Learning to Be Alone With Your Thoughts and Reveries

I spent most of my free time outdoors as a boy. I'd like to say that's where I chose to be, and I certainly have a lot of fond memories of playing outdoors, but it's also where Mom wanted us kids to be. She might let us watch a single TV program, but then we were shooed outside so that our eyes wouldn't "turn square." Any running or rowdiness was to be taken outside. For our own good, and her own, we were turned outdoors as long as there was still light in the sky.

Usually, we didn't object, especially since outside was where the other kids were, but I also have memories of long afternoons alone in my room. I could spend hours building a fort with my blocks, then populating it with toy soldiers, good guys and bad guys. When it was finally time for the shooting to begin, I would track the path of each individual bullet from the barrel of the gun to its target which I would knock over, dead or wounded, sometimes causing them to fall dramatically from the top of a tower. In the end, the entire fort would be destroyed in slow motion, one block at a time.

Sometimes I would set up one of our family board games -- like Monopoly -- then play all the pawns as my own.

My stuffed animals had personalities, social relationships, even entire communities, complete with families, friendships and rivalries.

As I got a little older I would sort, order, and rank my baseball cards based on statistics or the poses of the pictured athletes.

And then there was always drawing, hours and hours of drawing with pencils and pens, often detailed war scenes. Echoing my block play, I would take the time to track the path of each bullet with dotted lines, making sure every Nazi got what was coming to him. (I wasn't war obsessed, but we lived near Ft. Jackson and it played a role in my imaginary life.) One of these pictures was even selected to be hung at the South Carolina State Fair.

I'm fully capable of being a social and active person, but I'm also inclined to lose myself in my thoughts and reveries. In fact, writing this blog each morning is part of that. I get up at 5 a.m. for the quiet, for the solitude, to recapture that feeling I had as a boy sorting his bottle cap collection. It's not about limiting distractions because the early morning is full of them -- the mocking bird songs, the rumble of garbage trucks, the slow, sure rising of the sun -- but maybe it is a little bit about curating them. 

I love the unmitigated rambling of my thoughts, the stewing over things, the wondering and wishing. Few things delight me more than to imagine how I would distribute a financial windfall. My wife and I call it "spending Yugoslavian dollars."

You know that I'm fully comfortable with you when I start surfacing my internal dialog in your presence. When I first started doing this with my wife she would say, "Stop obsessing!" as if my mind were plaguing me, but she now understands that I take great and (usually) private joy in letting my mind gallop to no purpose other than because it is a nice way to pass the time.

I know a lot of people who wish they could turn their minds off, who want to stop obsessing. Often they attempt to do this with distraction: watch a program, go to a museum, exercise, socialize, anything to avoid being alone with their thoughts and reveries. And, of course, smartphones have become the go-to distraction. 

A few days ago, we attended a 40th anniversary screening of the Academy Award winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. The director, Robert Epstein, is a friend and neighbor and the theater was full of fellow friends and neighbors. We greeted one another with hugs and handshakes, but then most settled into their seats and turned on their private screens to await the opening credits. I've stopped carrying my phone with me when I go out, so I found myself alone in a crowd. I was instantly transported to being a boy in church during a dull sermon when I would imagine the heroism I would display should we suddenly be rocked by an earthquake, or the adventure we would have if the entire building revealed itself to be a space ship sent to carry us all off to another planet, or simply the satisfaction I would experience from calculating the number of people in the pews, hymnals in the racks, or panes of stained glass in the windows.

This is a skill I learned as a boy, this comfort with, and even craving for, being alone with my thoughts and reveries. I know I'm not the only one worried about what we are losing in this era of ubiquitous screens. It really is possible to never be alone with yourself. Maybe this is a skill that can be acquired as an adult, but it's not the same thing as meditation which seeks to quiet the "chattering monkeys." I'm talking about listening to those monkeys, taking pleasure in their voices, and letting them carry me where they will, or where I will. 

Maybe it's because I learned to enjoy my quiet time as a boy that it feels to me that this is the only time to learn it, but I can say that when I look back over the arc of my life, I've spent many of my most enjoyable hours alone amongst my thoughts and reveries. Maybe I've just made friends with my obsessiveness. I don't know. But I do know that many adults, and increasingly many children, have no idea what to do with their quiet time. Ready access to screens as a boy would have likely meant that I would not have learned it at all. Maybe I wouldn't even know enough to miss it.

This is not just about smartphones, however. Most young children today are spending the bulk of their waking hours in preschools and day cares, always amidst a crowd, always stimulated and distracted, always on schedule, never alone in their room, or any room. Indeed, we've come to a point where we believe it's a danger to leave a child unsupervised in a room. When do they get to track the path of individual bullets or make an entire world from stuffies? 

Yet, at the same time, we are facing a national crisis of loneliness. I can't help but think they are connected.

Maybe one of the antidotes to loneliness is learning how to be alone with our thoughts and reveries, to know how to embrace the monkeys. We focus on the smartphones, but maybe they aren't the cause, but rather a symptom.

******

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!

That is Respect

The four-year-old boy was in full on tantrum. He had lost his temper with another child, punching him in the neck, then picked up a wooden block as if to throw it at him. I grabbed his wrist, then with the other hand took the block from his grasp. He fought against me, trying to get away, yelling, crying, outraged. There were other children nearby, not to mention furniture and other objects on which he could potentially hurt himself. I took hold of his other arm, holding both wrists firmly.

He was fighting against me as I gently pulled him away from the crowd, toward a corner of the room where I sat on a bench, drawing him into me, my arms and legs encircling him. He continued to lash about. My arm would show a bruise for a few days. 

I said, "I don't like it when you hit me." 

I said, "My job is to keep people safe and when you hit people it's not safe." 

I said, "I can't let you hurt people."

This is perhaps the most fundamental aspect of our job: to keep the children safe. And that is what I was doing.

He called me "stupid." He spit. He continued to fight against my arms. I didn't take any of it personally. I said, "I can't let you go until I know you won't hit other people."

To his credit, he was honest, "I will hit them."

"Then I'll hold you," I said, "until you're ready to not hit them.

He continued to wrestle against me, but I could feel in my arms and in my chest that his full-body tension was beginning to ebb, so I loosened my grip slightly. He began to talk more coherently as he threw his body against mine, explaining himself, telling me what had happened. I said, "That would make me mad too."

Before long, I was holding my arms in a loose circle, his body between my legs. If he had wanted to, he could have easily ducked away, but instead he rolled around in my arms, still crying, still telling me what he wanted to tell me. 

I asked, "If I let you go will you hurt other people?" He said, "Yes," so we stayed there.

When another child came up to ask me a question, his body tensed once more as he shouted, "I need Teacher Tom now! You can have him later!"

Soon he was just leaning up against me, between my legs, my arms around his shoulders, the last of spasms of whimpering faded. I wasn't holding him at all any more. He said, "I'm ready for you to let me go now. I won't hurt anybody."

There are a lot of adult who would tell me I did it all wrong, that what this boy needed was to be taught a little respect.

All too often, adult people talking about young children use the word "respect" or "disrespect" when what they mean is "obey" or "disobey." There are even those who assert, against all evidence, that parents teach respect through punishment, even through hitting children in the barbaric practice of spanking. What they are teaching is fear. What they are teaching is that the powerful have the right to abuse and bully those over whom they have power so long as they mitigate it with the caveat, "for their own good."

I've known far too many adults who claim to respect children, but who wield their physical, intellectual, social, and cultural power over them like a cudgel.

"I'm the adult!" they insist, as if that's a valid argument. 

None of this has anything to do with respect. Indeed, exerting power over another person is the height of disrespect. 

Becoming a play-based educator begins and ends with respecting young children and that is where it began for me with this boy.

Respect means that we know that this person before us, no matter how small, is a fully formed human being. Indeed, respect for young children, or anyone for that matter, is the opposite of having the right of power over others: respect demands that we assume a slew of obligations and responsibilities toward them. It's not a tit-for-tat transaction. They owe us no respect in return. But rather, if we are to be respected by our children, we must earn it. And the only way to earn respect from our children is by first respecting them. 

There is no love without respect. As bell hooks writes in her book All About Love, "Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust" (italics are mine). Any relationship that does not include respect is not one of love, but rather, one of power.

And power corrupts, a cliché that is borne out time and again through research.

"One of the effects of power," writes Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind, "is that it makes you see others in a negative light. If you're powerful you're more likely to think most people are lazy and unreliable. That they need to be supervised and monitored, managed and regulated, censored and told what to do." Sounds a lot like how our schools operate, doesn't it? It might even corrupt us so much that we feel that we have the right to hit them . . . for their own good.

Play-based education only works when the adults respect the children. It means knowing that their needs, desires, and opinions stand on an equal footing with our own. It doesn't mean that we let them do whatever they want. Those obligations and responsibilities require us to, at minimum, keep them and others safe. We say, "I can't let you do that," then proceed to not let them do it, not because we say so, not because we are the adult, but because we are honoring our responsibility to keep them safe. 

There are likewise times when our responsibilities require us to keep them on schedule, maintain a certain level of hygiene, or otherwise do things they don't want to do, but that doesn't mean we must command them in the fashion of "my way or the highway." It means that we are obliged to explain ourselves, to be transparent about our responsibilities, and to sympathize with their feelings about it.

We say, "I know you don't want to." 

We say, "I don't want to either." 

We say, "I can't let you." 

If it's not negotiable, we don't negotiate. 

And sometimes that means that we take their hands or pick them up and carry them, crying, even yelling. When this happens, no one is showing anyone disrespect: one person is fulfilling their responsibility, while the other is raging at the fates. We might even tell them, "I feel the same way."

It's a nuance many adults don't get. They hear tantrums as rebellion and it is rebellion if it's a reaction to an abuse of power. That is, after all, what rebellion always is. When respect is present, however, when love is present, we can see their tears as the most human thing in the world. There is nothing to rebel against. They simply aren't getting what they want, not because the powerful are keeping it from them, but because life is imperfect. And sometimes that makes us cry. When respect is present, the adult is then there, not as a punitive force, but rather as a loving support, a fellow traveler in disappointment. And to keep everyone safe.

Every play-based educator has experienced that moment when a child in tantrum, relaxes into our shoulder, taking comfort from us even as, only moments before, it might have looked to outsiders that they were fighting against us. Only now are we ready to begin to make things right again.

That is respect.

******

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!

Every Child is Born a Genius

On the short list of history's geniuses, most of us would include Leonardo da Vinci. He is perhaps the most famous polymath to ever live -- a painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, engineer, technologist, and mathematician of the highest order. He is the embodiment of the High Renaissance. Today, he is best known for his painting the Mona Lisa, a masterpiece that to this day defines what a masterpiece is all about. But his other existing works like The Last Supper are every bit as sublime not to mention the volumes of notebooks he left behind detailing everything from helicopters and nautical innovations to adding machines, anatomical studies, and optical discoveries.

I think it's safe to say that most of us would be pretty proud if our kid grew up to be the new da Vinci, right? I mean, he represents the pinnacle of the much ballyhooed STEM (or STEAM) schooling that we hear so much about. Although, to be honest, Leonardo himself never went to school. He was a "studio boy" in an artist's workshop, eventually becoming an apprentice. It's unknown whether he chose that particular career path or if he just fell into it by way of relieving his lower-class single mother of the burden of his upkeep.

All told, the great genius da Vinci produced fewer than 25 paintings, most of which were unfinished and still in his possession upon his death. The Mona Lisa remained one of those unfinished works, even after some 15 years of fiddling with it. Of the works he actually "finished" most only saw the light of day in his lifetime because his patrons threatened to stop funding him. Indeed, he spent much of his life dodging debtors. His notebooks full of innovations, inventions, and discoveries were exactly that, notebooks in which he doodled his ideas, never intended for the public eye. It's likely that he would today have been diagnosed with ADHD, so scattered and varied were his interests and activities.

What a deadbeat! At least if judged by today's productivity standards, da Vinci was a classic failure-to-launch dreamer, full of high falutin ideas, but obviously without the grit or rigor to pull himself up by his own bootstraps or whatever. Just imagine what he could have accomplished had he only been more motivated.

It's a sucker's game, of course, to play 'what if' with history, but what if Leonardo had had the benefits of modern schooling?

I think it's safe to say that he would not have be Leonard da Vinci. Certainly, he might have found a vocation that kept the debtors off his back. Maybe he would have become a painter with his own commercial studio, cranking out above average allegorical motifs and portraits to decorate the hallways and mantles of the wealthy, perhaps even developing a line of budget paintings for more humble households. Or maybe he would have joined the military or become an engineer or an architect or a botanist, all vocations for which he showed an aptitude. But I think it's safe to say that he would not have become the great genius Leonardo. His school masters would have seen to that. He might have been more productive, but it's quite clear that fiddling, perfecting, and doodling were the methods behind his unique and world-changing genius. 

Without that, he would not have been the wonderfully fallible Leonardo da Vinci, but rather just another promising young man who made a decent living.

It's tempting to say, Oh, but that's just Leonardo the genius. He's the exception. Most kids left to their fiddling, perfecting, and doodling would just waste their time on video games. Maybe. It's also possible that our educational system that focuses on productivity and paying the bills as the key measures of success has created mass mediocrity from the raw material of genius. 

What if that other iconic genius Albert Einstein was right: "Every child is born a genius." What if the real trick of education is to not waste it on productivity and paying the bills?

******

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!

This is What We Choose

The closer something is to the core of existence, the harder it is to define. 

One of the reasons we struggle to do consistent research into play, for instance, is that we can't, from research team to research team, seem to agree on what exactly play is . . . Although most of us know it when we see it. Consciousness is so notoriously difficult to define that it's often referred to as "the hard problem" . . . But we know it when we experience it. We struggle to define "life," "art," "learning," and "happiness" even as we have all had those experiences.

Perhaps the most elusive and most central of all is this thing called love. Parental love, romantic love, devine love, communal love, self-love, redemptive love, and more, are all entangled in our ideas of what love is all about.

In his class self-help book, The Road Less Traveled, psychiatrist M. Scott Peck tries out this definition of love: "(T)he will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." There's another impossible to define word -- spirit.

I can honestly say that I've loved every child who has ever some my way. I didn't always like every child, but I always made the choice to love them.

"Love," writes Peck, "is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love." As early childhood educators, as caretakers of young children, as parents, when we embrace the choice to nurture growth in young children, be that spiritual or otherwise, we are choosing love.

Of course, in a world that often views "love" as something instinctual or out of our control, the idea of choosing love may sound like a pipe dream. After all we "fall" in love, right? And falling in love suggests a Bam! Boom! Swoon! type of an experience, but I would argue that that ain't love. It might lead to love, but as bell hooks writes in her book All About Love, "To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients -- care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication." This takes time and it starts with a choice to nurture growth.

I know that some of us are uncomfortable talking about love in a professional context, but ours is a field that touches, relentlessly, upon the core of what it means to be human. It is that place of awe and wonder, yes, but also right there beside it, are the awful truths that we futilely believe we can hide from the ears of youth. Every day, all day, we nurture children as they howl with pain, as they freeze in fear, as they glimpse the abyss. We call upon our commitment to care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and communication as we sit with them through everything. We choose to do this. We choose love.

This often unspoken, even unacknowledged choice we make each day is why the efforts of dilettantes to streamline or standardize or otherwise improve our practice always fail. They can only see the rote. They can only see those things that are simple to define because they stand so far away from the core of what it means to exist. We work in the part of the world in which definitions are elusive, and it's not just love. Teaching itself defies definitions. It's art, play, and learning as well. It's the hard problem. This is what we commit ourselves to when we choose to nurture spiritual growth. It's a commitment to life itself. 

This is how our profession is unlike any other.

The reason that those outside our profession find what we do so confounding is that most other professions are based on love's opposite: power.

"When love rules power disappears. When power rules love disappears." ~Paulo Coelho

There is no commitment to love in relationships based upon power. When power supplaints love, we find rigid schedules, both daily and developmental, in which everyone must constantly worry about "falling behind." Power predominates in places where adults seek to prepare children for some future life rather than allowing them to live the life they are living.

"Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other." ~Carl Jung

Love does not dictate; love does not manage; love does not need tricks and tips for manipulating children. Love is about connection. It is about listening. It is about acceptance. It is about this unique and beautiful person. As Mister Rogers wrote, "To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now." That is where child-centered learning begins. Love does not prepare children for life because to love someone is to know that they are already, right here and now, living.

That is what love nurtures. This is what we choose.

******

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!

The Real Learning that Happens Through Play

Critics of play-based learning often express doubts about whether any "meaningful" learning happens through play. Or rather, they don't count it as learning unless we can prove to them that any individual child has experienced the transformation from ignorance to knowledge.

For instance, when I assert that a child playing with our cast-iron water pump is learning about hydraulics, they might press me for evidence of my assertion. I might then explain that they are learning about hydraulics because they are directly experiencing it, seeing it with their eyes and feeling it in their bodies. I might point out that they are engaged in trial and error scientific experiments by digging channels in the sand to direct the water, dams to block it, bridges to go over it. I might invite this critic to listen to how the children use their own words to describe what they are experiencing or planning. 

"Let's make a major overflow!"

"Hey, we made an island!"

"Pump faster!"

Most people then get it, even if it doesn't look like the school they experienced or that they anticipate in their child's future. But there are many who still want to hear it from the child themself. They want me to test them in some way. They want to hear the words "hydraulics" or "water pressure" or "gravity" or "liquid" or whatever a textbook might call it. They want to know that this learning is in the children's conscious minds because, for these critics, the only learning that counts is the stuff we can prove we know that we know. 

This is the entire testing industry in a nutshell: attempting to prove what children are able to hold in their conscious minds. And really, if we're being honest, even then it only counts for these critics as learning if a teacher has intentionally "taught" it to them. All this playing with a cast-iron water pump might be educational, but unless the child can somehow articulate the learning in an approved manner, it ain't real learning.

Here's the thing: people who study learning have long known that there is simply far more information at any given moment than our conscious minds can process. Indeed, that part of our experience we call consciousness is an important, but tiny aspect of how humans learn. Most of the information we collect and store about the world is done unconsciously. 

As Annie Murphy Paul writes in her book The Extended Mind, "As we proceed through each day, we are continuously apprehending and storing regularities in our experience, tagging them for future reference. Through this information-gathering and pattern-identifying process, we come to know things — but we’re typically not able to articulate the content of such knowledge or to ascertain just how we came to know it. This trove of data remains mostly under the surface of consciousness, and that’s usually a good thing. Its submerged status preserves our limited stores of attention and working memory for other uses."

The more we learn about human cognition and consciousness, the more we come to see that the lion's share of what we know we've learned without knowing we've learned it, which is how most learning happens as we play. From this perspective, standard schooling, the kind most of us remember from our own youth, is beginning to look more and more like a system designed to limit learning.

I've often heard parents ask their children at pick up time, "What did you learn today?" It's usually a fruitless inquiry, especially in a play-based setting. Even asking the more concrete question, "What did you do today?" often produces meager results. "Who did you play with?" is usually a more successful question, but parents who really get how learning through play works, will not ask a question at all, but rather say something like, "I saw there was easel painting this morning," or "I noticed the train tracks were out," or "Your teacher said there would be fresh play dough today."

The kids still might not give them what they want, but the odds go way up that these prompts will help them remember stories from their day. And it's by listening to the children tell their stories about what they did and experienced and wondered that we can gain genuine insight into what they've learned, what they are still learning, and what they don't quite yet understand. 

******

If you're interested in transforming your own space into this kind of learning environment, you might want to join the 2025 cohort for my 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning. This is a  deep dive into transforming your classroom, home, or playground into the kind of learning environment in which young children thrive; in which novelty and self-motivation stand at the center of learning. In my decades as an early childhood educator, I've found that nothing improves my teaching and the children's learning experience more than a supportive classroom, both indoors and out. This course is for educators, parents, and directors. Registration closes this week! This cohort started yesterday, but if you join today, you won't be behind. You don't want to miss this chance to make your "third teacher" (the learning environment) the best it can be. I hope you join us! To learn more and register, click here.

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 Only Question Any of Us Every Have

You're walking.

And you don't always realize it, but you're always falling.

With each step you fall forward slightly.

And then catch yourself from falling.

Over and over, you're falling.

And then catching yourself from falling.

And this is how you can be walking and falling at the same time.

                                                                          ~Laurie Anderson

I found myself remembering these lyrics as I watched a baby toddle along the sidewalk, walking and falling at the same time. Every step an act of faith and courage.

She came upon a brown leaf, a grapefruit leaf. It stopped her. She seemed to consider the leaf, then bent suddenly at the waist, reaching for it with her chubby fingers, grasping it, then brought it to her mouth all in one motion. 

Her father lurched toward her, saying, "Phooey! Phooey!" The baby stood upright at his approach, noting her father with her eyes while her hands continued to clutch the leaf. Her father wiped bits from her lips, then pried her mouth open to check for anything that might have gotten past. 

She stood for a moment, making a face as if at a bitter taste. She fell forward slightly, then caught herself from falling, one, two, three times before stopping as she once more noticed the leaf, or what was left of the leaf, in her fist. Her father again said, "Phooey!" but instead of bringing it to her mouth, she released the leaf with a kind of lurch, perhaps attempting to throw it. It fell at her feet. She once more bent at the waist and grasped it, bringing it once more to her mouth.

"Phooey!"

This baby had walked before, she had bent, grasped, mouthed, and thrown before. Maybe not leaves, but other things: balls, dolls, sticks, rocks, napkins, cups, garbage, you name it. She is likely beginning to speak, but really, these interactions -- bending, grasping, mouthing, throwing -- are her questions. The courageous act of walking, falling and catching her fall, is one of her ways of discovering novel things about which to ask her questions.

Grasping that crumbly, brown leaf gave her a different answer than the one given by, say, the bunch of keys she grasped the day before. Judging by her expression, I'm thinking she didn't much like the answer to her mouthing question. When she threw her rubber ball it had bounced and rolled in answer to her throwing question, but this crumpled leaf's answer to momentum and gravity was . . . something else.

It's easy to be a cynic if you're a person who doesn't know young children like we do, to see all of this as involuntary movement resulting from mere instinct. Western scientific thinking remains attached to notions of a clockwork universe, including humans, but most other traditions see this as intelligence. The intelligence of a plant to turn toward the light: the intelligence of a human baby to bend, grasp, mouth, and throw.

But what if they fall? What if they choke? What if they throw a rock through a plate glass window? 

That's what they need us for. We are there to say "Phooey!" not because we're superior beings, but because it is our responsibility at this stage in our own development to keep them safe. The clockwork universe views us as separate beings, but babies are intelligent enough to know that there is no separation between us, that their existence is fully intwined with ours. 

They ask their questions without limit until they come to one, often discovered through pain. That falling and catching yourself from falling business started with just falling, and no matter how many times we catch them, they will not learn to catch themselves until they've discovered the limit, the pain, for themselves. When we say "Phooey!" when we say, "I can't let you do that," we are setting a limit, for now, beyond which the pain might be too much. We are so intwined with them that we operate as their prefrontal cortex, providing them with advanced executive function. And they, in turn, provide us with renewed curiosity about things like leaves on the sidewalk. We are so intwined that we keep one another fully alive. We say "Phooey!" not because we are their bosses, but because we are them.

If we could put our babies' questions into words, be it about leaves or anything, they would be phrased something like, "How do I connect with this?" And really, that's the only question any of us ever have.

And in between each asking, each connection, each intwining, we are falling and catching ourselves from falling, over and over. That's what babies know.

******

If you're interested in transforming your own space into this kind of learning environment, you might want to join the 2025 cohort for my 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning. This is a  deep dive into transforming your classroom, home, or playground into the kind of learning environment in which young children thrive; in which novelty and self-motivation stand at the center of learning. In my decades as an early childhood educator, I've found that nothing improves my teaching and the children's learning experience more than a supportive classroom, both indoors and out. This course is for educators, parents, and directors. Registration closes this week! You don't want to miss this chance to make your "third teacher" (the learning environment) the best it can be. I hope you join me! To learn more and register, click here.

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 Experience of Life Itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

If you're interested in transforming your own space into this kind of learning environment, you might want to join the 2025 cohort for my 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning. This is a  deep dive into transforming your classroom, home, or playground into the kind of learning environment in which young children thrive; in which novelty and self-motivation stand at the center of learning. In my decades as an early childhood educator, I've found that nothing improves my teaching and the children's learning experience more than a supportive classroom, both indoors and out. This course is for educators, parents, and directors. You don't want to miss this chance to make your "third teacher" (the learning environment) the best it can be. I hope you join me! To learn more and register, click here.

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!

Not as a Break From Learning, But as the Essence of What it Means to Learn

Kleo

I often watch the Great British Baking Show, a competition program that good-naturedly pits amateur bakers against one another. I don't bake myself, but I find the show relaxing. After 13 seasons, there are no surprises, the jokes are predictably corny, and the contestants, hosts, and judges seem like kind, bland, well-intended people. Each episode runs about an hour. It's been years since I've made to the end of one before dozing off. In other words, it's a program I choose to watch when the goal is an early night.

Recently, however, I chose to watch a German revenge thriller called Kleo. I've never seen anything quite like it. It is complex and strange. I was so eager to know what was going to happen next that I was up half the night.

In other words, the first show tends to turn my brain off, while the second definitely turns my brain on. In the most basic vernacular, I would say that I've grown bored with the baking show, while the thriller offers me something new. There was a time when I found GBBS more stimulating, when I might watch several episodes back-to-back, but the novelty has worn off.

In Christine Caldwell's book Bodyfulness. She writes:

"Researchers have found that the learning process begins when the nervous system, which monitors our inner and outer environment largely below our awareness, senses a contrast . . . This novelty wakes up certain parts of the brain, which then focus attention on the new stimuli and gather sensory data about that new thing . . . if it creates a contrast with what we are used to, then our conscious brain lights up and we start focusing our senses toward that new experience. We consciously take in the new experiential data, and if we feel sufficiently drawn to it or emotionally invested in it, we will commit this new experience to memory, which is another way of saying that we have just learned something. This also explains why we have difficulty learning things that we don't care about."

Novelty is an under appreciated aspect of how humans are designed to learn. I often think about how I learned to drive a car. As a 16-year-old, I really cared about learning to drive. The first time I got behind the wheel of our family car, however, I nearly drove into a ditch. In the beginning, the novelty, or contrast with what I was used to, was rather extreme. I had to concentrate on everything -- which pedal to press, operating the turn indicator, my speed and direction. But as I committed these new experiences to memory, as I learned to drive, I found that I needed to commit less and less conscious attention to the routine tasks to the point that I could carry on conversations, fret about homework deadlines, or anticipate the weekends. Some people have become so "bored" with the process that they text message or watch videos while driving. It's such a problem, in fact, that we spend millions a year on public service campaigns designed to remind people to pay attention as they drive.

We are constantly surveying our environments in search of novelty. Our first filter is whether or not the new thing poses a danger. After that, however, our next filter is whether or not this new thing is in some way relevant to us. Is it interesting? Confusing? Exciting? Useful? Is this new thing or stimuli or experience or person something I want or need to understand or learn more about? If so, then learning is a natural self-motivated process. 

If our brains determine it is not relevant, however, which is the case with a large percentage of the crap we're taught in school, then learning becomes a heavy lift for both teachers and children. Since we've decided that the hierarchy gets to decide what the children must learn, and by when, we drain the process of the natural motivation triggered by novelty and relevancy. We then have to refill it with a system of rewards and punishments. We scold teachers to to make otherwise boring stuff "relevant," pitting them against Mother Nature. And worst of all, when a child can't learn what we want them to learn, we set them to tasks of mind numbing repetition and rote memorization.

School is not typically set up around the concept of novelty. On the contrary, our idea of school tends to be one of predictability and uniformity. Even our curricula tend to be based on the idea of slowly building learning one step at a time, meaning that we rarely create the contrasts that our brains are designed to seek out as opportunities to learn. This is probably why children seem most "alive" (often interpreted as misbehavior or distraction) when the tedium is interrupted by field trips, substitute teachers, or broken water mains. It also probably explains why recess is many children's favorite part of the day: this is the one part of their day where they are free to pursue novelty, not as a break from learning, but as the essence of what it means to learn.

What if instead our schools were set up as environments in which novelty was allowed to fulfill its natural role in learning? What if our classrooms, playgrounds, and other learning environments were beautiful, child-centric places in which children were free to explore, through their curiosity, the contrasts that motivate them? These are among the questions we will be asking ourselves in the 2024 cohort of my course for educators, parents, and directors called Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning (see below to learn more and register). What if we allowed learning to be the natural self-motivated process is was meant to be?

******

If you're interested in transforming your own space into this kind of loose parts learning environment, you might want to join the 2025 cohort for my 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning. This is a  deep dive into transforming your classroom, home, or playground into the kind of learning environment in which young children thrive; in which novelty and self-motivation stand at the center of learning. In my decades as an early childhood educator, I've found that nothing improves my teaching and the children's learning experience more than a supportive classroom, both indoors and out. This course is for educators, parents, and directors. Group discounts are available. You don't want to miss this chance to make your "third teacher" (the learning environment) the best it can be. Registration closes this week. I hope you'll join me! To learn more and register, click here.

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!