Creating a Beautifully Age-Appropriate Curriculum

When I became a preschool teacher, I knew little about dinosaurs. Today, I'm much more knowledgable, not because I've made a study of paleontology, but because I've been present for hundreds of spontaneous preschool conversations on the topic.

Indeed, anyone who has had scores of young children pass their way, is in the same boat. In any group of preschoolers, there are always a few who can't wait to tell us what they know about dinosaurs. These are three, four, and five-year-olds tossing around words like apatosaurus, Jurassic, and carnivore. They bandy about concepts like extinction and evolution. They understand that these creatures no longer exist, although they wonder, like scientists do, whether or not some of them have simply evolved into animals with whom we modern homo sapiens share the earth, like birds or lizards. These discussions divert into geology, volcanism, and outer space, the source of the asteroids that may or may not have triggered a mass dinosaur die-off.

The children come to the classroom with their own bits of knowledge about dinosaurs, gleaned from shows and books and internet searches they've made alongside parents and caretakers and older siblings, all driven by curiosity. Our school is the place where they share their individual perspectives on dinosaurs, mingling it with the perspectives of peers, constructing a collective perspective that approaches closer to the full truth, but, like with all human inquiry, can never reach it. It's a beautifully age-appropriate curriculum.

It's beautiful because it simply emerges from the children, year after year, usually driven by the passions of a handful of kids, while we all, to one degree or another, get swept up in the educational excitement. And there is always excitement because otherwise the topic would die, as it should, for lack of it. When I sit amongst the children as they debate, theorize, make connections, and struggle with unanswered questions, I feel that I'm experiencing the Socratic ideal in which it's not correct answers, but the examination, the thinking, and the wondering that matters.

Contrast this to the way dinosaurs might be taught in a standard school. It begins with the adults who conceive of a set of "facts" that the teachers must impart. The children must then hold whatever the teacher tells them in their heads long enough to prove it on a test they take under the strict command to keep their eyes on their own paper, because in this scenario the urge to "collaborate" is redefined as the sin of "cheating." Educators, who typically have nothing to do with creating this dinosaur curriculum, are then tasked with artificially injecting curiosity and excitement by somehow "spurring" or "motivating" the children. This, of course, is nothing like the Socratic ideal, but is rather just plain old boring school.

I'm using dinosaurs in this example because, as a subject matter, it's universal, but at any given moment, in a play-based environment, the children are collectively cobbling together a perfectly age-appropriate curriculum on something, anything, about which they are curious. 

One year, a group of four and five-year-olds became engrossed in a game they referred to as "baby snow leopard." They played the game day after day with variations, although it always involved one or two children pretending to be baby snow leopards, while their "owners" (the rest of the children) attempted to keep them in a cage. In this case, it was a literal cage -- a large dog crate that was missing its door. The owners would wrestle the baby leopards into the cage, then block the exit. Eventually, however, the babies would escape and run away. They were chased by their owners who spoke not in the language of jailers, but rather of caretakers or parents.

"Come back, honey."

"It's not safe out here for babies."

"We'll give you a cookie if you go back in your cage right now."

But the snow leopards refused to respond as their owners wanted and, after a long chase, would be forcibly returned to captivity.

Holy cow!

As adults, we can clearly see the all-too-close-to-the-bone curriculum that emerged from the children, from their own questions, curiosity, and experience. It's a curriculum that was obviously vital to them, and I think we all know why. This universal "subject" will never be made part of an adult-imposed curriculum, even as every one of us deals with it throughout our lives, personally, socially, psychologically, and politically. 

I would argue that this baby snow leopard game, or our discussions about dinosaurs, or any one of the infinite other subjects of children's' curiosity and excitement is not just the proper, but the only, curricula that matters. When we quit trying to put them in our cages, even if we're doing it for "their own good," we find that everything worth learning emerges from the children themselves, and they are always perfectly capable of cobbling together their own beautifully age-appropriate curriculum.

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