The Love of Children v. the Love of Money

On the one hand, we have hundreds of children being currently imprisoned in concentration camps by our federal government and billionaire child rapists being protected by our courts, politicians, and the Justice Department. On the other, we have consistent and chronic underfunding of anything having to do with children and families, including education.

We are lead to believe that the culture war is about books, bathrooms, religion, patriotism, or “family values.” It's not. The real culture war is between people who love children and systems that love money. It's easy to despair, but there is some good news.

The Iowa state legislature is putting the finishing touches on a law that would mandate play-based learning in preschool and kindergarten. The law requires a minimum of 3 hours per day of play and child-directed experiences, including unstructured classroom discovery, in addition to recess and physical education. The law only specifies 45 minutes per day in kindergarten, but it's still an important step in the right direction.

Iowa joins Connecticut (2024), New Hampshire (2018), and Oklahoma (2021), all of which have legislated play for their youngest citizens. Nevada, Maine, Michigan, and Illinois have all adopted or are considering play-friendly policies and approaches. The Connecticut law even permits play-based learning through 5th grade. Of course, none of these laws goes far enough in my opinion, but they're all encouraging steps in the right direction.

For better or worse, our Constitution explicitly puts states in charge of education. The federal government is meant to be hands off, leaving states the freedom to experiment. The idea is that if something works in one state, it will be adopted by others. Of course, the federal government, with it's ability to grant or withhold funding has, under both Democrats and Republicans, tried to force misguided educational mandates on our schools (e.g., No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core). This federal (and I think illegal) incursion into our public schools has been one of the main driving forces behind the drill-and-kill high stakes testing regime that has come to dominate the educational experience of a vast majority of our children, including, cruelly, preschoolers and kindergarteners. 

My hope is that what we are seeing right now is the beginning of a trend in which states take meaningful corrective measures to protect children from those who love money more than children. 

Of course, legislation is not the same thing as making real change. Legislation signifies a direction, in this case a positive one, but it still takes people to make change happen.

For one thing, play, like love, is a notoriously illusive thing to define. Each state has adopted its own definition. I see words and phrases we've all used to describe our work, like "child-directed," "unstructured classroom discovery," "developmentally appropriate," "free play," "games," "movement," "socially interactive," and even "joyful." But when the rubber meets the road, as with anything to do with schools, it comes down to how individual teachers implement it.

Some veteran teachers in Connecticut, for instance, are requiring children to make a plan for their play and stick to it, in the name of "teaching" executive function. I'm pretty sure that can't be taught. It's something that develops through life experience, like those encountered while playing. In Oklahoma, the law prohibits districts from restricting teacher's use of play-based learning, but doesn't exactly require it. The New Hampshire and Connecticut laws define the role of teacher as "facilitator" or "guide on the side," but there is a lot of wiggle room. Only Iowa imposes a minimum number of hours for play-based learning, which means that in the other states the amount of play permitted to children can vary depending on the teacher's bent. It leaves the door wide open for play being dangled before children as a kind of reward or punishment, instead of a right.

Still, I'm encouraged. But if we are going to make these laws effective, we are going to have to tighten up our definitions of play and make sure that educators are well-trained in play-based pedagogy. As a play-purist, I'd like to see young children (and that includes children up to at least 10-years-old), playing all day. I know that's not realistic in the current climate, but we should have, as in the Iowa law, minimums set for preschoolers and kindergarteners, otherwise  play will continue to be treated as a "relief from serious learning" rather than the proper work of childhood (to paraphrase Mister Rogers). And I would definitely want to see us getting our children outside and away from screen-based technology which is replacing authentic childhood with artificial experiences.

I remain encouraged, even in a world that too often seems to love money more than children. I'm grateful to the bi-partisan coalition of legislators who are compelling schools to follow the science of learning and best practices by mandating play. And I'm fully in awe of those advocates -- educators and parents -- who have had the tenacity and skill to convince these legislators to do the right thing for our youngest citizens.

This is progress. Let's keep it up! No turning back!

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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!

Playing Our Way to Culture

"Octograbbers" was a Woodland Park fad for a time. To become an Octograbber, you had to have two of our playground shovels, one in each hand, which, of course, limited your ability to use your hands. If you wanted to pick something up, and that was a big part of the fad, you had to use your shovels like a pair of tongs in order to "grab" things. I have no idea where the "octo-" part came from, except to guess that it had something to do with octopuses. 

It started with a couple boys, spread to a wider group, and grew to include an ever-evolving collection of children to the point that there was daily bickering over shovels. It then ebbed and flowed, only dying out completely when the school year ended and the children scattered to their separate lives. 

Play theorists tell us that human culture is, at least in part, a product of play -- music, dance, art, fashion, and fads, but also social norms, customs, beliefs, values, and symbolic systems like language and communication. These are not instincts we are born with, but rather behaviors that we learn, which is why culture traditionally varies so much from place to place. We're likely the only preschool on earth to have played our way to a the specific cultural phenomenon of Octograbbers, but I reckon that every preschool has experienced its own unique cultural trends, for a week, a month, or a year . . . Or longer, as returning children revive certain games or themes year after year.

Culture emerges wherever humans come together, but it's not just humans.

I've written before about the resident orca pods in the Pacific Northwest that have been observed swimming with dead salmon on their heads. They were first noticed in the 1980's. The behavior seemed to then disappear for time before reemerging again recently, like a retro fad. The leading theory is that it's a form of social fad, one that is not shared by other orca pods around the world.

Bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia carry sea sponges on their snouts as protective tools for foraging on the seafloor in order to prevent injuries from the sharp rocks and corals. This behavior is mostly found in females and is passed on by dolphin mothers to their daughters, in what researchers point to as evidence of a cultural tradition being passed along through the generations. Again, other populations of bottlenose dolphins don't engage in this specific behavior, although they likely have their own, unique cultural practices.

Cultural behaviors begin in play. Humans and marine mammals aren't the only ones. Ravens, chimpanzees, and other species have played been observed playing their way to unique manifestations of culture. We spend a lot of energy in the play based world trying to "defend" play by pointing out the "academic" learning that happens, but most of what is learned through play is cultural.

I'm currently re-reading George Eliot's Middlemarch. In some ways it's a typical Victorian novel, set in an inward-looking rural county. There are occasional references to the king and parliament and London and the wider world in general, but mostly what occupies the people is what's happening amongst themselves, their unique Middlemarch culture. This is how humans have lived for most of our existence. This is what we're evolved to attend to: our immediate world of fellow humans. The modern world, however, is increasing destroying these unique, local cultures, homogenizing it, and putting it online. Of course, there are unique, online communities, but they lack the physical proximity that characterizes the cultures of play based preschools and orca pods. This is not to dismiss the experiences of those who thought they were all alone, only to find their community online, but at the end of the day, if that doesn't ultimately lead to physical proximity, the opportunity to actually "play" together in a daily, consistent, give-and-take way, the culture that emerges, I fear, will be impoverished.

Maybe this is just an old man's perspective, but I grew during the emergence of TV and mass media in general. I still remember local newspapers and radio programs that were all about my own unique pod or county or preschool, where everyone knew one another, or at least knew someone who knew someone, but today culture is increasingly global. I think half our stress comes from the fact that we haven't evolved to attend to the whole world: we've evolved to attend to what we can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, and that includes actual, embodied human beings with who we can create meaningful culture on a local level.

The mother of one of the core Octograbbers told me that her son was at first upset to find that his new kindergarten didn't have full sized shovels, just little spades. She told me that she knew he was going to be okay, however, when he came home a few days later talking about playing "Baby Snow Leopards." At the end of the day, creating culture together is a central aspect of how humans have evolved to connect. It gives us the sense that we belong. And it begins with play.

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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!

The Boy Told Me, "There's Going to Be a Lot of Fighting This Year"

On the first day of school he told me, "There's going to be a lot of fighting this year." It was an interesting comment, funny even, coming from this particular boy. I'd known him since he was a two-year-old and he had never shown any inclination toward violence, real or imaginary. On the contrary, tough guy bluster, even of the comical variety, had in the past often seemed to intimidate and confuse him. He was regularly reduced to tears by dramatic play that struck him as threatening, often retreating under our classroom loft for "safety."

Jousting with swings standing in for steeds

His mother explained that he had over the summer become fascinated with knights, including their armor, shields, and other weaponry, items he had taught himself to create using paper, scissors, tape, and staples. And that is how his "fighting" first showed up in the classroom, with him not only arming himself, but also others. He had mastered the fierce pose and when he found another kid inclined toward "fighting," he might threaten something like, "You better watch out, I'm going to fight you." The fighting itself was quite tame by the standards of Woodland Park play fighting, most often involving "swords," but sometimes featuring "jousting." He was clearly thrilled when someone engaged with him, although the moment actual contact was made, even when of the light and incidental variety, he usually called it off, often crying loudly. But once the tears were over, he was back at it, once more trying to lure others into his game of fighting knights.

This knight has been unseated

I hope this description doesn't make him seem like a problem child in any way, because he was not. No one who knew him was worried that he would grow up to be actually violent. This was clearly an intellectual pursuit, one full of questions to which he was seeking answers. Even months into the school year there was still obvious uncertainty as he approached others with his knight game, as he tested the others to see how they would respond. He was delighted by his successes: his face flushed with excitement when it was going as he expected, combatants committed to both ferocity and a kind of chivalry that included not really hurting one another. He was overwhelmed when others surpassed him in intensity or more extreme physicality. He was often disappointed by those who were neither impressed, nor attracted by this knight who was threaten-asking them to fight with him. He had made his knight studies at home as a self-selected "academic" pursuit and was now attempting to apply what he had learned in real life.

One of his classmates did a similar thing with his own animal studies. Earlier in the year, he could be found prowling the playground as a dinosaur, usually as a T-rex, his favorite, roaring and stalking about with his arms draw up to mimic the short forearms associated with the species. Then his interests turned to invertebrates, like his pet snails, but also slugs, worms, and insects. One day, he put shoes on his hands so that he could practice moving like an insect, developing a fuller understanding of how they crawl by studying it with his whole body, in the same way that my knight-loving friend sought to embody a knight in order to more fully understand.

Neither of these boys would be described as particularly physical, at least not in comparison to many of their classmates who spend their days racing around the place. In fact, when they moved on to public kindergartens the following year, they both adapted to desk work better than most. They will never show up as a "problem child" because they possess the sort of self-control and temperaments that will allow them to adapt more easily than will those "active" kids whose teachers will chase them around the classroom, scolding, punishing, and otherwise correcting them for moving their bodies at the wrong time and in the wrong way, perhaps even going so far as to recommend drugs.

It's a pity because it's clear that all children, even not obviously active ones, learn most naturally when allowed to engage their full selves, including their bodies, not in adult-proscribed ways and at adult-proscribed times, but as their own questioning and exploration dictates. Standard schools are notoriously bad at allowing this because so much of what happens in them is about crowd control rather than learning. We can't have knights and insects anywhere but in the form of words, read or listened to, then regurgitated in their approved form, with bodies in their proper places, doing their proper things. It's a pity because all children learn best when allowed to explore with their full-selves, teaching themselves. And they must use their full bodies to do it.

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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!

Telling Our Stories

Yesterday, my wife Jennifer and I went to a local happy hour and enjoyed two hours re-living old stories. We've been together for over four decades now, so there are a lot.

We've experienced our share of highs and lows, but there has never been a dull moment. We've moved households and changed jobs dozens of times. Our lives have been touched by barons and divas as well as oddballs and crackpots, often embodied in the same person. We've taken wild risks, made stupid decisions, failed, floundered, and f---ed up. Yes, there have been high points, successes, and joys, but the stories we re-told last night, the ones we smiled and chucked over were objectively pretty awful as we lived them. Today, they're vital chapters in our story, ones we would never wish away. 

"(W)e think we tell stories, but often the stories tell us," writes Rebecca Solnit in her book The Faraway Nearby, her brilliant exploration of the human capacity for narrative.

We are all storytellers, it's what our minds do. The world we "see" around us is really nothing but a collection of photons bombarding our eyes. It's our minds that make sense of them, that assemble them into something we can understand. We tell the story of those photons, just as we tell the story of the molecules, vibrations, electricity, gravity, and other phenomena that the totality of our senses take in. We create our stories both alone and in collaboration with one another, weaving together our agreements and disagreements, our insights and misunderstandings, making a reality that is nothing more or less than the story we tell.

And sometimes, like Jennifer and were doing, we tell the story, while other times it tells us. Much of what we remembered together last night were stories that had told us in the moment, but now, decades later, we have mastered them for better or worse. In therapy, we're meant to dig into those old stories, to disassemble them, to discover the "truth" that will bring us to a place where we can then heal through telling our story in a different way. As we told our stories together last night, it was obvious that this is exactly what we were doing.

Sitting with our memories is the domain of the old. Among writers it's said that the young write of feelings, while the old write of memories. The preschoolers in our lives are only just beginning their lifelong narrative, and it is one made largely of emotion and direct experience rather than sepia-toned reveries. As adults, we study children for clues as to what kind of adult they will become, what story they will tell. Sometimes we can guess at parts of it, but more often we can't. One of the children I was certain would one day become an attorney, did just that. The other became an actor . . . But they're young yet, so who knows, there are many chapters to go.

Some adults are desperate to tell a child's story for them. We see it all the time from parents who envision their baby at Stanford or starring in the movies. Our we see them helicoptering over their babies trying to somehow guarantee that there will be no disappointments or injuries or failures to mar their nascent narratives.

When we see this in parents we may have compassion for the instinct, but we worry that they are creating false or harmful narratives that their child will one day have to painfully rewrite if they are to be truly fulfilled. Or, perhaps worse, we worry that they are robbing their children of the opportunity to tell those vital stories of their resilience, recovery, and persistence.

Solnit writes: 

"I’ve heard from many women over the years, of the mother who gave herself away to everyone or someone and tried to get herself back from a daughter. Early on, she assured me that she had measured me as a toddler, doubled my height, and deduced that I would be five foot two, seven inches short than her, when I grew up and that my hair — white blond in my first years, lemon and then honey and then dirty blond streaked by the sun with gold as I grew older — was going to turn brown at any moment . . . This short, brown-haired daughter she decided upon was not terrifying, and she envisioned a modest future for me and occasionally tried to keep me to it."

We see this tendency more easily in parents, but it's likewise a pitfall for us educators. We often can't help but try tell their story right through to kindergarten, first grade, middle school and beyond. We see our role as getting them "ready" for what we think is next in their story. Indeed, we are often explicitly told that this is our job, but it is not. It's each child's job to tell their own story.

These young children have many chapters to go. They will tell and be told. They will sooner or later, whatever we do, find their own narrative. 

I often think that our most reliable guide in interacting with our fellow humans, young or old, is to consider how we will show up in their stories. Will we be friend, villain, or something else, like the Mad Hatter? I certainly don't want to be anyone's Herod or Voldemort or Uriah Heep. Let me be Joseph or Hagrid or Miss Betsy Trotwood and decades from now, when they sit with their memories, let them see that I was one of the people who helped them.

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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!

Facts About Play-Based Learning

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Economic Forum, and Unicef (and according to the dubious measurement of standardized test scores) Finland has the best schools in the world. They have achieved this status by building their educational system on evidence. The US languishes around the middle of the pack, often falling into the bottom half according to some measures. We have achieved this lack of success by relying upon the busy-body guesswork of policy makers, billionaire dilettantes, and administrators who listen to them.

It shouldn't be surprising that the system based on evidence, on research, on reality, would outperform the one based on the fantasies and feelings of people who are not professional educators. In Finland, they do not try to teach kindergarteners to read because the evidence tells us that formal literacy instruction should not start until at least the age of seven and that children who are compelled into it too early often suffer emotionally and academically in the long run. In the US we are forcing kindergartners, and even preschoolers, to learn to read. There is very little research that points to longterm gains from teaching children to read in kindergarten. In fact, most of the research that has been done tends to find early instruction reduces comprehension and reading for pleasure in later years.

The evidence tells us that early childhood education should focus on equity, happiness, well-being and joy in learning. This is what Finland has done by basing their educational model on childhood play, which is, again according to the overwhelming preponderance of research, the gold standard. The US has based its early childhood education on standardized testing, increased "instructional time," bottoms-in-your-seats carrot-and-stick standardization, and an ever-narrowing focus on literacy and math despite the evidence that it causes longterm harm to children, because people in power who know nothing about education think that sounds good to them.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the nation's oldest and largest professional association of pediatricians, affirms that play, and lots of it, is essential to the physical, mental, social, and intellectual health of children. Furthermore their clinical report on play finds that academic style instruction harms young children. Yet, our schools continue to double-down. In a sane world, we would see this as educational malpractice if not borderline abuse.

We are through the looking glass here. We are doing harm to our children. We are subjecting them to decades of "education" that is, again according to the evidence, doing them far more harm than good, while children in other countries are being provided the best education available because the adults are adult enough to look at reality and act accordingly.

This is the motivation behind Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning Summer Camp, for educators, parents, grandparents and caregivers seeking to offer the children in their care an authentic, playful childhood (see below). 

This is not my feeling. This is not my opinion. This is not my philosophy. These are the facts as far as we can currently determine them. It is cruel, even abusive, to base our educational system on other people's feelings and fantasies, even if they are rich and powerful. For the sake of our children, we must demand play-based education because, damn it, that's what the evidence tells us.

(Please click the links in this post. Most of them take you to articles, research, and papers that provide even further links into the evidence.)

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The science tells us that young children learn most of what they need to learn through play, through their self-selected activities, through asking and answering their own questions. Whether you are just starting out as a play-based educator, are a veteran of play, or are a parent/caregiver interested in providing children a playful childhood, please consider joining us. Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning Summer Camp is an intensive week (August 2-8) based on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed to make you think deeply about the role you play in the lives of children, and give you the inspiration, insight and tools needed to create an environment of genuine play for the children in your life. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, click here

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

You'll Want to Bookmark This Clinical Report

In 2007 the American Academy of Pediatrics published its clinical report on the importance of play in the healthy development of children and young children in particular. It reaffirmed the report in 2018, citing new and growing evidence that the decline in childhood play is harming children physically, intellectually, socially, and emotionally. This report, which specifically points to the push-down of academic-style instruction into early years programs, was once more reaffirmed at the beginning of this year.

The AAP is the largest and oldest association pediatricians in the US.

I want to bring attention to this paper because almost every day someone writes to me asking for help in finding "data" or "research" or "evidence" that supports play-based learning. They are seeking to persuade nervous parents or dubious administrators that what they are doing in their play-based classrooms is the best practice when it comes to young children. Which is to say, giving children the permission and opportunity to follow our species' biological heritage to direct our own learning through self-selected pursuits, driven by curiosity (i.e., play). And that the increasing academic "rigor" that has come to replace play for too many children is directly harming them.

This report includes links to all of that and more. I urge everyone to bookmark this report.

Of course, I've learned that "facts" alone are rarely persuasive when it comes to play-based learning. The scientifically unsupported mythology of modern schooling has too strong of a hold on our cultural mindset to be unsettled by mere data, research or evidence. You will still need to turn to emotional arguments as well.

That said, parents tend to listen to their pediatricians, especially when they say that academic preschools are intellectually, physically, socially, and emotionally harmful to their children. This report provides the evidence.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Re-Visiting Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society

"(L)earning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful society."

Ivan Illich was a Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic. His best known work, Deschooling Society, published in 1971, is a no holds barred critique of institutionalized, compulsory schooling, arguing that the overall effect is to alienate most children from their own learning.

"All over the world the school has an anti-education effect on society: school is recognized as the institution which specializes in education. The failures of school are taken by most people as proof that education is very costly, very complex, always arcane, and frequently (an) impossible task."

As a preschool teacher who has spent his entire career in play-based settings, I've always felt that my colleagues in more standard schools tend to complicate things. To be honest, when they talk about what they do to and with the children in the name of moving them through "the curriculum," I'm struck by a kind of despair. Learning, in my experience, is primarily a process of self-motivated individuals interacting with their environment and the people they find there. When I hear these educators talk about what they do to make learning happen, it sounds for all the world like the kind of micromanaging that causes adults to hate their jobs. Frankly, I couldn't handle the stress of believing that these children's futures depend on my ability to "teach" them all these things they aren't particularly interested in learning. 

“A . . . major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich counties, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.”

In my experience, "teaching" can only lead to learning when the learner is actively wondering about the questions being answered. Sadly, most of what we do in standard school is offer answers to questions that no child has ever asked . . . "for their own good." Without curiosity, educators are left with no alternative but manipulation through a system of punishments and rewards which are still not guarantees of learning, but rather, at best, of successful test taking.

Teaching and learning are very different things. They're not even on the same spectrum.

“Many students . . . intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.”

Illich pulls no punches and it can be painful to read him, even for someone like me who has spent his career outside the currents of modern education. When Illich was writing, our kindergartens and preschools, and even, for the most part, our elementary schools, were far less school-ish than they are today. Recesses were long and frequent. Art, music, and stories stood at the center of the school day. Testing was rare and largely inconsequential. If the goal is real learning and real freedom, then we have definitely gone the wrong direction in the past several decades.

As a product of those types of schools, my memories are of the playground, of my friends, and of the crushes I had on my teachers. Yet even then, the best days were those when I awoke to remember that it was Saturday. I was not one of those kids who struggled in school, and I liked the playground, my friends, and my teachers, but I nevertheless preferred not going because I preferred freedom.

“Equal educational opportunity is, indeed, both a desirable and a feasible goal, but to equate this with obligatory schooling is to confuse salvation with the Church. School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes future promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation-state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times. The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition.”

Like I said, reading Illich can be painful and he clearly has anarchist leanings (although he never used the word to describe himself). And when I consider all those well-meaning teachers who genuinely love the children in their care and want only what's best for them, I cringe at the comparison to things like the Inquisition. It's harsh. But the criticism is of the institution, not the people, and as people who love the children, who care about doing what is best for them, it behooves us to at least sit with criticisms like this.

“If society were to outgrow its age of childhood, it would have to become livable for the young. The present disjunction between an adult society which pretends to be humane and a school environment which mocks reality could no longer be maintained . . . The disestablishment of schools could also end the present discrimination against infants, adults, and the old in favor of children throughout their adolescence and youth . . . Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us the children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.” 

It's worth reflecting on. Few adults would willingly subject themselves to schooling, just as few children, if given the choice, would choose to spend their days there. We might have fond memories, but the reality of being managed to the point that you need permission to pee, is beyond the pale.

“The claim that a liberal society can be founded on the modern school is paradoxical. The safeguards of individual freedom are all canceled in the dealings of a teacher with his pupil. When the schoolteacher fuses in his person the functions of judge, ideologue, and doctor, the fundamental style of society is perverted by the very process which should prepare for life. A teacher who combines these three powers contributes to the warping of the child much more than the laws which establish his legal or economic minority, or restrict his right to free assembly or abode.”

Those of us who work in play-based settings or schools (like those based on the democratic free school model of the Sudbury Valley School) that trust self-directed learning, have created bubbles in which the human instinct to educate itself is kept alive. It's not always joyful, of course, but the learning is always self-motivated. The reward is not a grade or a test score, but rather the satisfaction of having asked your own questions and found your own answers. As adults our role is not to micromanage, teach, or to act as jailers, but rather to use our experience to keep the children safe enough, to respond honestly to the questions they ask us, and to be a loving presence when they struggle.  

I recently received a message from the parent of a former student who I'd not heard from in over a decade. I remember him as the type of child that institutional schooling loves most. He taught himself to read by the time he was three. He was bright, curious, well-spoken, and motivated, the kind of kid who lands in "gifted" programs. I'm sure he tested well because he loved playing games. His mother told me that in high school he was feeling pressure and said, "'What's the point? Work hard to get good grades so you can get into a good school to work hard to get good grades so you can get a job that you hate' . . . He held on to the idea that work could, and maybe should, be about play. You played a big part in setting that mindset in motion."

He's just taken a gap year and is off to university in the fall to study acting.

“The American university has become the final stage of the most all-encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth . . . We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling.”

There was a time when I genuinely believed that if I simply made my case for play-based learning, the world would see the logic, not to mention the humanity, and rally around the project of reformation. That was the whole point of this blog in the first place. I was naive, of course, but the intervening decades have not made me cynical if only because I know that even if I was just their preschool teacher, they learned that it's not just okay, but essential to play, which is another way of saying to find their purpose and strive to be free.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Learning is a Process of Upsetting the Status Quo

On a cellular level, learning something new requires growing new nerve cells along with the connectivity between them. In other words, learning always means replacing the status quo with something else.

As a little boy, it was self-evident that tiny people somehow got inside our television set or that there was another child inside the mirror who delighted in imitating me. As a species it was once self-evident that the sun revolved around the earth, that life could arise spontaneously from non-living matter, and that lightening was caused by angry gods.

What learning does, for the individual as well as for society as a whole, is change the order of things. And change can be frightening. It can be unsettling, even terrifying, to recognize that what we know is not definitive. It can also, sometimes even simultaneously, delight and awe us as we find ourselves privileged to see the old world in a new way.

We typically think of education as a process of moving from ignorance to knowledge, that we build learning from the foundations up, like a constructing a house. But it is really more like an unveiling, a lifting up of the curtain of ignorance to see behind it, first from this angle, then from that. Each peek shows us a new perspective on truth, one that doesn't negate what we once thought we knew, but rather adds to it, just as our brain adds neurons and connections as it learns.

Every now and then, we see things from a perspective that causes a revolution in our thinking, like when a child realizes, That's me in the mirror, or when Einstein recognized the theory of relativity by imagining himself on a beam of light. We call it epiphany and from that moment on, everything has changed. The status quo is no more. Long live the status quo.

As adults, those moments tend to be rare unless we go out of our way to seek them out, to become curious about things that may at first seem to have no apparent connection our status quo life. This is why we tend to become hideabound and jaded, sometimes to the point that we simply cannot, or refuse to, even consider new perspectives because we know it all. For young children, however, these moments of epiphany come fast and furious as they encounter so much for the first time. It's their openness, their curiosity, their willingness to have their status quo upset, that makes us declare that their minds are "sponges." Indeed, for young children, each day can bring a new ephipany.

Too often, we adults, seeing their capacity for learning, decide we must take advantage of these young brains growing all those new neurons and connections by striving to somehow cram as much in there as possible. I'm thinking here, of course, of the increasing academic-ization of preschool and kindergarten. When we do this, we show our own ignorance of how humans have evolved to learn, stripping the process of curiosity and replacing it with the far weaker external motivators of rewards and punishment. The result is that children become as hidebound and jaded as adults because it's just status quo all the time.

When we allow curiosity to lead, as we do in play-based settings, we lay the groundwork for epiphany. "We consciously take in . . . new experiential data," writes cognitive psychologist and author Christine Caldwell, "and if we feel sufficiently drawn to it (i.e., curious about it) or emotionally invested in it, we will commit this new experience to memory, which is another way of saying that we just learned something. This also explains why we have difficulty learning things we don't care about."

Caldwell goes on to say, "If learning is an act of upsetting the status quo, then, it stands to reason, that conflict is essential to learning. Collaboration is a conflict of ideas."

And this is the vital second piece of what makes play-based learning, or self-directed learning, the gold standard. The ultimate way we access new perspectives is through other people. Playing with others teaches us how to live in a world of conflicting perspectives, to collaborate, and that is why I often say that "together we're a genius."

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!