A Motivation Problem

I've told this story before, but it bears repeating.

I once randomly met a teacher from a local high school at a social event. I knew that one of my young relatives, then a 15-year-old, attended the school, so naturally I mentioned him.

The teacher shook his head, then said, "I worry about that kid." 

I didn't know the boy well, but I'd been seeing him at family gatherings two or three times a year for over a decade and I'd never noticed anything to worry about. Yes, he was a bit "nerdy," but in the absolutely best sense of that word. I knew him as a boy of passions. It seemed like each time I spoke with him he was enthusiastic about some new hobby or other -- outer space, collecting knives, electric trains, bicycles, playing guitar -- all self-motivated. He was, in a nutshell, the type of kid this play-based educator didn't worry about in the least.

When I asked his teacher for more, he answered that he was "too quiet" and "shut in," that he didn't seem particularly engaged with school, and that he had a "motivation problem."

I countered by telling him about the intellectually curious boy I knew.

"I had no idea," the teacher said, "I wish he'd open up to me!"

As luck would have it, I saw the boy a week or so later, I shared what his teacher had told me, saying, "I think he just wants to know the real you."

The boy grimaced. "I don't want my teachers to know anything about me. If they know what I like, they'll use it against me." He explained, "Whenever teachers know what a kid likes, they try to take it away and use it as, like, a reward for good grades or something." 

In my own mind, I added, Or threaten to take it away as a punishment. 

It was a keen insight. I didn't try to talk him out of it.

I was reminded of him yesterday when a reader commented on one of my posts from earlier this week. Her son's IEP (Individualized Education Program) calls for regular "movement breaks." She's recently learned that his teachers were dangling these mandated breaks as a "reward" for completing this or that assignment. Now, I don't know the law where she lives, but in many places an IEP is a legal document. Withholding movement from anyone should be criminal, but in this case it very well might be.

And lest you think this is a one-off, every day young children are having their recess time -- their free movement time -- taken away or curtailed for the very same reason. One of my former preschool students had his "outdoor time" revoked because, as his teacher said, "He won't sit still in class." Movement is not a choice. It's a necessity. There has never been a scientific study done that finds that holding a body still improves cognitive function. Indeed, the research finds just the opposite: every human ever tested thinks more clearly while their body is in motion. An educator who restricts a child's movement isn't after thinking, they're after obedience, which is thinking's opposite.

As my young relative figured out for himself, standard schools are so addicted to rewards and punishments that they are "worried about" self-directed learners. They are so committed to carrots and sticks that they simply can conceive of a child who is motivated from within. Our schools are so afraid of children actually thinking for themselves that they treat even that -- free thought -- as a kind of stimulus-response behaviorist tool. Once you've obeyed me, I'll let you think. When I ring this bell, you will drool.

What an incredible waste of childhood. What an incredible waste of life. The last time I touched base with my young relative he was off on his motorcycle for a weekend of rock climbing with his girlfriend. 

I've never taught a child who was not a self-motivated learner. I've never been tempted by rewards and punishments. Our play-based preschools are models of the way schools could be. 

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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!

Allowing Ourselves to Be Awed

Yesterday morning, a pair of well-fed coyotes trotted past my open door, no more than 10 feet from where I sat writing a blog post. They didn't turn to look my way, although they must have smelled my presence. It was only after they passed out of sight that I noticed the shouting of the ravens, a half dozen or more, working together to drive the intruders away.

I hear the ravens every morning during these spring days. They're always going on about something, but I guess I've learned to ignore them because even as they sounded the alarm about predators in the neighborhood, I didn't take note until the danger was literally upon my doorstep. Indeed, I really only attended to their cawing once the coyotes, the danger, was gone.

Or not gone. They had passed from my sight, but I knew they remained nearby because the ravens' intensity didn't abate. Not only did I hear their raven voices, but also the fierce flapping of their wings and the frantic scratching of their talons on my roof as they took turns dive-bombing the canines who must have been along the side of my house without windows. Then one of the coyotes reappeared, not running, but definitely hurrying, once more passing where I sat without looking my way, ravens with wingspans as wide as the coyote was long chasing after it.

It's peak nesting season for the ravens. There is a nest in a tree outside my backdoor. They have been exhibiting courtship and territorial defensive behaviors for months now, all of which they do noisily, which probably explains why I've learned to ignore them.

The ravens, of course, were protecting something far more important than mere territory. They were protecting their loved ones. My heart, of course, was with them.

Shortly after the coyotes had been driven off, I pulled our dog away from the remnants of what I took to be a rabbit not far from the front door, bits of fur still clinging to it. Maybe the ravens weren't protecting their young. After all, if there are any fledglings, they're at the top of a tree, out of the reach of any coyote, which, of course, the ravens knew. Any danger to their young will come from above -- a hawk or a mocking bird. Maybe, after all, they were harassing the coyotes for a share in the kill. 

The local rabbit population has been robust this spring, which would explain the arrival of coyotes, who normally avoid our dog-infested neighborhood, to thin the herd.

The cycle of life is as brutal as it is beautiful.

I've shared in this post a few "facts," but most of what I've written here is what George Bernard Shaw called metabiology. I've engaged in speculative reason about animal behavior from the perspective of a man sitting on a sofa. A proper scientist would likely be disappointed with me as I've cobbled together a story about nature that borrows from observed phenomenon, of course, but also includes such non-scientific concepts as "loved ones," "brutality," and "beauty." But I've gone even more off the rails than that: I've engaged with the mystique of nature.

"Just as the realm of speculative reason lies beyond the facts of science," writes naturalist and author James Wood Krutch, "so also, beyond the realm of speculative reason, lies the realm of emotion. To me that realm is no less important than the realm of fact or the realm of speculative thought, though to discuss what one experiences in the realm of emotion one must either depreciate it and explain it away, as the pure rationalist does, or one must accept what one can only call the mystique as opposed to the rational of the human being's intercourse with the universe around him."

Krutch wrote this some 70 years ago. He wrote in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, blending science, personal experience, speculation, philosophy, and emotion, to create an understanding of nature that places awe, joy, and beauty at the forefront. He writes, "If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either."

It's a perspective that borders on what "pure rationalists" mock as pantheism, a belief that the unity of the universe is, for want of a better word, god. 

I've had the privilege of having spent thousands of hours observing and playing with children in natural places, not to mention amongst the cedars, lilacs, insects, raccoons, squirrels and other living things that shared our urban playground. We even once had a bald eagle devour its prey in some overhead branches, showering us with what I believe were pigeon feathers. There amidst the children, I experienced the "mystique of intercourse with the universe," the joy, the awe and wonder, the beauty, which includes likewise those things we sometimes mistake for brutality.

It's only when modern humans are involved that brutality comes into it. The eagles and coyotes may kill, but when they do they are culling the weak, the aged, the sick, and unborn. Our human sadness is mitigated when we know that this ultimately strengthens the herd, helping to insure that the strongest genes survive and that suffering is minimized. They take only what they need for this day. Then the ravens and other scavengers ensure that nothing of those sacrificed lives is wasted. That bit of bone and fur was gone when returned to look for it a few moments later. 

Modern humans, however, shun the "easy prey," opting instead to hunt and kill the strong, weakening the herd, while often taking much more than they need. That is brutality. 

It is the brutality of a consumer society, one that attempts to exist outside the cycle of life.

One of our modern heirs to Krutch, Leopold, and Thoreau, is botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer who writes, "In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness."

That is what I witness when I'm with children in nature: fullness, gratitude, contentment. Our schools are products of a consumer society and as such the self-styled rationalists, the people who never enter the realm of the mystical, insist on the strictly "practical" -- ciphering and spelling and shaping proper letters. As Krutch puts it, things confined exclusively to that which is 'relevant to the child's daily life.'" This too is a brutality, a severance, one that leads inevitably to emptiness. The economy might need that, but human beings do not.

"Perhaps the mind is not merely a blank slate upon which anything may be written," writes Krutch. "Perhaps it reaches out spontaneously toward what can nourish either intelligence or imagination. Perhaps it is part of nature and, without being taught, shares nature's intentions.

"How could the part be greater than the whole? How can nature's meaning come wholly from man when is is only part of that meaning? . . . Only in nature do we have being." And the simple beauty is that all we need do to satisfy our emptiness is to open our doors, go outside, and allow ourselves to be awed.

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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!

Here We Go Again: Blaming Everything But Standardized Schooling

"Students are not where they need to be or where we want them to be." This is a quote from the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics regarding the National Assessment of Educational Progress report released in January.

"Generation Alpha" is what we're calling children born since 2010, which covers everyone from 0-15, the group that is currently being "schooled." I've been in education long enough now to know that this concern about students not being "where they need to be" is an alarm that's sounded with each generation. The problem, of course, is that their needs have nothing to do with it. They really never have when it comes to the core mission of standard schools. This talk of children's needs is just school-ish lip service. The important part of the commissioner's quote, the true part, is that students aren't where the testing regime (the "we" in this quote) "want them to be." 

Here are a few other quotes from standard school education types included in a recent Newsweek article hyping the Generation Alpha fears:

"There's a noticeable shift in student engagement and accountability."

"Many students today appear apathetic and disconnected from their own learning."

There has been "a noticeable change in student focus and engagement in school."

In other words, our youth are reacting to schooling the way they have reacted since the beginning compulsory mass schooling, which is, let's face it, about adults telling them "where they need to be" without bothering to consult them. It's the same tired, old story of curmudgeonly "school marms" humbugging over the youth of today. 

In this article, the "experts" quoted (all of whom are, not incidentally, major TikTok creators) are mostly blaming Covid, a lack of "consequences" and "accountability" (e.g., punishment), and technology. No one directly blames the parents, although there is some grumbling about kids using technology at home for "entertainment" after spending "their entire learning day" on screens. (I hope this is some kind of exaggeration because if young children are spending their entire "learning day" on iPads, that is gross malpractice.) Likewise, no one quoted in this article specifically blames the children themselves, although it's just beneath the surface.

"When students learn that minimal effort still yields promotion and that they can be chronically absent without consequence, they stop seeing the value in showing up -- mentally or physically." This is the school-ish mindset in a nutshell: learning is hard; the point of school isn't learning, but rather earning the grades and posting the scores that lead to "promotion"; and the only way to get kids to jump through our hoops, to get where they "need to be," is through carrots and sticks. 

I blame the schools. 

I blame these TikTok teachers. I blame the commissioner and her tests and data collection and standardization. The closest anyone in this Newsweek article comes to suggesting that maybe, in some way, school itself is to blame for the apathy and lack of engagement is to say, "It's not about abandoning tradition -- it's about adapting it." 

No, it is about abandoning it, at least if we are going to do something about the centuries long problem with lack of student engagement. There has never been a golden age of children enthusiastically loving standard schools. It has always been a bore. And there is nothing "traditional" about schooling, which is why I use the term "standard" when discussing what they do. For most of human history "school" was life itself and that doesn't bore anyone. It has, however, become a "tradition" to sit children in desks and inflict our "wants" on them with little concern about their wants or needs, then complain when they aren't interested in living the first two decades of their lives in a state of forced labor, obedience, and irrelevance. It's an entire system built on the adage, "I'm doing this for your own good." And as we've all learned, when someone threatens us with our "own good" we're well advised to run like the wind.

There is so much ignorance and lack of insight in articles like this that pop up in a cycle as predictable as the sunrise. One of these TikTok educators complains about screens while at the same time noting that his school has given every student an iPad. What the hell? He throws up his hands, "I do not think we were ready for the negative impact . . ." Who knew, right?

Students have never been enthusiastic about standardized top-down curricula and testing. No human has ever thrived in an environment of constant judgment and assessment.

I have never experienced the problems these educators are reporting. I have always, generation after generation, taught children who were enthusiastic about what they were learning, who worked hard, and who easily set their screens aside because what they got to do in school was even more engaging. That's because they get to play, especially outdoors, and to take charge of their own learning, which is how Mother Nature has designed us to learn, a fact that standard schools refuse to acknowledge, except perhaps by inflicting more adult-directed crap like "movement breaks" or worksheets featuring cartoon characters. 

In an environment of self-directed learning, learning is its own reward. It is always relevant and motivating because it is derived from life itself.

"Many students struggle to find value in traditional subjects," says one TikTok educator, "unless there's a direct, tangible payoff. If they can't see how reading or writing will translate into a paycheck or immediate benefit, they're often uninterested. Intrinsic motivation -- the kind that keeps you learning even when something gets hard -- is fading." 

The ignorance in this statement is astounding. She cannot see beyond the framework of rewards and punishments, of carrots and sticks. She obviously doesn't even know what "intrinsic motivation" means. She seems to be complaining that Generation Alpha isn't responding to her punishments and rewards -- Skinnerian external motivators. And clearly, she has no idea what might actually be relevant to a child. It certainly isn't a paycheck.

If you missed this article, don't worry. Another one just like it, full of the same handwringing will be coming around soon enough, blaming everything but standard schooling itself. After all, Newsweek is in the business of eyeballs, as are TikTok creators, and complaining about "kids today" has a proven track record that goes back at least to the Ancient Greeks.

"With the way social media algorithms work, students are being fed nonstop content that's not only entertaining but also specifically tailored to their interests," complains another scold. That is exactly what play-based or self-directed learning does as well, albeit without the necessity for screens or media corporations. This is where intrinsic motivation comes from. It's the way real, deep, relevant learning has always happened, since long before standard schools came along and replaced it with tedium, carrots, and sticks.

Let the TikTok-ers humbug. The rest of us will go out and play.

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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 Height of Wisdom

It wasn't that long ago that the best and the brightest of Western science were convinced that "lesser" animals, a definition that included non-native Europeans, were not capable of feeling pain. Oh sure, it was argued, they may look and act like they are suffering, but the "scientific fact" of the day was that this was merely an instinctive response to stimuli that didn't reflect any sort of internal state. After all, only white humans had the capacity for the kind of conscious and individualized thought necessary to perceive such things as pleasure or pain.

This "science" was used as a rationale for all manner of cruelty. From what I can tell, this disbelief in the inner life of others is unique in human culture. Every indigenous tradition with which I'm familiar grants consciousness (or in some traditions a soul), not just to animals, but to plants, fungi, and indeed, all living things, up to, and including, the earth itself. Indeed, as a child meditating upon ant hills in our backyard, I was convinced that I was witnessing evidence of intelligence. 

One of the first big words I learned, however, was "anthropomorphism" (attributing human characteristics to animals), and it was something that intelligent people avoided doing. But anyone with eyes, anyone with a heart, anyone with an ounce of compassion can see that the so-called "science" on this was, and continues to be, horrifically wrong. Of course, the consciousness of my dog is different than my own, but to deny her capacity for intelligence, emotion, and intention, is a stupidity that even a two-year-old can see through.

In April of last year, The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness was announced at a conference at NYU. As of today, it's been signed by 573 scientists. All it does is declare that maybe, possibly, if looked at in a certain light, at least some other species seem to have the capacity for conscious experience and that this should be considered when making decisions involving animals. Naturally, the other 8 million or so scientists in the world consider this to be grotesque anthropomorphism. The declaration includes ten examples of "recent" scientific findings that support their point of view which you can find by clicking here, but my point is that "science" isn't a synonym for "facts" or "common sense." 

I grew up largely in suburban neighborhoods. Most of my first-hand experience with living animals was therefore with pets, insects, birds, and the occasional reptile. Nevertheless, my early childhood experiences with animals taught me, unequivocally, that they are more than instinct driven automatons, a fact that most scientists, it appears, do not accept as fact. My science teachers tried to disabuse me of my anthropomorphism, but nothing they ever told me has caused me to doubt my own first-hand experiences. "The science just isn't there" they claim. Many even scoff at those of us who know what humans have always known until the so-called European Enlightenment made Westerners feel superior to the rest of the world's "barbarians."

Science is one way of understanding the world, but it's far from the only way. When Walt Whitman proclaimed, "I am large, I contain multitudes" he was expressing a fact about life itself that science is only just now getting around to "proving." When the ancient Tlingit spoke of orca-people and bear-people they were expressing knowledge that Western science still doesn't know. When I stand with preschoolers releasing painted lady butterflies we have observed metamorphosing from caterpillars, they call out, "Bye-bye butterfly," demonstrating understanding that surpasses that of modern science. The truth is that most of what we call "cutting edge science" is really just a new way of looking at what some of us at least have already known. The arrogance of science is that its proofs and methods are the only way of deriving facts from the natural world.

I don't intend anything I've written here to mean that I dismiss science in the way many scientists dismiss other ways of knowing, but rather to make the point that science, and especially Western science, does not hold a monopoly on truth.

“When we are awake," writes neuroscientist Guilio Tononi, "and our eyes are open, they tell the mind what it ought to see . . . but they don’t do the seeing, no, that’s something for the mind alone. For even though the eyes may be shut, as when asleep, or injured . . . the mind still sees, and of its own accord decides what’s to be seen.”

One of my hobbies is to try to understand human consciousness. It’s not necessary to be up to speed on the latest neuroscience in order to be a good educator, especially since the “latest”, by the time it gets to us dilletantes, is already outdated. But I find it fascinating that so many scientists on the cutting edge of research resort to art and poetry in order to explain what they think is true. Tononi, for instance, the developer of the integrated information theory of consciousness (a theory that in some ways "proves" much more ancient knowledge), has written a book called Phi (Φ) based on Italian poet Dante’s The Divine Comedy with a fictionalized Galileo as the protagonist. 

The very notion that our minds, not our eyes, are responsible for seeing is mind-blowing. It’s as if reality is too complex and beautiful to be reduced to mere language or the methodology of Western science. Sometimes it can only be understood through art. Indeed, quite often artists (e.g., Walt Whitman) and especially indigenous artists (e.g., Australian aboriginal dot paintings) reveal “sacred knowledge” long before scientists even knew where or how to look. 

And, gloriously, we can even discover this phenomenon in the artwork of our own preschoolers, an example of which I shared last week.

Among the legacies of Western science is the notion that adult minds are "superior" to the minds of children. There are differences, of course, but to rank minds, to place adult comprehension over that of young children, to place human comprehension over that of animals, goes against lived experience. The greatest knowledge is understanding that truth, or reality, is a creation of perspectives, not competing with one another, but rather each providing another piece, a reflection, an amplification. Truth is large. It contains multitudes. And each time we add a perspective to our understanding, we ourselves become larger and more multitudinous. And there is always a new perspective with which to play. That is the height of wisdom.

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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!

What Do You Do?

I spent the evening at a Memorial Day weekend barbecue in the company of several people I had never met before. We asked one another "What do you do?" which is our culture's shorthand for "What to you spend your weekdays working at, which is ultimately the question, "How do you go about acquiring food, clothing, and shelter?"

This dawned on me when one of my new acquaintances answered, "I don't do anything. I'm retired, just living off the fat of the land."

Of course, this man spends his days doing something. As we chatted, he mentioned grandchildren, golf, and gardening, he talked of travel and hiking. All of these things meet my definition of "doing," yet in his mind, in our collective mind, he's an idle man. In this, he is very much like most of the children I've known.

Indeed, this may well be the most decisive dividing line between children and adults. Kids just don't take work all that seriously, whereas for most of us grown-ups it's the center of our lives. Even if we love our jobs, we envy the kids their freedom, meanwhile we grind our teeth and wring our hands when they show any sign of being lazy, which is to say unproductive. We gripe that today's youth feel "entitled," that they don't seem to understand that they must work for their food, clothing, and shelter. We worry that our children are directionless, that they lack grit, or that they are more interested in their friends than their school work. These are all concerns, I would assert, related to answering the question "What do you do?"

Of course, in many cases it is illegal for children to contract to do proper work so we assign them chores -- some parents even pay their kids for completing them -- or we re-define school as a work place with grades as the paycheck. It's not the same, and the kids know it, because at the end of the day, they can't exchange their grades for their basic necessities. They see our re-framing for what it is: a flat-out lie. The consequence for not getting your chores or school work done is, at worst, punishment, whereas actual productive work, the kind of thing we say when someone asks us adults what we do, is life or death stuff.

Years ago, I went through a phase where I consciously avoided mentioning my profession when someone asked, "What do you do? I would say, "I read books" or "I like to cook," and my fellow adults would almost always follow up by asking, "Are you retired?"

It seems so natural to define ourselves by our work that we forget that for most humans throughout most of our history, work, the process through which we acquire the necessities of life, held a relatively insignificant place in the scheme of things. Marshall Sahlins' highly influential 1968 essay "The Original Affluent Society" made the point that despite claims to the contrary, technological advancement does not liberate us from work. Indeed, the story of modern man is one of spending more and more of our waking hours working. What we today call hunter-gatherers spent, typically, no more than two to four hours a day acquiring material necessities. Even Medieval serfs worked fewer hours in a day than we do and had far more holidays. One could argue that nearly every technological, political, or social development over he course of the past several centuries has resulted in us consuming more of our life in order to acquire food, clothing, and shelter.

I'm a big fan of food, clothing, and shelter, but if that's what it's all about, if that's all I "do," then what's the point? This is why we envy children. Life, as we've created it, is increasingly all work and no play. This is also why we worry that our youth won't have the grit or maturity required of our all-work-all-the-time society. What if they are so entitled that they think they get to continue playing?

This is all, however, just a story we tell ourselves. As David Graeber and David Wengrow write in their book The Dawn of Everything: "By framing the stages of human development largely around the ways people went about acquiring food, men like Adam Smith . . . inevitably put work -- previously considered a somewhat plebeian concern -- centre stage. There was a simple reason for this. It allowed them to claim that their own societies were self-evidently superior, a claim that -- at the time -- would have been much harder to defend had they used any criterion other than productive labor."

This is the story of colonization. Everywhere Europeans went, they found people who placed art, community, relationships, and play at the center of their lives rather than work. Instead of learning from them, we labeled them as backwards and lazy and sought to correct these flaws. In many ways, this is exactly what we do today with childhood, colonizing it with our grim story about work. We tell them, meanly, that school is their job, that learning is a matter of toil, that they can only play when they have done their work. But as we all know, the work is never done. For most children, when we open the door to school, we close the window of play, allowing it to only re-open again decades later, at life's sunset, the only time when it is acceptable to do "nothing" with our lives.

"What do you do?" We tend to relegate the question to holiday barbecues, but really, isn't it the question for every day. Isn't this the question we should be asking ourselves as we awake each morning? What will I do? There are valid answers other than work. We see it every day at preschool.

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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 One Rare Thing You Possess"

If there's one thing each of them claims not to resemble it's . . . himself. Instead he sets up a model, then imitates it; he doesn't even choose the model -- he accepts it ready-made. Yet I'm sure there's something more to be read in a man. People dare not . . . The laws of mimicry -- I call them the laws of fear. People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don't find themselves at all. I hate all this moral agoraphobia -- it's the worst kind of cowardice . . . What seems different in yourself: that's the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that's just what we try to suppress.                                ~André Gide

It's our eccentricities, the things that make us unlike every other human to ever walk the planet, that make us special in the world. It's there that we find our passion and purpose and it seems that this is what should most concern us as educators. 

Our schools have become increasingly standardized over the course of the last many decades, running like assembly lines on manufactured curricula and standardized testings. Children learn the moral agoraphobia young, adopting mimicry when they can. Being labelled challenging or behind or unmotivated if they can't. In school, the things that make us different become deficiencies that are used to define us as efforts are made to level us up to arbitrary standards.

Autism is generally viewed as a deficit in our standardized schools. I recently learned that in the Māori language autism is often referred to as takiwātanga, which translates as "in their own time and space." I've known hundreds of two-year-olds in my life. They've not yet learned the laws of mimicry and it seems that this defines every one of them. The normal schools try to tell us preschool teachers that our job is to get these unique humans "school ready," which translates as teaching them to subdue that rare thing they possess, the one thing that gives each of them their worth, in deference to a school-ish time and space. Indeed, in many ways, standardization is the primary lesson of normal schools.

The older I get, the more I've come to recognize that we all spend our lives dealing with the shame we are taught to feel about our eccentricities. Most of us simply get very good at mimicry, only sharing our differences, if we ever do, with our most trusted intimates. Many of my friends are now retired and it's striking to me how many of them, after decades of mimicry, are now attempting to re-surface those long buried eccentricities: making music, throwing pots, writing novels. I'm happy for them, but it's tempered by sadness over all those years of mimicry.

Some of us find it impossible to hide our uniqueness, which sets us up as targets for bullies of all kinds. 

A precious few learn to cultivate, embrace, and find power in their eccentricities. These are the people who do great things, even if it's only as an example of living authentically. 

The world doesn't need more mimicry, but rather people who have come alive because they have dared to embrace what makes them unique. What a change it would make if we, from the very beginning, instead of suppressing differences, celebrated them, and gave children the scope to express and pursue the rarity they possess, the thing or things that makes them come alive.

What if the primary lesson of schooling, instead of standardization, was that we are, each of us, here to find our purpose and pursue it with passion?

******

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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Godlike Works of a Creator

We were messing around with pipe cleaners and tissue paper circles. It's a craft-ish project that most of the kids know, because I showed them. You can make nifty little flowers by sliding the thin disks of paper onto their bendy stems one at a time, giving each one a gentle "crush" as you go. I don't have any pictures of them, but it's a common enough preschool activity that I'm sure most of my readers know what I'm talking about. (But if you want a look, here's a version from my friend Deborah using squares instead of circles.)

Some of the kids do their own thing with the materials available, creating "space ships" and "spiders" and "decorations," but there are always a handful who really, really want to master the flowers. Sarah, I thought, was one of those kids. She plunked herself down at the art table and got to work, brow furrowed, her authoritative chatter letting us know she was on top of things. Since I'd already demonstrated my own technique, I moved on to other things, leaving the art station in the capable hands of a parent-teacher.

Later, while outdoors, I chatted with the parent-teacher, saying something like, "That art project was pretty popular today. Sarah seemed to really like it."

She answered, "It was, but you know, she didn't make a single flower. She couldn't figure out how to get the tissue paper on the stem without tearing it." A huge bouquet of flowers had been created at that table and Sarah had sat there, hands busy for a good half hour. How could it be possible that she hadn't produced a single flower?

"Nope, not one," was the answer, "But she worked really hard. Every time she tried to crush the tissue like you showed them, the paper came off."

I'd not been watching Sarah's production, but only, occasionally, her face and body language. Not once had I seen a sign of frustration or failure. No, the girl I'd seen was hard at work, concentrating, narrating her activities, deeply involved in what I assumed was a manufacturing process like that of the other kids around the table who were making one for "mom," one for "dad," one for "grandma," one for "my pet cat Simon . . ."

"I tried to help her, but she didn't want help. She told me she was already an expert flower maker."

I said, "I guess that means we'd better keep making flowers tomorrow."

The following day, I made the same materials available, not on the art table this time, but on another table, a place where there would be no dedicated parent-teacher. Sarah didn't go there right away, instead choosing a housekeeping game, but before long she was drawn in, taking up a spot, alone with the materials. I sat with her, taking up my own stem, not saying anything. I watched her slide a tissue paper circle onto her pipe cleaner, tearing a huge hole in it during the process. And as had happened the day before, when she crushed it, it came off the stem. This didn't seem to bother her at all as she tossed the wad of paper aside and reached for another. This time she worked more slowly, nudging it along carefully, still ripping the paper too much, but when she crushed it, it stayed, almost balanced in place. Gingerly, she added a second disk of paper, halfway up the stem, then a third. 

From an artistic perspective it was a pretty pathetic looking flower. She held it up, no extra pride in her expression, no sign that there was anything amiss. "That's just so beautiful," she said as she stuck it in the glass vase where we were displaying our finished pieces. She then got to work on another.

I put a piece of tissue paper on my stem and in my best imitation of the way she had done it, tore the hole a little too big, then crushing it to keep it precariously fixed in place. Sarah watched me from the corner of her eyes. "No, that's not the way," she said. "You have to do it more gently. Like this," then she showed me on her own flower.

I tried imitating her as best I could. "Good," she said, "That's right. Now, do another one." I followed her instructions.

She made a second flower as pathetic as the first and called it good. Before starting on a third, she watched me for a moment, growing frustrated with my attempts, although I was doing my best to imitate her. She snatched it from me, her voice infused with a false cheerfulness, "Here, let me just do that for you." In her rush, she caused all the tentatively fixed tissue to drop from my stem. "See?" she said, "That's what's supposed to happen. Now you can start over."

I didn't like the feeling of failure the exchange gave me, even as I knew I'd not failed. I knew because I'm an adult and I had practically invented this damn process, yet here I was with the tables turned. This is why I'm not a big fan of crafts in preschool: I worry that we put too many children in this situation. I said, reflexively, "I don't want to start over."

She sighed, "Okay, but you'll never figure it out if you give up."

"That's true." I got back to work, this time making a flower the way I'd initially shown the kids two days before, quickly pulling together a nice, tidy white carnation. Sarah watched me work without comment, then got back to her own stem. When she was finished with yet another pathetic flower, she said, "I think we should plant these in the garden."

I answered, "They would be pretty," then joking, "But, you know, they're not real flowers."

"I know that."

"I think the wind and rain would destroy them. The petals would all fall off."

"Real flowers always fall off," and even as she said it, one of her tissue paper wads fell from the stem she held. "Like that."

It was then that I understood Sarah's flowers. She was not making the perfect little imitation flowers the rest of us were making, but "real" flowers, the kind that bloom, live, then fall away when the winds blow. And in that flash, I was no longer in the presence of the pathetic attempts of a child, but rather what I saw before me were the godlike works of a creator.

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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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"The Choice to Love"

We were all afraid of Mr. Turner. He was the principal at Meadowfield Elementary in Columbia, SC, and, it was rumored, he had a wooden paddle in his office with "holes drilled in it" so he could swing it faster. Even as an eight-year-old, I thought the physics of that sounded off, but I sure didn't want to test it. The most sure-fire way for a teacher to shut down disruptive behavior was to threaten to send the offender to the principal's office.

"Cultures of domination," writes bell hooks, "rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience."

As a boy, I valued my reputation as a "good boy." I valued the good opinion of my teachers and strived to shine in their eyes. I didn't always like or even understand what I was being taught, but I knew that learning was largely immaterial. The important thing was to convince the adults that the lessons were learned, which meant doing well on the quizzes and tests, yes, but more vital was to cheerfully abide by the rules. So that's where I focused my efforts, even as I risked being labeled a "teacher's pet."

I never came close to being sent to the principal's office. Avoiding sticks was easy for me. I was after those carrots. In other words, I fully accepted the notion that those with power could tell me what to do because, after all, they could mete out punishments. I wanted nothing to do with those, so I set my sights on the reward side of the equation. 

As a child, I struggled to understand kids who flirted with the punishment side, even as a part of me admired their courage, but I now know that my choice to be a "good boy" wasn't one that every child was capable of making. 

In all honesty, I doubt that paddle ever existed. I remember Mr. Turner as a large, chuckling, slightly fuddley man in the mold of Mr. Whetherbee from the Archie comic books. There were never any credible sightings of his paddle, let alone, actual evidence of its use. I suspect that the paddle rumor wasn't intentionally planted, but rather was the product of children who were regularly spanked sharing their fears with the rest of us: they knew that even loved ones had the potential to hit them. So even if the paddle was a fiction, the fear was real. I was a "good boy," but that doesn't mean that the threat of Mr. Turner's paddle wasn't a baseline consideration in every choice I made while at school.

Advocates for punishments value them as "motivation." And they are, I suppose, in that children learn to be motivated by fear. And fear is a powerful, yet deadly, motivator.

"In our society," writes hooks, "we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known . . . Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair."

This is the real challenge of our age: isolation, loneliness, and disconnection, the natural consequence of a culture of fear. And that fear is used to "motivate" us. There doesn't even have to be a paddle. The rumors are enough.

Today, most children go to elementary schools where corporal punishment is off the table. You would think that this would contribute to lowered anxiety, but according to the American Psychological Association, rates of anxiety in children have been on the rise since well before Covid. 

Our obsession with safety is a product of our culture of fear. This has lead us to greatly limit, in the name of safety, our children's access to independent play, which in turn contributes greatly to increased mental health challenges, and specifically anxiety and depression. According to researcher Peter Gray, rates of mental health issues among children, even very young ones, have been rising dramatically over the past many decades and are now at the highest rates ever recorded. 

"We would like to think of history as progress," Gray writes, "but if progress is measured in the mental health and happiness of young people, then we have been going backward at least since the early 1950's."

"When we choose to love," writes hooks, "we choose to move against fear -- against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect -- to find ourselves in the other."

If being educated is defined as being equipped to deal with the world in which we find ourselves, it seems that this, the choice to love, is the most necessary thing in the world, more important that literacy, more important than math. And love is impossible as long as the paddle remains in the backs of our minds.

I like that hooks refers to love as a choice -- "The choice to love." As an early childhood educator, this is a choice that I strive to make every day. Fear is a powerful motivator, but connection is infinitely more powerful. Only when a child feels connected, can they be truly motivated from within. An obedient child is motivated by fear and sycophancy. A connected child is one who seeks even deeper connection through cooperation, agreement, and kindness. And that, ultimately, is what is most needed if our children, and our world, are to thrive.

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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!