Not Helping

A common characteristic of play-based schools are policies discouraging adults from helping children with things they can do for themselves. This goes for everyday personal care things like putting on jackets and using the toilet, as well as physical challenges like climbing to the top of the playhouse or using the swings.

Ideally, we step back as they engage their struggles. When they begin to get frustrated, we might support them with narrative statements like, "You've put your arm in the sleeve," or perhaps helpful informative statements like, "Your other sleeve is behind you." When it's something necessary like dressing appropriately for outdoors or peeing in the potty, we then might step in with actual assistance when it appears the challenge is still too much for them, but only after giving each child a chance to do what he can for himself. When it's something with which the child is challenging herself, like climbing a tree, we might move closer and offer words of encouragement, or say things like, "I won't help you, but I won't let you get hurt."

Competence is built upon perseverance and these struggles with meaningful, real-world challenges (as opposed to the manufactured challenges of tests and homework) are the foundations upon which confident, self-motivated humans are built.

As a cooperative preschool in which parents work in the classroom as assistant teachers, this is one of the most important and difficult lessons some parents learn. Teachers who have never worked in a cooperative often ask me if parents "get in the way" or intervene too much or too quickly, and my answer is, "Yes, they do." When families arrive at our school with their two-year-olds, many are still brand new to the parenting game, primarily experienced in caring for infants who need so much done for them. For first time parents, that is the only parent-child relationship they know, and while there was a time when it frustrated me, I've come to realize that part of my job is to recognize where they are on their journey and to be there as they, and their child, transition into this new phase.

In other words, we don't always live up to our ideal, but rather, as is the case with any ideal, we always strive in that direction. 

The "unicycle merry-go-round" is one of the features of our outdoor classroom. It's made to sit on a paved surface, which we had when we acquired it, but it's now installed on sloped, wood chip covered ground. There's a "track" upon which the wheels are meant to turn, but it's almost always blocked with wood chips and other debris making it nearly impossible for children to peddle. At the beginning of the school year, in our 2's class in particular, there is almost always an adult bent to the task of pushing the children.

But now it's April, and it's thrilling to see clear evidence of the progress we've made along our journey. Last week, the adults stood back without my encouragement, as children struggled with the apparatus. They identified the wood chip problem themselves. They found brooms to sweep the track. Some chose to be "riders" while others were "motors," pushing one another around and around, taking turns by an unspoken system of their own devices, while the adults stood back, not helping, all of us striving toward our ideal.

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Rigor

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

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

We have a pair of wagons, which are regularly used on the hills. Last week, one became an airplane. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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When One Stops Scolding

Over the weekend, this blog reached an odd sort of milestone, a marker I set myself back in August of 2013. As you may recall, and as you may want to forget, that was when singer Miley Cyrus set the whole world on fire with her controversial performance on MTV's Video Music Awards and I, your intrepid blogger, joined the rest of the world in commenting upon it under the headline Miley Cyrus! Miley Cyrus! Miley Cyrus! The point I attempted to make was that there is a long, rich history of young people, and young artists in particular, outraging their elders. And while I wasn't necessarily comparing the former Hannah Montana actress to them as artists, she was simply following in the tradition of Sinatra, Elvis, and The Beatles. 

That post, based, I'm sure, in no small measure on its title, quickly rose to become one of this blog's all-time most read posts. It wasn't a chart-topper, but it has remained on the top ten list for the past twenty months. Looking back at the post today, I see that most of the comments under it are supportive, but I didn't receive universally positive feedback on Facebook and elsewhere. Most readers seemed to agree with me that it's part of the job of youth to poke a finger in the eye of us old farts, but a surprising number of folks, even while conceding that point, felt that in this case, Miley Cyrus had gone way to far.

People said she set feminism back 100 years.

People said she was irresponsibly teaching young women to debase and devalue themselves.

People said she was a talentless, disease-ridden whore on the highway to hell.

I thought I was making a sort of obvious point about the modern cult of teenager-dom, and I had figured some readers would disagree, but the level of vitriol voiced both about my post and Miley Cyrus in general was really something to behold. As that subsequent week rolled on, I was shocked by the slut shaming, name calling, and barely contained anger being expressed over this predictable pop culture phenomenon. The milestone this blog surpassed was that at some point over the weekend, that post was finally pushed from the all-time top ten list by a pair of recent posts (What Too Many Children Have Today Instead of Play and You Want Mommy to Come Back, in case you're interested). I had told myself that when this day came, when emotions had settled a little, I would re-visit that post.

I know, through my daughter, a large number of young women, most of whom were, at best, casual fans of Miley Cyrus. They had watched the Hannah Montana TV program as little girls, but her's wasn't a name that regularly came up on conversations about favorite music. I don't think any of them actually watch the VMA show live, although as the controversy blew up, they, like many of us, checked the video out, and found it "okay." What they mostly wanted to talk about, however, what pissed them off, was the vitriolic response. Many of them were responsive to some of the more thoughtful articles that examined the performance through the lens of feminism, sexuality, and race, but as the days passed, they became increasingly furious at her critics. As one of them said, referring specifically to singer Sinead O'Connor, who boosted her own career by ripping up a photo of the pope on Saturday Night Live, "I'm sick of these old women dumping on Miley. I feel like they're dumping on me."

As I wrote in that original post, I can't imagine that anyone expected that Miley Cyrus' performance, sandwiched as it was between Kanye West and Lady Gaga, would emerge as controversial, but it's quite clear from the perspective of nearly two years later that it did nothing but help her career. The anger directed toward her, the name-calling and slut shaming in particular, made her a sympathetic figure to the core of her fans: young women struggling to find their identity in the world, moving from the glitter and tiaras of childhood, into a more adult world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It's not surprising that so many of them took the criticism personally as old people once more lectured young people about morals, manners, and fashion, especially since there are so many more important things about which to be outraged.

As one of my daughter's friends said to me across the dinner table, "It's not like she caused global warming. It's not like she started a stupid war. All she did was shake her booty and stick out her tongue."

I don't always like the clothes my child wears, the music she listens to, or things she chooses to do. I reckon she's done her fair share of shaking her booty and sticking out her tongue (or whatever the latest thing is), but that isn't who she is any more than Miley Cyrus was Hannah Montana. Looking back from this somewhat arbitrary milestone, what I'm most grateful for is the opportunity it gave me to listen to my daughter and her friends. They're smart, thoughtful young women, who know it's all a show. It's the sort of thing one can only learn when one stops scolding.

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What's Next?

As I prepare for my upcoming trip to Greece, my last couple posts have circled around the idea of what it would mean to not just reform, but totally transform education in America (here, and here). Today, I intend to wrap things up with some thoughts on how to go about making it happen. I write here about what I know, my own country. The pathway in Greece, or any nation, will be different in it's details, but I expect there are some principles that can guide us all.

*****

In the US the corporate education "reformers," lead by dilettantes such as Bill Gates have taken an ideologically driven approach, imposing a faith-based regime of standardized curricula and high stakes standardized testing, magnifying the worst of the past, while ignoring the voices of education professionals, parents, and students. They have manufactured their own "research," based not on how humans best learn, building on the work of education giants such as Piagett, Vygotsky, and Montessori, but rather focusing narrowly on how children function in schools. It's like claiming to understand tigers by studying them in a zoo. And from this, they've fashioned a Dickensian set of devices that have been working their way downward over this past decade from high school toward our youngest children.

Up here in the Pacific Northwest, we've apparently been spared the brunt of it until recently, but now it's here and it's getting ugly. Up until 2012, one hundred percent of my former students surveyed told me, without question, that kindergarten "is better than preschool." For the past two years, their responses have been much less enthusiastic, even from the ones who have thrived, while a small, but significant percentage have been reduced to tears and the kind of self-doubt that, according to their parents, has lead them to question their ability to learn.

We have not changed what we do at Woodland Park. We proudly offer a progressive, play-based curriculum, based upon the best science about how children learn. We send enthusiastic, motivated, curious, self-directed learners out in to the world. Kindergarten has changed, with a heightened emphasis on developmentally inappropriate "academics," and it is not sitting well with children who expect, as they properly should, to be in charge of their own learning.

Not long ago, a former parent posted this on Facebook (edited to protect privacy):

Not happy about kindergarten, for many reasons. One of which is that his teacher won't allow them to make paper airplanes at school. So we made them at home. And he can fold one all by himself now. What his teacher doesn't understand yet is that paper airplanes are a study of science for this kid-engineer. With a discussion of symmetry, creasing, and types of triangles, (he) practiced unaided until he got it. We tested grandma and grandpa's design versus mommy's design and discussed the attributes of each. Yesterday, we studied painting in grandma's house for about 10 minutes, making astute observations of the feeling and mood portrayed, characters and setting. Discussing Impressionism. Before bed we observed a diagram of the moon rotating and revolving around the Earth as the Earth rotated and revolved around the sun, refreshing our vocabulary for these processes. All of this . . . He led. I hope his total anger toward kindergarten fizzles soon.

People often ask those of us who teach in play-based preschools, "But how to they adapt to traditional school?" Up until recently, the answer has been, "Just fine." But this is no longer even traditional school: from where I sit, kindergarten is rapidly turning into a test score coal mine employing child labor to earn profits for corporations like Microsoft and Pearson Education. I'd say that "total anger" is an appropriate response.

I will not drill-and-kill preschoolers, I will not pre-grind their noses, I will not turn my back on the science of education in order to somehow "prepare" them for this. Indeed, developmentally appropriate play-based education is the only preparation there is. In the words of Sydney Guerwitz Clemons, "We don't starve to prepare for a famine. We fatten them up to the best of our ability and hope they survive."

It's not our job to get children ready for kindergarten. We are sending them enthusiastic, motivated, curious, self-directed learners. It's kindergarten's responsibility to get ready for them as they are doing in Ontario, Canada where play-based kindergartners are at the lead in transforming elementary schools.

I've come to the conclusion that if we are going to transform education, it is going to have to come from the "bottom" up. What we are doing in our play-based preschools follows the science of how children learn and places democracy at its center. As I suggested yesterday, the process that lead to New Zealand's beloved Te Whāriki early childhood curriculum framework could be an appropriate model for us. 

In President Obama's most recent State of the Union address he announced that his administration was coming after us next:

"And as Congress decides what it's going to do, I'm going to pull together a coalition of elected officials, business leaders, and philanthropists willing to help more kids access the high-quality pre-K they need."

Please note that he makes no mention of including professional educators or parents in this process. He's turning to the same cast of "jobs of tomorrow" dilettantes who brought us the anti-democratic fiasco of Common Core, across the board standardization, job and college prep for kindergarteners, and high stakes standardized testing. I don't claim to know how to do this, but we must begin our own process: a democratic one that honors the voices of government and business, yes, but that leans primarily upon the science of how children best learn, the experience of professional educators, the love of parents, and the promise of democracy.

Preschool teachers can lead this and increasingly it's looking like we must lead this. A revolution is coming. Who's with me? What's next?

I'm here to change the world, and if I'm not, I'm probably wasting my time. ~Utah Phillips

I've been engaging in a public dialog with my fellow teachers here on this blog and face-to-face for the past six years now, and it's clear that most early childhood educators are "with me" when it comes to fighting for the transformation of education. The larger question is, "What's next?"

I want a transformation. We want a transformation. Heck, as misguided as he is, Bill Gates wants a transformation, but despite his billions it's becoming increasingly clear it ain't gonna happen on his watch. Why? Because, and I'm as surprised by this as anyone, it appears we still have a democracy: reformation, let alone transformation, can only happen when we all have a voice.

The big system can be pretty overwhelming. We know that we can't beat them by competing with them. What we can do is build small systems where we live and work that serve our needs as we define us and not as they're defined for us. The big boys in their shining armor are up there on castle walls hurling their thunderbolts. We're the ants patiently carrying sand a grain at a time from under the castle wall. We work from the bottom up. The knights up there don't see the ants and don't know what we're doing. They'll figure it out only when the wall begins to fall. It takes time and quiet persistence. Always remember this: They fight with money and we resist with time, and they're going to run out of money before we run out of time. ~Utah Phillips

I took a look at what the White House says it's got planned for our youngest citizens and confirmed that it's mostly just more of the Race To The Top, competition, rigor, and accountability crap that comes right out of those meetings of the "elected officials, business leaders, and philanthropists" he promised he would tap for the job, while excluding the rest of us. Still, it's not all bad stuff. I certainly like the idea of "preschool for all" and "boosting" the availability of childcare, especially for low-income families, although I'm sure we disagree on how to define "high-quality." There's probably no better use of our education dollars than to spend them on "empowering parents." And I don't necessarily quibble with the other goals, although the evidence is that without the voices of teachers, parents, and students helping to navigate, they've managed to Keystone Cop their way into the mud. To quote our president: "After they drove the car into the ditch . . . now they want the keys back. No! You can't drive."

Of course, that's where the car-driving metaphor falls apart, because to do something as big and as important as transforming education in America, the one-driver scenario is still going to wind us up in a ditch.

The best metaphor I can come up with, and it's far from genius, is a gigantic round table, big enough to accommodate one more chair. No one ever said democracy would be fast or easy. When New Zealand, with a population of less than 4.5 million, developed it's beloved Te Whāriki national early childhood curriculum framework, the first stage alone, from conception to publication, took five years, but with some parts not being completed for another 15. An even more diverse nation of over 300 million might, logically, take longer than that. In other words, transformation isn't a goal, it's a process: a long, deliberative one at that. But, you know, at the deepest level, we already spend all our time on the planet engaged in process, so why should this be different?

So, I suggest that the first step in this long journey is to start by finding a table big enough to accommodate one more chair. Our federal government has a table, but the chairs are apparently already full. We could march on DC and demand seats as many have suggested, and maybe that's the way to go: maybe the first part of our process is shouting so loudly that they have to listen to us. And when we're successful, that will still mean there are millions of other voices that need to be heard, so we will then need to begin demanding more chairs.

I'm willing to take that approach and see it's merits, but I've been thinking about another way to go: maybe we need to build our own table, one that is from the start designed to accommodate one more chair. 

I guarantee, that if I am elected, I will take over the White House, hang out, shoot pool, scratch my ass, and not do a damn thing . . . Which is to say, if you want something done, don't come to me to do it for you; you got to get together and figure out how to do it yourselves. Is that a deal?  ~Utah Phillips

In other words, I'm thinking that the only way to get this long process going is to get together and figure out how to do it ourselves, and the first thing is to start listening to each other: public school teachers, preschool teachers, special ed teachers, private school teachers, university professors; parents, parents of all colors and ethnicities, wealthy, poor and middle class parents, parents of children with special needs; children of all ages and of all backgrounds; business, non-profit, and philanthropic leaders, representing concerns of all sizes and from all economic and social sectors; scientists, researchers, historians, and others with specialized knowledge and wisdom . . . 

Then we begin to talk, listen, agree, while always reaching out to those who might not agree and invite them to sit at our table. I think the goal is a beloved early childhood curriculum framework like the one they have created and are creating in New Zealand, but I'm probably wrong. Maybe we start by creating "small systems where we live and work." Maybe it's a process of one school at a time, one district at a time, one city at a time, one state at a time. In the end, the best process cannot be determined from where we are now. It will have to emerge from the talking, listening, and agreeing.

And the table must always be big enough to accommodate one more chair, even for the "knights" who fall from their castle walls.

Every day, talk to at least two people who don't agree with you. It's the only way it is going to get done. ~Utah Phillips

So, I guess I'm opening it up to you. Maybe a good place to start is by creating a more complete list of those we know must be represented around our table, because I know mine is incomplete. Let's start figuring out how to do this ourselves. Indeed, that's the only way anything ever gets done.

What's next?

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A Democratic Revolution

Education does not need to be reformed -- it needs to be transformed. The key is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions. ~Ken Robinson

Yesterday, in anticipation of my upcoming travels to Greece, I wrote about the notion of transforming rather than reforming schools. This morning, as I contemplate the question of how that might come about, I recognize that, as an American, and specifically, an American who lives and works in a cooperative preschool in the upper left-hand corner to the US, I am truly blinded by perspective. I can speak about my personal experience quite well, the experience of my immediate community with some authority, and my own nation with a certain level of confidence, but the farther afield I go, the more I find that I don't know. I've decided here, to stick with the things I know. I expect that some of it will translate directly into "Greek," while some will be alien, so please, wherever you live, take what is worthwhile and disregard the rest. This is the reason democracy is essential to transformation: alone we are but a man, but together we are a genius.

*****

There are some, and I'm included among them, who believe that a revolution is coming in public education. Indeed, I feel emboldened these days, not just by recent evidence that the regressive corporate "reform" movement and their Dickensian drive to subject a generation of children to labor in test score mines, has been forced into a small strategic retreat, but also by the fact that the pushback is coming from parents, teachers, and students representing all points of America's political spectrum. Change seems to be in the air. The media seems to be finally noticing, and if this article in The Atlantic is any indication, they are starting to notice that the biggest problem with American public schools is poverty.

Like any good revolutionaries, then, assuming anything like "victory" is possible, we can't simply settle for a return to the status quo. Stopping "reform" is not enough: revolution is our opportunity for transformation.

I'm not going to pretend to know how to solve poverty, although I'm certain that it will require some version of the perfectly reasonable solutions devised by the children I teach: give them jobs, give them food, give them homes. (On that third point, the state of Utah has seemingly managed to actually cure homelessness in just this way.)

I have a few ideas, however, on the transformation of schools.

The first, and perhaps most difficult part, will be that we, as a society, will need to get past the hubristic belief that adults inherently know best how and what to know. We do not. Only the learner, whatever her age, can know this. As Peter Gray details through an exhaustive survey of anthropological research in his book Free to Learn, during most of the 10,000 years of human evolution we lived in hunter-gatherer societies in which free play was the norm for children. There is no evidence of the notion that adults had anything to "teach" other than that which could be conveyed through role modeling, like hunting, gathering, cooking, and singing. It's in this environment that the young learned what they needed to learn without classrooms, text books, lectures, and, most significantly, adults vainly persisting in the fallacy that they know how and what to know. It's in this environment that humans have evolved to learn, through free play, through free choice, through experimentation and observation.

I often think that my own childhood of roaming neighborhoods in Columbia, South Carolina and Athens, Greece, playing outdoors with the children and things I found there, with few toys and lots of time, and largely unsupervised, comes as close as the modern world has ever come to matching this hunter-gatherer educational ideal.

Lest this sound like I'm suggesting that children can thrive in a world entirely without adults, I assure you we will always have a significant role to play. We have experience: the stuff of wisdom. We know about important things like safety, schedules, and courtesy to others. And our heads are chock-a-block with bits of potentially useful information and true stories to tell, because questions will be asked and perfect moments will arise when just the right word, metaphor, concept, or idea can help build bridges for children when the gap is a bit too far to span on their own. It's the role of protector and guide more than all-knowing teacher.

As I wrote yesterday, it appears to me that a model for transformation already imperfectly resides in our play-based preschools and those few democratic free schools that dot the landscape. I suggest that our educational transformation can be built from this foundation, perhaps from the early years up, the way things are properly built, rather than this pie-in-the-sky notion that corporate "reformers" have of reverse engineering from the top down.

I see schools that are locally controlled if not locally owned, schools in which parents, teachers, and students work together to shape the physical and organizational environment, the "third leg" of the stool in Reggio Emilia parlance, because each neighborhood, each population of families, must be allowed to shape the culture of their own school if it is to truly serve its children. I don't see any reason why this transformation cannot begin with the facilities we already have in place, with their walls, libraries, computers, and outdoor spaces, although I'd be inclined to remove the doors from their hinges. I don't see any reason why this transformation cannot begin with the teachers we already have, although their role will shift from one in which direct instruction predominates to one more akin to "loitering with intent," concentrating mostly on the things adults understand best, like safety, schedules, courtesies to others, and, when called upon, to dispense those bits of information and tell those stories we've acquired through experience. Parents will be welcome at any time; indeed, they will be vital to the functioning of these learning communities, perhaps even in the way they are the lifeblood of our own cooperative preschool. 

As for the children, these transformed schools will be places they want to be, just as we were driven to escape each day into our neighborhoods to play with our friends. They will group themselves not by the strict superficialities of age, but rather according to their own interests and needs, learning through their processes and one another, discovering their unique talents, personalizing their education, and it will be through this, supported, but not directed by adults, that children will discover their true passions.

Am I dreaming? Probably, but revolution is in the air, and I fancy myself a revolutionary: now is the time to dream. 

In August of 2013 I was in Auckland, New Zealand conducting a teacher training. I've been doing this sort of thing for the past couple years, speaking to groups of teachers and parents in New Zealand, as well as the US, Canada, the UK, Greece, and Australia. This was the first and only time teachers arrived carrying copies of their nation's early childhood curriculum framework: Te Whāriki. 

As a citizen of a nation in which our national curriculum (Common Core) is being imposed from on high, I naturally assumed that they were hoping I'd perform a sort of on the spot criticism of their curriculum, but instead I discovered they had brought their copies proudly, to show me what was possible, but I still didn't really understand. It has taken me 12 months to get my mind around this alien idea of a national curriculum being almost universally embraced. In fact, it wasn't until a second trip Down Under where I met Wendy Lee, New Zealand educator and project director of the Education Leadership Project, that I finally "got it." As she discussed the development of the Te Whāriki, it clicked for me that one of the reasons these teachers felt so much ownership was that it had been developed through a transparent, inclusive, democratic process, as opposed to the behind-closed-doors, top-down, my-way-or-the-highway approach taken with our own disastrous Common Core.

It takes time to develop and implement a curriculum that is accepted, inclusive, meaningful and makes a difference for children. ~Prof. Helen May (lead writer of the Te Whāriki)

No one ever said democracy would be fast or easy, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't work: it means that to do its work well it takes time. It takes time because at the heart of democracy is a consultative process: if anyone's voice is excluded, then it's not democracy. Developing the Te Whāriki was a process that spanned the better part of two decades beginning in 1991.

From the book entitled Understanding the Te Whāriki Approach, authored by Wendy Lee, Margaret Carr (another lead writer of the Te Whāriki) and others:

The curriculum development process was organized to ensure dialogue with all parties having an interest in early childhood education. Representatives from all national early childhood organizations, government agencies, universities and research and teacher training institutions sat on an advisory panel and gave feedback on all the papers. A review group was established by the Ministry of Education to represent the government and evaluate the document . . . A curriculum development team of 15 practitioners, trainers and nationally recognised individuals formed the core working group. The curriculum was structured to enable the development of common principles, aims and goals, and also to provide the opportunity to negotiate the identity of diverse provision within the curriculum framework. Six specialists working groups were developed, enabling six core 'communities' to have a voice at the curriculum table.

Those 'communities' were the Infant and Toddler, Young Child, Māori Immersion, Pacific Island Language, Home-based Services, and Children with Special Needs working groups.

From 1991 to 1993, the framework was developed during a process of circulating a series of working papers and gaining feedback from early childhood educators, from a diversity of services, in local workshops and conference presentations across the country. Draft guidelines were published in 1993, inviting further published feedback. It was through this process of intensive consultation that consensus concerning the proposed curriculum principles and the aims and goals for children was able to be reached amongst the diverse early childhood services.

Only after the Te Whāriki was officially published in 1996, a document that by this time contained no surprises for anyone, did they then turn their attention to assessment, the place where the Gates Foundation and for-profit education testing companies, those who essentially wrote our Common Core, bizarrely, started. In the words of Helen May (link added by me):

The Ministry of Education subsequently funded several research projects towards developing frameworks for evaluation and assessment based on the inclusionary principles of Te Whāriki . . . followed by Kei Tue o te Pae-Assessment for learning: Early childhood exemplars, a project that was lead by Margaret Carr. The exemplars use a learning story framework of children's interest, strengths and dispositions. This represents a shift from internationally dominant paradigms of assessment for children based upon checklists and developmental measures of competency, skills and content (my note: not to mention high stakes standardized testing). A key principle being that diversity must be accommodated.

This is why the Common Core has been such a disaster from the start and is doomed, ultimately, to it's rightful place in the ashcan of history. It was designed to serve one constituency only: those imaginary "employers of tomorrow," fantastical creatures whose "needs" can't be foretold five years into the future, let alone decades from now when today's preschoolers will comprise the core of their workforce. The entire rest of American society, including our teachers, parents, and children, were intentionally cut out of the process, leaving us with a fait accompli, a set of dead documents, imposed in an act of intellectual imperialism, with, tellingly, no accommodations for feedback, change, or criticism. 

Te Whāriki translates from the indigenous Māori language of Aotearoa as 'a woven mat for all to stand on' and is the national early childhood curriculum in New Zealand. As a document it defines overall Principles and Goals for all early childhood programs. As a metaphor, Te Whāriki enables the diverse early childhood services and centers, their teachers, families and children, to 'weave' their own curriculum pattern shaped by different cultural perspectives, the age of children, the philosophy or structure of the program. ~Prof. Helen May

The Te Whāriki, is intended to to be a living, breathing document, open to an ongoing, democratic evolution. If I'd known then what I know now, it wouldn't have surprised me when New Zealand teachers proudly brought copies of their national curriculum to show me:

There was a high level of support for the curriculum by the early childhood sector relieved that: Te Whāriki was no takeover by the school national curriculum; it respected the existing diversity; it affirmed some strongly held beliefs about early childhood practice; it was very much a New Zealand statement and not another import from abroad. On the other hand it soon became apparent that Te Whāriki was complex, partly because it resisted telling practitioners what to do: it asked each program to 'weave' its own curriculum pattern.

There is so much to admire about Te Whāriki as a national early childhood curriculum in terms of content, structure, implementation, and evaluation, but from where I sit, the most important lesson for us in the rest of the world is the process by which it came about and continues to evolve. This is what democracy demands: an open, inclusive transparent process, be it undertaken on a national level, state-by-state, or even city-by-city. This is the primary lesson we can learn from the study of successful curriculum models (links added by me):

The stories of Singapore, Finland, and Ontario are not about the triumph of scientific methods. They are not about the triumph of markets, or successful standardization. They are about cultural and governmental settlements to particular forms of education and, indeed, forms of life. ~Allen Luke (educator, researcher, author)

I am by no means an expert on either Te Whāriki or Common Core, but the more I dig into the former, the more I find to love, while the more I learn about the later, the more appalled I become. The difference, I assert, is taking the time and care to "do" democracy properly: it's the difference between pride and shame.

I'll finish today with the foundational aspiration for children of the Te Whāriki, one I propose as a place to begin our own national, democratic discussion about the transformation of education -- the first small step in a journey of a thousand miles:

To grow up as competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body, and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to the world.

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!

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Imagine That Transformation

We all know the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." What many don't realize is that it's also considered a blessing, in the vein of its companion curse-blessing, "May all your dreams come true."

In a couple weeks, I'll be on my way to Greece to take part in a public discussion on the future of education. These are interesting times in the country of my youth. When I was in Athens two Springs ago, there were enormous economic austerity protests in the streets every afternoon and, if you've been following the news, you'll know that matters have only become more interesting in the intervening two years. The curse of Greece's interesting times is all too heartbreakingly evident, while the blessing is hidden in the future being manufactured through the decisions the people are making today. At least that's the hope.

The new Greek government is in the process of tearing down the old Greek educational system, one of rote and conformity that emerged in the years following World War II. The fear is that the old system will merely be replaced by an updated version of the same old thing, but the opportunity is a transformation that puts Greece at the global forefront in education.

As an American, I have no say in this, of course, but I can't help but be excited about the possibilities. What if we could start all over? What would that look like? For the next few days I intend to share my own thoughts on what such a transformation would look like.

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As our daughter Josephine approached school age we seriously considered homeschooling. Our three years of cooperative preschool had been wonderful, but as we stood at the threshold of kindergarten, I had a choice to make. Either I was going to send her off to school, with me staying behind to teach cooperative preschool or she was going to "stay home" with me and we would continue our educational journey shoulder-to-shoulder. I'd not yet become as radicalized about education as I am today, but even knowing what I know now, I'd have made the same decision.

We were, blessedly, a one-income family, which meant we were in a position to make this sort of choice. We had begun preschool when she was two, not out of a need for childcare, but rather because it was clear that Josephine had a stronger social drive than my own. Whereas I might be happy to spend a day puttering around the house, she insisted that we get out and "do something," even as a toddler, and for her, that meant finding some other kids with which to play. I know now that this was her educational instinct.

Learning, true learning, can really only take place in the context of others, or as author Alfie Kohn writes, "marinated in community." As a fundamentally introverted person, the chore of daily cobbling together a child-centric social life for my daughter and me, making arrangements to meet people here or there, signing up for classes, and organizing outings began to weigh on me. The idea of a place to regularly go, where we would find people we recognized, where we could build community together, began to appeal to me because I knew it would appeal to Josephine while relieving me of that weight of social organizing. Not that long ago, during my own childhood, extended families and more closely-knit neighborhoods largely filled this role, but we live in a world in which it is no longer acceptable (and in some places even illegal) to simply send one's child outside to play, for hours on end, with the children they find there. 

It still makes me sad to know that Josephine never had the experience of walking up and down the street knocking on doors to ask if Pheobe or Johnny can "come out to play," but our cooperative preschool, with its emphasis on play and community was a happy alternative, and she dug right in, every day, working, working, working on her relationships with the children and adults she found there. For our family, the idea of homeschooling or unschooling, would have been a kind of cruelty to both Josephine, who to this day is driven to get out there and mix it up with the other people, and me, who would spend my days, if left to my own devices, puttering in my jammies.

In other words, I never felt either of us needed school for the "academic" learning -- I'd long ago witnessed that literacy and numeracy and the absorption of scientific and other facts emerged as she was ready for them -- but rather for the opportunity to engage in community. This is why I've never once, in her 12 years of "real" school, asked a teacher a question about her grades, test scores, or transcript. I've listened to teachers tell me about these things, but when it came my turn to talk, I've always asked some version of the questions, "How does she treat her friends?" and "How do they treat her?" This is why we send her to school.

There is so much talk about school "reform," from all points of view, but as author Ken Robinson writes, we would be better served to be talking about "transformation." For many, this transformation involves getting rid of schools altogether, and maybe they're right. But from where I sit we will still need something like schools to replace them: places where children of all ages can come together and practice the skills of building community, to develop the habits of cooperation, to work with others, to be sociable, and to learn to walk the balance between personal freedom and honoring the agreements we make with one another. In other words, to practice the skills and habits of what I think of as deep democracy.

The children at Woodland Park make their own rules, by consensus. Several years ago, my friend Henry was walking around the classroom with his hands over his head, palms forward, wiggling his fingers rapidly. When I asked him what he was doing, he replied, "I'm the police." His hands were the flashing patrol car lights.

I asked, "Oh, so you're giving people tickets and stuff?"

"No," he answered, "I'm reminding them when they're breaking the rules." And sure enough, he was siddling up to his classmates and saying things like, "I want to remind you, we all agreed, no running inside," and "I want to remind you, we all agreed, no hitting." And his friends were thanking him. This is what I mean by deep democracy: not the superficial winner-take-all horse race of modern electoral politics, but the notion that free and equal humans are fully capable of self-governance, of making agreements with one another, then abiding by them. That really is the core of community: our agreements are sacred.

Children naturally understand deep democracy. Most adults have unlearned it even while we honestly believe we are the beacons of fairness. For instance, our playground has only two swings over which there are regular debates. When adults get involved the solution is invariably some version of enforced turn-taking, usually with a timer set to strictly limit each child's turn in the name of "fairness," leaving no one entirely satisfied. When children are left to their own devices, however, as we were as children, when not imposed from on high, our agreements, more often than not, result in mutual satisfaction.

Sometimes the children will decide to share the swing, cramming two, three or four kids onto a single seat. Indeed, at Woodland Park, this solution has evolved into hanging a plank of wood between the two swings, creating a kind of bench swing upon which as many as a dozen kids can swing at once.

Sometimes it turns into a game in which two children will alternate on their own, counting together to 10 or 20, a solution that fundamentally differs from the adult version in that it's a game they play together rather than one child standing sulkily by as a grown-up keeps an eye on her watch.

Sometimes children push one another, taking on different, but equal roles. And often they come up with complex agreements that become games unto themselves, like the time our 4-5 year olds developed a system by which one had to ask for a turn three times in succession, wording the question precisely each time, or, like a magic lock, it didn't work.

And always, over time and with the freedom to practice, the ethic emerges that when you find someone already using the swing you want, you simply call, "Next!" much the way children call "Shotgun!" to determine who gets to sit beside the driver in the car. This is deep democracy. "Next!" is sacred, so sacred that when the child on the swing is finished, he usually seeks out the rightful next in line, even if he has gone on to other things. 

Deep democracy is what happens when we agree to have a "pinecone fight," as we often did in my youth, all of us knowing without adult commands, that tacit in this agreement is the idea that no one wants to get hurt, so heads and faces are off limits, that one throws more gently at close range, that if someone starts to cry the game is on hold until that cry is over. Adults tend to muck this up by simply banning the game altogether, giving no one a chance to learn anything.

Deep democracy is what happens when the 10-year-old pitcher gently tosses the ball to the five-year-old batter instead of trying to strike him out because the unspoken agreement is to have fun, not win or lose. No one has to tell him to do that if he's had the opportunity to practice the skills and habits of community.

Deep democracy happens when children come together each day, girls and boys, friends and foes, with minimal adult interference and maximal freedom to play.

I commend and admire those of you who have managed this sort of deeply democratic educational experience through homeschooling and unschooling, but for most of us, we need schools, or something like schools. Maybe, before the transformation comes, we will need another word for it. True play-based preschools and democratic free schools, to me, are the best models we currently have for what's possible when the transformation comes. And I've purposefully repeated the word "comes," because it will come, not only because is it the right thing for education and for children, but it is ultimately in the direction of morality. As Martin Luther King famously said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice," which is ultimately what deep democracy is all about.

I invite everyone, and especially my Greek readers, to imagine for a moment "schools" in which children are free to discover and pursue their passions while marinated in community. Imagine that transformation, then imagine how all those free and motivated minds will transform our world.

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!

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