The Experience of Life Itself

Prior to the printing press, most people were illiterate. Books were still produced, but only by educated elites, mostly monks and other religious types, although there were also secular scholars, like Plato for instance, who engaged in the laborious and time-consuming process of writing their own books by hand.

By and large, these books were not written to be read by individuals, but rather as a core feature of an educational process that involved someone reading their own handwritten manuscript to a roomful of younger monks (or other scholars) who would essentially take dictation. These students would then, when it was done, own their own book, which essentially qualified them to "teach" it to others.

Naturally, this process didn't produce exact copies of the original book, but rather versions of the book. Spelling, for instance, wasn't the rigid right-or-wrong thing it is today, but rather a kind of creative process by which these scholars attempted to record the words they were hearing using the newfangled phonetic alphabet, a technology that reduces the universe of sounds humans can make to 26 symbols.

But it wasn't just spelling. Each "copy" of the original, which more often than not wasn't the original at all, but rather a copy of a copy of a copy, introduced misunderstandings, re-interpretations, improvements, and new ideas, added by each individual making their version of the manuscript. No one was grading them on accuracy. Indeed, these early books were produced in the spirit of the oral tradition that involved people telling and retelling stories, each in their own way.

In the centuries before Johann Gutenberg began printing Bibles, "the scriptures," as Marshall McLuhan writes in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, "had none of (the) uniform and homogeneous character" that we moderns associate with it. The technology of mass printing, mass production, turned this, and every formerly "living" manuscript into a standardized, "finished" product.

Of course, the printing press was a driving force behind mass literacy, but in the process it turned manuscripts into a kind of uniform packaged commodity that removed the learner from their active role in their own learning through books.

In many ways, the great educator John Dewey was working to, as McLuhan puts it, "restore education to its primitive, pre-print phase. He wanted to get the student out of the passive role of consumer of uniformly packaged learning."

Likewise, that's what we play-based preschool educators are attempting to do. While so-called "education reformers" seek to force literacy and other academics onto our youngest citizens through standardized curricula, play-based early childhood education lays the foundation of active participation by children in their own learning. Just as those ancient scholars literally took a hands-on role in creating their own books, we want our students to get their own hands dirty, to experience the world beyond the limits of linearity, standardization, and 26 symbols.

It could be argued, as McLuhan did, that "the highly literate Westerner steeped in the lineal and homogeneous modes of print culture has much trouble with the non-visual world of modern mathematics and physics" precisely because of this kind of standardization. When I learn about indigenous worldviews, views shaped outside Western standardization, I'm often startled by how much their understanding mirrors those of modern mathematics and physics. It makes me wonder if being highly literate in one way makes me illiterate in others.

This is not to dismiss the good that Gutenberg's printing press brought the world, but rather to emphasize that it, like all technology, limits us in some ways even as it expands us in others.

Today, we fret about smart phones and other screen-based technologies. We worry that they are changing us. We especially worry that they are changing our children. 

Let there be no doubt, our worries are well-founded. 

Prior to the invention of the phonetic alphabet, nearly every Greek person could recite their own version of Homer's epic poems (The Iliad and The Odyssey). There may have been an historic Homer, but by the time the words were written down, the original version had long since been transformed by the telling and re-telling. "Homer" was, in essence, an invention of everyone. Today, as a direct result of the printed word, almost no one can recite Homer from memory. The technology of literacy obliterated our ability to keep these poems alive in oral form. I now keep books containing a standardized version Homer on my bookshelf instead of in my head. As a result, Homer is much less "alive" to me than it was to those ancient Greeks. 

I have books on my shelf that are the modern standardized versions of the manuscripts those monks and scholars transcribed in the sixteenth century, but let there be no doubt, there is nothing "active" or "hands on" about these tired, old classics. Of course, when I gird myself and actually read those books, I find that they are full of great and forgotten wisdom, but because they're typeset, unchanging and unchangeable, for all eternity, they feel dead.

As a play-based preschool educator, I view the early years as a time for children to experience the world before the smartphone, before the printing press, before the alphabet. I have no illusion that they will ever truly know the world without those technologies, but this time is a window in which they have the opportunity to get their hands dirty without the limitations that these technologies impose on humans. 

Almost every child, for instance, memorizes entire books long before they are able to read. They turn the pages as if they're reading, but the words they speak aloud are words they know because they have heard them. When they do this, they are engaging in the oral tradition.

Almost every young child goes through a phase in which they believe that the world disappears (or they disappear) when they close their eyes. We standardized adults find it a charming misperception, but this is exactly what modern cognitive psychologists tell us happens when we close our eyes: the world as we perceive it doesn't exist when we aren't perceiving it. It's our brains that assemble all those photons into comprehensible visual phenomenon. It's mind-blowing to us, but for a young child it's an obvious reality. When they do this, they are engaging with both advanced science and indigenous wisdom.

Almost every young child delights in mathematics. At the end of the day, as I survey the playground and classroom, I find evidence of impromptu sorting, sequencing, and patterning, which is the essence of all mathematics. Yet, the more distant children become from this kind of hands-on learning, the more confusing and frustrating they find math, with most of us deciding math isn't for us even before we're out of elementary school. Preschool children delight in math because they've experienced it with their own hands, heads, and hearts.

Jonathan Haight (The Anxious Generation) and others make strong psychological and sociological cases against smartphones and other screens for young children. Early childhood educators have long known that most preschoolers are simply not developmentally equipped for formal literacy instruction, not to mention directive academic instruction, and that to attempt to impose that on them is a waste of time at best, and potentially harmful. 

I don't disagree, of course, but the primary reason that I'm suspicious of technology like screens and formal literacy instruction in the early years is that every technology tends to standardize, changing children in ways that limit their learning capacity in often unforeseen and regrettable ways. 

These early years are a unique opportunity for new humans to engage the world as we've evolved to engage it. The technologies will always be there, but this is the only opportunity any of us have to put our hands on the world before it is standardized, commodified, and packaged. It's the one time we have to play, learn, and deeply understand before we've been changed, forever, by our technologies. 

John Dewey famously wrote, "Education is not a preparation for life, education is life itself." This is what I strive to offer to young children: the experience of life itself. And that, at least for this precious time, means, to the degree possible, without the colonization of technology.

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