"I'll Bet You Won't Try That Again"

One of the best parts of growing up as I did, when I did, was that much of our childhood play took place beyond the reach and view of the adults. It's not that the adults weren't at hand, it's just that when the kids were playing outside, they did their adult things while we played in the neighborhood. This meant that there was very little prior restraint placed on our choices.

If we, say, wanted to try jumping off a shed roof or ride our brakeless red wagon willy-nilly down a hill, there was nothing but our own judgement to stop us. If we survived without significant injury, we got to try it again and again. If, however, things went poorly, our adults would tend to us, then be confident in saying, "I'll bet you won't try that again." And by-and-large we didn't.

What if we had been seriously injured, or even, heaven forbid killed? I don't know. It never happened. In fact, I don't recall any of the neighborhood kids suffering from anything worse than a broken bone or a few stitches. Maybe more terrible things happened to a kid two neighborhoods over, but we didn't have access to those grapevines. I imagine if we did, if say, our parents had heard about a local child becoming permanently paralyzed by a fall from a pine tree, we may have experienced prior restraint, "No climbing pine trees," but we were all "blissful" in our ignorance.

We don't live in that world any more, of course. Nearly everything in our children's lives is subject to prior restraint. There is always adult supervision and there are always rules about how fast, high, or far the kids can go. The grapevines have since invaded every nook of childhood, the fruit of which is the kind of catastrophic thinking that would have abhorred our parents as irresponsible and negligent.

But let's be honest, I'm quite certain that if our parents had known we were planning to jump from a shed roof (something I never, in fact, tried), they would have wisely put the kibosh on it. Likewise with careening downhill in wagons (something I did, in fact, do repeatedly). At a minimum they would have made us wear helmets . . . Had they existed.

And, indeed, the world has changed materially since then. I don't mean that there are more predators or that the laws of gravity have somehow shifted into a more dangerous phase -- the risks associated with those things, I expect, have stayed pretty constant over the decades. What has change are all those grapevines and their fearful fruit. We hear about every catastrophe, not just the local ones, and that has made us more anxious. But perhaps the most impactful things that have changed since the 1960's are that there is now a lot more traffic and that our neighbors are too often strangers who cannot be trusted in the impromptu project of responsible community supervision.

One of our few prior restraints was to avoid Macon Street. It was a "busy" street, the through street that connected all of our cul-de-sacs. By today's standards, it was a shady neighborhood promenade, but compared to the streets on which we played, everyone, even us kids, agreed it wasn't a safe place for us. And maybe because of this, we didn't know any of the families who lived on Macon, while we did know everyone on our own Wembley Street as well as Christopher which was the next cul-de-sac over, accessible to us kids by cutting through unfenced yards, thus avoiding Macon altogether.

In 1965, the leading causes of childhood death in the US were accidents like drowning or burns, followed by death by illnesses like influenza and pneumonia. Today, according to the CDC, the leading causes of childhood death are motor vehicles, followed by firearms. 

So yes, the world has changed, but not necessarily in the ways we often think.

Whatever the case, the result is that for today's children, every waking moment tends to involve prior restraint, enforced by ever-present adults.

As an educator, I can't change the world and its attitudes, but I can make a difference for the children in my care. 

I once taught a boy named Joseph who had a cannon for an arm. By that I mean, that he, as a three-year-old, was capable of throwing any object that could fit in his hand, on a line from one side of the playground to the other. And he loved to throw things: balls, rocks, blocks . . . You name it. He wasn't the first kid who enjoyed throwing, but he was the only preschooler I'd ever met who could throw with such velocity.

Naturally, Joseph's "genius" couldn't be tolerated in a crowded preschool setting. At the same time I felt incredibly guilty putting that prior restraint on something that he enjoyed and at which he excelled. Fortunately, we had access to a large, high-ceilinged room that we barely used for anything other than adult meetings and a bit of storage. One day, when Joseph was struggling with his urge to chuck stuff, I had the idea of designating this room as a kind of throwing range. I then provided him with a few tennis balls and turned it over to him.

He was in heaven.

There was some negotiating when other, less capable, kids wanted to try out the "throwing room," but Joseph himself devised a system whereby he waited until all the throwers were together, shoulder-to-shoulder, then, "One-two-three," they would throw together, all in the same direction, meaning no one was ever in harm's way. Like I said, genius.

It was a much better solution than the blanket prior restraint that children like Joseph so often face: "No throwing things." And it reminded me of the kind of agreements we kids made with one another when playing together unsupervised.

Similarly, when spontaneous wrestling disrupted things, instead of an adult-imposed, "No wrestling," we found a way to make it work without prior restraint, with the children themselves in charge of making it safe enough.

As anyone familiar with my work knows, we always began our school years with no prior restraints on the children because if we were going to have rules, I wanted the children, in the spirit of democracy, to make their own. So there were always restraints, but only those agreed upon by the children themselves, which is, again, in the spirit of how us neighborhood kids managed our own play off the radar of our adults.

I've been accused of wrapping my childhood memories in he sepia tones of nostalgia, making our freedom sound more perfect and complete than it actually was, and there is certainly some truth in that. It's what old men do. At the same time, that underlying freedom and autonomy is something I've always tried to make real for the children in my care and one of the ways to do that is to avoid, to the degree possible, prior restraint. 

And when things go wrong, as they sometimes do, to say with confidence, "I'll bet you won't try that again."

******

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!

It's Working

In the introduction to his book Humankind: a Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman writes: 

"If we believe most people can’t be trusted, that’s how we’ll treat each other, to everyone’s detriment. Few ideas have as much power to shape the world as our view of other people. Because ultimately, you get what you expect to get. If we want to tackle the greatest challenges of our times - from the climate crisis to our growing distrust of one another — then I think the place we need to start is our view of human nature."

If this sounds like magical thinking to you, that suggests to me that maybe you've not spent enough time with young children. I mean, sure, like all people, they can be unreasonable, impulsive, and frustrating, they make mistakes and harm other people, sometimes even intentionally, but they can be trusted.

Of course, they can't be trusted with secrets: they're far too honest for that.

They can't be trusted to brush their teeth or always recognize when they need to pee: they're far too grounded in the present moment to fret about the prospect of future cavities or to interrupt their play to go to the bathroom.

They can't be trusted to know or even care about their A-B-C's, 1-2-3's, or P's and Q's: they're far too curious about the actual world and the people they find there to attend too much to our adult-ish abstractions.

They can be trusted, however, to try too hard, to care too deeply, and to be unashamedly awkward. They can be trusted to be open about their enthusiasms, joys, sorrows, and fears with equal vigor. They may be selfish at times, but they can be trusted to not be intentionally mean. And when equipped with both the facts and the freedom to act on those facts, they can be trusted to opt for fairness and compassion.

That last assertion might strike some as more of that magical thinking, but having spent most of my adult life among children who I've sought to set free, I've seen it time after time.

When told they must give up their seat on the swings to another child, they can be trusted to grip the chains more tightly as they refuse to budge. But when informed that someone else is waiting for a turn, I've learned that they can always be trusted to give up their swing within minutes, if not seconds.

I've found that the less I command and the more I inform, the more I can trust young children with their own freedom.

The clinical symptoms of what professor and theorist George Gerber called "mean world syndrome" are cynicism, misanthropy and pessimism. This syndrome causes people to believe that they live in a world that is more violent a dangerous than it actually is and tends to afflict the people who consume the most media. It's what causes people to label trust in fellow humans as "magical thinking." As Gerber put it in his 1981 Congressional testimony, "Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simply, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures . . . They may accept and even welcome repression if it promotes to relieve their insecurities."

As we learn in preschool, when people feel less free, they are less inclined to be fair and compassionate. In other words, it becomes a vicious cycle: distrust leads to repression which leads to more distrust. You get what you expect to get.

Making us distrust one another is, of course, good for business, and clearly makes for successful politics, but as Bregman points out, it also makes it nearly impossible to solve any problem that demands collective action.

Spending more time watching television (or doom scrolling or partisan podcast listening or whatever) teaches us that people can't be trusted. Spending more time with actual people, like we do in preschool, teaches us just the opposite. Over the past year, I've made a conscious effort to stay away from the news and to limit my viewing, listening, and reading habits to things that celebrate fairness and compassion. But the biggest shift I've made is to spend as much time as possible with other adult people.

I got accused the other day of being "too trusting" and of "thinking the best of everyone."

It's working.

******

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 Stupidity of Thinking We Can One-Up Mother Nature

We often think of ourselves as being x years old, but that is only the age of the unique mind-body we call our "self." When considering the full miracle of existence, the fact that we are entities capable of the self-awareness to even consider such a calculation, it's more accurate, as neuroscientist Patrick House suggests, to consider that we are really our "age plus three billion years." 

Mother Nature has been growing her garden for a very long time and everything, including us, is the product of eons. 

George Bernard Shaw wrote, "Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does." And that's because it doesn't seek to "manage" it's affairs, but rather to simply live, to pull sustenance from the soil and air, to photosynthesize, to grow and propagate, to change according to the seasons, to "listen," and to respond as well as possible to environmental changes both large and small. In other words, the tree isn't managing at all, but rather engaging in life itself.

Modern humans, as Shaw suggests, have a real problem with thinking we can somehow one-up Mother Nature. The most grotesque example is idea that we can somehow, through managed "breeding" (eugenics), create a race of super humans. At the most extreme are those who seek to create a "master race." Decent people are appalled at both their idea and their efforts to make it happen, of course, and cast them from our midst, but that doesn't stop the rest of us from thinking we are capable of improving upon nature through our "management."

Schooling is a case in point. For those billions of years (4.5 billion, in fact; I don't know where House got his 3 billion), humans have, like trees, educated ourselves through the process of life itself. And that's been more than enough, yet, in our hubris, we've created institutions that pretend to be an improvement upon the system by which the entire rest of the universe educates itself. Our species has evolved in a way that means our young are born too soon to fend for themselves without the support and protection of adults, that's true, but this responsibility is too often interpreted by us as a superiority that allows us to dictate to them. Most of our young now spend the first couple decades of their lives forcibly separated from life itself and are instead compelled to attend to our best guesses about what they will need to know in order function once we finally set them loose to finally engage with life itself. 

The argument most often put forward for why we must do this is that modern human society is too complicated and complex to leave them to their own devices. But that is to suggest, once more, that we've outdone Mother Nature. What arrogance. There is more complexity in a single leaf on a single tree than in all of our civilizations put together: that's what happens with a 4.5 billion year head start.

I'm sixty-three years old and, yes, those years of experience can prove useful to those with marginally less experience, but the moment I step outside of my responsibility to support and protect, I risk adding a dose of stupidity to nature's time-tested educational model.

Education isn't the only place where we try and fail to one-up Mother Nature. The treadmill is a poor replacement for Mother's Nature's fitness plan of life itself which challenges our bodies with terrain, weather, risk, and purpose, to move our bodies in novel, creative ways, with the full engagement of all of our senses. Our methods of manufacturing and distributing food is leaving us weak, hypertensive, and diabetic, when Mother Nature's nutritional plan for every other living things is the fruit-of-the-vine and fat-of-the-land. Social media is a poor, poor replacement for actual community. Recorded music is a far cry from making music ourselves. The farther we get from life itself, the more sickly, bored, and unhappy we become.

“Plants answer questions by the way they live, by their responses to change," writes Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, "you just need to learn how to ask. I smile when I hear colleagues say 'I discovered X.' That’s kind of like Columbus claiming to have discovered America. It was here all along, it’s just that he didn’t know it. Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating knowledge.”

This is how the rest of Mother Nature learns. We aren't meant to waste our childhoods isolated within walls, attending to task-masters. Nature's curriculum wants us out there in the midst of life itself, actively engaged, and listening -- with our ears, eyes, bodies, hearts, and minds -- to those things that demand our attention and spark our curiosity, those very things that standard schooling labels as "distractions." Our school walls are there both literally and metaphorically to shut our children away from life itself, only accessible through pre-packaged lessons made from the dried husks of real things, sterilized and disconnected.

Yesterday, I read an article by an educator who was offended by someone who had called out standard schooling for its reliance on direct instruction, rote, and memorization (the treadmills of education: what schools use as a stand-in for actual thinking). He huffily defended this approach, insisting that brains first need a "stock of knowledge" from which to draw in order to ever think clearly. He's not wrong as far as that goes: experience is important to cognitive development, but the hubris is that he believes that his "stock of knowledge" and his coercive, tedious method of delivery is superior to that of life itself.

When we see our role as supporting and protecting children as they play, we are educating our children alongside, rather than in opposition to, Mother Nature. As the great John Dewey wrote, "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."

******

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!

In Today's World, That is Radical

"I like you just the way you are."

If you read that and immediately thought of Mister Rogers, you're probably a child of the 70's. It's a simple, radical message, especially when it comes to adult relationships with young children. And it's more radical now than it was back then.

It's radical to like anyone just the way they are, but to like our children just the way they is almost unheard of. I'm sure that many parents would insist that they like their kids, but you wouldn't have to dig very deep to find the "but . . ." 

"I like my child . . . but she never listens to me."

"I like my child . . . but I wish he were more motivated."

"I like my child . . . but all they care about is (fill in the blank) . . ."

I'm sure that many teachers, when asked, would say they like the kids they teach, but the entire job of "teacher" in the standard sense is to shape the child in front of us into someone else.

Indeed, if a parent or educator likes a child just as they are, much of the rest of society would accuse them of failing at their "job." Parents are supposed to "raise" children. Teachers are supposed to mould children. 

In her book The Gardener and the Carpenter, author and psychologist Alison Gopnik argues that our view of parenting has changed dramatically since the mid-century. We have moved from a time when to be a parent (a noun) referred to a relationship of love between two people to the idea of "parenting" (a verb) in which "your qualities as a parent can be, and even should be, judged by the child you create."

"To be a wife is not to engage in "wifing," to be a friend is not to engage in "friending" . . . and we don't "child" our mothers and fathers. Yet these relationships are central to who we are. Any human being living a fully satisfying life is immersed in such social connections. And this is not only a philosophical truth about human beings, but one that is deeply rooted in our very biology . . . I would not evaluate the success of my marriage by measuring whether my husband's character had improved in the years since we wed. I would not evaluate the quality of an old friendship by whether my friend was happier or more successful than when we first met -- indeed, we all know that friendships show their quality most in the darkest days. Nevertheless, this is the implicit picture of parenting . . ."

"Parenting" as a verb, she argues, is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that turns us from "gardeners" who understand that it is the child's job to grow into "carpenters" who are charged with manufacturing our children. In this scenario, to simply like our children just the way they are is to fail at our "job." Maybe educators have always been a type of carpenter, but this attitude has clearly seeped into our relationship with children as well, leading our schools to the extremes of test and assess and drill and kill.

"Love doesn't have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose. The purpose is not to change the person we love, but to give them what they need to thrive. Love's purpose is not to shape our beloved's destiny, but to help them shape their own. It isn't to show them the way, but to help them find a path for themselves, even if the path they take isn't one . . . we would choose for them."

"I like you just the way you are." "I love you just the way you are." That is the soil in which our children can grow toward their purpose in life, their unique gift, their genius. "The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world," writes bontantist and philosopher Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. "Individuality is cherished and nurtured, because, in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others."

"Don't ask what the world needs," Howard Thurman advised his friend Martin Luther King, Jr. "Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." This is the stance of a gardener. 

Gopnik concludes: "So our job as parents (and I would add, as teachers) is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children's minds; it's to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it's to give them the toys and pick the toys up again after the kids are done. We can't make children learn, but we can let them learn."

And to like them just the way they are. In today's world, that is radical.

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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!

Ugly Plastic Things

I want to save the human race as much as the next person. 

Despite appearances, I do have an aesthetic sense.

And I think it's pretty well established that I want what's best for children. 

All of that said, we always had a lot of plastic things around the school, much of which was brightly colored.

There's been a movement in the preschool world over the past decades to do away with the plastic junk that has come to dominate early years environments, with an emphasis upon replacing it with more "natural" materials like wood, fabric, and metal. I support this effort on environmental, aesthetic and pedagogical grounds, yet the plastic remained even as we had greatly increased our use of said natural things over the course of my 20 years there.

One of my personal ethics is that we don't throw things away as long as there is still use in them. We had a plastic shopping cart and a wagon, for instance, that pre-dated my time at Woodland Park, playground workhorses that managed to survive generations of children. They were garish plastic things, but how could we pitch them into a landfill where they will remain forever when they were still going strong? 

Indeed, even broken things, like trucks with no wheels or dolls with no arms, continue to have play value, with children using them in creative and unexpected ways far beyond the time that they "should" have been trashed. And even then, even when something plastic is so far gone that even the children aren't picking it up and using it for something new, it can still live on as part of a piece of art. Our "glue gun box" was always full plastic items that found new life as parts of sculptures or space ships or doll houses that then went home with the children to be displayed on shelves, played with, and otherwise treasured for at least a little longer before winding up as garbage long after they would have otherwise.

Generally speaking, I don't find plastic things to be beautiful and if I could snap my fingers and turn all the plastics in our school into alternative materials, I would. Of course, I'd rather spend my days surrounded by the warmth and beauty of wood and stone, and I don't dismiss experts who caution us about surrounding children with the gaudy colors that plastic toy makers seem to favor. 

As we purchase new things, I strive for the sort of look and feel of natural things. The set of sturdy tables and chairs we purchased for outdoor use, made from plastic salvaged from recycled plastic milk jugs, are a chocolate brown. The playhouse is made from untreated wood. The outdoor environment is dominated by wood, plants, concrete, and brick, but because another of our ethics is that we favor donations over purchasing new stuff (again, I believe, an environmentally, as well as economically, sound choice) we stand as the sort of "beggars" who can't always be choosers. 

When someone offers their old car tires or the guts of an defunct washing machine or a collection of Disney figurines, we enthusiastically take them. From where I stand, one of the functions of preschools in our society is not to use things, but to finish using things. And while these things may not be "beautiful" to the adult eye (hence our playground's moniker, the Junkyard Playground), they are delights to the children as evidenced by how enthusiastically they incorporate vacuum cleaner hoses, the caps from dried out marker pens, and discarded office machinery into their play, creating the sort of beauty that can always be found in the eye of the beholder.

So while I am in favor of reducing the use of plastic in our environment, and I congratulate those who have achieved it, I will also never be fanatical about it. There is still use and even a kind of beauty in those plastic items, not to mention that they are, for us, free, which is good for everyone except the folks who continue to manufacture ugly plastic things for kids.

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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!

You Can't Get There on a Treadmill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Treadmills are now regular features in our public schools.

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

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

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

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

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

And you can't get there on a treadmill.

******

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

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

Play is How Children Practice Making Real Decisions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Universal Language

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

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

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

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

Kimmerer asserts, "Plants teach the universal language."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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