This Is How The Species Progresses

(A while back I posted my Greatest Hits as determined by readership statistics, which then got me thinking about older posts that I wish more people had read, which has now become a sort of irregular series. Bill Nye recently posted a video online entitled "Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children," a brilliant critique of ideologues who will insist on teaching school children things that are simply not true. It reminded me of this piece from back in 2010 entitled "Those Are The Facts," which I posted back when I had very few readers. I've embedded the Bill Nye video for those of you who missed it. At the bottom of the post you'll find links to others in this series of posts I wish more people had read.)

Facts are not negotiable; they are the undeniable things that we all have in common.

The sun rises in the east. Check.

2 + 2 = 4. Check.

It takes two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom to make a water molecule. Check.

Facts are things we can prove, measure, and test. They are things we know. And I'm not interested in any freshman year philosophical questions like, "But how do we know that we know?" When the preponderance of evidence is there, we owe it to ourselves, our fellow man, and even our god to behave as if it's true. This is how the species progresses.

This little lecture has been brought to you out of my reaction to reading Deb's terrific post over at Science@Home explaining in terms understandable to children why daddies tend to be bigger than mummies. Deb is a scientist, educator and mummy, all of which are evident in her clear, concise, fact-based post. It's exactly the kind of explanation that I'd hope my own young child would receive from her science teachers. (I urge you to head on over there and have a look around.)

Sadly, in many parts of the US, the contents of Deb's post, if delivered in a public school classroom, would land her in the principal's office to face angry parents over evoking such scientific consensus as evolution, her matter-of-fact discussion of procreation, and statements like, "we are animals and work on the same rules as the rest of the world." And while there are anti-science zealots everywhere, no other modern nation teeters so close to the edge of having it's public science education curriculum fall into the intentional blindness of fundamentalist faith. Polls taken over the course of the last decade, for instance, consistently show that between 25 and 30 percent of Americans believe that "creationism" or the junk science of "intelligent design" should be taught in science class alongside evolution. Really? I do hope that this is just the result of poorly crafted polling questions because otherwise it means that, at minimum, one in every 4 people with whom I come into contact on a daily basis does not understand the difference between science and religion. Or worse, actively seeks to blur the line in the furtherance of his own particular religious or political ends.

It's insane, too, that after writing the above paragraph I must, as a matter of form, quickly and apologetically offer the disclaimer that I, of course, have nothing against religion. Damn it, I do have something against any religion whose adherents seek to force its mythologies upon me and my child, be it in the public schools or through laws that serve no purpose other than to enshrine religious intolerance (like banning gay marriage).

If democracy is going to work, we must be able to agree that facts are facts. Other nations seem to understand this. We can and should debate our beliefs in our philosophy and religious studies classes, in our churches and synagogues, even amongst willing friends and families, but when your beliefs are contradicted by fact as determined through the rigors of the scientific method and the weight of academic consensus, you don't get to insist that we change those facts to suit your illogical, however spiritually gratifying, belief. Period.

Our public schools have wavered, but so far the courts of both law and public opinion have compelled them back onto the path of democracy. It's crazy that we must constantly defend our educational system like this, always fighting back those who would have us return to the dark times when religious leaders, not scientists, commanded that the Earth was the center of the universe, that disease was caused by sin, and that cats are in league with satan.

I've often written here about my conviction that the purpose of public schools in America is to educate children so that they can function as citizens in a democracy, while expressing concern about the vocationalization of our curricula. While I find many points at which these two purposes are at odds, one point upon which they share interests is in children receiving a fact-based science education. I've spent my entire adult life (mostly via my wife) in the company of business executives and business owners, people whose economic success depends upon our public schools producing adults who can think logically and lucidly, who possess a grasp of what is factually knowable about the world. Some of them are religious, some not, some are conservatives, some liberal, but I've never met one who would hire an employee whose understanding of science was based on creation myths.

In a democracy, I get to believe as my conscience guides me, as does my child, who as a 12-year-old decided to embrace a faith different than my own. If I walk into your church, if I ask you about your faith, then have at me, evangelize away. But when it comes to science classes in our public schools, belief does not trump fact. When it does, we are all lost.

I've had enough experience with this debate in recent years to know that I'm setting myself up for attack. I'll be called an atheist, which I am not. I'll be directed to so-called "peer reviewed" articles that cast doubts on evolution, all of which will be from the Discovery Institute, a "think tank" based here in Seattle, which exists solely for the purpose of muddying the waters around the teaching of evolution. I'll be told that evolution is "just a theory," a position that demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. They will be wrong.

Those are the facts.

Other posts I wish more people had read:

Can You Teach Me?

We Are Only Two

Mister Rogers

Rebellion Is Built Into Us

The Real Life For Which We Prepare Children

Courage To Screw Things Up

Teaching Self-Governance

To Live Is To Play, And To Play Is To Live

How Our Cooperative Preschool Works

They Will Grow Into Gentle, Loving Men

How To Make Adults Who Will Not Be Pushed Around

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The More Magic There Is

Rolling a hoop down a hill is not as simple as it might at first appear. Most of the 2 and 3 year olds can't do it, except by accident, and then they stand amazed, later growing frustrated when they try and fail to recreate their magic trick. So instead, I often roll hoops for them to chase and retrieve, because the whole idea of a hoop rolling down a hill is still an important thing to have in your life.

There's a lot to know about the world and your own body before you can master this particular form of magic. 

I sometimes perform slight of hand tricks with the children, then violate the magicians oath and lift the veil on how it's done. However, no matter how many times I show the younger children that the coin is, in fact, in my other hand, they still follow the empty hand with their eyes. It's only as they approach 4 and 5-years-old that their brains are ready to "get it," their eyes perhaps fooled for a second, but then, usually with a laugh or squeal, they redirect their attention to where the coin really is, in the hand resting innocently on my lap. Sometimes they just point to where they now know the coin to be, but other times they try to pry my fingers open, determined to prove to themselves that they now get it.

We sometimes tell children that "magic isn't real," but as I watched the kids in our new 5's program, rolling and chasing their hoops down the hill, something that has rarely happened at Woodland Park, even in our 3-5's class, it occurred to me that magic is real, not "if we believe" as Peter Pan might suggest, but rather so long as it's something just beyond our grasp. Maybe we sometimes call it innocence.

When we successfully and repeatedly roll a hoop down the hill, it shifts from the realm of magic, into the realm of science, something to be studied and perhaps perfected.

At one point a hoop stopped at my feet. I picked it up and tossed it up the hill, high into the air, over the  heads of the kids, imparting a lot of backspin. The hoop landed on it's edged, skidded for moment, then began racing back down the hill.

Finn looked at me with wide eyes, "How did you do that, Teacher Tom?"

I demonstrated how I did that particular magic trick, showing Finn, but knowing that it would be awhile before he would be able to do it himself.  That's the real wonder of magic, I think, the more of it you turn into science, the more magic there is.

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I Stand With Chicago Teachers

I want to be perfectly clear: I stand behind the Chicago Teachers Union strike one hundred percent. They are fighting not just for themselves, but for everyone who values public education. And that should be all of us.

A couple days ago I wrote a piece about the Chicago teachers strike, one that was based upon incomplete knowledge on my part. I've really had my head down these last few weeks, concentrating on getting my own school year up and running, so my awareness of things happening outside of my little Lake Union lifestyle has come mostly from skimming headlines. I stand by much of what I wrote in that piece, but it was irresponsible to have published it nevertheless, you know, because of the propaganda.

It was my understanding at the time that the major sticking point was pay, but I've now come to understand that I bought into the line that the mayor and his corporate education reform buddies are peddling, the one that is designed to demonize teachers as (say it with me) "greedy, lazy union thugs." As I've done more digging, and as people I've trusted have weighed in one the matter, I've come to understand that what the Chicago teachers are doing is nothing less than drawing a line in the sand for all of us who stand opposed to the corporate reform experiment of high-stakes standardized testing, the turning over of our public schools to corporations, longer class days, the de-professionalization of teaching, fierce competition between teachers and schools, and larger classes. Every single plank in the corporate reform agenda is, at best, unproven: none of it is supported by research. I'm going to repeat that: none of what the corporate education reformers are proposing can be supported by research. These so-called hard-headed businessmen are attempting a wholesale take-over of our public schools based on nothing more than theories, a few pie-charts, and their hatred for unions. And, in fact, many of the things they are proposing, like their testing regime, merit pay, charter schools, and larger classes, have been proven time and again to actually produce worse educational outcomes. 

Corporate education reform is damaging children and must be stopped.

In my last post I called for good faith negotiations on both sides. I now know that it is not both sides, but rather Rahm Emmanuel and his hand-selected school board that have refused to budge on most of the important issues behind this strike. Like I said in my last post, Emmanuel has a long history of creating toxicity wherever he goes, so this shouldn't surprise anyone.

But don't take my word for it. Two of the leading voices advocating for genuine, research-based, reality-tested education reform have written outstanding pieces detailing what is actually happening in Chicago, what is at stake, and why what Emmanuel and his cronies are doing is so dangerous. Please take a moment to read them:

Education historian Diane Ravitch, writing in the New York Times Review of Books, provides an excellent thumbnail history of Chicago schools, which have been subject to a tragically failed experiment in corporate education reform for the past 20 years, as well as a very clear look behind the propaganda at what is really in play, not just in Chicago, but for all of us who care about public education.

Columnist Valerie Strauss, in her always brilliant Answer Sheet column in the Washington Post, takes apart the corporate reform argument piece by piece, paying particular attention to test-based evaluations and merit pay, charter schools, and longer class days. For those of you wanting to dig deeper, she provides plenty of links to support her claims -- something the corporate reformers can never do.

Please take the time to look behind the propaganda. You too, will stand with the Chicago teachers because it is clear that they are the critical thinkers in this, while Emmanuel and his corporate allies are trying to sell themselves to you simply on the idea that they are heroic "tough guys" and nothing else. This is too important for headline skimming.

*****

Update: Something has gone wonky and I've not been able to post comments to my own blog for the past couple days, so I'm hoping it suffices to reply to comments here. In fact, when I look at the blog, the wrong comments are being attributed to the wrong posts and some posts are even missing. I don't believe it's anything I've done, but I'm hoping it's something that will "correct itself" (Blogger?) soon. In the meantime, rest assured I am seeing your comments. Thank you!

@Suschada (Mama Eve) . . . I have written about the propaganda film "Waiting for Superman," you'll find it here. There you'll find a link to Diane Ravitch's piece on it. If you want to read more of what I've had to say about corporate education reform and my view on the state of our public schools, you can click on the education reform label at the bottom of this post. I've written quite a bit!

@Julie Toole . . . I couldn't believe what I was reading when I learned that Chicago's school board is not elected, but rather appointed by the mayor. I don't know how parents stand for it. Thank you for fighting for us, Julie!

@melanie . . . I'm really sorry, but your comment got deleted in my process of attempting to "fix" my comment problem. You wrote to disagree with me, saying that you do not support a worker's right to strike. You feel that teachers who strike should be fired and replaced by one of the many out of work teachers. You said that you do not support corporate education reform, but feel that it can only be fought from within the system. I hope that fairly summarizes your points . . . Breaking unions is one of the primary objectives of the corporate education reform movement. If the unions are gone or weakened, the field will be free for them to implement their dangerous, unproven agenda. I simply don't understand how any American can be against unions, especially public employee unions. This is how we bring democracy into the workplace. I don't understand why corporations are free to form whatever strategic alliances they want in the name of profit, while workers, people with skills and talents to sell, can't form alliances with one another in the name of better pay, benefits and working conditions. And this isn't even a corporation we're talking about: these are our public schools. If democracy belongs anywhere, it's here. Beyond that, you seem to be under the misapprehension, like I was, that CTU was primarily striking over pay. This isn't true. If you click on the links I provided in the post, you'll learn that there is much more at stake, not just for teachers, but for children and their parents.

Finally, the reports are that CTU and the mayor's office are very close to a contract deal. It probably helped that despite the propaganda efforts by Emmanuel and his corporate allies, polls are showing that majorities of parents and citizens in Chicago support the teachers. In other words, most people have been able to see through the smokescreen and genuinely want what's best for our children. Strikes, while sometimes necessary, are hard for everyone. I hope we get an official announcement soon!

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Talking About "Windy"

It's been a couple years since I've tried singing the song "Windy" in school. In fact, I'd forgotten the lyrics until The Association classic took its turn on my playlist the other day. I seemed like a good one for the first day of our new 5's program, so I played it through a couple more times to lock in the words, then sang it for the kids on Monday.

No one sang along with me, of course, because none of them had heard it before, so it was like a performance with me throwing in a few hand gestures.

In introducing a new song, I like to sing it through once in my croaking, off-key voice, then follow it up  by going line-by-line, figuring out what it all means.

"Who's peeking out from under a stairway?" I sang to them. "I wonder what that means."

There was a moment of staring silence before, "I think it means there were some stairs that didn't have any wood under them."

Me: "And she got under there?"

"She got really small and crawled under."

"She was peeking out through the part of the stairs where there wasn't anything."

"My cousins house has a place under another place that doesn't have anything under it and you can go under there."

Me: "And you can peek out of there?"

"Yeah."

"Hey, one time I saw stairs that didn't have anything under them and you can look through them to the ground!"

Me: "And if you got under them could you look out?"

"I didn't get under them, but somebody could."

I sang, "Calling a name that's lighter than air? . . . I wonder what that's all about." I knew it was a tricky one, so I waited. When there was no response, I asked, "Is there anything lighter than air?"

"Clouds."

Me: "Clouds float up in the air."

"What about seeds?"

Me: "Yeah, like dandelion seeds, they float in the wind."

We diverted into a conversation about dandelion seeds, before I brought us back around, "What else is lighter than air?" Silence. "Is air heavy?" I made my arms into a kind of forklift and pantomimed lifting something.

"Yes."

"No."

Several of the kids imitated me, lifting air. There was then a general consensus that air was very light. I said, "I guess not many things are lighter than air."

"A whisper."

Me: "A whisper." I whispered the word "whisper" several times. "It has a very light sound."

"Words don't weigh anything."

"The Hulk."

Me: "The Hulk is lighter than air?"

"No, he's heavy," tightening his muscles in imitation of The Hulk.

"His name is light."

Me: "Lighter than air?"

"Yes."

"My friend Audrey is light. I can pick her up really easy. Right up like this."

I sang, "Who's peeking out from under a stairway? Calling a name that's lighter than air? Who's bending down to give me a rainbow? . . . How do you give somebody a rainbow?"

"Maybe she had a sprinkler and turned it on and the sun was shining."

Me: "And it made a rainbow?"

"Yeah."

Me: "Has anyone else seen a rainbow in a sprinkler?"

"Me!"

"I did!"

"You can see one with a hose too."

We then broke into a short discussion of rainbows before I brought us back to the song, "So did she bend down and turn on a sprinkler?"

"My friend has a baby and the baby has a rainbow. A toy rainbow." I made a rainbow shape with my hands. "No, it's little." I made a little rainbow shape with my hands. "Like this little," and she showed me the size. "Maybe that's what she gave him -- a toy rainbow."

I sang: "Who's peeking out from under a stairway? Calling a name that's lighter than air? Who's bending down to give me a rainbow? Everyone knows it's Windy."

"Who's Windy?"

We agreed she was a girl. This had all taken nearly 15 minutes. A great group conversation for the first day of class. Seriously. But since time was running short, we'll have to pick up the conversation next time. I can't wait to find out about those eyes that flash at the sound of lies.

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Why We Laugh When We Play

Most of the actual work I do is in preparing for the arrival of the kids, and by "work" I mean the kinds of things I'd rather not be doing: the stuff for which I'd wave a magic wand if I could. Once the kids arrive on the scene, however, it's pretty much all play for me, the part of my day I'd not wish away for anything. 

Indeed, sometimes we adults need to deal with certain aspects of cleaning or snack prep or bodily functions that we might identify as "work," but really, if we're going to be a play-based classroom worth its salt, everyone in the room should be playing, children and adults. A roomful of shoulder-to-shoulder learners is one of the key features of a full-on play-based curriculum -- at least the way we do it here at Woodland Park.

Much of what play-based learning is about is making connections, discoveries that come from putting things together then comparing the results to the things we thought we already knew. This is why the exact same environment, the exact same classroom set-up, serves as a learning environment for humans of all ages. We might be starting with the same stuff, but we're not all starting from the same place. A tool, a shovel for instance, may be used by a 2-year-old to make discoveries about the properties of corn starch mixed with water. That same tool may be used by an adult to make discoveries about the properties of that child or children in general or interactions between children and herself in relation to them.

As a child struggles to pull, say, a dinosaur from a cornstarch and water muck, she's experiencing adhesion, leverage, angles, emulsion, tension, moisture, suction, and the flexing of muscles. This is like the mud she found in the same place last week -- damp, gooey, possessing properties attributable to both liquids and solids -- but different as well. And as she plays, connecting what she knows with what she doesn't yet know, the adult makes her own connections between this child and the others she's known. This is like the child she found in the same place a few minutes ago -- persevering, testing, talking -- but different as well. And these connections, these examinations of similarities and differences, the interplay between what is known and unknown, shake the foundations of our metaphors, creating new ones, opening our eyes to mysterious places within ourselves, other people, and the physical world.

We discover there are always new connections to be made: that the more we know, the more there is to know.

When a child crosses the ground from the art table where he's been driving cars through paint and down ramps, hands slimy with red, he shows us all a newly connected world, opening up avenues into the very things we just thought we'd figured out. And as children begin to run back and forth to carry their own fists full of paint to where we're playing, we adults laugh with them from the joy of our own epiphanies, wondering at their wonder. They, the adults, look up at me, their eyes sometimes more than the children alight with the joy of connection, of discovery, "He made pink! We're making pink! Now the dinos are pink!"

And the kids are saying, "Ghost dinos! Pink ghost dinos!" as metaphors take shape, new scaffolding erected, the world changing before our very eyes.

Then someone else comes over from the work bench, still clutching the Duplos he found over there, drawn by the sounds of discovery, and from that curiosity, we then all learn what happens when we drop a block in the pink goo.

I think about connections as I go through the "work" part of my day, trying to anticipate the paths it will take, and every now and then I get to experience the euphoria of being right, of having my best guesses proven in the real world of play-based learning. But that's a rare treat, one I enjoy, but no more so than the ones we all share when we play here together, connecting. Discovery is always unexpected. It's why we laugh when we play.

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It's Time To Reward The Critical Thinkers

Chicago public school teachers have voted to go on strike. Nearly 90 percent of all the teachers, not just 90 percent of those who voted, but 90 percent of all teachers in the district voted "yes." This was to overcome the 75 percent strike threshold put in place by the mayor, state legislature, and corporate education reformers last year to make teacher strikes "impossible" in Chicago. Ninety percent voted to put their lives and careers on the line for this, doing the impossible.

The centerpiece in the conflict are working hours and pay. The unelected Chicago School Board, with the support of the same mayor, President Obama's former chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel, backed by the well-funded corporate education lobbying group Stand For Children, have their PR machine in high gear, going with the general meme that teachers are lazy, greedy, selfish thugs. The union is responding in kind. This is a preview of the stand-off we can expect to see more of in the coming years. Even me, a blogger located all the way out here in Seattle, who has often taken the side of unions and teachers, has been contacted several times in the past few days by interested parties asking me to publicly weigh in.

I don't want to get into arguing the details here, but as it's playing out in the media right now, the mayor is framing his side of the argument as a 2 percent pay raise for 10 percent more work. The union is accepting the longer school days, but asking for a 24 percent pay increase.  Doesn't it seem obvious that the two sides have staked out extreme negotiating positions? The mayor's offer is pathetic, the union's counter-offer looks like an over-reach. Normal humans, then, in a non-toxic environment will work their way toward some middle point, right? That's the path of fairness.

But we have a toxic environment. And it's in the midst of this nasty brew that we are trying to educate children. Really? It's hard for me to not notice that this new age of ugliness coincides with the introduction of Wall Street types into the mix: these are people who've demonstrated in the past couple decades that they will do anything to turn a buck (or a billion) and school budgets represent a big pot of gold. But admittedly that's my bias, one I've repeatedly made clear here on this blog which is why certain interests want me to chime in. My point here isn't to get into a debate over Chicago, but rather to point out that both sides are intentionally making this into a simplistic black and white, us vs. them, chose-your-side kind of proposition. The teachers have overwhelmingly staked out their side, the entrenched political and corporate interests theirs, so ultimately, they're both targeting parents, attempting to pit them against one another in the cage-match of public opinion. 

Don't let them do it! This issue is far, far more nuanced than greedy unions versus greedy corporate-types. We do live in tough economic times requiring tough choices. We do need to improve our educational outcomes. And while we all agree that a teacher's job is vitally important, most people don't understand how hard, complex, and emotionally demanding the job is (statistically teaching has the highest turnover rate of any profession: the average tenure being less than 5 years). This is not only about greed: in fact, I believe that most people on both sides have children and education at heart, even if we personally think they are misguided. It is admittedly unfair when I paint all "reformers" as bad guys, just as it's unfair to portray all teachers as lazy. And speaking for myself in this particular stand-off, I think both sides are agreeing upon the wrong thing: there is no connection between longer school days and longer school years and better education. Nothing is ever as simple as the stories spun by PR departments. If we need anything else from our public education it is citizens with critical thinking skills, not simply knee-jerk partisan ones. Yet if all you do is read the press reports, which is where this conflict is now being played out, then you'll feel you have to choose sides.

(And all that said, just because "both sides do it," that doesn't mean it's symmetrical. I have no problem, for instance, in identifying Rahm Emmanuel as a bad actor in this: he has a long history of catering to corporate interests and creating toxic environments everywhere he goes. The pretend journalists who play the "both sides do it" game don't helping matters.)

The right answer is in the middle somewhere. That's what we need to be demanding: good faith negotiation. We need to make it clear that the first side to move toward the middle, if even a little, is who we will applaud. And then turn to the other side and demand a step from them. Being immovable is not an option. Bare-knuckled politics is bad for children and it's bad for education. And frankly, it's bad for America. It's time to reward the critical thinkers.

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"I Figure I Might As Well At Least Get Up"

A friend of mine's father was a boilermaker. I never met the man, but he was described to me as a tough, leathery guy who was missing a couple fingers. One morning, as a boy, my friend complained to his father, "Dad, I don't feel so good."

His old man answered, "I wake up that way a lot mornings not feeling so good, but you know, I figure I might as well at least get up, just to make sure.

"If I still feel bad after getting up, well then I figure I'm already up, so might as well at least get dressed.

"If I still fell bad, I figure since I'm up and dressed, I might as well at least eat some breakfast.

"If after that I still feel bad, well why not? I'm up and dressed and fed, I might as well head on in to work.

"If I still feel bad at my coffee break, I figure it's not too long until lunch. If after lunch I still feel bad, I figure I've come this far, so I might as well just finish up the day.

"When I get home, I figure if I still feel bad, I can crawl back into bed, but you know what? By then I almost never feel so bad any more."

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What Is Progressive Education?

I "wrapped up" my series on "Why I Teach The Way I Do" (read from the bottom up) a few days ago, but it's been bugging me that I never got around to addressing reader Atlanta's request that I address what I mean when I use the term "progressive education," which I did repeatedly. It's such a broad and inclusive term, I think, the definition of which would properly take up another 10-part series of posts, but her comment has stuck with me these past two weeks so I thought, in a meager way, to have a go at what it means, at least, to me. I started by digging through the archives, certain that in all the verbiage here, I've at least attempted it before. And finally, I found what I was looking for, written a couple years ago as a preamble to a different piece entirely. I've rewritten it for today, but if some of it sounds familiar, it means you've been reading here a long time -- thank you!

The single greatest influence on me as a teacher was my own daughter's preschool teacher and North Seattle Community College parent educator Chris David. No matter how many books I read or classes I took, I learned most of what I started out knowing by working as a parent-teacher apprenticing in her 3-5's class for two years. Our daily schedule, our songs, our stations, our over-arching philosophical approach to working with young children are all rooted in what I learned from Chris. For my first year or so as a teacher, I spent a lot of time consciously trying to be her. I found myself constantly searching my mental files for not only the exact words I thought Chris might say or thing she might do, but even trying to reflect her body language, her cadence, and her vocal tone.

Over time, of course, while I believe I've remained true to the core principles I learned from Chris, my teaching style has become my own to the point that I doubt there are many people who would observe the two of us and find similarities beyond the superficial ones of schedule, songs and stations. And that's how it ought to work, of course, Chris and I are different people. It is only natural to expect that we would form different kinds of relationships with the people in our lives. Yet we are both progressive educators.

The biggest challenge in communicating about how progressive education works, I think, is that it really can only be discussed and understood "in context." When guys like Bill Gates (who for better or worse has become the poster boy for a cookie cutter model of education) promote their versions of education, it's a much easier task because it's a one-size-fits-all theory with a pot of gold (literally, in the form of a "job") as a reward. And like all "beautiful" theories (e.g., Marxism, libertarianism, neo-liberalism) it may be made to work in a small scale, well-funded, incubator-like setting, but it will always fall apart when tried out in the context of actual humans behaving like actual messy, wonderful, diverse human beings, and not the theory's concept of how human beings ought to behave.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. ~Proverb*

Progressive education, by it's very nature, means different things to different people. To me, it starts with relationships among the people involved: the kids, the teachers, and the parents. Alfie Kohn writes, "Progressive education is marinated in community," and that has been my guiding principle since before I'd heard of Kohn, or indeed, ever really thought about progressive education. The factory approach to education that has been largely in vogue since the Industrial Revolution relies heavily on a hierarchical model of a boss-teacher to fill all those empty vessels with the information deemed important by those higher up the chain of command, which more often than not meant the guys who own the "factories" in which these kids were presumed destined to be employed. Up until this point in Western society, education had been a much more free-form, community-based (what we today might call "progressive") endeavor, but people educated in this way simply don't do so well in the mind-numbing repetitious factory jobs industrialists were creating. So even more important than the information they sought to pour into those kids, they shaped schools to reflect what they saw as the "realities" of the modern workplace, making it more about things and specific skills, and less about people and their relationships.

As it turns out, most of us don't spend our lives working in factories, but this rather radical (in the context of history) educational model has stuck with us, serving businessmen, but not necessarily children or our wider community. 

We keep hearing that public education is in crisis, and I don't doubt it, but the solution is not to double down on the factory model, making school more competitive, more standardized, more hierarchical, which is what the Gates-lead reform movement seems to be all about. But, of course, what can we expect from these guys? As reader Barbara once pointed out the comments on this blog, "Remember, Microsoft is just a couple of geniuses and a whole lot of worker bees." In this new age of technology, they still need all the "trained" cubicle drones they can get.

As I see it, we need to return to the "traditional" (e.g., pre-Industrial Revolution) models of placing relationships at the center of education which had far more in common with progressive education than not.

When I look at progressive schools, no two are alike. We are Reggio Emilia and Montessori and Waldorf and forest and outdoor and alternative and free and cooperative and every permutation and mixture imaginable. My own school, Woodland Park, is even different from year to year, depending on the relationships that form between the children, the parents, and with me. As a teacher, I play to my strengths, as we all should. I learn from other teachers and other programs, of course, but ultimately there is no "progressive template," no one-size-fits-all. Progressive education is not an off the rack endeavor, but rather a community sewing bee in which everything is custom made. And there are no bosses, only relationships between people, who have equal rights and responsibilities even if some of them are "just kids."

That's the context in which progressive educators teach. When I write about putting children in charge of their own education, I'm writing about the struggle all of us have to "forget" our industrial education backgrounds and treat children not as underlings, but as fully-formed people; not as incomplete adults, but rather equal and free humans with whom we form genuine relationships. From those seeds we grow community, and from that a progressive education.

(*Note: Most progressive educators are familiar with this quote, or something like it. Versions of it are variously attributed to W.B. Yeats, Plutarch, Socrates and others. I've tried to find the proper source many times without success. In the days before the internet, we simply attributed common wisdom like this to "the universe," which is what I've decided to do here.)

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A Child Of Doing With A Still Mind Of Contemplation

I've slept in this morning, something I've been trying to teach myself to do this summer, making it all the way to 6:50 a.m.  I tried today, one more time, on this, the final Friday of the summer break. It's been more of a game than a real effort.

In truth, I've not slept in nor really had a full-on summer break for awhile, opting instead to keep my hand in the game, teaching a 3-day a week summer program in the outdoor classroom. People in other professions envy us our time off, although not our salaries, but I've finally come in recent years to the realization that I'm not really very good at time off. Sure, weekends are good, but even the 4-day weekends I've enjoyed since June were a bit too much for me. I'm not a worrier by nature, but perhaps that's only because I'm not an idler by nature. I've never been able to enjoy a towel on a beach with a book because then my mind turns endlessly on doing; that's what I've always done when my body lies still except when its time to sleep, and then I sleep like rock.

My wife says to me, "Stop obsessing!" but it's not obsessing. Obsession, to me, is when one's brain churns itself ceaselessly on matters one wishes it wouldn't, but I generally like these places my brain takes me. The problem is that where my brain takes me my body craves to follow, my hands want to plunge in, my feet to take my weight and move to the piston chug of the churning. It's when my body can't follow that I finally begin to dwell on failure and on that even more crippling fear of success.

I like better to be up on my feet, moving, doing, being, reacting. That's why my thoughts go where they go, as a lead, a prompt, a push, and when the body fails to follow, I think, the brain believes something must be wrong and goes into the nonsense of darker places.

Don't get me wrong; I am able to contemplate. I do it here every day. I've wondered if it's time I learned to meditate -- my friends say I'll love it. Then when they tell me about it, what it does for them, taking them to the stillness they crave, I wonder how that's so different from my urban hikes or long, long, day long bike rides where the movement of my body makes my mind so still that sometimes, for instance, I revolve upon the same re-discovered song lyric for an hour at a time:

Chuck E.'s in love with the little girl singing this song.

As I ransack their homes they want to shake my hand.

What's wrong with that, I'd like to know, so here I go, again.

It seems like so much work to have to sit my body and my mind still.

Ah, but you see, that's what this teacher does with the time off that others envy: reflect on this and that as my wife says, as a joke now, after more than a quarter of a century of getting to know one another, "Stop obsessing!" We both know that physical idleness is simply not for me. I need to do, to turn thoughts into action, often against the warnings of my intellect, so I work through the summer; I continue to write here every day about the work I'm supposed to have forgotten for a time, my wonderful (and it is wonderful, and so is yours) brain churning over matters upon which I want it to churn.

For the past few days, I've been contemplating this old and broken watering can as I ride my bike, a thing that is really not a watering can any longer. It's been with our school longer than I. We have proper watering cans, good ones that still have the little diffusers over their spouts that cause the water to fall more gently on seedlings; larger watering cans in more interesting colors. This old and broken thing, in my mind, lives in the sand pit, and that's where I put it, up by the cast iron water pump, a container to be filled and dumped, filled and dumped, filled and dumped until it finally breaks apart and can be thrown away.

And every day, every single day, I find it in the garden, damp, empty, lying on its side. The other watering cans, the real ones? Scattered to the wind. Here and there, full of sand, pebbles, hanging from a lilac branch, balanced on a swing. But this one, this one that I think lives in the sand pit, is always, at the end of the day, in the garden where watering cans belong.

It is not one child who does it day after day, brings it to the garden, because it happens every day, no matter what group of children play there, and it's found its way there over years. I can honestly say, I've never actually seen a child holding it, but there it is, in the garden, day after day, year after year.

Why the hell am I wasting this last Friday morning of summer, a day that is already in full sun and sharp blue sky, a day that will be neither too hot nor too cold, a perfect day to ride, ride, ride, do, do, do, thinking about this damned old and broken no-longer-watering can?

Because for a time each day it stands at the center of a child's life: a child of doing with a still mind of contemplation.

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