If Money Were Still No Object

As Peter Gray points out in his book Free To Learn, our current educational system is based almost entirely on habit. It is not based on research, it is not based upon evidence, it is not based upon how humans learn, but rather upon notions of efficiency derived from the Industrial Revolution. Of course, there has been research performed upon children attempting to learn within this system, in which it's been demonstrated that tweaking things here or there will produce marginal learning gains, but that's like studying tigers in the zoo then claiming to understand tigers. Of course, if you want to really understand tigers, you study them in the wild. 

And there have been researchers who have studied children's learning "in the wild," starting with such great names as Piaget, Vygotsky, Montessori, and Dewey, research that has been continued right up to our times. All of that research tells us we are doing it wrong; that if we really want to provide the best conditions for learning, we must break the habits of assembly line thinking, and instead adopt a child-lead approach, one embodied by play-based preschools and democratic free schools, places where children are free to seek answers to their own questions.

I finished last week with a post which was essentially an architectural "wish list" of what I'd like to see for our Woodland Park Cooperative School if money was no object. As folks chimed in with their own ideas, many, not surprisingly, strayed into the broader definition of what the Reggio Emilia model refers to as the "third teacher," into things like higher teacher pay and other structural changes they wished for our school system at large. I thought today that I'd take a crack at expanding upon those comments by playing the same game I did on Friday, except this time I would re-imagine public schools as if overcoming inertia were no object.

I'll start by asking the question: Why do we the people educate our children?

Contrary to what our political and business leaders with their fantastical "jobs of tomorrow" will tell you, the purpose of public education is not primarily for vocational training. If that were the reason for public schools, I would agree with those who say we ought to get rid of them altogether and let corporations train their own damn workers. No, the driving public interest in educating our youth is that the ongoing experiment of democracy, the dream of self-governance, can only work with a well-educated population. The purpose of public education is citizenship.

If that's the case, then the next question is: What are the characteristics of a good citizen?

First and foremost, a good citizen is a critical thinker, a person who can listen, discuss, and share, but will ultimately think for herself. A good citizen is someone who asks a lot of questions and who knows it is not just his right, but his responsibility to question authority. A good citizen knows that she owes it to everyone to stand up for what she believes in even when everyone else disagrees; and the flip-side of that coin is that a good citizen knows it's important to respectfully listen to those with whom she disagrees. A good citizen, ultimately, is a person who contributes to our society in ways other than his narrow economic self-interest: socially, artistically, politically, spiritually, and as a member of communities both small and large. These are the kinds of self-directed people I want helping me in the collaborative project of self-governance.

So what would these schools look like? For this, I'll borrow freely from my own experience as a play-based preschool teacher and from what I know of the democratic free school movement.

Physically, I would imagine them looking fundamentally like the school I described on Friday, expansive, free-flowing places, where neighborhood children of all ages come together and actually get to work on the project of self-governance, practicing the skills and habits of citizenship. There would be no set schedule, or classes, or curricula, except those that emerge from the children themselves. Adults would be present for the purposes of safety, of course, but their primary role would be to support children as they pursue their "happiness," within the the context of community, helping them when asked, working to secure necessary resources, scaffolding inquiries, and stepping in to assist with strong emotions and heated conflicts. Children would not be divided up by age and subject, but would rather organize themselves around their interests, their questions of the moment, going deep or going broad as their temperaments and passions dictate.

There would be nothing compulsory about these schools, other than the community meetings during which the children would settle overarching conflicts and make their agreements (their democratically determined rules) for how they want their society to operate.

The adult staff would be members of the community in which the school is located. In fact, if I had my way, comfortable, middle-class housing near (or even on) campus would be provided as part of the compensation package. Pay would be sufficient to afford a comfortable living, indexed to the local cost of living, and would, of course, include health care and a good pension.

Naturally, I'm an advocate for parent involvement and as such, the campus would be open on evenings and weekends, both for children and their families to congregate and engage in parent education and other enrichment opportunities, or to share their skills and knowledge with the rest of the community. In fact, I would envision these public schools as the hubs of their communities, literally placing education at the center of society. And I know it's a radical idea, but I would have no problem with literally paying parents to be active in their children's school lives, at least those of meager economic means who might otherwise have to sacrifice income in order to participate.

In line with that vision, state provided school funds would be the sole responsibility of the students, parents, and staff of the community school, and those schools would therefore reflect the values of their community rather than the standardized cookie cutter data mines the corporate reformers envision. And likewise, when it comes to assessments, I would imagine that being a natural function of the ongoing community dialog because, after all, we the people should always be the final arbiters. 

I can't imagine that any this would cost more than it does now. In fact, I would assert that an educational system based upon democratic communities would cost far less and would produce far better results in terms of citizenship than even our "best schools" do today.

So, this is my starting point. I'm sure I left things out. Please chime in with your ideas in the comments.

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If Money Were No Object

For one year, my daughter's cooperative preschool was housed in the rooms designated as the "laboratory preschool" at North Seattle College, but for the rest of the nearly two decades I've been working with young children, our schools have been housed in places like church basements, unused rooms in public schools, and other make-do spare spaces. Our current location in the Fremont Baptist Church in the Center of the Universe is incredible, but it's a shared-use facility that wasn't necessarily designed with young children in mind.

In idle moments, I often wonder, with money as no object, what would it be like to build a Woodland Park Cooperative School from scratch.

This video below is about a kindergarten in Tokyo designed by architect Takaharu Tezuka, which is not a bad place to start.

I'd want more natural spaces with trees and mud and rocks and bugs and hills and sand and grasses than one sees in this video, but since it would continue to be an urban school, still located in Fremont, that would be among the biggest challenges. I reckon, however, without being too greedy, a full city block would be about right. I would not include climbers of any sort at this imagined school, but rely instead on those trees and rocks and hills. Perhaps we would have swings and a slide or two, but I would prefer to see children swinging on ropes dangling from branches and cannonballing down muddy hills. There would be enormous areas of sand and several hand-operated water pumps. Since we would consequently have lots of messy children, we would need some fun washing up and changing areas . . . for the children who care.

My purpose-built school would have the sort of indoor-outdoor flow you see here and which is quite common in many of the Australian preschools I've visited on my trips Down Under. I also like the multi-level aspects of this kindergarten design, with it's skylights and rope nets creating opportunities to interact with one another through those vertical spaces.

I very much like the free-form modular furniture concept shown in this video. I think crates of various sizes, light weight enough for the children to move themselves, would give us the sort of flexibility we would need.

There would need to be a smooth paved surface sufficient for riding wheeled vehicles and a patch of lawn for sports play.

We would have a large garden, with a greenhouse, which would be staffed with a master garden educator, whose primary responsibility would be to engage the children who come there, meeting them at their level and interest, and where we would grow the bulk of the food we eat at school. We would also keep chickens.

Near the garden would be our kitchen, at least partially built to scale for young chefs, which is where we would prepare and eat our snacks and meals, and where the children serve themselves and one another.

We would have a fully equipped workshop where children would be supervised by our school carpenter. There would, of course, be hand tools for the children to use as well as age-appropriate power tools, but our collection would also include full-sized table, band, jig, and miter saws, a drill-press, a lathe, and whatever else a carpenter might need, because when our school needed something new, we would build it ourselves, right there in the workshop where curious kids could watch from behind some sort of safety partition, even while working on their own projects.

The children would have their own storefront "lemonade stand" as well, a place where kids could, when the mood strikes them, attempt to sell marketable items to the general public as they pass by, setting prices, making change, and generally learning about the economic law of supply and demand. Perhaps we would attempt to sell the produce we're growing in our garden or items we've manufactured in the workshop or created at the easel. And then, naturally, we would plan together how we want to spend our profits.

There would be Reggio Emilia style atelier equipped not only the full gamut of art supplies and a real-live atelierista, but also tons of storage so that children's work can be readily set aside and returned to again and again, day after day, until the child declares it "finished." This is where we would also keep our sewing machines because you never know when you're going to need a costume.

Near the atelier, of course, we would need a proper theatrical stage with curtains, a backstage area, lighting, and plenty of props and costumes.

Our library would be everywhere, with books stashed in nooks and crannies in every corner of the school, but I would really like a special "cozy story time" area of pillows, blankets, and stuffed animals where our librarian would always be available for reading stories to the kids. Likewise, musical instruments would be among our loose parts, available in every corner of the school, including everything from bells and rhythm sticks to full drum sets and pianos.

And speaking of loose parts, our collection of tires, planks, ropes, brooms, shovels, ladders, jewels, fairies, vehicles, and whatever else would be extensive.

Finally, there would be a massive, well-organized storage facility and I wouldn't mind a small office for myself, perhaps at the top of a tower that would give me a bird's eye view of the entire place, much the way the legendary football coach Bear Bryant used to survey the practices of his Crimson Tide.

I'm sure I've left out many things, and it's obviously incomplete because I've not even yet surveyed the children about their fantasy school, but what a wonderful third teacher this would be. If you have more ideas, I'd love to see them in the comments.

Update: My friend Bob suggested a laboratory, which I'll interpret in preschool as a potion mixing station, stocked with baking soda, vinegar, corn starch, oil, and other interesting, non-toxic substances, along with lots of beakers of various shapes and sizes and a large sensory table. It would be adjacent to both the workshop and natural spaces to encourage spin-off explorations.

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Death Talk

As Jody and I played with our plastic farm animals, he began to tell a story about the horse he was holding. It was, according to him, squashed by one of our cardboard blocks and "got dead." He told the story several times in a row, not seeming particularly emotional, narrating events in an even, matter-of-fact tone, using more or less the same words each time. He seemed to be processing the concept, maybe trying to find a way for the story to continue beyond getting dead, but each time he stopped with "got dead" before starting over. On his last iteration he added, "Just dead," as a kind of final word on the subject before moving on to something else.

Death comes up in preschool. Often our discussions are prompted by the discovery of dead worms or bugs. Once there was a dead bird in the parking lot and the kids were excited to talk about it. With some classes death is not a major topic, but I've had years when it emerged as a significant theme amongst the children, and one year in particular when parents approached me as a concerned group because their children seemed "obsessed." I think particularly upsetting to these parents was that this group of boys was using death as a kind of punch line, cracking each other up with the word "dead," the way they might otherwise have done with their potty talk. (Working on the theory that the boys had the idea that talking about death was somehow "naughty" and were simply finding joy of stepping together out of bounds, we brought the subject out of the closet by making it a part of our circle time discussion for a few days. It seemed to help a lot.) Perhaps those kids were a bit obsessed with the idea of death, but that's certainly not the exclusive domain of preschoolers. 

We're not a religious school, but rather a community comprised of families who express a variety of faiths and not-faiths, and therefore there is no universally agreed upon dogmatic framework for death that I can offer the kids. So while the topic is often much discussed amongst the children, the role of adults in the room is simply to listen and perhaps make observations of fact like, "I'll bet your mommy would be sad if you really died," or when the death talk includes violence, "It would hurt to be stabbed." When questions about what happens after death is broached, however, that is a job for parents. 

Vincent, our chow, was my most constant companion for 13 years. Early one Christmas Eve morning he passed away.

During his last year his eyesight had grown dimmer (he had one prosthetic eye and glaucoma in the other), his hearing had dwindled, and his vet even suspected that he had become hard of smelling. Of course we knew it was coming – he was approaching 100 in human years – but it was sad nonetheless.

As we discussed Vincent’s last day, each member of my family confessed to having thought about the possibility of his death within the preceding 24 hours. Our then 7-year-old daughter Josephine said, “I’m sorry I thought this was going to happen,” and, “I’m sorry I was ever mean to him.”

Naturally, we assured her that her thoughts had nothing to with his death; that the long, gentle strokes she gave him as he panted through the pain, and the water she carried to him for his very last drink, comforted him and made those final few hours a little more bearable.

Intellectually I know that none of us had anything to do with his dying, but when I look inside myself I find an echo of Josephine’s sentiment in my own heart. What could I have done to give us one more day together? I could have chosen the more expensive dog food. I could have taken him for more walks. Maybe we should have tried the surgery that the doctor offered, with its exceedingly slim hope for success – at least that included hope. I shoved Vincent aside with my shin that last week when he stood in my way: I could have been more loving. Maybe that’s all he needed to go on for another day – a little more love from me.

We know that children tend to assume culpability for the bad things that happen in their lives. We’ve heard the stories of children feeling responsible for their parents’ divorce. When we’re angry they almost always wonder if they’re the cause. And even my Josephine, as a big first grader, thought that she was somehow responsible for Vincent’s death and felt regret for not having been perfect in her love for him.

It’s not just children, of course; it’s all of us. Death is one of the areas of life in which I don’t think we ever attain any kind of superior knowledge or wisdom over children. When it comes to death, we are always children. Maybe you’re one of the lucky few who feel “sure” about death, but for most of us, whatever our dogma or professed beliefs, there remains an enormous, unanswerable question.

For better or worse, we chose to provide Josephine with an answer to this unanswerable question. When she was just a two-year-old her Uncle Chris was stricken with cancer -- non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. We visited him in the hospital almost daily. She watched him get rapidly sicker and she knew it when he died. Up until that point it was not in me to discuss the eventuality of his death. I’m by nature hopeful, and until there was no longer hope, I hoped. On the day of his death, I told Josephine about heaven. Like generations of parents before me I painted a picture of a perfect existence where Chris could play his guitar, shoot baskets, and drink coffee all day long; a place where he was waiting for the rest of us in peace and joy.

My own belief is that there is peace and joy in death, but it doesn’t match the picture of heaven that I provided my daughter. It’s a lie I told her. I know that the concept of heaven gave me comfort as a young child and I grasped for it as a parent. She is now, at 18, old enough to think for herself, to doubt, and I think she has forgiven me for lying.

Death is the most universal aspect of life and, at the same time, it’s the most individual. It comes to us all and, at bottom, we must all deal with it alone. In talking to children about death, it seems to me, we must each find our own way. Some of us can rely on our own hearts, others will need to consult books and authorities, while others turn to their religion. Some of us tell lies.

We are all children in this. Perhaps the most important thing we can do in talking to our children about death is to listen. As Mister Rogers said, "(L)istening is the most powerful way to show love."

Love and hope. That’s all we have. If we speak and listen from that place, we’re doing the best we can.

Strangely enough, even as I write this, I don’t really feel like I lied to Josephine. I know I lied to her, but don’t feel it. The adult in me knows that Vincent's ashes are in a wooden box across the room from where I sit and that a part of him lives on in the relationships I have with the two dogs it took to fill the space he left. But I don't feel like I lied to Josephine because the child in me knows to a certainty that Vincent is not "just dead," but rather with Uncle Chris, eating meat and cheese, sniffing butts, and waiting for me in peace and joy.

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Waiting For The Crosswalk Light To Change

It was probably around 1987 or so that I found myself one early morning standing on a downtown Seattle street corner in the pouring rain waiting for the crosswalk light to change. It had been one of the things that had endeared the city to me, this local ethic of not crossing against the red light even when the streets were empty of traffic as they were this morning. As I stood there, a scruffy street person shuffled up beside me where he stopped to wait as well. Moments later an older gentleman who I recognized as John Ellis, CEO of Puget Power, one of the area's largest utility companies, stepped up on the other side of me. And there we waited in the downpour, the three of us being Seattleites together, until the light changed and we each went on our way.

I've lived in other places since then and I've never been anyplace where this particular pedestrian quirk was so pronounced. 

Today, I live in a part of downtown called South Lake Union, an area being aggressively re-developed, primarily to provide more office space for the online retail giant Amazon. Some of us still wait for the crosswalk signal, but the charm is apparently lost of the bulk of Amazon employees who charge across the road given even the smallest break in traffic. I know they're Amazon employees because they're all labelled as such with employee badges on lanyards or clipped to their belts. This sort of scofflaw behavior is also evident in the touristy areas of downtown, near Pike Place Market, for instance, where jaywalking has become standard fare, but I can hardly fault them given where they're from. When you get into other neighborhoods, however, it's still fairly common for locals to wait for the light, even when it's inconvenient, the last charming vestiges of when we all waited together even in the pouring rain, living our lives in such a way that we actually had the time to wait.

A couple days ago, the New York Times published a lengthy article about what it is like to work for Amazon, portraying it as a sort of dog-eat-dog world of impossible hours, impossible standards, where employees who are not 100 percent devoted find themselves out on the street; no excuses, data driven, and what-have-you-done-for-me-lately. Among the money quotes are "Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk," and "The joke in the office was that when it came to work/life balance, work came first, life came second, and trying to find the balance came last." A friend who worked there for a number of years, declared the article 85.7 percent accurate.

I've taken an interest because I live here on the Amazon campus which is transforming this part of our city and because I know many current and former employees, some of whom have enrolled their children in our school, but mainly because several early childhood educators have pointed me toward this article saying something like, "Oh my god, this is exactly what they're trying to do to our public schools." And indeed, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has been involved in the corporate education reform movement that is turning our schools into test score coal mines.

I know people who really like working for Amazon and I know other people who only lasted a year because they otherwise would have had to pay back their signing bonus. To each his own. Personally, I couldn't do it. I will never voluntarily be a mere "human resource." I'm married to a woman who will never be a human resource and I doubt my daughter will agree to be one if she can help it. Indeed, I reckon most of us, even if we really needed the money, wouldn't last long in a place like Amazon, but, you know, who am I to judge those who do like it, those that say things like, "I was so addicted to wanting to be successful there. For those of us who went to work there, it was like a drug that we could get self-worth from." Amazon is far from the only stressful workplace; some people thrive on that.

These are the people who don't wait for crosswalk lights to change.

No, my critique is a broader one than just Amazon. I mean, the way they make money, what they drive their employees so hard to do, at bottom, is sell more merchandise, more stuff, at rock-bottom prices. It's the same critique I would have of Walmart or Target or any of the other gigantic retailers who are leading the American race to the bottom, and ultimately my critique is of American consumers who don't seem to share my concern.

When you buy cheap, you make the world a more miserable place to live. Much of that cheap stuff is manufactured in sweatshops in third world nations, work that is too often performed by slave labor or children. Much of the way cheap stuff is kept cheap is by paying wages so low that full time employees qualify for welfare, and cutting corners on safety, and even things like air conditioning in warehouses where temperatures regularly soar past 100 degrees and employees pass out with such regularity that ambulances are stationed outside to rush them to the hospital. Our worship of cheap stuff means that the independent mom and pop enterprises that once anchored our Main Streets can't survive because they can't compete with the economies of scale created by these gigantic retailers.

I could go on, but you get my point. I'm proud to say that I've never spent a dime in a Walmart. I often shop on Amazon, then purchase the product I want at a local brick-and-morter retailer. I try to buy products made in America at every opportunity, and if I can find something of local manufacture, then even better. I'm not a wealthy man. I afford the higher prices by simply not cluttering my life with so much stuff. I've lived with lots of stuff and I've lived with less stuff: living with less stuff is better.

As the Buddha taught, "Life is suffering." To me that means we're here to alleviate that suffering, not just for ourselves, but for our fellow man. Our national obsession with cheap stuff, from where I sit, just adds more suffering to the world. There is an institutional sociopathy at work at places like Amazon, where the drive for profit, the drive for sales, the drive to move more and more cheap stuff, is the highest virtue. Its symptoms are Seattleites crossing against the red lights and grown men reduced to crying at their desks, not to mention the even more grotesque suffering farther down the food chain. I'm not blaming Jeff Bezos or the Walton family: what they are creating can only thrive when we the people support them with our pocketbooks and, through our elected representatives, the laws we've made to govern their behavior.

I strive to live my life otherwise.

But now they are attempting to bring their sociopathy into my house, to the place I live and work, where I am entrusted to do what is best for young children. Across the country, young children are crying at their desks as well. A grown man can chose to walk away, but our children have no other option than to suffer. Our schools can't be in the business of selling cheap stuff, and our children are not mere resources. To quote the great Utah Phillips, "Have you ever seen what they do to valuable natural resources?"

The purpose of education in America is to create well-educated citizens, critical thinkers, people capable of working with the rest of us in the grand project of self-governance, traits more aligned with those mom and pop enterprises that were once the backbone of our nation, where finding a work/life balance came first.

I will fight for children. I will refuse to become a human resource. I will always believe that people regularly crying at their desks is a sign that something is horribly wrong. I don't want my life cluttered with cheap stuff. And I will strive to live each day so that I have the time and constitution to wait until the light turns green, right there alongside my fellow citizens.

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And The Kids Know It

We still have our collection of toy tools, plastic hammers, saws, and drills, but they don't come out much any longer. There are a several reasons why they've been pushed to the back of the shelves, but the primary one is that kids try to kill each other with them, especially the hammers.

I don't usually hide away classroom items that "cause" problems, seeing the situations that arise around them as opportunities to coach kids through a process of risk assessment or conflict resolution or other kinds of problem solving. As politicians say, "Don't let a good crisis go to waste," and that's sort of what I like to do as a teacher, over-riding my initial instinct, which is to simply say something like, "If you can't play nicely, then you don't get to play at all."

In the case of the toy hammers, however, I don't often put them into play because we have real hammers. And the funny thing about the real hammers is that in all the time we've been putting them into the hands of preschoolers, I've yet to see a child use one with anything other than respect, both for the tool and his fellow classmates. The same kid who will clonk another one with a plastic hammer, either accidentally, on purpose, or accidentally-on-purpose, will be a study in concentration and safety with a real hammer in his hand.

Even 2-year-olds step up to the responsibility of the real hammer. An adult still needs to be there at first, insisting on eye protection, reminding the child to find a safe area in which to get to work, one free of other people who might be hit or things that might get broken, and to focus her on the concept of targeting a nail (or a bottle cap: we've found that it's quite satisfying to drive them into soft wood). It's not a hard thing to do because a child with a hammer in his hand instantly becomes a calmer child, a more focused child.  A plastic hammer is a toy; a real hammer is a responsibility, children know it, and even the youngest, even the most hyperactive, are capable of taking it on.

This is true of all kinds of responsibility. Children know when they've only been allowed to handle the plastic hammer of pretend responsibility when, say, we give him the false choice of "walking on your own feet or being carried." I know experts advocate this technique, many of whom I respect very much, wanting to permit children a sense of agency over their own immediate fate, but it's never worked for me, and I think that's because everyone involved, including the child, knows that I've not given the child any real choice at all. We all know that the bottom line is that we have to leave a place he doesn't want to leave, even if we give him the choice of leaving in "3 minutes or 5 minutes." 

Responsibility is one of those things that is either real or it doesn't exist. There is no halfway. No amount of lecturing on responsibility will replace the real thing.  There is no way to "practice" responsibility without actually having it in your possession. If we want children to learn to be responsible, we must in fact turn over to them something that is real, and indeed, give them room to make mistakes, and that means the potential for making "wrong" choices. If there isn't that potential, then it's not responsibility at all: it's a plastic hammer. And the kids know it.

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Protecting Ourselves

We're lucky to have several large trees in our outdoor classroom, mostly cedars, providing shade in the summer and rain cover in the winter. A couple years back, our landlords needed to remove one of them, leaving us with a stump up at one end of the concrete slide. If you pressed me to guess what kind of tree it was, I would guess it was a type of hawthorn.

At one time, I'd imagined "doing something" with the stump, like making it into a throne or sculpture of some sort, but it's been a year or more since I've thought about it. As children were arriving last Thursday, I was monkeying around with the cast iron water pump, which has been acting like it might be ready for a new set of leather fittings, when I backed into some foliage and felt a sharp prick to my forearm. The stump, as stumps do, had been sending out dozens of root suckers, a process that had apparently been happening for some time, since some of them as big around as my thumb and a good eight feet long. And along those stems were long, sharp thorns.

Kids have been playing up there for months, maybe years, now without complaint. In fact the thorny branches had mingled with the lilac branches creating a tunnel through which the children ducked as a backdoor access to the top of the concrete slide.

I said to the nearest kid, "Hey, check out these thorns."

Soon I had a half dozen children crowded around to take a look. Some of them cautiously and intentionally pricked their fingers, scientists confirming an hypothesis. 

Oliver, a five-year-old, said, "We need to protect the little kids."

His twin brother, Mateo said, "I'll get the caution cones." He was joined by several other kids and soon we had a circle of orange cones around the dangerous thorns that had not, to my knowledge, done anything to anyone other than me. Of course, for all I know, children have been getting poked for months, shaken it off as one of the prices of their play, then moved on without comment.

Alexis thought we should remove them, "We could break them off." As the team of "big kids" doubled down on their security measures by standing just outside the cones warning off any "little kids" who happened by, she carefully took hold of the nearest sucker, found a long thorn and carefully broke it off. She had brought me a rose from her family's garden the previous week, so she knew her way around thorns.

I said, "That will take a long time."

Oliver agreed, "Teacher Tom, you should cut all the branches off."

The only tools we have around the place for pruning are saws, so I asked, "Would a saw work?"

The kids agreed a saw would do the trick, so as I went to the tool shed, the big kids stayed behind to caution little kids. My idea was to collect the severed suckers in a pile and to then properly dispose of them, but the kids had other ideas, thinking they would make a good bad guy trap. As Mateo explained it, "The bad guys will come in and get poked and then leave."

They were so incredibly careful as they picked up those thorny suckers, pinching them between their fingers, seeking out just the right place to grip them. Soon there were a half dozen big kids walking around, gingerly holding their branches, moving as if they were almost afraid to move lest they hurt themselves or others. They took this business seriously. A few of them couldn't handle the pressure and returned their branches to me, but others, being careful not to stand too close to one another, discussed the best location for their bad guy trap, finally settling on the top of the stump, which by now had been cleared of thorny suckers.

They stood back looking at their trap. I asked, "Don't you need some bait?" We've had lots of discussions about bait over the course of the last year.

Wyatt said, "The best bait for bad guys is money."

"Does anyone have any money?"

Some of them had some at home, but our pockets were empty. They stood looking at their trap for awhile, then Alexis said, "Teacher Tom, you should probably just throw the pokey branches away," and her friends agreed, so I did.

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The Secret To Success

 

Back in the 80's I held the position of communications manager at the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce where I kept my hair short (even sporting a flat top for a time) and wore suits with large shoulders and lots of extra fabric. About a year or so into the job, my assistant manager found a better position and as she moved up, I began interviewing to fill the vacancy. My superiors left it up to me to make the decision, so the resumes landed in my inbox where I took a sort of OCD-like pleasure in sorting and categorizing them the way I had my baseball cards as a boy, using this process to bring the number of candidates down to a reasonable number, then scheduled interviews. Within a couple weeks, having spoken to a dozen or so prospects, I had my top five. Up to this point it had been a fairly easy process, but now I had five top quality candidates, each well-qualified on paper and general deportment.

So how did I make my final decision? The way every employer makes the final decision: I tried to imagine what it would be like to spend my days, day-after-day, with each one of them. Would I be able to handle this personality quirk or habit or would it get on my nerves? Did she seem upbeat or dour? Had we laughed together during the interview? Did we connect in any way on a personal level? In other words, putting transcripts and resumes and achievements aside, my final decision came down to how well I thought we would get along.

No one had told me about this as a young man. No matter how locked down and data-driven the world becomes, no matter how much they attempt to treat humans like resources, if you're going to move up in the world, be it in business, a profession, government, or education, if you don't work well with others, your only hope is to develop savant-like skills because otherwise people are just not going to want you around.

A new longitudinal study conducted by researchers at Penn State and Duke Universities and published in the American Journal of Public Health (pdf), has confirmed what many of us have known for a long time. Social-emotional skills, the kind we practice in play-based preschools, are at least as important, and probably more important, than those precious "academic" skills that reformers and politicians continue to force upon our youngest citizens. The researchers followed a group of 800 children over the course of two decades to determine if there is a link between a child's social skills in kindergarten and how they were doing in early adulthood. 

Our analysis included 4 education and employment outcomes representing attainment through age 25 years. Kindergarten prosocial skills were significantly and uniquely predictive of all 4 outcomes: whether participants graduated from high school on time, completed a college degree, obtained stable employment in young adulthood, and were employed full time in young adulthood.

Of course, education is about more than just vocational success, but that is the leading argument used by those who are turning our public schools into test score coal mines: getting our children ready for those jobs of tomorrow. This study confirms what early childhood educators already know. It doesn't matter how traditionally brilliant a child may be, if he lacks the ability to resolve conflicts, share, and cooperate, he's going to suffer both in school and the workplace.

Two of the 3 outcomes representing public assistance in young adulthood were significantly linked to early social competence. Early prosocial skills were negatively related to the likelihood of living in or being on a waiting list for public housing.

Corporate reformers love to dress themselves in the garb of social do-gooders, even going so far as to call themselves "civil rights" leaders, claiming that their narrow focus on academics will lift those poor children out of poverty (approximately half of all public school children live in poverty), yet it appears that focusing on social skills will do more to keep these children "off the public dole."

Results for justice system outcomes demonstrated consistent patterns across different ages and variables. Early prosocial skills were significantly inversely predictive of any involvement with police before adulthood and ever being in a detention facility . . . juveniles' self-report of whether they had been arrested and or had appeared in court followed the same pattern. In young adulthood, early social competence was significantly and uniquely linked to being arrested and appearing in court. Finally, early social competence significantly predicted the number of arrests for a severe offense by age 25 years, as determined through public records.

Reformers and politicians of all stripes regularly pivot to "education" when asked about crime rates. It appears that a focus on social competence would do more to reduce criminal activity than any amount of drill-and-kill education.

And when it comes to health:

Although early social competence was not associated with alcohol and drug dependence diagnoses in early adulthood, our model showed that it correlated with substance abuse behavior. We found statistically significant associations in separate models of the number of days of binge drinking in the past month and the number of days marijuana was used . . . Finally, early prosocial skills significantly predicted number of years on medication for emotional or behavioral issues through high school.

The conclusion:

The growing body of literature that demonstrates the importance of noncognitive skills in development should motivate policymakers and program developers to target efforts to improve these skills to young children. Much evidence has shown how effective intervention in preschool and the early elementary years can improve childhood noncognitive skills in a lasting way. Enhancing these skills can have an impact in multiple areas and therefore has the potential for positively affecting individuals as well as community public health substantially.

I've been looking for years, and despite the corporate reformers' pretense of being hard-headed businessmen, I've never found a single longitudinal study that points to any sort of long term benefits of our current drive to hammer children with academics. Even Bill Gates, the billionaire leader of the corporate reformers, admits that we won't know if he's right for at least a decade. In other words, they are using a generation of children as guinea pigs in their cruel experiments. Meanwhile, this study is just one of many that have shown that social-emotional skills in early childhood are the greatest predictor of future success.

As I read through some of the mainstream media reports (like this one from CNN) I found "experts" touting things like special social skills board games and books to help children exercise their social skills "muscles." What a load of crap. The way to learn social skills is to practice in a safe and loving environment. No video game or pre-packaged program can replace what we do in play-based preschools and kindergartens, places where children have the freedom to play with one another in self-directed and therefore meaningful ways, where they actually practice cooperating, sharing, resolving conflicts, and being sociable in the real world.

Perhaps the greatest accolade our school has ever received was from a local public school kindergarten teacher who regularly sees the children from our school in her classroom. She told me, "I can always tell which kids came from Woodland Park: they know how they should be treated and how to treat others." That's the secret to success.

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Success Is Meaningless

Last night, as some of us chatted in the aftermath of our all school board meeting, the mother of a school-aged boy brought up parent-teacher conferences. "The teachers always want to talk about academics. I assume the academics are fine. What I want to know about is how he is doing socially."

That's how Woodland Park parents are and it echoes my own experience. When I sat down for those parent-teacher conferences, my first and only questions were: "How does she treat her friends?" and "How do her friends treat her?" It often threw the teachers a bit who had prepared detailed subject-by-subject reports, complete with examples of the work she had been doing, because that's what parents usually expect, I guess: more information piled atop those test scores and grades. I often lay the blame at the feet of the corporate education reformers for what is happening in our public schools, and that's where most of it lies, but there are always a few teachers among my readership who point out that much of the pressure they feel comes from parents who do not, under any circumstances, want junior to fail.

Failure, not success, stands at the heart of a good education. All those straight-A's and top scores are not only meaningless, but even detrimental to learning how to think, how to struggle, how to figure things out for oneself. And worst of all, I think, is how this unhealthy focus on all success all the time, is destroying our children's joy of learning.

From Jessica Lahey's recent piece in The Atlantic:

The truth -- for this parent and so many others -- is this: Her child has sacrificed her natural curiosity and love of learning at the alter of achievement, and it's our fault.

At Woodland Park, we're all about failure. At any given moment, when you look around our classroom or playground, you see almost all of the children in the midst of failure, starting over, trying again.

Marianna is a very smart and high-achieving, and her mother reminds her of that on a daily basis. However, Marianna does not get praised for the diligence and effort she puts into sticking with a hard math problem or a convoluted scientific inquiry. If that answer at the end of the page is wrong, or if she arrives at a dead end in her research, she has failed -- no matter what she has learned from her struggle. And contrary to what she may believe, in these more difficult situations she is learning. She learns to be creative in her problem-solving. She learns diligence. She learns self-control and perseverance. But because she is scared to death of failing, she has started to take fewer intellectual risks. She has trouble writing rough drafts and she doesn't like to hypothesize or think out loud in class. She knows that if she tries something challenging or new, and fails, that failure will be hard evidence that she's not as smart as everyone keeps telling her she is. Better to be safe. Is that what we want? Kids who get straight As but hate learning? Kids who achieve academically, but are too afraid to take leaps into the unknown?

This is why we strive at Woodland Park to avoid praise altogether, and especially the empty praise of "Good job!" or "Way to go!" that has become epidemic in our country. We instead focus on the important part, the failure, the struggle, the process, and if we adults must say something it's more along the lines of, "You worked hard at that."  That is where the learning takes place. Without the work, without the failure, success is meaningless.

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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"White Supremacist Liberal"

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about how I was done talking about race and made a vow to start listening instead. Little did I know that I would be put to the test so soon.

I was at a rally on Saturday to support and celebrate the success of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It was an afternoon of many speakers to be capped by some words from Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. It was a feel good event, with speaker after speaker telling their stories about these most important parts of our nation's social safety net, but when it got time for Sanders to speak, a pair of young women, who said they represented the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Mara Jacqueline Willaford and Marissa Johnson, rushed the stage. They were allowed to take control of the microphone, and Sanders, along with the event organizers, more or less stepped back and let them have their say, part of which included calling the crowd "white supremacist liberals."

Many of my fellow rally-goers booed, some called for the women to be arrested. I was angry too, and disappointed. Not only had I come specifically to hear Sanders speak, but more to the point, it's upsetting to be called a white supremacist. I mean, I've participated in Black Lives Matter protests, I've written about it here on this blog, I've spoken about my outrage with friends and family, yet here I was being told that despite all of that, I was a white supremacist. And to top it off, I reminded myself as those around me became increasingly agitated, I had vowed to shut up and listen.

So that's what I tried to do. I heard some things I already knew about my city and a few other things that I'd never heard before. It was hard to tamp down my anger and even harder to stop myself from judging and analyzing what was going on. I heard very angry black women, yet through that anger I also heard the voices of intelligent, educated women. I thought they were stupid for undertaking this particular action at this particular time, targeting this particular politician. I kept my lips shut, but I heard my thoughts and emotions echoed by the white people who surrounded me:

"Oh, come on, this is a rally about Social Security."

"This is just hurting their cause."

"Don't they realize that Sanders is their best friend?"

The news reports have made it sound like the crowd was uniformly jeering the protesters, but that's simply untrue. Most of us were silent. Some were shushing the angry shouters. A group of young white people near me started chanting, "Black lives matter! Black lives matter!" And yes, some were quite livid and vocal about it. People bitched and moaned when the women said they would not let the event continue until we had honored a 4.5 minute silence in remembrance of Michael Brown, the unarmed victim of a police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri a year ago. I thought, "Fat chance of that happening," but amazingly, the crowd of around 2000, aside from a few, remained silent for the full time. That wasn't the end, however, and the event organizers finally decided to pull the plug on everyone, leaving Sanders to work the crowd for a few minutes, then we all went home.

I was tight lipped as I made my way through the crowd, as I shook Sanders' hand, and as I made my way back home. I had promised to listen when people of color talk about race. I had largely failed at that in the moment, but I tried really hard to "listen" upon reflection. Part of listening, I think, is to give the speaker the benefit of the doubt, so I started with the question, "Am I a white supremacist liberal?" What did they mean by that? I didn't think I was a white supremacist liberal. I sure didn't want to be one. There was something I didn't understand.

I asked myself, "Why Sanders?" One of the answers is clearly that he makes himself more accessible than any other candidate. He will soon likely receive Secret Service protection and then it will become impossible for actions like this to take place, so I'm guessing that part of their motivation was to take advantage of this window of opportunity, which is smart. But why else? There is definitely something they want Sanders to understand (this is the second time he's been interrupted by BLM protesters), but it seemed pretty apparent that they also wanted to talk to us, his supporters.

I had trouble sleeping on Saturday night thinking about what those women were trying to tell me. I spent Sunday morning digging through all the BLM stuff I could. At least a few black commenters said that Sanders supporters were targeted, in part, because we are the most likely to actually listen, although based on the comments I found from those white supporters, most were judgmental and angry. Many were speculating that the women had to be some kind of plant, sent there by enemies of Sanders or the Democratic party or the Hillary Clinton campaign or even Sarah Palin (really).

Then I came across this expert from Martin Luther King's Letters from the Birmingham Jail:

First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Holy cow. I mean, isn't that exactly what I had done as those angry young women ranted at us? I had been that white moderate, and frankly, so had most of those in the Sanders crowd. Someone had sat at our lunch counter. Someone had refused to move to the back of the bus. Someone had used our water fountain.

On Sunday evening, I cycled up to Capital Hill where a Black Lives Matters march was scheduled to commemorate the anniversary of Michael Brown's death. I went specifically to listen. I was hoping that the women who had interrupted Sanders would be there. I was hoping I might even get to speak with them.

Sadly, neither woman was there, but we talked about them. Several people told me they didn't necessarily agree with everything they had said, but every person of color with whom I spoke said they supported the action, and specifically, that the women were justified. There has been much made in the media and elsewhere about the fact that Willaford and Johnson aren't "really" a part of BLM, but from everything I could gather from these local BLM activist, they are embraced by the movement and known by many of the people there on Sunday. There has been much made in the media and elsewhere about the fact that Willaford and Johnson's actions would hurt both BLM and Sanders, but over the weekend the Sanders campaign announced the hiring of a BLM activist as his national press secretary and released a racial justice platform, both signs that, in fact, these kinds of actions had helped make both the movement and Sanders' campaign stronger.

There were no official speakers before the Sunday evening BLM march, but rather a megaphone and an invitation for anyone to speak who had something to say. Speaker after speaker stood up, telling personal stories, each one sounding as angry as the women who had interrupted the Social Security event. One man pointed at a sign depicting the faces of black people who have been killed by American police and said, "The only difference between them and me is that I survived." I heard people saying that they were sick and tired of having to explain themselves, of having the justify their anger, of having to listen to their white allies explain how they are doing it wrong. And honestly, most of the crowd was white. One speaker even said, looking out over the 200 or so of us who had turned out, "It looks like a chocolate chip cookie without enough chocolate chips."

I'd not intended to actually march, but when we took to the streets, I followed along, echoing the words of our chant leaders. When we got to the Capital Hill Police Station, we blocked an intersection, circling it, leaving the center open. Cops in combat gear lined the sidewalks. One at a time, individuals came forward to offer their own testimony. Every one of them was angry. At one point a man brought his wife and two sons into the middle of the intersection. He spoke not of anger, but of fear; fear that his boys would be the victims. As he spoke, his wife cried, hugging her sons. Then, looking over the heads of the protesters, he spoke directly to the cops, "I see you laughing at me. You think I'm a joke, but let me tell you, I'll do anything to protect my family."

Every one of the speakers was angry. They tell us that anger is usually a secondary emotion, one that really stems from fear or sadness.

I've been listening. I've learned that I have been a "white moderate" for most of my life, more devoted to the false peace that comes from order rather than the real peace that comes through justice. I still don't think I'm a white supremacist, but I still might learn that I am. I sure hope not, but I do now understand why someone might say that to me. I cannot set the timetable for another man's freedom and it is not my place to judge his methods or his season. The two angry young women who prevented Bernie Sanders from speaking may or may not be "right," but they are justified, and I'm am grateful that they did what they did.

I'm not here to argue the rightness or wrongness of any of this, but rather to bear witness to the power of listening. If you are interested, here are three links that I found enlightening.

The Political Beliefs of the Protester Who Interrupted Bernie Sanders

Why Saturday's Bernie Sanders Rally Left Me Feeling Heartbroken

Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter and the Racial Divide in Seattle

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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