The Case Against Professionalism

There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.      ~J. Robert Oppenheimer

When architect Simon Nicholson first proposed his theory of loose parts ("How Not to Cheat Children") in 1971 he asserted that the "gifted few" (professionals) got to have all the fun. They designed the buildings, created the music, wrote poems, did the science, and then the rest of us were left to just sort of live with, but never touch, change, or question their work. His big idea was to give amateurs, and especially children, the ability to do the fun part themselves by filling their spaces with "loose parts" that they were free to manipulate, connect, and transform.

It was a radical idea, one that holds the potential to turn education upside down. It was an idea in keeping with the ideas that had been emerging over the preceding 70 years from education pioneering amateurs like John Dewey and Maria Montessori right through Loris Malaguzzi and even Mister Rogers. The idea was to put the "fun part" of learning into the hands of the learners themselves, to allow children to determine their own curriculum from the loose parts of life.

Those of us who have embraced play-based learning strive to do this, but we continue to be outliers. Most "professional" educators today have acknowledged the theory, then absorbed it into their professional work, manipulating it to fit in their professional orthodoxy, and generally colonizing it with their professionalism. It is in the nature of professionalism to accept the current "environment" and only consider change that can happen within that current environment. If they stray beyond the current boundaries, they risk being deemed "unprofessional," which is the kiss of death. That's why, you can today find preschool classrooms with "loose parts" corners that are little more than a few tidy baskets of bits and bobs, just another watered-down concept that allows the profession to say, "See? We're open to new ideas."  

I'm not blaming the educators: I'm blaming professionalism. Professionals have a lot to lose, amateurs and children do not. As philosopher Marshall McLuhan puts it, "The "expert" is the man who stays put."

I understand why professional educators want to be seen as professionals. If nothing else, being a "professional" often carries with it both prestige and money. That's why we fight for the recognition. I have nothing against prestige and money, but I resist, at some level, being a professional in the name of . . . well, professionalism. I strive for a professionalism that constantly questions the status quo: one that abhors staying put, that recognizes that, at its heart, learning always involves upsetting the status quo.

As adults, we become experts by learning the rules of our professional environment and that's useful, of course. It allows us to navigate the professional world efficiently, which is one of the hallmarks of professionalism. But it also tends to blind us. When we learn those lessons too well, when we get too wrapped up in the jargon and "best practices," we have a tendency to stop noticing possibilities that fall outside those rules.

This is, I think, what Oppenheimer was referring to as well. He certainly wasn't saying that children know their physics as well as the father of the atomic bomb. Rather, he's pointing out that children, as amateurs, haven't yet had their sensory perceptions boxed in by all those professional assumptions. They're inclined to ask questions a professional would never think to ask. They consider objects in ways professionals would never imagine. They see possibilities where professionals see obstacles. Even a child can see the insanity of creating an atomic bomb, while the professionals went right ahead and created a way to destroy life on earth.

Children are classic amateurs, or even dilettantes (in the best sense of that word). They're not incompetent, but rather free from the systems of conventions and agreements, the environment, that too often captures professionals. Amateurs dispense with the professional jargon that often seems designed to exclude amateurs. Amateurs retain the freedom to ask questions that professionals cannot conceive of asking because to become a professional, to be considered a professional by their peers, they have mastered the assumptions and "problems" of the world as the other experts know it. Curious amateurs are inclined to question whether they're even addressing the right problems.

We see this phenomenon all the time in education. Go to almost any online resource for educators and you'll find professionals asking professionally appropriate things like, How do we get children to learn letters sooner? Or How do we improve compliance? Or How do we measure learning more accurately? Or How do I motivate these children? Or How do we get children to listen?

Being a professional too often means losing the ability to perceive the profession's own assumptions. "Professionalism" means delivering curriculum, adhering to "best practices," aligning with standards, and achieving measurable results. That's the professional environment. Anything outside of that is, by definition, unprofessional.

Meanwhile, children are asking valid questions that fall beyond the scope of the professionally accepted ground rules; genuine questions like Why do we have to learn this at all? Why can't we think about something more interesting? Who got to decide that this crap matters? Why can't we just go outside?

In our work with children, these are the questions play-based educators ask: the amateur's questions. The children's questions. We fight to remain connected to our amateur status. 

I've never done most of the "professional" things that educators in normal schools do. Instead, I create environments, I pay attention to the children, I respond to what emerges from their play, and I trust the children's competence. I listen to the questions the children are asking. Instead of being professional, I strive to remain curious, to retain the capacity to be surprised, and to be willing, at any moment, to abandon any plan when something more interesting emerges. I'm more interested in children learning to motivate themselves, to assess their own learning, and to practice life itself within the context of community.

This is what play-based learning is all about. It's what pioneering amateurs like Montessori, Malaguzzi, and Mister Rogers understood. They distrusted expertise that had, as it always does, become disconnected from direct experience. They wondered what would happen if we stopped deciding, in advance, what learning is supposed to happen, and instead let the children pursue learning that is meaningful to them.

Of course, children are not merely amateurs—they are also novices. They don't know what they don't know. It is also part of our job to keep them safe enough, to provide information that they need, and to help them figure out how to be part of a community. But we err when we make the mistake of trying to professionalize childhood. We cheat children when we forget that childhood is, and always must be, a season of life when curiosity matters more than expertise.

That's why children need play, the natural environment of amateurism. Not because play prepares them for the real world, but because it preserves ways of seeing that the rest of us too often lose. Our job is not to rush children toward professionalism. Our job is to create beautiful environments, keep them safe enough, answer their questions, and then stay out of the way as much as possible. The future doesn't belong to the experts who stay put. It belongs to those who can still discover possibilities where everyone else sees only the way things have always been done.

******

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!

To Live an Abundant Life

The four and five year olds started their days on the playground. Some would take a moment to greet me, but most barely paused to shed their backpacks and jackets before plunging into their play. That might mean manning a position at the cast iron water pump, digging in the sand, swinging, racing up and down the concrete slide, hunting out a favorite loose part, or gathering with friends to plot and plan together, inviting one another with the most beautiful sentences in the human language, the one's that start with the contraction, "Let's . . ."

"Let's pretend we're pilots!"

"Let's all be baby animals!"

"Let's go over there!"

Most of the four and five year olds I've ever taught had been together in school for a couple of years already. They knew me, they knew the other kids, they knew the environment, and they knew how to derive satisfaction from playing together. They did it effortlessly and without prompting. This was life as they knew it, a formula of their own collective and ongoing distillation. Of course, they knew there would be conflict, even pain, because they had already learned from experience that the permission to learn from pleasure always includes the possibility of pain. That's perhaps the lesson of life, not this artificial pain that is imposed by schools in the name of teaching children the harsh lessons of the workplace: do what you're told even when it's mind-numbing and soul-crushing.

In our school, the children knew that they were free to pursue, both individually and together, a life in which their work was their play and vice versa. 

"(M)ost individuals today are born into serfdom to Factory Earth," writes historian Peter Stearns in his book From Alienation to Addiction. "With factory industry, most people, for the first time in human history outside of some forms of slavery, could never aspire to work without direct supervision."

The adults at Woodland Park performed their ancient role of caretakers, protectors, and occasional advisors, because the goal of education as we saw it is to allow young humans to seek their one true path, the one they follow, for a day or a week or a lifetime, out of curiosity. In our way of doing it, curiosity stands in the stead of the factory floor boss.

What do you do that is as effortless and unprompted as the four and five year olds playing together at Woodland Park? What is it that you do that doesn't need to be put on a "to do" list because you will do it anyway? As adults, many of us have forgotten what it means to live in this way, looking inward and asking ourselves what would give us permission to play-work-live like these children? People often envy these young children who are, quite frankly, living a life of abundance and purpose. It still surprises me how many feel they need to put a stop to it, "for their own good." They can't just go through life doing what they want. It's the grim view of life as a factory. A place where no one has ever found abundance and purpose. As the Greek philosopher Epicurus wrote, "Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance." 

But life can't just be about enjoyment! If it feels good, it must be bad. If we do it just to satisfy our curiosity, it must be a waste of time. Curiosity kills the cat. What's good must be hard and painful. Pleasure is only a dessert, something to be limited and saved for last. 

The novelist Edith Wharton asks, "Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?" Why indeed.

I've spent my adult life trying to learn the lessons of humans for whom pleasure and curiosity stand as the pure goods that they are. These are the people who are living, not happy lives, but abundant ones. At the end of life, no one wishes they had worked harder. If they have any regrets it's that they didn't love and play more. Why is it that we only seem to understand this central truth at the Alpha and Omega of life, whereas during the journey in between we treat it as, at best, a hinderance and at worst a devil that must be kept down lest we . . . What? Find purpose in life before it's all over? Sounds pretty good to me.

I know why, of course. It's fear and doubt. We've been taught by years of schooling, both curricular and extracurricular, that the floor bosses know best, that we are here to serve Factory Earth, and that anything that makes our hearts sing is a secret evil. It's reinforced every time a child is reprimanded for daydreaming and not paying attention. It's taught each time children are scolded for chatting amongst themselves instead to listening to the teacher's instructions. We've been made to feel afraid of ourselves and our own desires because they have no place in the factory.

As I spent my days amidst these self-directed humans who had permission to work-play-live, I knew that they would inevitably leave Woodland Park where they would begin their training for Factory Earth. Soon enough they would come across those who would direct them "for their own good" and make them feel guilt or shame over those things that bring them joy, and pride in doing the things against which their souls rebelled. I found my joy in the moment; the now of this community of children. I will always have the satisfaction in knowing that for a time, on that playground, the four and five year olds knew they had permission to live abundantly in a world in which "Let's . . ." was the sacred a call to live together with a purpose all our own.

I can dream that one day we will come to understand that this should stand at the center of education. Until then, I'll just live it.

******

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!

What Are the Babies Crying About?

Young parents with a crying infant know that behavior is communication, although it may take weeks or months to figure out exactly what it is their babies are communicating. Does this cry mean I'm hungry? Does that one mean I'm in pain? Frightened? Tired? 

Coming to understand our new babies generally involves a lot of trial and error as we try one approach after another. If they reject the breast then we check their diaper. If they don't respond to singing we try rocking, bouncing or cooing. In other words, we try everything we can think of from burping to taking them for a drive until we hit on the proper response. 

The one thing every new parent learns is that the proper response to their baby's cried request or query or demand or complaint, is to do something to change their environment or their situation within the environment. It's not our babies that need to change -- they are the one perfect thing in an imperfect world. Their crying is feedback on their experience in that imperfect world and their place in it. And in this business of being an adult caretaker, the customer is always right, so we do what we need to do to make the world, at least for a time, a bit more hospitable. Then we do it again and again until one day we decide, usually gradually, but sometimes abruptly like on the first day of school, that it's not the world, but the child that must change.

This is the beginning of what we call "education." Behavior continues to be feedback: I need more time. I need to go outside. I need to know everything about this mote I've discovered under my fingernail. That's why I'm covering my ears. That's why I'm bouncing off the walls. That's why I can't keep my eyes on you and attend to your irrelevant blather. The adults have decided that they will no longer respond to their request or query or demand or complaint by doing something to change their environment or their situation within the environment, but rather strive to change the child, to invalidate their communication with, say, scolding, bribing, shaming, and even punishing. I've known far too many children who have been kicked out of preschool because they are unable to change to suit this or that environment or curriculum or methodology. 

But they need to learn to adapt, we argue, it's a life lesson. The world is the way it is. We say this even though we've all discovered that the real world simply doesn't box us up in packages of two dozen people of like age, sit us in chairs, face us forward, silence us, and compel us to attend to whatever nonsense is on the pre-planned agenda for the day. We say that we are preparing our children for reality, which is to say an unchanging world that will only accommodate requests or queries or demands or complaints within a limited range. There will be no taking you for a drive or cooing or laying you down for a nap on the top of a running clothes dryer (the thing that finally soothed our infant daughter for a time). We continue to do this even though it is demonstrably untrue that this is the way the real world works.

On the contrary, we double down on changing the child to suit this mythical "real world." If you don't keep up, if you don't shut up, we will label you. If you don't know this week's spelling words this week, you're "behind." And you remain behind even if six months later you demonstrate you know how to spell those words because the curriculum has been cranking out new spelling tests in the meantime. 

It's like a train that continues to chug along even when passengers are falling off. Instead of stopping to let them hop back on it continues moving forward expecting the children, children who are screaming "Wait!" to just, somehow, catch up. And if the child won't or can't run after the train, they are labeled as deficient in some way and specialists are called in to fix the child who has all the while been clearly saying, through their behavior, This sucks for me!

In the actual world, however, there is always another train. In the actual world, unlike school, you can take a taxi or ride a bike or walk or opt to go somewhere else on an entirely different timetable. Or just choose to not go anywhere at all. The real world may have its tracks and obstacles, but ultimately it is infinitely malleable. 

What if this were the core lesson of school? What if instead of being charged with shaping all children according to some artificial and arbitrary norm, we made them into places that strive to understand the children's requests or queries or demands or complaints?

Awhile back we were in New York to visit our daughter. While there, we went to see the world premier of a documentary about performance artist Taylor Mac's 2016 "24-Decade History of Popular Music", a 24-hour, one-time-only show about the American experience. The show featured dozens of costumes by the designer Machine Dazzle. During the question and answer session following the screening, an audience member asked Mac to name his favorite costume. He seemed genuinely stumped before good-naturedly refusing to answer the question, quoting author Iyania Vanzant, "Comparison is an act of violence."

Our schools are simply not designed to support each child in achieving their own unique potential, which is what our babies are always calling out for if we would only listen. Instead they are in the business of comparing, measuring, grading, and ranking with some sort of arbitrary standard or norm in mind. This is harmful and limiting not just to every child, but every human. It's violence.

What if we instead saw education as a process of trial and error, one that sought above all else to understand what each child is crying about; what they are communicating about the environment and their situation within that environment? What if, as educators, we dropped our measuring sticks, forgot our timetables, ditched our curricula, and focused instead on listening in order to properly respond to what the children are trying to communicate? Maybe then we would have an educational system that truly prepared our children to engage fully with life itself.

******

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!

It's Remarkable That We've Gotten it So Wrong

Young children do math for fun. Most of us, however, have been taught to misunderstand mathematics. We think it has to do with numbers and equations, but that's like mistaking a map for the actual terrain. A friend with a PhD in mathematics once told me that most of what he does is discover increasingly beautiful ways to pattern, organize, sequence, and group things.

In other words, when we see a child arrange blocks in a red-blue-red-blue pattern we see a child engaged in math. When children sort objects by color or shape or some other characteristic, they are doing math. When children discover a clapping pattern or identify an animal as belonging to a smaller category called "bugs," they are engaged in math. Math is one of the fundamental ways that humans make sense of a complex world. The numbers and equations are academic abstractions that help us communicate, explore, and solve specific problems, but when we center this aspect of math in the early years we rob it of its essential connection to the human experience. 

In other words, we tend to render it boring and meaningless, an academic exercise done for the purpose of grades or a teacher's approval.

Shakespeare is an other example of something profoundly beautiful that schools tend to render dull by treating it as an academic pursuit. I wasn't introduced to his work until high school where I was expected to read the script of Romeo and Juliet. I struggled through it, listened carefully to my teacher explain it, then managed to pass my test, but it was dull, dull, dull. When we complained, our teacher recommended we try reading it aloud, which helped to enliven it a bit. Finally, as a senior, a group of us were rewarded with a field trip to the Ashland Shakespearean Festival, where we were in the audience for several plays. I still struggled with it, but it was far from dull.

My daughter's experience with Shakespeare was quite different. At 8-years-old, she declared that she was going to grow up to be a Shakespearean actor, a pursuit that carried her through college. Her introduction to The Bard was through a summer camp in which the kids spent two weeks acting out scenes with an emphasis on fight choreography. She went on to spend the next several years performing in a series of Shakespearean plays through a youth program offered by the Seattle Shakespeare Company. She was never bored. Indeed, she became obsessed with the works of one of the greatest artists to ever live. I'll never forget arguing with her about something or other when she was 10. She settled matters by quoting Macbeth, a play in which she hadn't even yet performed. Shakespeare wasn't something for school or study, it had become intertwined with her life.

The works of Shakespeare, perhaps the most influential and enduring art in history, are meant for the stage. When we read them, they bore us. When we see them acted, they come alive. When we act them ourselves, we embody them. Schools, however, tend to do it backwards, just as they do with math: they start with the disembodied abstractions, then, some day, once most of the kids have long given up on Shakespeare, it's offered as an extracurricular activity that only "nerds" care about. It's as if we tried to teach art by making preschoolers start with years of tedium like horizontal line theory, only allowing them to paint a full canvas painting once they've worked their way through years of shape, color, and shading drills. Taught this way, everyone would hate painting.

But this is what normal schools do with everything. Academic instruction dehumanizes things that are essentially human. Academics instruction strips away the the natural motivations of beauty and relevance, replacing it with dry external rewards (like grades) and threats ("If you don't learn this, you'll never get into college."). It's a system that makes learning itself, perhaps the most inspiring thing any of us will ever do, into drudgery. 

As a boy, I played and watched a lot of baseball, a game that features a whole lot of statistics involving averages and relatively complex calculations. Long before I got to the academic version of averages and other statistics, I understood it because I'd been motivated to make sense of all those columns of numbers of the backs of baseball cards. In the same way my daughter was fully conversant with Shakespeare long before it was presented to her as an academic pursuit. This is the direction in which learning is meant to flow. We must first experience the terrain before we can comprehend the map. 

This is exactly the way play-based, or self-directed, learning works. We start with the beauty. We start with the relevance. We start with self-motivation; with life itself. We start with the full canvas painting, the patterns, the terrain, the comedy and tragedy. When learning starts with our natural curiosity about life itself, the educator's role becomes one of keeping up rather than cracking the whip. 

Learning is the easiest, most natural, and joyful thing in the world. It's remarkable that we've gotten it so wrong.

******

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!

Watching Ravens, Contemplating Clouds, and Picking Dandelions IS Education

National Park Service

Ravens are found pretty much everywhere.

Their "success" has to do with their intelligence and adaptability, especially their capacity for working with other species.

Like humans, they are omnivores, although most of their diet is meat. They have been known to hunt smaller animals. They are also notorious nest raiders, making off with both eggs and hatchlings. But their preference is scavenging. If you live in an urban area, you see them around open dumpsters. The ravens in Seattle are well-known for frequenting parks on sunny days which is why you never leave a picnic lunch unattended.

In more recent times, ravens are thought to be nefarious pests. Their flocks are called "unkindnesses" in some places. But throughout most of history, humans have admired ravens. They feature in many mythologies as tricksters and emissaries of the gods. Their presence during a hunt was considered to be a good omen in many indigenous cultures.  

And that's not mere superstition. Ravens commonly hang out around hunters, especially wolves and humans, but also bears, big cats, and other predators. Of course, they're after the spoils, but they are more active than that. They're known for calling out (caw-caw) while "pointing" (wing dips) to indicate where choice prey is hiding. When predators are successful, ravens feast alongside them.

This is an example of one of the most beautiful aspects of nature: symbiotic relationships. Bluestreak cleaner wrasse is a small fish that sets up "cleaning stations" on coral reefs where larger fish queue up for cleaning. Oxpeckers in Africa eat the ticks and other parasites from the skin of large mammals. Antbirds follow columns of army ants in tropical forests feeding on the prey that escapes them. Historian Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, makes the case that humans and wheat are in a symbiotic relationship in which the wheat provides us with food, while we, through mass farming, have made it one of the most populous grass species on the planet. In fact, he wonders who domesticated whom.

If you start thinking in this way, it's easy to see symbiosis throughout nature, at every level, involving every living thing. Hence a web of nature based on the principle of you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours. It's cooperation and mutual benefit. Without the mutual benefit, if one side takes without giving, it becomes parasitism in which either the parasite destroys the host or the host destroys the parasite.

We rightfully worry about what all those screens are doing to this generation of children. I worry about what it's doing to all of us. In the US, Gen Z and younger adults spend, on average, less than five hours a week outdoors, with many avoiding the open sky altogether. Adults aren't much better. We're quickly losing our connection to the natural world, and with it our essential symbiotic relationships. When these ties are broken we suffer physically, emotionally, and psychologically, not just as individuals, but as a species.

Screens are not the disease, but rather the symptom. The real culprit is a society that is hostile to children spending time outdoors at all, let alone in natural spaces. Our schools are largely indoor projects. Inmates in high security prisons get more time outdoors than the average American school child. Our cities, neighborhoods, parks, and playgrounds all require adult supervision, which means that most children cannot choose to be outdoors, but rather must wait for their adults to be both willing and able. The adults can't handle the "begging," so we give them screens.

Increasingly, our role in nature is shifting from that of symbiosis to parasitism. Of course, we aren't capable of destroying the world, so that means the world will have to destroy us. It's a matter of urgency and survival that we return to nature as a species and the place to start is to ditch the screens and open the doors of our preschools. As a matter of public policy, our preschoolers should be spending at least half of their school days outdoors, preferable in actual nature, but at least playgrounds that are gardens, where the stuff of nature (trees, rocks, water) replace standard-issue manufactured equipment. It must be understood that watching ravens, contemplating clouds and picking dandelions is education for the survival of our species.

Children who are hooked on nature instead of screens will "demand" their elementary schools do the same. And from there, who knows what will happen.

******

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!

Fight As If You're Right and Listen As If You're Wrong

Socrates is arguably the most famous teacher of all time, at least in Western culture. His Socratic Method is a type of argumentative dialog between individuals, usually a student and teacher, that involves asking and answering ever more probing and confrontational questions. Ideally, the goal of these "arguments" is not to persuade or to "win" but rather to move the conversation ever closer to truth or wisdom or knowledge.

Perhaps the most inspiring thing about Socrates as a philosopher and teacher was his consistent assertion that despite his reputation as "the wisest man in Athens" he himself knew nothing. His wisdom did not consist of certainty, but rather in questioning, which is to say to look at all things, even the most sacred, from all sides, and to know that there was always another perspective he had not considered. 

Modern schooling tends to take the opposite approach, at least when it comes to the early years in which knowledge is viewed as a collection of correct answers that the children must be able to repeat on command. Children who challenge the "authorized gods" (as Socrates put it), who question, who argue, are viewed as problems. They might be humored for a bit, but ultimately, if they don't conform, they are punished with poor grades, low test scores, and sometimes, if they persist in arguing, worse.

Intellectually, most of us agree with Socrates: "(T)he life that is unexamined is not worth living." But among the very first and most important lessons we teach our children in standard schools -- if they are to be "successful" -- is to not question the correct answers. And by no means are you to argue. 

The result of decades of this kind of schooling is that few of us know how to argue productively. Almost everyone I know confesses to being "conflict averse." Arguments make them uncomfortable. It's no wonder because arguing these days, especially over politics, but really anything of importance, tends to be fraught, so much so that many of us have given it up altogether. After all, we all know, going in, that we’re very unlikely to change anyone’s mind, so why risk the vitriol, anger, and even the threats of violence that seem to lie just under the surface.

The thing is, study after study shows that if the goal is to learn something new, to make better decisions, or to be innovative, then the best way to make that happen is for people to fight over ideas. As Stanford business school professor Robert Sutton says, if learning or creativity is the goal, then “People would fight as if they are right, and listen as if they are wrong.” In other words, winning or persuading has nothing to do with this kind of argument. And while the latest science demonstrates the power of intellectual conflict, Socrates and his famous method has been with us for centuries.

As a preschool teacher, I want the children I teach to know that it's not just their right, but their responsibility to question the authorized gods. I want them to know that the most important thing they can do is to ask questions, especially inconvenient ones. I want them to know that their questions deserve thoughtful, honest answers, even if that answer is "I don't know." And the only way this happens is for me to give up on the idea of correct answers.

******

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!

"Comparison is the Thief of Joy"

I recently met a parent "in the wild," who, when she learned what I do for a living, began telling me why her son is perfectly normal. In other words, she, like many parents, had some doubts about it.

"Normal" is not a useful concept when it comes to human beings, and most especially young children. In recent decades, we've attempted replace it with the word "typical" -- as in neurotypical -- but in the minds of nervous parents I'm not sure there's much difference between the two.

Theodore Roosevelt once said, "Comparison is the thief of joy." Normal and typical are terms of comparison that run so deep in modern education that it can be hard to conceive of institutionalized learning without them. We grade and rank children, we expect them to meet or exceed arbitrary "standards" and "developmental milestones," we fret about reading above or below "grade level." Not so long ago, our youngest citizens weren't victims of these ham-fisted comparisons until well into elementary school, but today they are being analyzed and assessed from the moment they're born, always having hoops placed before them to prove they are "normal."

No wonder our children are so depressed, stressed, fragile, and joyless. The process of normalization in normal schools is crushing. It plays out as a relentless focus on each child's deficits, which means a search for ways in which they do not fully measure up. Oh sure, we celebrate those who exceed the standards, but when children are extraordinary in any way that the system does not measure, their unique traits are deemed to be challenging behaviors. Their extraordinariness is evidence of an inability to focus. Or a waste of time. They are then tutored, punished, pathologized, and even drugged in order to bring them in line with normal.

I've never met a normal or typical child. They are all extraordinary. This is not an empty platitude. I've spent my professional career refusing to engage in the violence of comparison. This is often frustrating to parents who have been brainwashed into worrying about how their kid measure up to normal, but when I'm asked to assess any child, I only talk about their superpowers. I talk about what spurs their curiosity and what sparks their joy. I delight in their quirks, eccentricities, and passions. This is my job: to figure out what gives them joy, then to do whatever I can to make it possible for them to be joyful. 

The flaw in a school system (or child rearing) based on normal is that the focus on deficits presumes there is some process or method by which we can somehow get all the kids to measure up, to toe the line, to be like everybody else. It defines "extraordinary" in a very narrow and, frankly, arbitrary range, which, of course, leaves most kids out.

Play-based preschool is the only educational method I know that fully embraces the extraordinary in every child. It should never be about comparison, but rather the joy of learning what it means for each child to come fully alive. 

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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.

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Taking Delight in the Experience of Exploring a Mystery

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either. ~Joseph Wood Krutch

The daughter of a friend, a girl with whom I used to roll down grassy hills, is in graduate school, putting the finishing touches on her studies in earth systems science (ESS). She spends much of her time in nature doing research. She does not spend her days fussing over atoms or genes. She refers to computational models, but doesn't see them as anything other than starting points or perhaps maps that may indicate reality, but are not reality. As she once told me, nature is far too complex to be "captured" by math.

ESS is a new kind of science, one that takes a huge step back from the Western tradition of attempting to understand reality by disassembling it. It's not an offshoot of physics, biology, chemistry, or social science, but rather a coming together of all of them. Instead of reducing everything to their component parts, the science of complex systems embraces complexity as its highest principle. In many ways it is a return to the science of indigenous peoples from around the world who start with the interconnectedness of life.

A few days ago, I wrote a post in which I stated that "research rarely persuades anyone of anything." I pointed out that in the world of early years research, the evidence overwhelmingly favors play-based preschools and keeping our youngest citizens away from handheld screen-based devices, yet our system continues to push academics into our preschools and parents keep handing their babies iPhones. This is science denialism.

The term "science denialism" is tossed around a great deal these days. It's used on both sides of the political divide to paint their opponents as cult-like and irrational. We accuse one another of cherry-picking data to suit our pre-conceived narratives about the world. And we're not wrong: that's exactly what most of us do. Humans have not evolved to seek accuracy or truth, but rather survival, and one of the strategies our species uses is to tell stories, both to ourselves and one another, that enhance our chances. 

That tree we see, if we believe reductionist science, is a product of photons that reflect off a collection of atoms and our minds put it together to tell a story that allows us to avoid harming ourselves by hitting our head on its branches. Or a story that allows us to identify whether or not we can count on it for sustenance, shade, or refuge. Indeed, as cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman argues in his book The Case Against Reality, what we see is almost certainly not what is actually there. As cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness."

Yet still, I see a tree, which is a complex system that connects the soil to the sky. I breathe the oxygen it produces. It breathes the carbon dioxide that I produce. This means that I am part of the system that is this tree and it is included in the system that is this human. Interconnectedness is what our lived experience tells us about the world. It's what formed the basis of most indigenous science prior to being colonized by Western science. There is no doubt that the science of reductionism has created powerful "tools" for us to understand nature, but often at the expense of lived experience. 

We are not separate from "nature," we are in the midst of it. Western science depends on objectivity, but there is no objective place from which to consider reality. All data sets include the biases of the observers' perspective. When we break it all down into atoms and waves and formula derived in computer models or laboratory settings, we ultimately render it meaningless and functionless. And math? Well, as Nancy Cartwright puts it in her book How the Laws of Physics Lie, "(M)athematical physical laws don't describe reality; they describe idealized objects in models."

No wonder science denialism is on the rise. It's a form of sales resistance. We've been sold "science" -- Western science -- as a collection of "facts," that only the ignorant would dispute. Yet our lived experience disputes it every second of every day. Reductionist science tells us that time is not part of reality, but tell that to the man who's just missed his train. It tells us that colors are products of our minds, not reality, but tell that to the woman who mistakes a tiger for a zebra. It tells us that hot and cold are psychological phenomena, but tell that to the person who is shivering.

In their book The Blind Spot, a physicist and a pair of philosophers (Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson), warn about how science is "sold" to society:

It may take the form of science documentaries telling people they are nothing more than their so-called genetic programming (genes aren’t programs, and they require the existence of whole organisms embedded in their ecosystems to be expressed). It may be breathless science news articles that claim future generations will upload themselves into computers (your selfhood or personhood isn’t a computational data structure). It may be public lectures or op-eds that claim physics has now answered the question of why there is something rather than nothing (this is not the kind of question science can answer) . . . When Blind Spot ideas are presented to the public as facts that only the naive and uneducated would dispute, it is likely to exacerbate opposition to science in public policy debates.

As early childhood educators we are currently being "sold" the lie that "earlier is better." Policymakers and parents, wielding "data" collected by pseudo-scientific testing, are trying to get us to buy into the mathematics-driven story of bottoms-in-seats, drill-and-kill direct instruction. They sell it with fear-mongering and snake oil about poor children "falling behind." Meanwhile, our lived experience of this approach is the reality of miserable, anxious children whose development is stunted because they never learn to play. They are taught that learning is hard and they are incompetent; that their curiosity is a distraction, that their bodies must remain still, and their voices silent. When we object, they accuse us of being naive and uneducated, of standing in the way of "progress." They show us their metaphorical maps and try to convince us that it is the real terrain, even as we live, every day, in the actual world and witness with our own eyes the harm they are inflicting on children.

A while back I wrote about meeting a man who believes the earth is flat. The conversation reminded me of the aggravating round-and-round debates I have with those who are convinced that children need worksheets and homework. As frustrating as science denialism is, however, I find myself wondering if its rise isn't simply as aspect of the system trying to correct.

The Blind Spot authors write:

(B)est practices in the domain of science and society include becoming aware of how the story of science is told to the public. Without doubt that story is about the profound capacity of the human imagination and our ability to prevail over ignorance and bias. But if the story is told as one of transcending the human, then it becomes an essentially religious narrative about the search for perfect knowledge beyond our finitude. Instead of saying that science is a means for rising above the great, strange mystery of being human in the vast wide world, a better story is that science takes us deeper into that mystery, revealing new ways to experience it, delight in it, and, most of all, value it.

Taking delight in the experience of exploring a mystery. This is what makes humans come alive. This is what a proper education is all about.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!