We Laughed Together Subversively

I looked up to see a familiar face. For a moment, however, I couldn't place it, but then recognized my friend who I'd not seen since he was five-years-old.

"I recognize you!" I blurted before his name came back to me. He was standing with his mom, pressed into her legs shyly, a posture I didn't recall from a couple years ago when we had seen one another almost every day. But, of course, he would feel that way. For a young child, two years is a very long time, long enough to have completely forgotten his old preschool teacher.

Yet he hadn't forgotten me. He was here because he had told his mother he wanted to visit me. When she asked if it was okay, I'd said to feel free to drop by any time. I've always had an open door policy for alumni.

His mother nudged him to respond, "Hi, Teacher Tom."

I'd met Duncan as a two-year-old who was enthralled with his older sister, often coming to class wearing her old clothes, sharing stories about what Bella had done or said, drawing pictures and making paintings to take home to her as gifts. As he got older, he turned his attention to "great apes," which he taught me included chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. He wore our classroom gorilla costume almost every day, which included an anatomically correct backside that he would shake to make the rest of us laugh. During the three years that he and I were together he took himself along a wandering path of self-directed learning that carried him from Bella to the great apes, then, in a progression that made sense to him, on to dinosaurs, arachnids, outer space, Star Wars . . .

He intuitively signaled his changing interests by changing costumes, using dress-up as a way to embody his current driving passion. And through it all was woven an abiding interest in connecting with the other children, often bringing them along for portions of his journey.

In other words, he was a kid who always made the most of our days together.

I used my standard line that I use on visiting alumni, "Hey, I used to know a kid who looked a lot like you, but he was a lot smaller."

"It's me, Teacher Tom -- Duncan."

He was taking an afternoon off from first grade to be here. As much as I wanted to spend more time with him, I had other responsibilities so I left he and his mother to nostalgically go through the arrival routine of signing in, hanging up his jacket, stashing his backpack, and washing his hands. We later reconnected up by the cast iron water pump, which his mother had mentioned as something he particularly remembered. By then he had warmed up.

"This pump seems a lot smaller," he said. "Everything seems smaller. My school is huge."

"Yeah, well you got a lot bigger," I answered, "so you need a bigger school. Is your teacher bigger too?"

He thought about it for a second, not hearing it as a joke, then answered, "She's not bigger . . . but she's meaner."

"Oh, come on! She can't be that mean."

He conceded, "Well, she's not mean, but she made a rule -- no costumes except on Halloween."

"That's too bad."

"And she always wants us to tell her math facts."

"Wow, you know math facts? That's pretty cool."

"It's not cool, Teacher Tom. It's stupid."

"I hate doing stupid stuff."

"Me too, but did you know that I'm the smartest kid in my class?"

"I didn't know that."

"I know all the math facts. None of the other kids know all the math facts."

"That must make you feel good."

"It doesn't," he answered while lazily pumping water as the younger kids scrambled to dig channels in the sand into which it was flowing. The kids are always hoping for someone to pump the water for them and Duncan was obliging. "It makes me feel bored, but Bella told me that school is always boring. She's in fourth grade now."

"I'll bet Bella knows even more math facts."

He nodded earnestly, "She even knows more math facts than me. And she gets really good grades, like As and Bs. I also get As and Bs."

"And that's good?"

"Miss Herring says it's good," he answered brightly before glumly adding, "but I can do better."

I thought of the fully engaged boy from a couple years ago. "Good" and "better" and "smartest" and "bored" were not words anyone could ever attach to his learning. It wasn't the first time, nor would it be the last, that I've seen how this system we call school had taught yet another of my young friends to focus on competing, ranking, rating, and jumping through hoops rather than simply engaging the world through their own curiosity.  

I knew that this was why he had remembered preschool, however, and why he had wanted to return. I also knew that this was why his mother had pulled him out of school for a visit. As he reengaged with his self-selected project of being the big kid pumping water for the little kids, I stepped back to stand with his mother.

I asked her about the family and specifically about Duncan. She told me he was miserable at school. I sympathized, then repeated some of what he had said about math facts and grades. She replied, "Oh, he's doing fine. The school work is easy for him. It's this," she said, waving at arm at the playground, "that we're missing. I want that boy back . . . Look at him!"

He was down on his knees in the mud, taking charge of building a proper dam as the little kids swarmed around this big boy, everyone playing the trail-and-error game, the research technique that underpins most play.

"I won't be able to take him back to school now," she laughed. "They won't let him in the classroom covered in mud. I packed a couple of towels in the car just in case."

We stood together watching Duncan in his element for a long, silent moment, before she added, "But it's still in there, you know? All that time with you is still in there. I know that's why he needed to come back. Thanks for having us."

We send them off into the world, us play-based educators, knowing that while life itself is ultimately self-directed, while schooling stands starkly apart as a place of pleasing adults, competition with your peers, and learning to game the system. It is a kind of battle they will be compelled to fight, one that pits their natural instincts and curiosity against tests, homework, and grades. We can only hope that we've fortified them for it. What gives me hope for Duncan and the other children I've taught is that "it's still in there." And because we're a cooperative school, it's still in their parents as well. 

Later, I found Duncan standing in front of our classroom costume rack looking disappointed. "I'm too big," he shrugged, "None of them fit me."

"Yeah, you always liked our costumes. Too bad you can't wear any at school."

"Actually, I do."

"But I thought you said your teacher has a rule."

"She does, but she doesn't know that I wear Darth Vader underpants every day!" We laughed together subversively.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

Playing at the End of Summer

For a time, the children gathered together around the workbench where they made things with junk using glue guns. Others chose to create using construction paper, tape, and staplers. They talked quietly amongst themselves as they worked, sharing tools and ideas as they went.

After a while, in ones and twos, they declared their projects complete and began to move away into the rest of the playground. Someone began to work the handle on the cast iron pump and the flow of water attracted the children, who took up shovels to direct the flow of the water. There was talk of creating a lake that was deep enough to float the old row boat that has rested in the sandpit for over a decade. They organized themselves.

It was a warm, breezy end of summer day. I tried not to think of all those poor children who were already back school. It's impossible not to think of it as an outright robbery. For me, summer belongs to children. Only a self-important killjoy would take that away. I was grateful to live in a place that at least respects childhood enough to give them a proper summer. 

I was sitting with a mother whose oldest daughter just completed her first year of public school kindergarten. As we watched the children from afar she sighed. Her children had been part of Woodland Park for the past five years, a place where the seasons change, but the spirit of summer feeds the entire year. She said, "Kindergarten was great, but it made me doubt myself. When we're here I know my kids are doing the right thing." 

No one ever needs "desk time" more than they need this. 

Earlier in the week, I performed a little slight-of-hand for the kids. Some of them figured out how I did it, which lead to a conversation about magic that has stretched out over hours and days. Some of them believe in magic, others think it's all slight-of-hand. We've wondered about unicorns and tooth fairies. We had a long conversation about dragons. We discussed the fire-breathing kind, but also the metaphorical ones that exist in Chinese mythology: the creative dragon that flows through our minds as we make art, or the water dragon that exists in the flow of water coming from the pump, or the fire dragon that makes the sun so hot. One group of siblings told us they were taking a weekend drive up onto the mountain dragon's back where there would still be snow even in the summer. And then there was the heavenly dragon, who is so large and powerful that its entire body is made of pearls of wisdom and other dragons.

Some of us danced together. Some of us danced while hanging upside down by our knees.

Summer, childhood, where there is no such thing as falling behind. The dragon myths are uplifting, but the one about falling behind is crushing our children and crushing our families. Indeed, it's not even a myth, but rather one of those dark fairytales designed to frighten us into "proper" behavior. I've heard of teachers being celebrated for giving children short breaks to dance at their desks, a crowd control technique that empties dance of its joy and freedom. Indeed, it's not even dance.

I recently had lunch with a friend who teaches in the public schools. She's always been a ball-of-fire, aware of the flaws in our educational system, but convinced that she, at least for the children in her life, could overcome them. This time she told me, "I no longer think I can change the world. I'm not even sure I can change the world for a single child." She had hoped that the pandemic would have opened people's eyes to what we are doing to children in the name of "desk time" and the fear of falling behind, but, as she said, "Everyone is just rushed to get right back to the crap." 

Against this background, I watched these children play in their natural habitat. I took several deep breaths, allowing myself to join them in this genuine moment of summer, of childhood, without adults breathing down their necks, without having to get career and college ready, without worry over the myth of falling behind. This is what young children should be doing: creating, digging, splashing, talking about dragons, and dancing, not in a rush, but in the warmth of a lazy mid-summer day.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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 Real Rigor of Play

The opposite of play is not work, it's rote. ~Dr. Edward Hallowell

Our outdoor classroom is one big slope and within that slope there are many ups and downs, reflecting our city which is built on hills. We're forever experimenting with gravity out there, rolling and flowing things downhill or dragging and pushing things up. There are parts of the space that are so steep one needs a running start to get to the top and there is very little flat upon which to rest one's legs.

We have a pair of wagons, which are regularly used on the hills. One day, one of those wagons became an airplane. 

From my photos, it's easy to see the physics and engineering learning, but those were minor aspects, almost side-effects, of the bigger, more important project, which was figuring out how to get along with the other people.

People sometimes question the "rigor" of a play-based curriculum when, in fact, we're engaged in the most rigorous curriculum known to mankind. There is simply no greater or more important challenge than the one of balancing our own individual desires and needs with those of the other humans with whom we find ourselves. 

A play-based curriculum is rigorous because of it's subject matter, which is the all-important one of getting along with the one another, something children are passionate about. Traditional schools, on the other hand, are rigorous simply because they attempt to teach less interesting things by rote, lecture, and text book, the most difficult way to learn new things because most children find them tedious and frustrating. It's an artificial rigor designed, I guess, to make the adults feel important.

Many people confuse hating school with rigor, saying things like, "It prepares them for life," but those of us who work in a play-based environment spend our days amongst children who love school, who arrive each day eager to tackle the challenges of community, and I would assert that there is no better preparation for life. Make no mistake, it's not pure joy, it's not all laughter. There are tears. There is conflict. There is negotiating and compromise. Children might complain, but they return each day eager to engage, to figure out the things they are most driven to figure out: the most important things of all.

There was so much to learn about flying our airplane together. Would it be safe? Where would everyone sit? How many of us can go at a time? Who gets to steer? Who rides and who "launches?" How do we get it back to the top of the hill? How do we make sure everyone gets a turn?

For the most part, we adults stood back, taking a few pictures, letting the kids work it out. Sure, the first few times they launched themselves down the hill, I jogged just ahead of them, prepared to intervene in the name of safety, but as it turned out on this day, I was unnecessary, even when the airplane crashed and burned.

I'll take the real rigor of play over the artificial rigor of rote any day. And so would the kids.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

Playing With Social Arrangements

When the two boys played alone, they tended toward the art table where they would chatter their way through works of art that involved action -- superheroes mostly. Or maybe they would claim a corner of the rug where they built a fort or parking garage together. When they played this way, it was as equals, almost in the spirit of improvisational comedy, building their play one "Yes, and . . ." at a time.

They were also part of a larger group of boys that often played together. You would find four of them forming a team of some sort, usually involving costumes or carrying "blasters" they had made from Legos. These games were full of "C'mon everybody!" and "Let's go over there." Although at times they had to pause things in order to negotiate the exact nature of what they were doing, usually culminating a Eureka! moment of democratic synthesis with someone saying, "I've got an idea!" 

And sometimes they played in even larger groups, with up to a dozen kids, boys and girls, engaged in, say, digging ditches and holes in the sand, then flooding the area from the uphill side with water to see where it would flow. These games could involve a great deal of bickering, sometimes breaking up into factions, but usually coalescing around one or two children who directed while the rest set their own agendas aside, at least temporarily, for the greater good.

You could find these boys engaged in each kind of social arrangement over the course of any given week -- sometimes even over the course of a day. In fact, most of the children ebbed and flowed in this way, sometimes playing alone, sometimes in small groups, sometimes massing together. 

Of course, it was rarely quite this clear-cut. At any given moment, someone was getting frustrated that their ideas aren't being considered. Or there was someone on the outside biding their time for their bestie to break away and join them in something more intimate. There might be someone trying to figure out how they could fit in with the glamorous team that was swooping about the classroom, or someone else who had broken away for solo play that was destined to become the next great fad.

In many ways, this sort of experimentation with social arrangements, the question of what is the "best" way for humans to live together, stands at the heart of what makes our species unlike any other. In their book The Dawn of Everything, the Davids Graeber and Wengrow, an anthropologist and archeologist respectively, point out that a fish or a hedgehog exist in a "state beyond good and evil" and therefore have no need to ask such questions. They organize themselves as their instincts guide them. But humans have evolved the capacity to be moral and social beings, which makes us unique in the animal kingdom. We can choose how we are going to organize ourselves.

Not everyone believes this, of course, there are many who insist that we are evolutionarily hierarchical and that civilizations always progress from the "primitive" to "civilized" in a predictable way. But Graeber and Wengrow beg to differ:

"(A)rcheological evidence is piling up to suggest that . . . our remote ancestors . . . shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of the year then dismantling them -- all, it would seem, on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states . . . our remote forager ancestors were much bolder experimenters in social form, breaking apart and reassembling their societies at different scales, often in radically different forms, with different value systems, from one time of year to the next."

Graeber and Wengrow have re-interpreted the anthropological and archeological record of our species, finding this phenomenon on every continent (with the obvious exception of Antarctica) across millennia. They show that many Indigenous societies deliberately shifted social forms, often on a seasonal basis. A community might be relatively egalitarian during one season and highly hierarchical during another, depending on what they were trying to accomplish. Hierarchy was never an inevitable or permanent state, but rather a tool, adopted for a time, to get certain things done. 

Our habit of considering our ancestors to be "primitive" in comparison to us tends to blind us to the fact that they were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers too. "Likely as not, they grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity just as much as we do; and understood them -- at least the most reflexive among them -- just as much, which also means just as little. They were perhaps more aware of some things and less aware of others . . . equally perceptive, equally confused."

In a similar way, I sometimes think, our habit of considering young children as less cognitively capable, likewise blinds us. When they engage in these kinds of social experiments, these ebbs and flows, they are following in these same footsteps, grappling with the paradoxes of social order, creativity, and what it means to be both free and connected. The Davids argue that our present social order where we see nation-states and hierarchy as inevitable, is unnatural, that we have become "stuck," and that this is the source of many of the world's most pressing challenges. There is no room for the natural ebb, flow, and experiment.

In her Canopus in Argos pentology (five book series), Doris Lessing explores a similar theme, but at the level of consciousness rather than political organization. She creates a mythology based on Sufi philosophy, in which there are six zones, each representing a specific level of consciousness. As moderns, our habit is to rank these zones, ranging from the most earthy to the most Devine, but she shows us that healthy development requires movement and exchange, like the circulation of blood, between the zones, or levels, or ways of being with regard to the other people. 

Otherwise we stagnate. Otherwise the blood clots.

As moderns, we've come to understand freedom as freedom from the control of others, but maybe, as our Indigenous ancestors seemed to understand, freedom is the ability to move between social arrangements, not the obligation to live perpetually under one "ideal" system or another. 

When children are moving like this, between self-created social arrangements, I see a healthy classroom. I see children moving fluidly between moments of complete autonomy, collaborative negotiation, and, hopefully rarely, situations in which an adult must temporarily take charge because the moment calls for it (like when safety is at stake). This may be one of the biggest challenges for us adults: remembering that our moments of authority must be temporary.

The health of any community lies not in its commitment to one governing principle or other, but rather in its flexibility. That is what the children are playing with as they circulate and move, enjoying the fruits of one way of being together, bumping up against the paradoxes, and then trying something else again and again and again. Perhaps it's only when we become stuck that we have a problem.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

Knowing How to Play This Game

"Wait a minute! I know how to play this game."

The children were standing around a table upon which were the tokens, dice and other parts and pieces from the board games Monopoly and The Game of Life. The night before, I had discovered, in my building's garbage room, that one of my neighbors had thrown out these brand new board games. I assume that it was the young couple from down the hall who had been talking for some time about hosting a game night for their friends. 

And as a preschool teacher, I'm not above a little dumpster diving.

If you're familiar with these particular classic games, you know they aren't designed for preschoolers, but I thought the kids would nevertheless get a kick out of the little houses and cars, the roulette wheel spinner, the stacks of phony money and whatnot. I had set the actual game boards aside, replacing them with a piece of white mat board that a previous group of children had used for an art project involving table and crayons.

"I know how to play this," the boy insisted, as if convincing himself. He was taking in the scene, his eyes and hands darting from piece-to-piece, "I know how to play this." 

Of course, he could not possibly know how to play this game because there was nothing to know; there was no game there. It wasn't a game at all, but rather a collection of game pieces. What he was reacting to was the idea of a board game, something he derived from previous experiences with these same, or similar, game pieces. He was making connections between his memories and the present. He was seeing patterns, interpreting them through the filter of experience, and, right there in front of everyone, constructing knowledge. "I know," he said.

Humans are born knowing no visual stories so the world they see is just a bunch of blobs. Likewise, smells and tastes begin as meaningless sensations. Newborns have, however, had the experience of listening to their world in utero, muffled by the womb, and so they are born knowing to attend, for instance, to their mother's voice: they turn their heads toward the familiar sound because a story about that voice has already started to form. 

The human brain is a pattern-recognizing machine, one that cannot abide a story vacuum. So, just as the boy constructed the story of a game from those mixed up pieces, a baby begins, from the moment of birth, even before, constructing the story of mommy, connection, and love.

As adult humans, it's obvious to us that the raven in the tree over our heads is not actually smaller than the raven in the grass near our feet. Indeed, we treat perspective as a scientific and artistic truth, but the ability to perceive that is a story we constructed for ourselves. It's a story we've learned. 

Not all the stories we tell ourselves throughout our lives turn out to be true. The patterns we think we've identified, the connections we've made between things, might turn out to be wrong, or at least not the same as the way other people do it, resulting in a different story. Our conflicts are always disagreements over stories.

By the same token, our greatest achievements emerge from working together to fill the vacuum with a common story. As the boy began to share with the other children about this game he "knew," they began to join in, asking questions, making their own assertions, and even negotiating exactly what this game was all about. The story of the game that emerged was not the one that we adults with our more detailed experience with board games in general, and these board games in particular, would have told. This was a fresh, new story.

So much of what passes for education is adults trying to tell their same, old, tired stories to the children. Stories that may or may not be true. A play-based curriculum is one in which the children are free to do what our brains are designed to do, which is to construct their own learning. This is how our species progresses.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

Imaginative Play is Thinking Play

Imaginative play is the backbone of most of the play we see in our preschool classrooms. It might be making art or building with blocks or playing house or putting on costumes and creating entire worlds. It's the opposite of our cultural stereotypes of "school" because it's not about "just the facts." On the contrary, it's about counter-factual thinking, which is, as it sounds, using our imaginations to create something that isn't, in fact, real.

They use their imaginations to paint a "spooky ghost with spider legs" or build a Lego laser or bake a pan of play dough muffins. They play games in which they are mommies or baddies or baby snow leopards. Sometimes critics of play-based learning point this out as a nothing more than a silly waste of time, but nearly everything around us that isn't nature is a product of counter-factual thinking. Someone had to first imagine a vehicle that propelled itself with a motor before it could ever become a reality.

Imaginative play is more than invention, of course. It's also how children come to understand their world. When they pretend to cook they are exploring, from the inside, something that is obviously important to understand. Dress up play is a gateway to storytelling and ultimately literacy. It's also a part of how we develop empathy and understanding of others. 

The imaginative play of children often seems dreamlike as they cobble together their play from fragments of past experiences, loose parts, compromise, and agreement. In imaginative play there can be two queens, talking gorillas, and healthy cookies. An orange rind can become a rainbow. A stick can be . . . well, almost anything.

Yesterday, I wrote of our memories as something we construct, or as experimental psychologist Frederic Bartlett put it, an "imaginative reconstruction," born anew, altered, adapted, and improved, each time we evoke them. He also argued that imagination is a product of memory. Indeed, the process of assembling bits and pieces into a cohesive product of imagination is, in our brain, remarkably similar to the process we use to call up memories. 

As neuroscientists Charan Ranganath puts it, "the hippocampus and the DMN (default mode network) . . . function at the crossroads between memory and imagination by allowing us to extract the ingredients from past experiences and recombine them into new creations. In other words, our brains are not memorization organs, but rather thinking organs, and imagination, not being a silly waste of time at all, stands at the center of it.

When we attempt to make children stop playing in order to force-feed them academics we are, in a pathetic adult-centric way, attempting to control their memories, the raw material they have at their disposal for thinking. And what dull stuff it is. Foolishly, we declare that all children must be forced to know this or that, ignoring the fact that our brains have evolved to be singular, to take in meaningful information and transform it in unique and idiosyncratic ways (i.e., by thinking) into something else. That is the entire story of human evolution.

And that is exactly what children are doing as they engage in their imaginative play. They are making memories and meaning, meaning and memories, in a creative cognitive process, which is, at the end of the day, what our brains are meant to do.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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 Lively Alert Fearless Curiosity of Children

Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as one of the "godfathers of AI," famously said, "The jobs that are going to survive AI for a long time are jobs where you have to be very adaptable and physically skilled, and plumbing is that kind of job."

People who write for a living, especially those who are creative writers, like novelists and screenwriters, are, rightfully, concerned that these new tools will take their jobs. And they aren't the only ones. The jobs of anyone who works with their mind is in jeopardy. 

Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, HVAC technicians, mechanics, chefs, and other "embodied" professions that require dexterity, spatial reasoning, and an ability to handle messy, unpredictable environments -- like crawling under the house to improvise a repair -- seem to be, at least in the near term, relatively safe from being replaced by AI.

I'm also going to include early childhood educators in the safe category. For one thing, our work is physical work. But more to the point, our work depends on relationships, judgment, empathy, and responding to unique (messy) human situations. These are not things AI will be able to do anytime soon. 

But that's not primarily what we're worrying about when it comes to AI. We're mostly worrying about how a world in which AI is appearing in every context is going to impact the cognitive development of today's children. For instance, I recently read an article in which the author made the case that children who are growing up today risk never learning to "think for themselves." It's a valid concern, but it echoes the concerns that educators have had about every technological development. 

Socrates, the most celebrated educator of us all, was famously opposed to the introduction of the phonetic alphabet. That's right, literacy, the backbone of what we moderns call education, was going to make the minds of our youth feeble. From the perspective of today, this concern seems hilariously misguided, but he wasn't wrong. Being educated in Ancient Greece meant possessing the ability to memorize. For instance, an educated Athenian could recite the entirety of The Iliad and The Odyssey from memory. Today, we're so lazy of mind that if we're going to quote Homer, we have to look it up. That, to Socrates, was tragic.

But it wasn't just literacy. The printing press, according to no less an "educated" person than René Descarte, resulted in so much inferior work being published that it distracted the serious mind. Again, in his day, being educated meant being well versed in "the classics," whereas this democratization of mass printing meant that the young had access to all kinds of dubiousness. From the perspective of education as he understood it, he was, like Socrates, correct.

The Enlightenment itself, this explosion of science, reason, and art, was going to separate the young from their God. And again, they weren't wrong because religious instruction was the foundation of education in those days.

Locomotive travel was going to make us all batty. Novels were going to rot the minds of our youth. When pocket calculators were introduced educators clutched their pearls.

Indeed, every major (and even minor) human development has been met with valid worry about how it would impact the education of the young. It's too soon to know if AI is really going to be on par with literacy, the printing press, or The Enlightenment. The hypers are hyping, but I'm old enough to remember when Microsoft founder Bill Gates, in 2001, hyped the Segway as being "as significant as the PC." (The Segway?) My guess, however, is that AI will prove to be a transformative tool. And it will, without a doubt, change both our children and how we educate them.

But taking a step back to look at education in our modern world, it's not as if we've designed our current system to encourage children to think for themselves. I mean, there's a ton of test taking, a ton of right and wrong answers, and a ton of standardization. The goal for most kids is grades, graduation, and jobs, none of which require original thinking. Indeed, original thinkers, those who doubt, who argue, who refuse, who dance to the beat of a different drummer, are penalized by modern schooling. They're all too often failed, drugged, punished, and generally made to feel inadequate. So it's not just AI that discourages "thinking for themselves."

In other words, our schools are less about learning and more about jumping through hoops, which is exactly what AI is good at. No wonder children, like adults in the workplace, are eager to adopt this tool that will help them more easily achieve the highest goal of school, which is to graduate with high marks. Actual learning is obviously, at best, secondary.

It's also important to point out that in today's world, schooling is mostly about preparing children for the workforce. At least that's what standard schools and policymakers seem to think. They can't talk about education without referring to those "jobs of tomorrow." The whole purpose of our schools is to produce young adults with the proper degrees so that they can get the very jobs that AI is going to be doing. If I were a kid graduating right now, I'd be pissed if I'd kept my nose to the grindstone and my eye on the prize only to discover that I should have been in trade school all along.

My point is that AI, like the technologies that came before it, is exposing our flawed approach to "education" and it's freaking people out.

In play based preschools, our students are self-motivated learners. We need no tests or grades or carrots or sticks because the whole point is self-directed learning, asking and answering our own questions, and learning, not with a job or degree in mind, but for the sheer joy. This is something AI will never be able to do, but it can be a powerful tool in a world in which human curiosity is finally set free.

We have to decide what we want our schools, what we want education, what we want childhood, to be about. AI is obviously a threat to our current system, but what happens if we set our children free to learn as humans were meant to learn?

"Education means only this," writes novelist Doris Lessing, "that the lively alert fearless curiosity of children must be fed, must be kept alive. That is education."

What if that is what stood at the center of our understanding of education: that lively alert fearless curiosity of children? If it did, would we be worried about AI at all?

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

Creepy Crawlers!

John Sain was a couple years older than me, which would have made him seven or eight. We always called him by his full name to distinguish him from his next door neighbor who was also named John. John Sain's father, Mr. Sain, had the caché of being retired military and having once killed a rattle snake in his garage with a garden hoe then called us kids in from the street where we were playing so that we could see first hand what these local dangers looked like. He even allowed me the honor of carrying the sack with the carcass around to the back of the house where we buried it. Mr. Sain once sucked blood from a finger I'd cut on a bit of glass while we worked together on a church-organized roadside litter clean-up crew. After spitting the blood onto the pavement, he told me it was to help avoid infection, which sounded both scientific and manly. Having such a father and being older, John Sain stood a little above the rest of us. He went to school during the day and so could only play with us in the evening and on weekends. When he was out there with us, it made our regular games special.

One day, I showed him some small plastic "army men" that I particularly treasured, which prompted him to invite me to his bedroom where he pulled out what he told me was an "army man making set." There was a small heating element, molds portraying the hollows of soldiers in various action poses, and pellets of lead. The idea was to choose a mold, put one lead pellet in it, melt it over the heating device, then, once the metal had fully liquified, you plunged it in a cold water bath to harden it. 

I expect Mr. Sain wouldn't have allowed John Sain to show such a "big kid" toy to a five-year-old, which is why we were being extra quiet and probably explained why he kept me at a distance as he worked. I admired how cautiously he handled the tools, how he used an oven mitt to handle the hot things, and the drama of the explosion of steam that leapt from the cold water bath. When he removed the newly shaped lead soldier from the mold, he handed to me saying, "You can't keep it" explaining that he would later melt it down again to make a new soldier.

This was the only time I got to see this toy, but I was sure I wanted one, badly. I begged my parents, who reminded me of Christmas and my birthday. I must have been consistent in my request for this toy because at the next gift-receiving opportunity I unwrapped my own casting set. I was only temporarily disappointed when the one my parents gave me melted plastic instead of lead and that the molds were of insects instead of soldiers. I suspect that the "Thingmaker featuring Creepy Crawlers" was considered a somewhat safer version of John Sain's set up, but it still involved heat, melting, molds, and steam blasts, although, to my disappointment, the instructions said to never try to re-melt cast figures. Still, I was absolutely thrilled. I can still experience the fumes of the melted plastic if I try, the heat on my hands, the electrical buzz of the heating element, the topography of the molds under my fingers, and the blasts of steam on my cheeks.

This was a toy I played with unsupervised, alone and sometimes with visiting friends. I emulated John Sain's authoritative caution, keeping others at a distance. Filling the molds took a steady hand. The whole process involved concentration, slow movements, and fine motor skills. The risk of doing things wrong was manifest. I didn't need an adult hovering over me to chirp "be careful" in order to be careful. I imagine my father must have helped me with the first batch, but from then I was on my own, a five-year-old with a toy that could not be sold today to children of any age, learning the kinds of lessons that simply can't be taught through theory. This is one of my earliest memories of play. To this day, I recall it as a kind of giddy balancing act. Always at the back of my mind was the reality that had been enforced by John Sain that one slip and I would be injured, perhaps badly. Indeed, without the danger, I expect it would have been a toy of a single day, something to which I'd never again return after that first afternoon, but as it was, I girded myself regularly. Each time I removed the box with its tidily organized interior from its shelf, I summoned a bit of courage as my heart beat with excitement that can only come direct experience. 

Lead is a hazardous substance, especially for young children, and while the box assured us that the plastic was non-toxic, I still wonder about the fumes it released while being heated. I'm not writing about this to "sell" anyone on the idea of purchasing such a toy for their own kids, but only to share what is one of my earliest memories, which is to say, an experience that made a significant impact on me. The two-time Nobel prize winning chemist Linus Pauling tells of a similar experience with an older boy who had a small home chemistry lab, saying that he was "simply entranced" by the experiments he was able to perform. I don't have a story anywhere near as dramatic, but to this day, I love few things more than cooking over gas flames on my stove top and undertaking art projects that require a steady hand and full concentration. I have no idea what impact my childhood experience had, whether it simply revealed something that was already there or inspired me to something that might have never been otherwise discovered, but I do often think of John Sain, Mr. Sain, and the Thingmaker as I work around heat or when I'm engaged in anything that requires a slow and steady hand.

What I do know, however, is that I have a fine memory of childhood, a real experience that is as much a part of me as the finger from which Mr. Sain sucked blood. There is truth and falsehood mixed up in it, science and myth. It lives not just in my mind, but also in my body and soul, having been fixed there by the manifest danger and the full concentration it demanded.

If you think melting and casting might be something you want to try with your own preschoolers, here is a version I came up with for the kids at Woodland Park to try. It still involves real risk, concentration, and a steady hand, but without some of the unnecessary hazards.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!