"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?

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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!

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.

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 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 syncophancy. 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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Registration for the 2025 cohort of The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think closes at midnight  tonight! What children need most of all is is to be treated with dignity and respect. In this course we explore how even small changes in the way we speak with children can create environments in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. For me, this technology is the foundation of how I do play-based learning. It will transform your classroom or home into a place in which children are self-motivated to do the right thing, not because you said so, but because they've made up their own mind. This is a particularly good course to take with your whole team. Group discounts are available. Click here to join the waitlist and for more information.

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 We are Saying is Radical

I sometimes forget how radical our ideas are about young children. I forget that not everyone trusts children even if most people say they do. I forget that most adults are convinced that children must be guided, coerced, tricked or otherwise manipulated to do "right" things, even as they genuinely profess a belief in their innate goodness. I forget that out there, outside our bubble, grown-ups might proudly say they want "kids to be kids," yet their behavior demonstrates that they can't imagine them thriving absent a background of near constant correction, "good jobs," and unsolicited advice. Most people think that we agree with one another about children, but once we get talking, they start to realize that what we're saying is radical.

It's the radical idea that children are fully formed people, due the rights and respect due to all the other people. When we treat adults as untrustworthy, when we seek to guide, coerce, trick or otherwise manipulate them, when we correct or offer false praise or unsolicited advice, we are generally considered to be jerks of the highest order. Yet somehow, many of us, maybe most of us, live in a world in which it's considered normal to treat children this way.

Do they need us when they're young? Of course they do, in the way that seeds need gardeners to make sure the soil is well-tended, that it is protected, and that it gets enough water, but the growing, the sprouting, the leafing, the budding, the blooming, and the fruiting is up to the plant.

I am spending more time these days outside of our bubble, interacting with adults who seem to genuinely want to do the right thing by children, to do better by children, but who are stuck with outmoded ideas of what children are. They have no notion that, from an historical perspective, what they think is normal is not: for children to spend their days doing what the grown-ups tell them to do, to sit still, to spend all those hours indoors, to move from place to place driven by a schedule rather than curiosity. Recently, I was in a meeting with a pair of partners interested in investing in educational matters. Their own children had both been in cooperative preschools like the one in which I taught for nearly 20 years. One of them said, "On my first day working in the classroom I was down on my knees helping the kids build with blocks. Teacher Sandi tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'This is the children's project, not yours.' That was a real eye-opener for me."

I know Teacher Sandi. I know exactly how she said it. I've done it myself, often to highly accomplished professional people "slumming" for a day in the classroom. This kind of thing, as simple and as obvious as it sounds to those of us who have dedicated our lives to progressive play-based education, is for most people still a radical idea. Sometimes the thought of making the changes that need to happen seems overwhelming. It makes me want to crawl back into the bubble and stay there, focusing on the children of the parents who get it. But then I'm encouraged by how readily this radical idea can also become an "eye-opener," just as it was for me as I set out on the same journey more than two decades ago, and just as it continues to be.

Most of what I've learned from and about young children over the past two decades comes down to un-learning the modern lessons of "parenting," schooling, and the capabilities of children. I've discovered that if I am to do right by children I must release control, shut up and listen, get out of their way, and love them. And whenever I'm challenged, whenever things are not going well, I've discovered that the answer always lies in returning to the radical idea of treating children like people.

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Registration for the 2025 cohort of The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think closes at midnight tomorrow night! What children need most of all is is to be treated with dignity and respect. In this course we explore how even small changes in the way we speak with children can create environments in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. For me, this technology is the foundation of how I do play-based learning. It will transform your classroom or home into a place in which children are self-motivated to do the right thing, not because you said so, but because they've made up their own mind. This is a particularly good course to take with your whole team. Group discounts are available. Click here to join the waitlist and for more information.

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!

When Our Words are "Loose Parts"

"No climbing to the top!"

When our daughter was in kindergarten, her school installed an amazing rope-and-steel climbing structure. The kindergartners were forbidden from climbing to the very top, which meant that adults were always hovering around the thing, "reminding" the children when they got too high. 

One day, I asked her if she was loving the new climber. She replied, "It's kind of in the way. No one plays on it." When I asked her why, she just shrugged, "It's just not fun."

Awhile back, I posted some thoughts on The Theory of Loose Parts. Appropriately, it is an idea that has emerged from the field of architecture about how the best learning environments are those in which we have permission to shape and manipulate our surroundings, and the things found within our surroundings, to suit our needs, ideas and curiosity.

It's a theory that's generally thought of in terms of the physical environment, but no matter how loose the parts, no matter how flexible the space, if the environment does not grant permission to engage freely, then the children, as loose parts theorist Simon Nicholson puts it, will still be cheated.

That's what happened at our daughter's school. The adults, in their concern about safety (or perhaps liability), had sucked the joy out of it. They would have been better off not installing the thing at all. Or installing a shorter one. Or, the way we did it at Woodland Park, not have a climbing structure at all, but rather provide the materials -- scraps of wood, shipping pallets, car tires, ropes -- from which the children could build their own "climbers."

And at our school, that's what the children did. None so high as the one on our daughter's kindergarten playground, of course, but always just the right height for the children creating it. Not only that, these impromptu structures were never in the way because the moment the kids were done with it, the parts were on the move, being put to other uses. 

But this didn't happen just because we provided the parts. It wasn't even just because they were "loose." This kind of self-motivated play can only happen when children know they have permission to follow their curiosity.

At our daughter's school, the adults specifically forbid a certain type of exploration, but much of the time we let children know they don't have permission in more subtle ways. 

For instance, if you listen to the things adults are saying to children at play -- "Come here!" "Slow down!" "Be careful!" -- we hear mostly commands. Research finds that 80 percent of the sentences adults speak to young children are commands. And an environment full of commands is not an environment of permission.

We also hear a lot of school-ish questions, "What color is that?" "How many marbles do I have in my hand?" "Do you know what letter that is?" Implied in these types of questions is the idea that the adults know better than the children what to think about. But even more open-ended questions like, "What do you think will happen if you put one more block on your tower?" tend to steer children into adult approved "places" in which the parts are no longer loose. When we ask questions, we compel children to divert from their own course and onto the one we've chosen for them.

There are times for commands and questions, but if our goal is to create the kind of loose parts environments that allow children to learn at full-capacity, then we are well served to consider even our words as loose parts. When we strive to replace our commands and questions with informational statements -- "That color is red," "I have marbles in my hand," "This is the letter R" -- we are offering children information, facts, that they, like with any loose part, can use or not use.

Instead of the command "Get in the car," we might state the fact, "It's time to go" and let them do their own thinking. Instead of the command "Be careful!" we might say, "The ground below you is concrete and it will hurt if you fall on it." Instead of school-ish questions to which we already know the answers we might instead simply speculate aloud, "I wonder why the sky is blue," leaving it there for the children to consider . . . or not. 

Of course, we might also choose to just not say anything at all which is when our "third teacher," the environment, often does her best work.

We will be discussing this and much more in my course, The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think, a deep dive for educators, parents, and other caregivers who want to transform their relationship with young children by transforming how we speak with them . . . Or sometimes by not speaking at all! Registration is closes tomorrow at midnight. Click here to learn more. I'd love to see you there!

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If you're interested in learning how to transform your own words into the kind of loose parts that allow children to think for themselves, please consider registering for my course The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think. This 2025 cohort will examine how the language we use with children creates reality . . . for better or worse! We will explore how the way we speak with children creates an environment in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. Group discounts are available, but hurry because registration closes at midnight, Tuesday, May 20. Click here for more information and to register.

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!

There's a Hole in My Sidewalk

There is no evidence that Albert Einstein said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results," although he often gets credit for it. Novelist Rita Mae Brown was the first to use it in print, although she probably learned it from Alcoholics Anonymous.

The Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool is housed in the lower level of the Fremont Baptist Church, a congregation that serves its community by providing space for several 12-step programs. There was one very early morning group that met in a room adjacent to the school rooms and shared our kitchen space. As I prepared for the children, I tried to honor their privacy, but I couldn't help but overhear much of what was said. Over the years, I got to know several of the regulars quite well and, to some extent, I was considered an "honorary" member of the group.

That quote about insanity punctuated many of the stories people told of their struggles, usually expressed as an if-I-didn't-laugh-I'd-cry-all-day joke. It never failed to raise a chuckle of recognition.

I'm grateful for that unique experience of preparing for the children against the background of these stories of former children. I couldn't help but think of it that way. Obviously, I strive to "teach" or help raise the kids in my care to avoid the trap of addiction, to protect them, to equip them with the coping skills and self-esteem that I hoped would allow them to not fall into this particular brand of "insanity." At the same time, I found myself chuckling along as well. This isn't just a caution for addicts . . . Or maybe we just need to expand our definition of what addiction means because I don't know any adult who can't identify with the sentiment, who hasn't found themselves once more digging themselves out of a familiar deep hole.

Last night, my wife and I went to an open mic event to support a friend. There were a couple dozen performers, one of whom recited a poem by Portia Nelson called "There's a Hole in My Sidewalk." It made us laugh. It sounded familiar and not just because its message was universal. This morning I awoke knowing where I'd heard it before. Years ago, one of the AA regulars read it to the group. It made me chuckle back then as well.

Chapter One

I walk down the street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I fall in.

I am lost . . . I am helpless.

It isn't my fault.

It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter Two

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I pretend I don't see it.

I fall in again.

I can't believe I am in the same place.

But it isn't my fault.

It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter Three

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I see it is there.

I still fall in . . . it's a habit.

My eyes are open.

I know where I am.

It is my fault . . . I get out immediately.

Chapter Four

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I walk around it.

Chapter Five

I walk down another street.

When we see this story playing out in the lives of others, as we so often do as adults who work with young children, it's so painfully easy to see it coming. We might even shout, "Watch out for that hole!" but they fall in anyway. We're frustrated. It would save them so much pain if they would've just listened to us. We're the adults and they're the children so we, of course, pull them out of that hole, dust them off, bandage their wounds, and hope that they now know what they need to know about that hole in the sidewalk. But more often than not, there are more chapters to come.

This is one of the most difficult parts of working with young children. On the one hand, we know that experience is our best teacher. As Oscar Wilde wrote: "Experience is the name we give our mistakes." At the same time, we're there to help and most of us can't bear sitting by as a child suffers and struggles, so of course we help them. We dust them off and bandage their wounds as best we can, then worry if we've somehow, in our solicitude, prevented them from learning what they needed to learn.

One of the things I know from my years of being AA adjacent is that none of us can do it alone. Indeed, that's what 12-step programs are all about. Of course, I want the children in my care to grow into adults who can "stand on their own two feet," but at the same time none of us are capable of doing that. Not all the time. We all have our sidewalks. We all have our holes. We all live our chapters. If we always steer them around the holes in their sidewalk, we know that they will promptly fall in the moment we stop holding their hand. But at the same time, who's going to let a child fall into a hole? It's tempting to want to help by skipping ahead to Chapter Five, but that isn't the way stories or learning works. Without those middle chapters the ending is meaningless. 

It's a tricky balance that we walk as important adults in the lives of children. Most of the time, I find it in viewing my role as a colleague or fellow traveller. I share my own experience as we go along by pointing out the holes that I can see, but I'm aware that there are an infinite number of holes that I can't see. Life is about falling into them and climbing back out: that's where the learning is. It's hard, sure, and painful, but if it's rendered a little less so if we don't have to do it alone. If nothing else, that gives us someone with whom to chuckle as we start digging ourselves out, because, you know, it's a pretty good joke.

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What we can do, and what children need more than anything, is to be treated with dignity and respect. In this course we explore how even small changes in the way we speak with children can create environments in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. For me, this technology is the foundation of how I do play-based learning. It will transform your classroom or home into a place in which children are self-motivated to do the right thing, not because you said so, but because they've made up their own mind. This is a particularly good course to take with your whole team. Group discounts are available. Click here to join the waitlist and for more information.

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!

For Better and Worse

"Teachers often notice the cracks before the data does. Right now, many teachers are seeing a sharp drop in focus during reading and writing (thanks to cell phones) and a growing dependence on AI to think and write. We're not heading for a learning crisis. We are already in one."

"Too much screen time in elementary school is delaying reading and writing skills, weakening focus, and hurting social development."

"Children will not be able to read the founding documents if they can't read cursive."

Over the past year I've made the conscious decision to cut way back on my social media consumption. Specifically, it's the endless scrolling. I still jump on to communicate with old high school friends and to interact with Teacher Tom readers, of course, but the endless parade of posts and messages that populate my feed are a monumental waste of time. 

I have better things to do, like watching the clouds and listening to birds.

When I joined Facebook almost 20 years ago, my feed was almost exclusively messages and posts from people I knew, but now it's mostly just whatever the algorithms have decided I should see. And lately, it's been memes about how things like smartphones, AI, social media, and the death of cursive are ruining our children and threatening humanity's future.

We obviously didn't have smartphones or social media when I was a boy, and we all learned cursive, painstakingly. Back then, the technology that was going to ruin or lives, turn our eyes square, make us soulless, flabby zombies, was the "boob tube," broadcast television. The adults were always going on about it. I remember our first TV set, a black and white Zenith that, if we adjusted our antenna properly, gave us three, maybe four, channels. Looking back it seems quaint. Even after we got a color set, we probably only watched for a few hours a week, but nevertheless, TV was going to be the ruin an entire generation.

Then along came cable with its 57 channels (and nothing on). That was really going to ruin us, but for a television-native like me, it didn't change my viewing habits at all . . . That is, until MTV came along when I was 18. That's where all the cool stuff was. It was the soundtrack for party time and we particularly enjoyed that the adults were worried that Madonna or Adam Ant or even Tina Turner (for crying out loud) were going to definitely ruin us. But for us kids, it was all just TV, the milieu in which we had lived our entire lives. We knew how to swim in it. By then, our parents might have gotten sucked into the TV-all-day habit, but we had figured out how to turn it off and on, and change the channels, to suit our lives.

By the time smartphones and social media came around, however, people of my generation were people of our parents' age. We dipped our toes into this new technology and found ourselves completely sucked in. We made and continue to make all the mistakes: compulsively checking our phones, endless scrolling, engaging with the trolls, not reading anything longer than a paragraph, and embarrassing ourselves when we forget that in this new world, every place is a public one.

Our children, however, have never known anything else. Like TV was for me, this is the water in which they've always lived. I worry more about myself than my kid.

At the turn of the last century, composer John Philip Sousa, amongst others, predicted calamity due to the advent of recorded music. "There are more pianos, violins, guitars, mandolins, and banjoes among the working classes of America than in all the rest of the world . . . But once machine music arrived, children, understandably, turned on the machine and sat at home to 'listen to the machine's performance' rather than engaging in study to learn how to play the piano, violin, or harp themselves." 

He wasn't wrong, but would any of us today give up our "machine music"?

A century earlier, the older people were panicked over locomotives. Humans, they said, were not made to move at such high speeds. It would, they worried, ruin us.

There was a similar concern during the Victorian era over the mind-rotting habit of reading novels.

Centuries earlier, the concern was over the printing press and how mass literacy would be the downfall of humanity.

This fear of technological change goes back as far as humans. Socrates was famously opposed to the introduction of the phonetic alphabet, fearing it would mean that the young would lose the ability to remember, to recite (it was common in his day for even every-day-Joes to be able to recite Homer from memory), to think and  to know. We know about this because Socrates' student Plato was using new the technology of the phonetic alphabet to write it all down. If the ancient Greeks had had social media, I can imagine Socrates might have posted his own meme: "Too much reading is delaying memory and oral storytelling skills, weakening focus, and hurting social development." 

And, like Sousa, he wasn't wrong. I imagine there were those who predicted that the wheel or fire or stone tools were going to be the ruin of our species.

Here's the thing: people who worry about the latest technologies or the loss of old ones aren't wrong. Indeed, every technology I've mentioned here has dramatically altered what it means to live as a human even if our babies are still being born with the same basic biology as they did in Socrates' time. Smartphones have changed us. Social media has changed us. AI is already shaping our brains in ways we can't yet imagine. Just as literacy, the printing press, and high speed travel have made us into a different animal. Every technology changes us, it upsets the status quo. Things that we once considered central to cognition and essential for being "educated" have faded, while alternative ways of being and doing have risen.

For better and worse.

I have no doubt that today's new-ish technologies will cause a decline in literacy, in a traditional sense, in future generations. Indeed, Marshall McLuhan predicted as much during the early days of television. He figured that we were entering a new age with a new type of literacy that went beyond the confines of 26 letters. He is also not wrong.

"Today man has developed extensions for practically everything he used to do with his body. The evolution of weapons begins with the teeth and the fist and ends with the atom bomb. Clothes and houses are extensions of man’s biological temperature-control mechanisms. Furniture takes the place of squatting and sitting on the ground. Power tools, glasses, TV, telephones, and books which carry the voice across both time and space are examples of material extensions. Money is a way of extending and storing labor. Our transportation networks now do what we used to do with our feet and backs. In fact, all man-made material things can be treated as extensions of what man once did with his body or some specialized part of his body."

That's what technology is.

Each one of these extensions causes us to lose something that once defined our species. We may wish to go back to using our teeth and fists, relying on our own "fur" for warmth, and living in a world of barter, but we've "evolved" beyond that. Perhaps it's the curse of our species, but we have learned to steer the evolutionary process through our technologies. And our technologies, in turn, steer us.

We may rant and rail against these things -- I sure do -- but our young children are simply living in the world in which they find themselves, not pining over a lost past, but rather making the most of getting there needs met in the present. Fifty years from now, they may well bemoan the death of the screen (like we do with the decline of cursive) or fret that their own children never even pick up their phones (like we do about reading books), but right now they're simply doing what children have always done: seeking connection and meaning in the world they find before them, the world we have created for them. We worry because their experience isn't our experience. They'll never have to adjust an antenna, get to slam a telephone receiver, or lose a bar bet because they can't remember how many home runs Hank Aaron hit.

And you know what? The advent of audio books and electronic reading devices, technology, have contributed to increased book sales over the past couple decades, after years of decline. But what is leading the charge are actual printed books. And "young adult" books are leading the charge. It's actually us older people who don't read as much any more. We're too busy scrolling through our social media feeds.

This doesn't mean that I don't worry. I worry specifically that our young people are losing the ability to connect with one another. I worry that our very young children are spending too much of their childhoods attending to screens rather than watching clouds and listening to birds. I worry that our older children are shopping for dates on apps. I worry about all of this because I am a product of my own experience, my own technologies . . . And I'm not wrong.

In the meantime, I strive to introduce the children in my life to the world as I know it and to discourage those things that I think are harmful. But my influence as a teacher, or even a parent, is limited. I worry, but I also have faith that this incredible generation, like every other incredible generation, will learn how to thrive, in their way, in the milieu in which they find themselves. All I can do is give them my best while I can, then cheer them on as they go about the project of creating themselves in a world they didn't create.

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