They Will Forget Most of Today

Much, if not most, of what you experience today will be forgotten by tomorrow.

It's why we write things down. We know that if we don't, we'll "forget." It's why we keep calendars, maintain "to do" lists, and write diaries. We think of these things as memory prompts, but they can also be thought of as ways of extending our minds beyond our bodies. We've not evolved to remember everything on our own, so we devise ways to make sure we don't forget certain things. 

It drives my wife crazy sometimes, but if I want to, say, remember to make a dentist appointment, I'll leave my toothbrush in an awkward spot before going to bed, in the spirit of tying a string around my finger. The idea is that when I see my toothbrush in an odd spot the following morning, it will remind me of what I need to do. If my wife decides to "tidy up" after me and put it away, I'll "forget" to make the appointment. 

There are techniques for improving one's memory (e.g., "memory palaces" or Method of loci), but most of us don't need that level of recall. In fact, for most of us most of the time, it's extraordinarily unimportant.

I'm thinking about memory because I've just returned from a visit with my parents, my brother, and my sister. As you might expect, when the five of us are together, we talk about our memories. At one point, my brother was telling a story about something that had happened to him. It was a familiar story, but in my version, it had happened to me. I realized that my memory had managed to reshape his story as my own.

Experts tell us that literal recall isn't the primary function of memory. As memory researcher Charan Ranganath puts it, "The human brain is not a memorization machine; it's a thinking machine. We organize our experiences in ways that allow us to make sense of the world we live in. To handle the complexities of the world, without falling prey to interference, we exploit one of the brain's most powerful tools for organizing information: the schema . . . A schema is a kind of mental framework that allows our minds to process, organize, and interpret a great deal of information with minimal effort. The way the human brain uses schemas to construct new memories is not unlike how an architect uses a blueprint to design a house. An architectural blueprint functions as a kind of map of the bare-bones information about the structure . . . of a building that shows how everything is connected. The abstract nature of a blueprint means it can be reused over and over."

In other words, it's not so important whether or not we can recall the specifics of what happened (episodic memory), but rather that we recall what we've learned about the world, "regardless of when and where that information was learned" (semantic memory). And quite often, the process of thinking causes us to reshape the specifics of our memories into a more useful story about what must have happened.

My brother and I remember the same story differently because we have different goals, emotions, and beliefs that cause us to interpret the story from our own particular perspectives. This, of course, shapes how we reconstruct our memories.

And that's the most fascinating thing about memories: they are not something we have, but rather something we construct. Indeed, experts tell us that the more often we recall a memory, the more often we've constructed it, the more it tends to stray away from what actually happened. In other words, we re-tell the story, the memory, to fit within our schemas.

This is what the children in our care are doing as they play and why the specific things we try to teach them are relatively unimportant. What they are doing in these early years is building a repertoire of schemas, of blueprints, that will serve them as they move through the world. Indeed, most of us recall very little from before we were five-years-old, but the important learning remains in the form of those schemas. 

At the end of a preschool day, I'm aware that most of what happened, the children will have forgotten by tomorrow, but that doesn't mean they haven't been doing important work. This is why I often do the minimum of tidying up. I try to leave things on the playground and classroom as the children left them. To put them away might well be the equivalent of my wife putting away my toothbrush. This pile of stones, that arrangement of twigs, these costumes on the hooks, may or may not be mind extensions, prompts, that the children have left, intentionally or not, to remind them of where they were and where they were going.

The hope is that they will more readily return to yesterday's play as through no time has passed. They see the stones and remember something about what they were thinking about. They find the cape hanging where they left it and are reminded of who they have been. They discover the half-built structure and know what comes next. Naturally, they may not remember any of this at all. They may look at the stones and see something entirely new. That's how memory works as well. We don't simply retrieve the past, but rather reconstruct it in service of the present.

This is why I'm wary when adults become too concerned about whether children "remember" what they've been taught. We ask, "What did you learn today?" as though learning can be measured by their ability to retrieve information. That's what computers are for. The most important learning, especially in early childhood, is almost never available to us in that form. What's important is the blueprint: what other people are like, what happens when I try, what my body can do, how friendship works, what happens when things fall down, how conflicts unfold, what it feels like to belong.

They will forget most of today by tomorrow. But tomorrow, they will use what they learned today to think.

And perhaps we'll have the good sense not to put away all their toothbrushes.

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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 ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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

Is Play the Creative Process of Our Universe?

"Love isn't a state of perfect caring," wrote Mister Rogers. "It is an active noun like struggle."

I hate to quibble with the great man, but love and struggle are also verbs. The English language is already largely comprised of nouns, which is, as Robin Wall-Kimmerer commented in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, "appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things."

Physicist Carlo Rovelli tells us that the theory of quantum mechanics, the core theory of modern physics, "does not describe things as they 'are': it describes how things 'occur,' and how they 'interact with each other'." In other words, our entire physical universe is not comprised of things at all, but rather interactions, processes, and systems, which is to say verbs. We don't live in a world of objects, but rather "a world of events."

The language of the Potawatomi people of what is today the Great Lakes region of North America, is a language of verbs. It's estimated that 70 percent of their words are action words. "When bay is a noun," writes Wall-Kimmerer, "it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegadmaa -- to be a bay -- releases the water from bondage and lets it live."

The people who brought English to the Americas didn't just colonize land. The Potawatomi weren't the only Indigenous people whose language and traditions reveal an understanding of the universe that Western science is only now coming around to embracing. Western culture still has a long way to go. Around the world, we find Indigenous cultures understand that humans cannot be separated from the rest of nature, that nothing exists without relationship and connection, that nothing can be thrown away because there is no such place as "away."

Our young children, if we avoid colonizing them with our thing-based way of viewing the world, seek to understand their world through relationships. Most conventional schooling expects children to categorize things like letters, numbers, colors, shapes, and facts that can be tested. Play-based learning is much more about verbs than nouns: exploring, negotiating, building, pretending, wondering, arguing, balancing, inventing, and connecting. Learning in this context isn't something they acquire, but rather something they do. 

This is purely anecdotal, but I've noticed lately that many of my former preschool students have chosen educational and career paths that study the earth itself, like environmental science, climate science, Earth systems science, sustainability, and interdisciplinary environmental programs. These are all disciplines that ask about relationships: how to the atmosphere, oceans, soil, plants, animals, microbes, and humans interact? I like to think that their play-based foundation played a part in this. 

Play is how we learn about how the world works, how the different parts, the loose parts, play with one another, and we too are a part of it. 

In her new book The Beginning Comes After the End, she writes of a "world as made up of processes rather than objects, as phenomena forever flowing and changing and thereby exchanging with each other and changing each other. It proposes that it is more useful and accurate to think of ourselves and most of what we call things as events." 

It strikes me that this would make for a good definition of play.

She points out that Indigenous creation myths tend to be about "trickster creators" who argue and improvise a world that is "never perfect, never finished," and, most telling, "never fell from grace." This is how I view the young children with whom I work, these natural humans, these creators, who evoke the entire universe as they play. 

Maybe what we see is that play is the creative process of our universe. I don't think it's a stretch to at least wonder about 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 ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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

In Endless Dialog With An Interconnected World

Yoan Capote (detail from Isla, oil, nails, fish hooks, artist's blood)

I often talk about my blogging habit as the core of my reflective practice as an educator. I generally don't sit down and write because I have answers, but rather because something has happened that intrigues me, or challenges me, and I want to understand it better.

Maybe it's a child doing something. Maybe it's something I've read. Maybe it's something someone has said. Maybe it's the state of the world. It starts with an anecdote or quote or phenomenon and this part, the writing, is my best effort at making sense of it. I like writing for publication because knowing that someone might read it, gives me an imagined thinking partner or interlocutor. I write a sentence and wonder how someone might respond. Will they, with reason, scoff, will they doubt, will they be confused, will they be angry or depressed or inspired. They say we shouldn't worry what the other people think, and sometimes that's probably good advice, but I find that if I'm not considering how others will respond, then it's often difficult to think of anything at all.

One of the things I think I've learned from working with young children is that they seem to think best while engaged in play. As developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky put it, "In play a child is always above their average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than themself."

In this way, my blogging, I think, is a form of play, a way to sustain a thread of thought, not with a specific goal in mind, but rather because I've learned if I'm not rushing toward a conclusion, I'm much more likely to discover connections I could not have otherwise anticipated.

In their book, The Dawn of Everything, David Greaber and David Wengrow, write:

“When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window of consciousness’, during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds . . . the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on tend. This is of course why so often, even if we’re trying to figure something out by ourselves, we imagine arguing with or explaining it to someone else. Human thought is inherently dialogic. Ancient philosophers tended to be keenly aware of all this: that’s why, whether they were in China, India or Greece, they tended to write their books in the form of dialogues. Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem.”

Play is likewise a kind of sustaining dialog, a thread that keeps children engaged without forcing a predetermined destination. This is why it stands in such sharp contrast to normal schooling, which is all about predetermined destinations in the form of "correct answers." Play, like dialogue, is inherently about taking the time to explore questions without the pressure of being judged right or wrong.

In his book Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that Neanderthals, our species' chief hominoid rivals, were individually much more intelligent than individual Homo sapiens. If Neandrathals were like mainframe computers, we are much more like PCs, individually less powerful, but far better connected. This is what our species has evolved to do: to think through, with, and alongside people, places, and things. Our minds are not confined to our brains, but rather come into being through the connections we make.

In other words, thinking is at least as much a social activity as it is a cognitive process. Together we're a genius.

We've evolved in conversation, in argument, storytelling, joking, teaching, debating, writing, and playing. And it seems to me that play is the seed from which it all grows. Play is how we evolved to sustain inquiry. It's how we come to stand a head taller than ourselves. Children do it with blocks, mud, and pretending. Adults do it with ideas, stories, and conversations. In both cases, the activity provides enough structure to keep the thread from dissolving, to keep our minds from distraction, while remaining open enough to be surprised and delighted by what we find; not because it's the right answer, but rather, as Eleanor Duckworth puts it, because it's a "wonderful idea."

When we are free to play, this is what we're doing, moving from one wonderful idea to the next, in endless dialog with an interconnected world.

******

Who do you want to be when the children arrive? If you want to learn more about how the language we use with children impacts not just our relationships with them, but also their entire learning environment, join us for summer camp. This is my popular 6-week course, The Technology of Speaking With Children So The Can Think, condensed into a single week. Join colleges from around the world as we examine how the language we use with children creates reality. We will explore how the way we speak with children becomes an environment in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. This is great summer PD for the whole team. There is nothing like getting everyone on the same page to start the new school year! Clink here for more information and to register.

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"Look What We Did"

As a play-based preschool teacher, I make sure, every day, to have at least two opportunities for making art available to the kids, one indoors and one outdoors. Typically, the outdoor provocation offers the opportunity to get good and messy, although it can get messy indoors as well. Sometimes I go to great effort in preparing things, such as when we do pendulum painting or are melting crayons to pour into play dough molds, but most of the time, I keep it simple.

For instance, I'll roll out a sheet of butcher paper on a table and provide something with which to apply pigment -- crayons, tempera, pastels, water color, makers, pencils, bingo dotters, powdered paint, and so on. And, when appropriate, tools for applying and manipulating the pigment -- brushes of various types and sizes, kitchen tools, stampers, sponges, pipettes, stencils, brayers, cutlery, and so on. 

These are group projects, something to gather around and discuss as you work in creative collaboration. When the paper is full, we take a moment to admire it, then shift it out of the way to make room for another sheet of butcher paper, or cardboard, or a bed sheet, or other communal canvas. These finished products are not signed by any individual. They are not taken home to display on the refrigerator door. No one says, "I made that," but they often say, "Look what we did."

I've recently been revisiting the theories and predictions of philosopher Marshall McLuhan, he of "The medium is the message" fame. In his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan points out that the concept of copyright, the idea that an individual could "own" the work they had produced, emerged alongside the transformative technology of the printing press. Looking at the arc of history from the perspective of 1962, the year of my birth, he felt that our emerging electronic media (radio and television specifically) marked the beginning of the end of the reign of print media. 

Print media had made ours into a predominately visual culture, one that both read, and therefore tended to think, in a linear manner. Electronic media was to return us to a kind of "global village" in which oral storytelling came to dominate once more, freeing us of the linearity and shaping us into a people with more in common with pre-printing press cultures and their oral traditions.

And with the death of print culture would come the death of the concept of copyright, which is to say individual ownership of a creative work. 

Up through medieval times, great works of "literature" were certainly created. The Odyssey is showing in theaters right now. Someone named Homer is credited with it, but it's far more likely that "Homer" is a name given to a collective effort over generations. Perhaps it originated with an individual bard who was particularly gifted in retelling these evergreen tales, but the stories themselves are the product of an oral tradition going back over centuries, making it a collective work. 

"Look what we did."

Our concept of copyright, or individual ownership of stories, has extended well into our electronic age. Until the internet arrived, this concept continued to be tenable, but now in the era of AI, it's becoming increasingly clear that the age of copyright, along with the age of print, is coming to an end. It won't happen all at once, there will be plenty of death throes, but pride of authorship is already dissolving. Much of the music we listen to is cobbled together from samples of other people's music. Social media is fueled by re-mixes of memes and clips and reimaginings. And our movies and programs are increasingly erasing the lines between what it proprietary and what is available for common usage. 

I have no doubt that we'll create a leaky dyke of laws to protect copyright for a time, but the writing is on the wall, pun intended. Anonymous graffiti, I believe, has more of a future -- in the long run -- than, say, the collected works of Marshall McLuhan.

And what will we be left with? Something like these children crowding around a table, shoulder-to-shoulder, creating collective works of culture, rather than proprietary works of individual genius.

As Albert Einstein, one of the most iconic individual geniuses of modern times, once complained, "(T)he cult of individual personalities is always, in my view, unjustified . . . It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few individuals for boundless admiration and to attribute superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate."

As historian Darrin McMahon wonders in his book on the history of genius, The Divine Fury, in a world in which Supermen are not needed, in which genius is becoming a group activity, "are we returning to the era in which we are closer to god?"

As I watch these young children crowd around, shoulder-to-shoulder, creating together, I see a through-line hearkening back to pre-printing press times when community meant creating together and remembering together; when a rambling troubadour might come through to sing songs and spin yarns, leaving them behind, not as works of proprietary genius, but as commonly held material to be used by the people, just as the children use crayons and paper to make their own stories.

"Look what we did." Our culture may be generations away from McLuhan's predicted transformation, but preschool classrooms, as pre-literate cultures, are already there. Just look at that crowd around the art table practicing the literacy of the future.

******

Who do you want to be when the children arrive? The countdown for Teacher Tom's Summer Camp has begun. In this course you will learn how even seemingly small changes in how you speak with children can transform even the most challenging behaviors without the need for rewards and punishments. This is especially effective when the whole team is on board. And there's nothing like coming together with like-minded educators to get you ready for when the children arrive. To learn more and to register, click here. I hope to see you around the campfire!

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!

Family Dinners and Becoming the Authors of Our Own Lives

Growing up, family dinners weren't exactly sacred, but they were our default mode. Most evenings during my first 18 years of life involved the five of us sitting down around the dining room table and talking.

Much of what we talked about were our collective memories, especially as we got older. And when we get together, that's what we still tend to do. My wife of 40 years has heard our stories countless times by now. She's been a part of the family so long that she's part of many of them, even as she teases me that we hash and re-hash the same stories over and over again, year after year.

If my family is typical, about 40 percent of our conversational time is spent doing this. Some scientists are attempting to make the case that the primary reason our species developed language at all is so that we could communicate our memories with one another.

At one level, why that would be the case is obvious. If our prehistoric ancestors could accurately and efficiently share their memories of, say, where they found food or where they encountered danger, it increases the overall odds of collective survival.

The fascinating thing is that, as Charan Ranganath writes, "Our personal memories do not exist in a vacuum -- they are constantly being influenced and reconfigured as we interact with family, loved ones, friends, and our larger communities. The science of collective memory . . . is still nascent, but we have discovered that the very act of sharing our past experiences can significantly change what we remember and the meaning we derive from it."

I recently wrote a post here about an accident I had while riding my bike. In a nutshell, a man had been flying a kite in a field adjacent to the bike track when a gust of wind knocked his kite to the ground, causing the string to stretch tightly across my path, something I didn't see until it was already cutting deeply and painful into my arms, ultimately sending me to urgent care. 

At the time, I was in the midst of reading Ranganath's book (Why We Remember) and decided that I was going to experiment with taking charge, or at least being as aware as possible, of my memories from this traumatic experience. One of the ways I did this was by telling the story to everyone I knew, focusing on the bizarre and even humorous aspects, showing off my scars, and generally turning it into a kind of heroic yarn. Writing about it here on the blog was, in fact, one of my first attempts to shape the memory. When people asked, I told the truth about the pain, the anger, and the gore, but most of my attention has been on turning it into a story of bouncing back from a strange accident. I know that some will say that I'm consciously practicing "denial" by repressing memories, but it feels more like I'm taking charge of the narrative memory. 

The fascinating thing is that from the moment I arrived home after the accident, my wife began to share the memory with me. Then as I showed the fresh wounds to friends and neighbors, they became part of it. The story of the accident itself is one about which I've maintained awareness and some control, even if I'm fully aware that I tend to leave out certain parts and focus on others. But the memory of how my friends and family got me to finally take the injuries seriously and seek medical attention, is one that has entered the realm of collective memory. In this collective memory I come off as somewhat naive and foolhardy; a man who's putting on a brave face or even indulging in a show of machismo. A man, in fact, who is consciously practicing at least a little bit of denial.

It's now been around six weeks since the accident occurred and my experiment began. When I re-read that post, I'm reminded of details I've already dropped from the memory while there are new aspects that have "emerged" in the meantime. For instance, I'm now convinced that I subconsciously leaned into the string with my biceps out of concern that it would slip up to my neck, causing more grievous injury. Is it true? In my memory it is. I mean it makes sense.

And that's exactly the point of memory. It's not there to accurately record events, but rather to help us orient toward the future. That's why our memories are typically more about what must have happened than what actually happened. And a big part of how we cobble our memories together is in dialog with others which is why I see some of my behaviors, in hindsight, in memory, as something I'd do differently in the future.

That is the great power of family dinners when it comes to our memories.

According to Ranganath, psychologist Robyn Fivush "found that children whose mothers asked open-ended questions . . . and elaborated on their children's answers . . . tend to remember more of their life experiences and put them together in a more coherent narrative than those whose mothers ask their children to recall specific information. These kinds of interactions can significantly impact a child's self-concept. Children who are encouraged to have a voice develop more ownership over their sense of self . . . because they are allowed to be authors of their personal narratives."

When I read that, I realized that this is what I'm attempting to do with my own memory experiments: become the author of my own personal narrative so that I can use it to inform my future behaviors. For instance, in the future, I won't wait 24-hours to go to the doctor.

"Conversely," writes Ranganath, "disallowing certain stories to be told or . . . disputing a child's perspective can undermine their sense of the experience and be detrimental to the development of self." Fivush has found that when families make a habit of discussing shared memories collectively, their children tend to have higher self-esteem and are less likely to be anxious, depressed, or to have behavioral issues. 

Collective memory may be a relatively new area of study, but its practice is at least as old as language itself. When we talk about our shared memories, be it around a modern dinner table or hunter-gatherer campfire, we are in a very real sense preparing ourselves for an unknowable future, coming to a kind of collective agreement, not about what happened, but about what must have happened, connecting the past to the present in a story of which we are the authors.

Advocating for family dinner time, one without screens or other distractions, seems so cliche as to be fuddy-duddy, but these moments of talking about our memories are more important than we realize. When we share our memories with our loved ones, we are allowed to become the authors of the narrative of our own lives.

******

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

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

Living a Meaningful Life is the Only Real Success

More often than not in our culture, when someone is talking about "success" we assume they are referring to either material wealth or the result of someone having achieved some sort of victory or prize. And often they are. Most of us are less superficial in how we define our own successes. Oh, we'll take the cash and the laurels, but our drive to success tends to be motivated by more personally meaningful measures like a sense of satisfaction about a job well-done or having good relationships with family and friends or an overall feeling of contentment. 

As educators, we're widely viewed as agents for the success of the children in our care. A parent of one of my former preschool students wrote to me about how her daughter, now a second grader, had boldly stood up to a child who had been excluding her from a game. "She told her how it made her feel and said, 'I don't like that.' And the other girl apologized and started including her. That's all because of you Teacher Tom." Success! 

Parents want their children to be successful and most want to see us as allies in making their children successful. Taking a step back, we see that our policymakers have similar ideas about our role in society in that most of them cast us in the role of getting children "college and career ready," which is widely viewed as the surest pathway to worldly success. 

The problem is that our obsession with success too often clashes with the far more important goal of education, which is to support children in creating a meaningful life.

In her book The Power of Meaning, Emily Esfahani Smith proposes four pillars of meaning: belonging, purpose, storytelling and transcendence. The more connected we feel to our family, friends, and community (belonging), the more we are motivated by positive long-term goals (purpose), the more adeptly we can make a narrative from the threads of our life (storytelling) and the more we concentrate our energies on something larger than ourselves (transcendent), the more meaningful our lives are.

It all begins with belonging, which is the only curriculum with which I've ever really concerned myself. It's within the context of community that we flourish. Community is an active living thing, something that requires the contributions of everyone. Success is inclusion. When that girl stood up for herself, she was asserting her place in her community. When the other girl listened, apologized, then included her, she was likewise doing the work of belonging. In many ways, this is the only work there is. It's not easy. And it's almost impossible in an educational system that focuses on individual achievement and competition, which is to say, division. The world doesn't need more division.

Living a meaningful life is the only real success. The only way to get there is through belonging. 

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Today is the final day of the Preschool Autism Summit! There are still many more free sessions to make it worth your while . . . Including a live discussion panel with me at 2 p.m. PST. Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I've learned a lot the past two days. Looking forward for more of the same today. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for some outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass right here.

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

Playing With Social Arrangements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Otherwise we stagnate. Otherwise the blood clots.

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

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

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

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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 ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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

What Preschoolers Know About the Future of Reading

I subscribed to The Atlantic for quite awhile, but recently let it expire when I decided to limit my consumption of "political news." I don't have the time or bandwidth. I'm too busy playing with children and reading books.

That said, they currently have a long article up about the demise of reading books. It's called The End of Reading is Here. All I've read is a longish excerpt because the rest of it is behind their paywall, but if I did want to read it I could find it at my local library. 

I don't, however, expect it to say anything surprising. People have been predicting the end of phonetic alphabet based literacy for some time. Probably the most famous is Marshall McLuhan who, in 1962, the year of my birth, in his mind-blowing book The Gutenberg Galaxy, introduced the idea that electronic media are returning us to a kind of "tribal" or "post-literate" culture. 

As early childhood educators, we know what it's like to exist in this kind of society. We spend our days surrounded by highly intelligent, yet illiterate humans, who create their culture through stories, music, gesture, curiosity, and play.

The adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet by the Ancient Greeks (~800 BCE) happened in a culture that stored and transmitted its knowledge, stories, and history via an oral tradition, not so unlike what we experience on a smaller scale in our classrooms. The creation of the Greek alphabet, however, with its letters representing vowel sounds, introduced a more efficient, but far less nuanced way to store and transmit. As McLuhan points out, 24 letters, even when we consider digraphs, trigraphs, and blended consonants, can't even come close to representing all the sounds we're capable of making with our voices, not to mention non-verbal communication. This means that as powerful as it is, the phonetic alphabet has greatly narrowed what and how we communicate compared to an oral culture. 

The temptation is to become concerned about the decline of literacy, but it was never going to last long as a human "fad." I mean, if The Atlantic is right (or even ahead of game by a few centuries) the kind of literacy we fret over in schools will have only been a "thing" for less than 1 percent of our species' history. At best, it will be considered a kind of bridge between the Ancient Greeks and electronic media.

The decline in novel reading in favor of movies and programs is one of the ways we're moving beyond reading, but I'm really curious about how we'll handle things like laws, contracts, and other bureaucratic things. The future will tell, but not in my lifetime.

Reading books is on the decline, but not in my home. I'm a product of the age of books. My wife reads even more than I do. Our walls are lined in books, most of which we've read, many we've re-read, and there remains an enticing sufficiency of "aspirational" reads. It makes me feel both wealthy and smart. 

I like having read The Gutenberg Galaxy with its dense, convoluted sentences. The kind of things that AI would try to chop up into more easily digested bits. The often ponderous prose of Moby Dick (Herman Melville) presents an ordeal for the modern reader that is every bit as difficult and messy as the lives of the whalers it depicts. I've tackled that white whale of a book twice, including, both times, the famously skip-able chapter on cetology. 

It's become popular to advise modern readers that there is no shame in not finishing a book if it doesn't spark something, but c'mon! Some of the greatest reading experiences of my life have involved real struggle. When I first tackled Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, I got to the halfway point only to realize that I had absolutely no idea what was going on. In frustration I began re-reading it from the beginning each morning, while simultaneously continuing to read in the evening from where I'd realized I'd gotten lost. Amazingly, this process revealed the novel's incredible architecture, its themes, and its story, in a way that I would have missed entirely had I not taken action or worse, stopped reading. I consider having read the book in this way to be one of the crowning achievements of my intellectual life.

The truth is that much of what we call classic literature, both fiction and non-fiction, is written for a different generation of readers, one that pre-dates me. Just has the oral culture of the pre-literacy Greeks produced people with the capacity for feats of what we would today see as prodigious memorization, the culture of literacy produced people capable of appreciating prodigious sentences.

Thomas Paine's Common Sense was published in 1776 and almost instantly became the best selling book up to that point in history. It was praised for its conciseness and clarity. Today, of course, it could never be published as it is. Editors (and AI tools) would demand shorter paragraphs, shorter sentences, fewer nested sentences, an eradication of semicolons and rhetorical flourishes, more frequent headings and white space, more concrete examples, and simpler syntax. 

Modern readers, for the most part, don't often make it beyond the first few pages of Common Sense, unless it's required reading. Of course, we're capable of understanding it, but sustaining engagement with long, layered sentences is a societal muscle that has atrophied in the intervening centuries, especially since the advent of radio and then television. What pre-electronic media cultures once found to be rich and rewarding reading now just feels like unnecessary effort to many of us. I feel that this is why I often struggle with older texts, at least until I get going. I'm lucky that I've discovered the joy of getting over the hump enough to delight in nested sentences, long paragraphs, and semicolons. 

"The medium is the message" is McLuhan's most famous line (sometimes phrased as "The medium is the massage.") His assertion is that new media don't merely change what and how we consume information, but they reshape our minds. This is clearly seen in this brief flash of human existence during which books were king.

Middle and high school teachers as well as university professors are reporting that many of their students simply refuse to read entire books any more. Even as recently as when I was at university in the early 80's, we were regularly assigned reading lists with a dozen books. I once read 20 books for two classes over the span of three months. Students from 200 years ago, I suspect, would have been ecstatic at the prospect of so many books, much in the way that we get excited today when a new season of our favorite network show drops. 

The evidence that this kind of print literacy is on the wane could not be more clear. It's not caused by intellectual laziness, but rather the kind of transformation of our species that attends the introduction of every new technology.

When I'm among preschoolers, I often find myself pitying them. So many are destined to move on to elementary school where they will be hammered with literacy instruction and made to feel badly about themselves when they find it difficult. Others will find reading easier, even enjoyable, but the "work" of reading books, I fear, will get them too. Just as I was born into the first generation for whom Latin was no longer considered a standard part of education, it's quite possible that these children could be among the last for whom reading books is prerequisite for being deemed "educated." It's quite possible that some of them will never read a book.

I also see the future when I'm with them, telling stories and jokes, negotiating, making agreements, then doing it all again the next day. They are citizens of today's world, becoming citizens of tomorrow's. 

In my lifetime, I've seen television become the dominant media, followed by personal computers, the internet, smartphones, and now AI. One could say that my life has been lived almost exactly at the hinge between what might be called the late age of print and the early age of electronic media. I feel lucky to have escaped Latin, one of the oldest rites of passage of print culture, but I'm even more lucky to have grown up with books. People my age are both products of the age of books and children of the beginning of its decline. Today's youth are living during a similar hinge. Maybe everyone always has.

I'm often accused of being too wordy here on the blog, of dragging my sentences out with comma after comma, of taking detours and side roads instead of getting straight to my destination. I try, sometimes, to accommodate the modern reader with more white space and fewer rhetorical flourishes, but sadly, I'm afraid, I've read far too many books for that.

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The Preschool Autism Summit is starts on Sunday! Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I can't wait to dig into all 30 of these sessions. I know I'm going to learn a lot . . . And I know I'm going to be a better teacher for it. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for 3 days of outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass right 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!