting of others, more playful, and less selfish. These are all things we could use more of in the world. This too is part of the power of the village.

We might not be able to change the world, but we can, today, begin changing it for the children in our care by opening the doors of our "ghettos." By both getting out there in the world and also by bringing others into our settings, especially their parents and extended families. Our world may never be the village we need, but our preschools can be exactly that, communities based on the knowledge of every other long-lived species: it takes a village. 

It might sound like a stretch, it might sound neigh impossible to engage the parents of the children we teach in this way, but not only do I know it's possible, I know it's the only antidote to cynicism. It takes a village to raise a child. It also takes children to raise a village. 

If this sounds like something you want to pursue more deeply, consider registering for my 6-week course, The Empowered Educator: Partnering with Parents (see below). Perhaps we can change the world on preschool at a time.

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If you're interested in learning about what you can do, right now, to create a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For the over 20 years, I've worked in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? Click this link to register and to learn more. Discounts are available for groups.

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!