But First We Must Admit We've Been Fooled

I stepped out into a windy morning. The sky overhead was swept clean of clouds, although they lurked around the fringes. But what caught my eye were the ravens. Dozens of them swirling in the wind that came, uncharacteristically, out of the south, wings spread, rarely flapping, but rather subtly changing shape to catch this or that gust. When the wind momentarily died, the ravens turned into it, moving into it like master sailors tacking against the wind. When the wind roared again, the ravens turned and abandoned themselves to it, tipping, flipping, and diving, embodied as acrobatic kites.

Behind them was the dome of blue. And then I noticed that it was peppered with ravens, soaring higher than I'd ever seen any bird before, hundreds of them, playing, there is no other rational explanation it.

Perhaps they were building brains, building muscles, making themselves more fit for survival, but like when humans play, really play, there is no reason other than joy. 

I want the children in my life to learn at full capacity, to soar to great heights, which is why I do whatever I can to set them free to play.

Mark Twain is thought to have said, "It's easier to fool people than to convince them they've been fooled." I think that's the position we are in with schooling. Despite ever-mounting evidence that the way we do schooling -- confined indoors, still and quiet, tested and graded, lectured and bored -- is perhaps the worst possible educational system anyone could devise. As I wrote last week, it's literally based on systems originally created to "break" animals to make them more docile and obedient. 

Things like joy, awe, curiosity, and wonder have no place in a system like this.

If our goal really is for our young to learn at full capacity, very few of our schools, beyond play-based preschools, base what happens within them on the evidence of how humans learn. We've been fooled so long and so thoroughly that we simply can't admit it.

There are those who will read this and strenuously object. They will assert that their children experience joy every day, that they are learning at full capacity. I have no doubt that these educators are doing the best they can, but it's clear they've been fooled. If the kids were experiencing so much joy, then why do 75 percent of them say they have "negative feelings" about school (according to the lead researcher, "they are not energized or enthusiastic," key aspects of joy). If they are learning at full capacity, then why do so many children fail to earn top marks, fall through the cracks, and require remediation?

These ravens didn't need anyone's permission to play in the wind. When joy is at hand, it is their's to embrace. That is how life is meant to learn.

The plight of modern human children is that they need permission for everything they do, even play. In our schools, sequels of joy are stifled, leaps of joy are discouraged. Indeed, almost all expressions of joy, if not immediately curtailed through obedience, are grounds for punishment. 

Going outside to be in the wind, under the dome of blue, is limited to, at best, a few meager minutes of the day. The American Bar Association, the Association for the Prevention of Torture, and other organizations say that humane incarceration requires giving prisoners a minimum of one hour a day outdoors. Most of our schools don't even allow even half that time to elementary school children. Some surveys show that the typical American child spends less than 10 minutes a day engaged in unstructured play outdoors, despite the fact that all the research finds that humans think more clearly while outdoors. Learning, not to mention mental health, demands time outdoors, yet our schools flat out ignore it.

It's a difficult thing to admit, that we've been doing it so wrong for so long. Tragic even, considering all the generations who have been subjected to it. It takes courage and humility to admit we've been fooled, courage and humility that most of us don't seem to have, even as we know in our hearts that it's true.

Can't we even, in the interest of education, give our children permission to play? It's joy that matters, not their damn test scores.

"(T)he imagination," writes George Orwell, "like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity."

The evidence tells us that we must set children free, like these ravens, to find joy in the wind, and it's only from this that learning at full capacity will take wing. 

But first we must admit we've been fooled.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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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