Not to Correct, But to Expand

Separately, individually, the two boys were sweet, but together they took joy in tormenting their classmates. They called themselves "bad guys." They knocked over block constructions. they gleefully upset games of domesticity. They called names, snatched objects from hands, and roared, all the while giggling together, then running off whenever an adult approached.

They never physically harmed anyone, but they definitely frighten some, but mostly, they left a trail of frustration and anger behind them. When one of the boys was not at school, the "bad guys" were likewise absent. It was a behavior that emerged only as a collaboration. Every now and then, I'd find myself alone with one of the boys. When I broached the subject of "bad guys," they would both insist that it was "fun." They also acknowledged that they frightened and frustrated the other kids and knew that their game was "just pretend." Neither felt they were really bad guys. Based on my separate conversations with them, I knew that they recognized that some of their classmates might not know it was pretend, and they even seemed to regret that the "bad guys" made other people afraid or angry.

Together, however, this recognition either disappeared or was ignored as they giddily returned to their challenging behaviors.

I didn't see it as bullying behavior. They didn't target the weak the way bullies do. Indeed, they generally preferred being "bad guys" to the children who responded with most fervor, the ones who fought back, who yelled, who matched, or even fed, their energy. 

Then, irritatingly, they giggled together and ran off to scheme their next act of bad guy-ism.

There's a concept in psychology called distributed cognition, which studies how thinking can extend beyond an individual into interactions with other people, objects, and environments. A related idea, participatory sense-making, explores how meaning can emerge through interaction rather than simply being exchanged between separate minds.

We see examples of both of these things in preschool all the time. Most often we celebrate the idea that together we're smarter, more capable, more creative. We imagine collective cognition like this as an improvement on individual cognition. I often express this concept as together we're a genius. 

This is often one of the most exciting discoveries of early childhood.

And it's not wrong to see it this way. After all, as historian Yuval Noah Harari discusses in his book Sapiens, much of the success of our species is our ability to cooperate and work together. Alone we are rather frail, naked apes, easy prey for apex predators like tigers, sharks, and bears, but together we build cities, dominate continents, and make the world new through our collective imaginations.

But this capacity for creating meaning through interaction can also, obviously, take a more ominous turn. We can, in fact, behave collectively as "bad guys." Distributed cognition and participatory sense-making can create something like a single mind that carries us into the kind of morally ambiguous territory that we would avoid as individuals. It can cause us to be less capable of recognizing certain truths that are obvious when we're on our own.

I spent a lot of time talking with these boys, both separately and together. Individually, they committed themselves to taking more care of their classmates, but the mind that emerged when they were together continued to cause problems. It wasn't until we began to discuss the "bad guy" situation at circle time that things began to change.

It started with one girl proposing we make a classroom rule: "No bad guys." The children make their own rules (or agreements). I often discuss this process in terms of self-governance and democracy, but I've also come to understand it in terms of psychology as well. 

The boys, of course, immediately objected to a rule against their favorite game, and it was clear from the start that they would never agree to it, but that doesn't mean that a circle time conversation about "bad guys" wouldn't be productive. I asked the girl to explain why she thought we needed that rule, to which she replied, "They scare me." This confession caused the boys to giggle, but as classmate after classmate shared their anger, frustration, and fear, that disappeared. The bad guys had some defenders, as well, but the giggling disappeared. 

By the end of that day's discussion, you could feel the collective mind had grown, which is what happens as we add perspectives. 

This wasn't the end of the "bad guys." Nor was it the end of our collective mind-expanding circle time discussions. The concept of "good guys" emerged as a natural counterbalance. Likewise the notion that this was all "just pretend" began to be included. Pretend fear and pretend anger began to replace some of what had been real. "Powers" were created, like invisible shields or magic wands that could stop "bad guys." But more importantly, the antagonists found their own perceptions expanded in ways that allowed them to include the impact their behaviors had on others.

And slowly, over weeks, the bad guy mind evolved into something bigger, even if it never lost the high energy, connection, and giggling.

A common approach to "bad guy" play is for the adults to quash it one way or another. We start with an attempt to show the baddies how their behavior negatively impacts others and when that doesn't work, we tend to ban or constrain the game, often under threat of punishment. It's a short cut that relies on teaching the lesson that those with power get to tell others what to do, a fundamentally anti-democratic concept, and often just succeeds in pushing the behaviors underground.

The alternative is to trust that the same collective intelligence that creates the problem can also be part of the solution. The two boys had discovered something powerful in their relationship, something that neither could have created alone. My job wasn't to break that relationship or extinguish their joy, but to help bring it into conversation with the larger community. The solution was not to correct their collective mind, but to expand it. And as more perspectives became part of it, new possibilities emerged, possibilities that none of us, certainly not me, could have imagined on our own.

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