A Sea of Metaphor

Starlings are often called "the mynah birds of the north" for their ability to mimic not just other bird songs, but other animals, including humans. They have even been known to re-create the sounds of telephones, squeaky hinges, sirens, doorbells, and other common sounds they pick up from their environment. No one really knows why they've developed this penchant, although it's been speculated that it allows them to deceive potential predators. I can imagine that a hawk, for instance, might have second thoughts when its intended lunch barks like a junkyard dog. 

Whatever the case, starlings and other birds that tend toward mimicry, are constantly adding to their repertoire from their environment as well as learning from other starlings, passing down certain sounds from generation to generation, often continuing to reproduce sounds from bygone eras long after that sound has disappeared from their habitat. This means that a population of starlings that has existed in a single place for generations has become a sort of data storage system for elements of sound, perhaps even entire soundscapes, from earlier centuries.

I was thinking about this as we sat down with friends for dinner last week. 

We tend to think of human language as simply a means of communication, but just as starlings can keep the past alive through their songs, we too, in a way, do the same, even when we are completely unaware of it. For instance, nearly every word we use, can be traced back to a metaphor. Someone sat at the "head" of the table. It wasn't, of course, an actual head, but a metaphorical one that derives from a time when there was no other way to describe that seat of honor. It's "like" a head, we thought, and so it entered the language, subtly shaping generations of humans as we gather together for a repast. Likewise, the chair I sat in had "arms" and "legs." We gathered together to be "in touch" with one another. Some of us had to "handle" a difficult relative or conversation. 

But it's not just when we refer to physical objects that we reveal our linguistic DNA. Our verb "to be" comes from the ancient Sanskrit word blu, which means "to grow" while the English forms of "am" and "is" have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asme, which means "to breathe." Even our fundamental word to describe existence hearkens back to when we had no other word for it so we resorted to a metaphor that reminds us to grow and breathe.

Our language derives from our collective experience as a species and has evolved as more than mere birdsong, functioning as a kind of organ of perception, a creator of reality, and a record of our evolution as conscious animals.

As adults, most of us, however, use our language unconsciously and because of this, I think, we often have a tendency to re-create a familiar reality, especially at traditional gatherings like Thanksgiving. We do it without thinking. We do it because this is the way it's always been done. And even when we strive to break away from the old patterns the ancient metaphors steer us back to the familiar.

Our children, however, do not yet know the metaphors we know. They are still closer to the creative potential of language which is why, if we can remember to shut up and listen, we find ourselves so delighted, often profoundly so, by the things they express as they seek to wrap language around experience and vice versa. 

In our current rush to make our children literate, however, we teach them at younger and younger ages that language is a dead thing, mere communication confined by immutable rules of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. We rob them of something essential when we compel them to, essentially, shut up and listen. It's a robbery that impoverishes all of us. Children are there to make the familiar once more unfamiliar, but the only way this happens is if language precedes literacy. Literacy is a mere workman's plow that bends our backs toward utilitarian ends, while language is a growing, breathing thing, a restless sea of metaphor, a cacophony of birdsong, that is central to what it means to be human. 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Journeys of Becoming

The two-year-old attached himself to one of the few intact toys that exist on our junkyard playground: an ancient (more than 20 years old) plastic shopping cart. He methodically filled it with things he found on the ground, nothing special, just whatever came to hand.

Elsewhere on the playground other two-year-olds were engaged in their own solo activities, just getting a feel for the place, this being their first day of school. The children that appeared to be playing together were, in fact, interacting through one of the adults. This will change as the year progresses. 

Apparently satisfied with the contents of his shopping cart, the boy began pushing it up the hill upon which our playground is built, managing it over our uneven, wood chip bestrewn ground. It was a slow process, not because it was hard for him to do, but rather because he wasn't in any particular hurry. He was imitating behavior he had seen, perhaps, but without the goal-oriented urgency of delivering anything from point A to point B. This was about moving that cart, not going anywhere or being anything, but rather a process of becoming a human who can move a cart.

Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli wrote, "The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being but of becoming." I reflected on this as I watched those two-year-olds on their first day of school, their first day together on this playground, already becoming, always becoming.

When the boy got near the top of the hill, he was approached by another child, attracted as he had been by the shopping cart. In her interest, she inadvertently blocked his way, stopping his progress. She took hold of the opposite side of the cart from him, peering into its basket as if taking inventory. They stood this way for a time, he impeded, she impeding, neither of them seeming to notice the other as they studied the situation in which they found themselves. One might have expected the boy to object or the girl to insist, but it seems that neither of them have become those humans yet. It wasn't until the boy released the cart in order to drop a handful of wood chips into it, that the girl seemed to notice him, not so much as a fellow human, but as an action that drew her attention. She smiled as she watched him, then made a sound. When he looked up he found her smiling at him and he smiled back.

All of these young people, of course, are experienced in connecting with other people. Indeed, they have not fully identified themselves as something separate from their mothers and fathers, their brothers and sisters, their households of other people. They know they are part of their families; now they are becoming part of the wider world.

The two children stood smiling at one another across the shopping cart. Then they began to move, together, the girl pushing the cart down the hill, the boy pulling it, walking backwards, the two of them still smiling at one another.

This is what I expect to see from two-year-olds. Some of the change they will experience together will follow a more or less predictable pattern. They will find one another, discovering as they play that they are part of something bigger. They will struggle to figure it out, becoming more competent, more self-aware, more individuated, more connected, until it's the people, not the toys that first capture their attention when they step onto the junkyard playground. But most of the becoming we will see over the next few weeks, then months, then years, is entirely unpredictable: I might be able to anticipate the general picture, but the particulars of what they will become, both as individuals and together, can't be known until it has been created.

The boy and the girl made their way, unhurriedly, smiling, down the hill until they came to a flatter piece of ground. This time when the boy stooped to pick up a handful of wood chips, their eye contact broken, the girl looked away and they went back to their separate journeys of becoming.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

"Your Footsteps are the Road"

Every preschooler knows that the first step to becoming, say, a firefighter, is to put on the costume. Lacking a costume, they know that any old hat will do for a helmet and any length of anything can be a hose. And if even those things aren't at hand, the firefighter kit in our mind's eye will do just fine.

We are born knowing that if there is something we want to be in life, sitting around planning or wishing or pining gets us nowhere. Transformation is in the doing.

If you wait until you're motivated or fully prepared to do something hard, to make a change, chances are you will wait a long time, perhaps forever.

Philosopher Antonia Case writes, "We are so governed by our minds that we can fool ourselves into believing that self-change comes from thinking about it . . . We fool ourselves into thinking that we just need a little time, some space, and then, once all the receptors are open, the voice within will tell us the way . . . But this is not how self-change happens. Your footsteps are the road and nothing more."

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Because She is a Genius

The boy was running at full speed when he tripped and fell chin first. As falls go, it wasn't a particularly hard one and thankfully the surface on which he fell was forgiving, but the impact startled him and he came up crying.

I wasn't far from where he fell, but still wasn't the first caretaker on the scene. That would be Hattie. Of course, it would be Hattie. This was one of the first days of a summer session which meant we were a multiage mixture of children who had been coming to Woodland Park for awhile alongside newcomers. Over the course of the previous two years, I'd gotten to know Hattie and her particular genius, which was caring for others. With Hattie on the scene, and without blood in evidence, I knew I could step back.

Hattie went first for the boy's head, placing a palm on it, lowering her own face to his. She might have said something to him or she might have just been making sure he knew she was there, locking eyes, sharing breath. Her other hand went to his chin, rubbing it gently. He raised his head, pushing himself up to a partial sitting position. Hattie's arm was now draped over his shoulders, her eyes still on his, studying, interpreting his expression which remained pained.

We adults had come to refer to her as Mother Hattie or Nurse Hattie and that's exactly how she appeared as she began to rub the boys back before noticing that one of his shoes had come off in the fall. She tried handing it to the boy, who whimpered, "I can't," so Hattie proceeded to gently wiggle his foot into the shoe.

As humans we have come to value a certain type of intelligence, the kind that is self-conscious, solves puzzles, uses language, and ciphers; the kind of thing that is measured by the crude instrument of what we call IQ tests. We arrogantly assert that our intelligence is a higher one and are forever ranking other species' intelligence in relationship with our own. Chimpanzee's are the second most intelligent animal. No, it's dolphins! Ravens! Pigs! Elephants! Anyone who has ever loved dog, however, has seen the kind of intelligence Hattie was displaying as she wrestled that shoe onto the boy's foot: one that is about intuitive mood-enhancement and unselfconscious love, not puzzle-solving. And frankly, from a Darwinian point-of-view, one that favors traits that support survival, not of the individual, but of the species, then, in this moment of caring, this moment of crackling, breath-taking intelligence, Hattie demonstrated an intelligence neither higher nor lower, but just right for dealing with this moment.

By the time Hattie had finished with putting the shoe on his foot, the boy was finished crying. 

The kind of intelligence that Hattie mobilized in just the right moment is often dismissed as a secondary kind, generally not even included in discussions of intelligence, but rather demoted with terms like "intuition" or, even lower down, "instinct." But watching Hattie, I knew I was witnessing the kind of genius we could do well to foster in ourselves and others. It's neither higher nor lower, but it seems to me to be exactly the kind of intelligence humans will need to rediscover if we are to survive much longer.

Back on his feet, the boy beamed his gratitude at Hattie. There was a brief moment in which I was tempted to say something to her like, "That was kind" or "Thank you." But I she didn't need me to say anything. Genius knows itself. When she finally looked at me after watching the boy dash away, however, I smiled as the boy had, and I knew, without a doubt, that she understood, because she is a genius.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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 the World is Ours to Shape

Anthony James

The two-year-old stood at the bottom of the stairway. From her perspective it must have looked massive, probably unlike any stairway she had ever seen, wide enough for a dozen people to ascend shoulder to shoulder. We were in the multi-storied atrium of an art museum and these stairs wound their way to galleries on the top floor.

She stood there for a moment, then took her mother's hand. "I want to go up these stairs," she said. "I want to go up them until they stop." When she lifted her short, chubby leg to step onto the first of the stairs her entire body tipped with the effort. Step-over-step, hand-in-hand she set off on her self-selected journey.

Over her head, her mother signaled silently to the other adults in their party, a father perhaps and grandparents, to go on about their own art museum business.

I've taken hundreds of children to art museums over the years, including my own daughter when she was even younger than this girl. And almost always, it's not the art on the walls, but rather the architecture that draws them in. They want to climb the stairs, to swing on the railings, to get lost in the maze of galleries. They want to scale the statues, press their noses to the windows, test the sound of their voices within these walls, and, of course, check out the restrooms.

Adults know why they are here: to see the artwork. I myself was there to see a certain special exhibit. We tend to utilize the architecture functionally, employing the stairs and hallways to get somewhere, the windows for lighting, the railings as something to stand behind, the walls as backdrops for paintings.

This girl was making a quest of the stairs. Later I found her in the top floor galleries stretching out on one of the benches that only very old or very tired adults tend to make use of. Her mother was standing beside her. "I want you to sit with me," she said, "And I want daddy to sit here too. I want to be in the middle."

Her mother went to the railing to look down through the vertical space of the atrium, presumedly to locate the daddy. The girl followed her, leaning her full body against the glass to see all the way to the bottom. "I see the stairs mommy. I see the stairs where we started. When we go down that's where we go."

This is what so many children are driven to do in new places, to map them in their heads, to understand them. They want to go up the stairs until they stop, they want to discover where this or that passageway goes, they want to explore the unfamiliar space. At least that has been my experience in taking children to art museums, libraries, fire stations, or anywhere for that matter.

Architecture speaks to young children in ways it perhaps no longer speaks to adults. They feel it in ways we don't feel it. It calls to them to run in its long narrow spaces or shout in its echoey chambers. It says climb with its half walls and jump when something hangs from above. Naturally, because of this, when you bring groups of children to public spaces, the security details go into high alert, shadowing the enthused explorers who are not typically behaving with hushed decorum, who are not fixing their gaze on paintings or sculptures. This little girl on her own can be tolerated perhaps, but more than one or two, or older children with bigger bodies and bigger voices, children who behave like children, are frowned upon.

This is exactly what architect Simon Nicholson was writing about in his manifesto that appeared in a 1971 issue of Landscape Architecture entitled "How Not to Treat Children: The Theory of Loose Parts Play." His big idea was that we are most inventive and creative when allowed to construct, manipulate, and otherwise play with our environments. He argued that when we leave the design of spaces to professionals, we are, in effect, excluding children (and adults) from the most important, and fun, part of the process. We are, in his words, "stealing" it from the children.

That the theory of loose parts emerged from architecture is fascinating to think about. It echoes, in a way, the work of Reggio Emilia founder Loris Malaguzzi who was at about the same time postulating that children had three teachers: adults, other children, and the environment, the environment being the primary purview of architecture. Nicholson’s theory, as he phrased it in that original article:

In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.

Nicholson was not talking exclusively about early childhood, but about educational environments in general. He included playgrounds and classrooms in his discussion, but also places for all ages, like museums and libraries. 

Even if we haven’t consciously adopted the theory of loose parts play, every early childhood professional, even those working in otherwise highly structured environments, knows this to be true. None of us would, for instance, build a block structure for the children, then expect them to learn anything by merely looking at it and listening to us lecture. We know that the children must take those blocks in hand, must both construct and deconstruct, must experiment, test, and manipulate. We also know that their play, and therefore their learning is expanded as we add more and varied materials to their environment.

The theory of loose parts applies the principles of the “block area” to the entire environment, encouraging us to let go of our ideas of how a learning environment is supposed to be and to instead fill it with variables, things that can be moved, manipulated, and transported. This, as Nicholson points out, is where creativity and inventiveness live. It’s important to remember that his theory continues to be a radical one, even as aspects of it are becoming more mainstream. This is about more than tree cookies and toilet paper tubes and clothes pins. It’s about more than old tires, shipping pallets, and planks of wood. At its core, the theory of loose parts is a theory about freedom, self-governance, and the rights and responsibilities of both individuals and groups to come together to shape their world according to their own vision.

The world is always ours to shape and when we are not shaping it, it is shaping us. Nicholson’s insight was that our environment is too often a kind of dictator, one that is restricting rather than expanding our possibilities. As we work with our “third teacher” it’s important that we keep this in mind and always ask ourselves, “Is this stealing the fun from the children?”

I saw the girl and her family one more time before I left the museum. They were all now again on the ground floor, the girl presumedly having experienced the long, wide stairway once more. She had found another bench and was directing her mother and father where to sit, then she took her place between them, the space within the space that she had envisioned earlier. 

She wiggled around, however, seeming dissatisfied. "I want us all to be in the middle," she said, jumping to her feet. "Everybody stand up." Her parents good naturally stood, then she instructed her father to sit in the middle of the bench. "Now mommy you sit on daddy's lap and I'll sit on your lap. Then we will all be in the middle."

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Restoring the Rhythm

Two two-year-olds were at the cast iron pump, accidentally taking turns, filling their containers, then dumping the water into the sand. They were using plastic jars that they were calling "cans," each holding about a cup or so of water. The turn taking was accidental because they weren't intentionally making space for one another, but had rather simply gotten into a mutual rhythm of pumping, dumping, and studying the results that left room for both of them to go about their similar business. There was a little jostling now and then, but they were mostly just peacefully playing the same game, side-by-side, while in sync.

Then one of them discovered a larger container, a red bucket that held at least twice as much water. Trading his "can" for the bucket ruined the rhythm, leaving the boy with the smaller container in the position of waiting, reluctantly, as the larger container was filled. There was some fussing, some insistence upon "mine," and the jostling began to look more like shoving.

There were several of us adults around and we chirped the usual things one says about taking turns and waiting and not shoving. Then the boy with the larger bucket, perhaps by way of putting space between himself and his rival, walked away from the pump to dump his water, which happened to be into a channel that had been carved out the day before by older kids making a proper "river."

The water flowed better here where the sand was more packed down, with a finger of it reaching all the way to the drop off between the upper and lower levels of our sand pit. I narrated its flow, "You made a river . . . It's flowing . . . I think it's going to make it all the way to the edge . . . It did! . . . You made a waterfall."

Meanwhile, his companion had been filling his smaller container at the pump. He said, "I'm going to make a river too." With that, he dumped his smaller volume of water into the sand at his feet, which didn't flow at all, but rather simple absorbed into the sand, just as it had done every other time he had tried it.

The cycle of play then came back around. The boy with the smaller container watched as the other boy filled his bucket, there was no fussing about the wait this time, because now he was making a study. He continued to watch as the other boy carefully carried his bucket to the old "river bed" to dump it. This time he narrated what he saw, "River . . . Waterfall!"

With that, he dropped his small container, exchanging it for a larger one. He waited for his turn. He filled the bucket, then carried it to the proper place where he dumped it. The water flowed into a waterfall. He watched until the water was no longer flowing, then returned to the pump where the other boy, the boy from whom he had learned how to do it, was just finishing filling his own bucket, and the rhythm, for the time being, was restored.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Building a "Junk House"

Yesterday, I shared a small "learning pile." Today, I'm sharing a big one and a few more thoughts on what it means.

One Wednesday, a couple of kids in our 4-5's class decided they were going to remove the walls of the playhouse. It's designed for this, giving kids the ability to create windows and doorways wherever they want them, an innovation of one of our grandfathers. Before long, their enthusiasm had drawn in another handful of kids. It's not easy to remove the boards that make up the walls: they have to be slid up and out and often get stuck when they become askew which happens quite easily.

There was a lot of struggling and teamwork and when they were done opening up those walls, they weren't ready for it to be over so they moved on to filling the lower level of the playhouse with anything they could move: planks of wood, car tires, traffic cones, rocks, logs, furniture, gutters, shovels, pails . . . Whatever wasn't nailed down got shoved in there.

They were calling it the "junk house" and they were quite proud of it, cautiously climbing atop the pile, their heads touching the ceiling. Over the course of their project, their collective mood went from industrious to a kind of rowdy mischievousness, continually calling out to me and the other adults to "look," as they chuckled. I think some of them half expected to be scolded or at least be told they were "making a mess." The only "correction" they received from me was when I discovered that the wireless speaker we use to play dance music for the stage went missing. Figuring it was at the bottom of the pile, I used my smartphone to play a song and sure enough, we heard the frenetic strains of Everything is Awesome!!!!! from under the rubble.

Other than to ask them to dig out the speaker, my calm, non-judgmental demeanor belied what was going on inside. Normally, I wouldn't have cared, but in this case I was fully aware that on Thursday night we were hosting several dozen parents for a summer program orientation meeting, people who had signed up to allow their "babies" to play on our playground for the summer, many of whom were new to our school and more than a little nervous already. Our junkyard playground has a certain edgy charm when all the odds and ends are spread out over the space, but when presented as a big, tippy pile like this, something that could easily result in heavy objects sliding off and landing on the noggin of an unsuspecting two-year-old, I can imagine that it is somewhat less charming. In other words, while the kids played, I was thinking about marketing.

I finally told myself that it would be okay: either I would tell the story of how the junk house came to be as an illustration of the sorts of thing their kids might get up to during the summer, or (the option I was leaning toward) taking advantage of the two hours between the end of school on Thursday and the start of the meeting that evening to take care of it myself.

The following morning, the kindergarteners were, as usual, the first to arrive, and they were not happy with the junk house. "Did you see what the little kids did to the playhouse, Teacher Tom?" I told them I had, then suggested that the might want to "fix it," a hopeful suggestion that they did not take up. Later that morning, however, our 3's class had the playground to themselves. They too had complaints about the junk house. When I suggested that they fix it "because we have a meeting tonight," one of the parent-teachers asked, "Do you want me to start emptying it out?"

And so she began to methodically remove planks and tires and cones and rock and logs from the playhouse. Her work drew in another adult and then several of the kids who spent the next half hour un-doing the work of the older kids from the day before. When the kindergarteners returned to the playground, they joined the effort. When the playhouse was empty, they "washed" the floor by dumping several buckets of water on it.

As they worked, I found myself humming the late, great Tom Hunter's song, Build it Up and Knock it Down. The ancient Greeks had their myth of Sisyphus, a character condemned to an eternity of repeatedly pushing a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back down again. So much of what we do in life is like pushing that boulder: we make our beds each morning only to unmake them at night; we go to work, return home, then return to work again; we fill the trash can, throw it out, then refill it again. It's easy to see it all as meaningless repetition, but when I play with children, I don't feel that at all. On the contrary, filling it up and emptying it out, turning it on and turning it off, pushing it up and letting it roll back down, makes up the core of what children do all day when left to play as they see fit. Adults unlearn it, I think, as we become brainwashed into the cult of productivity and progress. We learn instead to find it, at best, boring. Children, however, never tire of it. "Build it up and knock it down and build it up again/Knock it down and build it up and knock it down again."

The philosopher and author Albert Camus wrote an essay entitled The Myth of Sisyphus. The concluding line has stuck with me for decades:

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

This is what the children know. And I won't have to imagine them happy because I know, in their way, they will be.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Monuments to the Urge to Create Cooperatively

You can count on it happening several times every school year: the kids just start heaping every moveable object on the playground into a pile. The picture at the top of this post is of a small one created by three-year-olds. They filled in a deep hole the kindergarteners had been working on in the sand pit.

In my mind I call them "learning piles," these accumulations of moveable items culled from a loose parts playground. 

Sometimes they start off with "Let's build a space ship . . . " or some such thing, but as the game progresses it becomes about what else can we put in the pile. The pile pictured here is a small, tidy one compared to the ones the older kids make that include shipping pallets, old tires, tree branches, house gutters, and, sometimes, even the tables and chairs. There have been times when the project wasn't complete until everything that can be moved, has been moved.

These are never solo projects. Typically, there's a lot of teamwork involved, especially with the heavy things. Indeed, they are meaningful, emergent, child-led projects that at one level offend my adult sense of both purpose and aesthetics. In fact, I sometimes wonder if this is why this exact process emerges year after year in play-based preschools around the globe: because the adults would never think of doing this in a million years and when one of these piles is being created, we tend to just stay out of the way. The only time we pile things up like this is in preparation for throwing the junk out.

But this is an opposite instinct at work. I've come to think of them as impromptu monuments to the urge to create cooperatively. And when the children stand back and admire their work, the look of accomplishment in their faces is inspiring.

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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!

Misspent Leisure

"A sound schooling," wrote novelist Norman Douglas, "should teach manner of thought rather than matter. It should have a dual aim -- to equip a man for hours of work, and for hours of leisure. They interact; if the leisure is misspent, the work will suffer." 

In his book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt connects modern parenting trends and smartphone proliferation to the alarming, and well-documented, spike in childhood mental illness over the past couple decades. I'm on his bandwagon when it comes of over-protective, fear-based parenting. Today's children are spending virtually one hundred percent of their lives under adult supervision, mostly indoors, and with very little actual freedom compared to past generations. This is simply a recipe for anxiety and depression, not to mention basic life-skill incompetence, which, naturally, further feeds anxiety and depression.

I'm not as sure about the impact of smartphones on mental health. Much of his argument centers around the fact that these devices are "rewiring" our children's brains, which can be said of any and every technology that has ever become widespread. The locomotive rewired our brains. The printing press, electric lights, and the phonetic alphabet likewise changed what it means to be human. The concerning thing about smartphones for me, and this is equally true for adults as young children, is that they have become the leisure activity of choice for many of us. 

That said, there is a fairly wide variety of good things being done via the smartphone, including connecting with friends and colleagues via texting, email, and talking, listening to music, banking, research, reading, taking pictures and shooting videos, shopping, navigating, gaming, scheduling, tracking health goals, and, I'm sure, dozens of other things of which I'm ignorant. None of these things in and of themselves are a "misspent" use of time. The concerning part is that these are all things that once involved distinct behaviors and experiences. Now it's all delivered through apps operated by thumbs while hunched over a tiny screen. Even if our kids would rather jump on their bikes to hang out with their friends, go to the library, listen to live music, shop in actual stores, or play pick-up basketball at the neighborhood park, modern parenting (and the laws that have grown from modern parenting fears) makes that difficult if not impossible. It seems to me that smartphone use is a symptom of this problem, rather than a cause.

I doubt that the world is any more dangerous than it was when I was a boy growing up outdoors and largely unsupervised during the 1960s (in fact, today's crime rates in the US are more or less similar to those of 1965). But the perception that the world is too dangerous for childhood independence has taken such deep root in both popular consciousness and contemporary law that I have no expectation that we can return to past parenting practices any time soon. What that means to me is that it's on our schools, the only place in society we set aside for childhood, to take a step back from preparing children from those "hours of work" and focus more on those "hours of leisure" in order to help ensure that our children's free time won't be "misspent." 

Haidt and my friends Lenore Skenazy and Peter Gray are doing good work right now through their non-profit Let Grow, helping schools create opportunities for childhood independence. But there is so much more our schools could and should be doing. The antidote to anxiety and depression isn't found in a tiny screen operated by thumbs, but rather in allowing curiosity to guide us into a wide variety of self-selected ideas and activities, from cooking and sports to crafts and dance. Even more importantly is that to truly find happiness our children need to be free to engage their curiosity without the constant judgmental gaze of adults. 

The Ancient Greek word for "school" is scholē, which translates as "leisure" or "free time". The stereotype of modern children is that we can't allow them too much free time because all they'll do is waste it on their phones. Maybe that's because that's all we've left them. Maybe it's because when they're "inside" their phones it's the only time they have a modicum of freedom from adult supervision, judgement, and evaluation. Maybe it's because all they learn in school is how to set their curiosity aside to focus on those hours of work leaving them ill-equipped for those vital hours of leisure. 

Douglas writes, "(Schooling) should enable a man to extract as much happiness as possible out of his spare time. The secret of happiness, given good health, is curiosity." And the way we learn to happily use our hours of leisure is to be free to follow our curiosity wherever it takes us, which is to say, to play.

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