Hills

You can't help someone get up a hill without getting closer to the top yourself. ~H. Norman Schwartzkopf

I don't know if you'll take the leap with me here, but if "the cardboard box" and "the stick" have been inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame, then certainly "the hill" belongs there as well. Of course, hills are not portable, which may be part of the definition of a toy. And if you admit the hill into the pantheon, "the tree" would undoubtedly be next, followed by "the wind" and "the tides."

When we moved to the center of the universe, we got a hill, a couple hills, in fact. The first thing many of the kids do each morning is run down the long hill from the gate to our entry door, some cautiously, up on tippy toes, while others pound down pell mell to the bottom. I've been thinking we need a stack of hay bales or something down there. 

The overall hilliness of our outdoor classroom was what inspired the two-level sand pit, down which our water flows, from the cast iron pump through gutters and channels dug into the sand, making waterfalls and eddies and floods. Some of the kids spend most of their day playing with this hill. 

If you went to a toy manufacturer to pitch this concept, I'm guessing you'd be laughed out of the office. "What's it do? There's an up and a down. That's it?"

But, you know, you never run out of the things to do with a hill. A gradual slope makes for a terrific place to work on summersaults. While a steeper slope is built for thrills.

It's easier to go down a hill than up it, but the view is much better at the top. ~Henry Ward Beecher

And just think what would happen if the toy maker brought in his attorney.

That would result in one doozy of a warning label, if he'd even let them go into production at all.

After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. ~Nelson Mandela

But you can hardly be considered educated without the wisdom of the hills; without the battle with gravity; without the dance with gravity.

Even the simple act of standing on a hill skews you, makes you use your body differently, forces you to take a different point of view.

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues. ~Phillips Brooks

No, I take it all back, hills are so much greater than mere toys, abstractions of something real. Hills are the material of life.

They are opportunity and challenge and beauty and toil. They prove truth to the optimist and pessimist alike: a perfect symmetry of ups and downs. Hills are the balance of trudging and flying; running like the wind and falling like a stone. And let me tell you one other thing I know about hills: no one enjoys walking on them sideways. That's not the way humans are made.

Stop and get me on the ride up. Stop and get me on the ride up. Stop and get me on the ride up. I'm only going to the top of the hill. ~Tom Waits

All of life is about hills. If we're not in the process of going up or down, we're contemplating the challenge or taking in the view, but inevitably a hill is to be undertaken, at some point, one way or another, even if all we're doing is rolling things down it.

Hills are perhaps the first metaphor we're capable of understanding. In fact, it's one we're each lead to by our experiences with ups and downs.

At some point, you can't lift this boulder with just your own strength. And if you find that you need to move bigger and bigger boulders up hills, you will need more and more help. ~Vinton Cerf

Like stones rolling down hills, fair ideas reach their objectives despite all obstacles and barriers. It may be possible to speed or hinder them, but impossible to stop them.  ~Jose Marti

No one throughout time has misunderstood hills.

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Milestones

As adults, we talk a lot, too much, about children and their milestones, often ticking them off like a "to do" list. Both parents and teachers have lists of things we expect children to do and by when. We boast when they reach them early and worry when they are late.

This isn't to say that milestones aren't important, it's just that the ones we adults focus on are not necessarily the ones that are important to the child. I have a very strong memory, for instance, the day I taught myself to whistle, a milestone that was on no one's list but my own. Snapping my fingers was another, as was successfully performing the "rock the baby" trick with my yo yo. These are things that won't show up on any of the copyrighted lists of milestones, but most of us, even today, have marks in our memories of when we passed them. That's because these were important, these moments of success, these moments when we knew we had learned something that made us like the bigger kids, or even, in some cases, the adults. Despite how our memories have stored them, these moments don't usually come us in a flash, but rather after weeks and months of effort, but it is the moment of success, the personal milestone, that we both set and passed for ourselves.

And, of course, there is learning to "pump." If you hang out at our swing set for any length of time, the subject comes up, and you'll find children at various stages of figuring it out. Adults don't teach this to children, although I've seen some, frustratingly, try. "Pumping," moving the swing under one's own power, is something most children learn because they are self-motivated to acquire the skill. I remember working on it myself, striving to rock my body in just the right way to make the swing move. Not only had I seen the older kids doing it, but I knew that once I'd mastered it, I was no longer reliant upon finding someone to push me. It was a milestone I had set for myself and that I was free to pursue on my own with no adults telling me when or how to do it. My motivation was made up of equal parts aspiration to be like the older kids and a desire for the freedom the skill would give me.

The freedom to pursue the answers to our own questions is the key to all self-motivated learning. And most of what we are motivated to learn is because we seek more freedom, to be more self-reliant, to be more like our older, more sophisticated elders, especially those glamorous ones who are only a few years older than ourselves.

The other day, a younger sister, long frustrated by her inability to to pump like she sees her older brother and his friends do it, was fussily working on her skills, complaining to no one in particular, "I can't do it." In a moment of frustration, she gave up and walked away, only to return a short time later to try again, finding that both of the swing seats were full. To bide her time, she climbed into our pallet swing, where she began experimenting with rocking herself. Soon the pallet swing began to move a little in response to her body. And as slight as that motion was, I heard her say aloud, excitedly, but to herself, "I'm pumping!" It was like a she had shouted the word, "Freedom!"

So far, she's barely moving, but it won't be long before she's soaring with the big kids.

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Without Diminishing Your Degrees Of Freedom

"It is not for me to change you. The question is, how can I be of service to you without diminishing your degrees of freedom." ~Buckminster Fuller

Yesterday, I wrote about a girl who picked all of our schoolyard garden blueberries before they were ripe. This is not the first time it's happened, indeed, in our six years of attempting to grow various kinds of berries, we've never had one make it to ripeness before being picked. I also mentioned that I have an agenda and that is to one day actually harvest a crop of ripe berries.

That said, another of my adult agenda items, a higher one than a crop of berries, is that children have a garden of their own, a place where they can be among things that grow, day-to-day, from seed to fruit and back again; a place where they can freely experience growing food with all of their senses. And that derives from an even higher value, which is that our school should be a place where children have the freedom to educate themselves by asking and answering their own questions about their world.

I could impose rules about the berries. I could put a fence around the berries. But rules and fences, imposed from on high, would rob her of freedom. She is clearly seeking answers to her questions about berries, about a community garden, about cause and effect, and she should have the freedom to pick those berries, even as I want her to wait until they are ripe. It's only through that exercise of her freedom that she can acquire the knowledge she is seeking.

My agenda is that the other children not be deprived of their share of the blueberries. And I do want to emphasize that this is my agenda. I have this idea that children should experience eating food they've grown themselves. So far, I've never had a child complain about missing out on his share of the berries. If that happened, it would be a different story, a conflict between two or more free people, and my role as the teacher becomes clear: to be of service to them as they attempt to hash it out.

As it stands now, however, the whole blueberries-for-all thing is my agenda. We won't be uprooting our blueberry plants. I reckon we'll leave them right where they are, where they will continue to fulfill their destiny of never producing ripe berries.

In the meantime, we have our new greenhouse, located on the other side of the building. The adult plan is to one day grow enough food there that the children are everyday eating something they've grown themselves, and among those crops, I expect there will be berries. I intend to speak of the plants growing in and around our greenhouse -- the green room -- as our food, as everyone's food. I intend to speak informationally about how plants grow, what they need, and that we often must wait for the good stuff. I hope to create the space in which these free children can think for themselves about their garden and make their own decisions about how we explore this new part of our world.

Will these berries grow to be ripe? I hope so, but they can't come at the cost of diminishing the children's degrees of freedom.

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"Then Everybody Can Have Some Berries"

One of the crops that grow particularly well in our Pacific Northwest climate are berries. For the past several years, our schoolyard garden has grown strawberries and raspberries, and this year we added blueberries. So far, over the course of several growing seasons, we've not once had a berry survive until it was ripe. No matter how carefully we adults eagle eye those hard, green, immature berries, every one of them gets picked too early. In fact, this year, many of our strawberries were harvested early in the spring in the form of a tiny bouquet of white and yellow flowers. 

At least this year most of the un-ripe blueberries were consumed, as one of our three-year-olds discovered she had a fondness for sour fruit. She went through our entire crop in a single sitting. Growing up, they always warned us kids that eating green berries would give us tummy aches. Apparently, that's not always the case, but I'm tempted to revive that myth for next year's efforts. That said, we've hopefully remedied our problem of early harvests with the addition of our new greenhouse, an operation that will allow us to better control harvesting so that our communally grown plants benefit more than just a single sour berry lover, while still retaining the freedom of our little playground "grazing" garden.

I'm currently reading Jared Diamond's book, Collapse. Whereas his book that preceded it, Guns, Germs and Steel, took a look at the factors that underpin "successful" societies throughout history, this one is about the conditions that cause civilizations to rise to great heights before failing, with a focus on those that did so spectacularly. The ancient Mayan civilization is a case in point, having risen to become one of the most prosperous, creative, and thriving societies in the world, only to, in very short order, fall apart. Providing example after example from history and prehistory, Diamond is meticulous in laying out the dynamics that caused each demise, drawing parallels not just to one another, but also to our modern times. He has identified a set of five factors, any or all of which can cause a collapse, some of which are beyond human control, but most of his examples are case studies in human shortsightedness, especially regarding economic and environmental activities.

In case after case, from the Polynesian kingdoms to the Mayans in Central America to the Anasazi in what is now the American Southwest, as well as civilizations that rose, prospered, and the fell on every continent, the seeds of their demise are found in a failure of foresight, usually driven by an elite that was either unable or unwilling to give up a little today in order to have a tomorrow. Or, as we might say today: their lifestyles were "unsustainable," yet they pursued them to the bitter end. 

The most stunning example to me is the story of Easter Island, an isolated land that was once heavily forested by the largest palms ever known, growing to nearly 100 feet high, with trunks seven feet in diameter. When humans first settled the island, those trees became the foundation of a great society, providing not only building and boat making material, but the sweet sap could be fermented to make wine or boiled down to make sugar. The nuts were a delicacy and the fronds useful for everything from thatching and baskets to mats and boat sails. By the time Westerners "discovered" Easter, however, those palms were gone, the island completely deforested, the farmlands exhausted, and the once thriving civilization that built those mysterious giant stone heads reduced to only a few hundred natives scratching out a meager existence. Someone made the decision to cut down that last tree the way the Onceler did in Dr. Seuss' masterpiece The Lorax.

Of course, there is no way to know exactly what happened on Easter because they were a pre-literate society and the stories come to us thousands of years later as part of an oral tradition, but as I read Diamond's book it becomes clear that a major contributor to collapse, perhaps the major contributor, are elites who chose the maintenance of their privileged lifestyle, their greed, despite the evidence before their very eyes that it was coming at the expense of the long term success of the rest of their civilization.

The girl who picked that bouquet of strawberry blossoms isn't a member of any sort of "elite," but by skimming off those flowers for her own short term pleasure, we were left without berries for the rest of us. The girl who loves the green berries, deprived the rest of us of our share of the bounty in pursuit of her short term enjoyment. I'm not blaming these girls for anything because they are simply children exploring their world, but I do blame adults, who should know better, when they destroy our Commons in pursuit of their own short term self interest.

There are no new lands to discover on our planet and, very slowly, maybe too slowly, we are beginning to understand that the pursuit of our short term convenience and pleasure is making our world increasingly less livable. There is still a ridiculous debate centered in the US as "climate deniers" continue to advocate for their own short term self interest, but much of the rest of the world is waking up to the fact that we're going to have to change our ways, and quickly, if we aren't going to "collapse."

Last week, the Greek people voted overwhelmingly to reject economic austerity measures that the elites representing the European Union are attempting to force upon them. I have a particular fondness for Greece and her people, having lived there as a boy and traveled there more recently as an adult. I've been engaged for the past couple of days in fascinating and alarming discussions on Facebook and elsewhere with smart people who disagree about what has happened, what could happen, and what should happen. It's a mind-bendingly complicated situation, with so many moving parts, ideas and opinions that it's nearly impossible to know which end is up. It's become clear to me that anyone who claims to know what is happening, or what should happen, or what could happen, is just guessing right along with the rest of us. Historians of the future will, of course, be able to tell us what we did right or wrong, but in these unprecedented times, I must commend the Greek government for turning toward democracy in the search for answers. There was nothing that required them to make this a matter for referendum, and indeed, the bankers warned them not to, but in lieu of a clear path forward, they turned to the people. And the people have spoken. "No."

The farther we get away from the worldwide financial crisis of 2008, the clearer it becomes to me that our international banking system has been engaged in a kind of economic clear cutting operation whereby they gave irresponsible subprime mortgage loans to people who couldn't afford them, packaged them up as ticking time bombs called "mortgage backed securities" then sold them to pension funds and cities and countries throughout Europe, skimming off hundreds of billions in the process. The biggest banks, who knew exactly what they were doing, then bet that those bombs would explode, which they did, resulting in the big banks buying the smaller ones at a great discount, raking in billions more in profits from the people they bankrupted, and blackmailing taxpayers for trillions in bailouts while the rest of us lost our jobs, homes, and standards of living. The Greek people alone bailed out their bankers to the tune of $30 billion. Governments around the world took on massive debt, then, from the very people who caused the problem, which is the primary reason they are all so deeply in debt today.

Now these bankers, stuffed with green berries, are standing before the final Truffula trees demanding that we let them cut them down. The Greek people have said, "No."

This might seem like it is just about Greece with its economy that is about the same size as a major American city, but there are a half dozen other nations in Europe that appear to be headed toward a similar conflict with the technocratic bankers at the helm of Europe's economic ship. And those bankers seem hell bent on cutting down that last damn tree. That tree belongs to all of us.

A couple weeks ago, I was in our garden with the girl who consumed our entire crop of blueberries. There is still some hope for a few strawberries and raspberries and we were discussing them. She told me she really wanted to pick them because they were so "good for my tummy." There were several other children with us, listening to our conversation. One by one they said that they didn't like green berries, but they did like ripe berries. Then this three-year-old said, shrugging, as if teaching us all a lesson she had now learned, "We have to have patience. Then everybody can have some berries."

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I Hope You Had A Happy Independence Day

I've been re-posting a version of this piece for the past six years. I missed my opportunity over the weekend, but still wanted to share it again.

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We must hang together gentlemen . . . else we shall most assuredly hang separately. ~Benjamin Franklin

Happy Independence Day! And “happy” is the appropriate greeting for it. The Declaration of Independence was the first historical instance of the word "happiness" appearing in the founding documents of any nation.

In 1776, 56 men signed their names to this radical document. As a result they were, without trial, proclaimed traitors by the government and sentenced to death. These were middle class people. John Hancock was the wealthiest among them and he was not even a millionaire by today's standards. The wealthy sided with the king. Most of the signers were working people -- farmers and tradesmen primarily. None of them left behind a family fortune, or a foundation, or any other kind of financial memorial of their lives. Our nation is their legacy.

Their average age was 33 (Thomas Jefferson's age at the time). The youngest was only 20-years-old. The oldest was Benjamin Franklin, who was 83.

As a result of having signed the Declaration of Independence, all 56 of the signers were forced to flee their homes. Twelve returned to find only rubble.

As a result of having signed the Declaration of Independence, 17 of them were wiped out financially by the British government.

As a result of having signed the Declaration of Independence, many of them were captured and tortured, or their families were imprisoned, or their children were taken from them. Nine of them died and 4 of them lost their children.

As I read the Declaration of Independence, as I do each July 4, I find myself in awe of their courage. They were all aware of the likely consequences, but they did what they knew must be done. Two centuries later, I still feel the outrage they must have felt as I read through the specific governmental abuses that lead them to that critical moment.

Even more than our Constitution, the Declaration of Independence is the beginning point for the United States of America. I find it both educational and inspirational to return to the source before heading out for fireworks.

When Franklin was asked what kind of nation they were forming, he answered, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

I worry at times that we won't be able to keep it, that, in fact, we've already lost it. I worry that too many of us have declared our independence not from tyrants, but from one another, not understanding that in creating a constitutional government of, by, and for we the people, we were also declaring our interdependence.

At the signing to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Franklin famously said, "We must hang together gentlemen . . . else we shall most assuredly hang separately." 

And while we came together this weekend to commemorate our independence from tyranny, this is also a time for embracing our fellow countrymen, for celebrating our interdependence. In that direction lies happiness.

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Protecting Everyone

There are no off-limits topics at Woodland Park. The subjects we push underground, only become more glamorous in their mystery, so when the subject arises naturally, we have frank and honest conversations about body parts, babies, sex, violence, race, or whatever comes up in our play. I try to stick to facts and stating my own opinion without judgement. I've learned to stay calm, even when the things said inflame me. The following dialog was really quite light despite the subject matter. We do this all the time, negotiating our agreements with one another. I could have made this an emotionally charged situation, I could have become scold-y, but I'm glad I managed not to. I think we wound up in a good place without anyone feeling ashamed of "mistakes" they may have made while exploring something dark.

This story may also sound sexist in that everyone assumed stereotypical gender roles. I suppose there was some of that, but mostly it was about friends sticking up for friends. The girls had done their own share of scheming against boys and they often played heroic roles both with their girlfriends as well as alongside their boyfriends, and in turn, many of the boys had played the role of being rescued. On this day, however, it happened like this:

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One day, a group of boys got outside first. They had been spending a lot of time figuring out their "teams" ("I'm on your team," "Are you on my team?" "Are we bad guys or good guys?") usually eventually settling on everyone being on the same team which is what was happening as I approached.

"What does our team do?"

"We're going to catch the girls, then we're going to kill them."

I know it looks shocking here in print, but it was offered as a kind of joke. I said, keeping an even tone, "I don't think the girls will like that. I don't think anybody wants to get killed."

"We're just going to chase them and pretend to kill them."

"Do you think the girls will like that?"

"Don't tell them."

"We have to tell them. We have to ask them if they want to be caught and killed. Those are our rules."

"Teacher Tom, you'll ruin our trap."

"I don't think they'll like being trapped either. I think I should ask them."

Usually, I send the kids to do their own asking, but most of the girls were still inside, eating a snack together. The kids don't always divide themselves up by gender, but today they had. "Hey," I said, "The boys outside want to know if the girls want to be caught and killed."

They answered, "No!" together.

"I didn't think so. Do you want to pretend to be caught and killed?" 

Only one of them thought that might be a fun game.

"So, I'll tell them you don't want to be caught and killed and only one of you want to pretend to be caught and killed. Do you want to be trapped?"

They answered, emphatically, that they didn't want to be trapped.

As I started toward the door to carry the message back outside, one of the boys at the snack table called out, "I want to protect the girls."

Then another, "Me to, I want to help protect them."

In fact, all of the boys at the snack table agreed they wanted to be on the girl's team and protect them.

When I returned outdoors, the boys were still scheming. I reported what I'd learned: "The girls don't want to be caught and killed and only one of them wants to pretend to be caught and killed. None of them want to get trapped . . . Oh, and you should know that all the other boys have decided they're going to protect the girls."

For a moment we all stood in silence, then one of the boys said, "I want to protect the girls too."

"Me too."

By the time we were done, all the boys agreed they were going to protect the girls.

When the girls came outside, the boys chased the girls chased the boys, wildly, around and around our outdoor space, all flushed and breathing hard, chasing without catching, everyone protecting everyone.

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The Jobs Of Tomorrow

The schools we have today evolved alongside, and many say as a part of, the Industrial Revolution. The assembly line was all the rage and it's efficiencies were brought to the classroom where (to borrow from Sir Ken Robinson) incomplete humans are sorted by "manufacture date," then sent on their straight-line journey from chapter to chapter, from text book to text book, from grade to grade, until, at the end they were stuffed full with education and ready to assume those "jobs of tomorrow" which would mostly involve standing at a factory assembly line performing the sort of repetitive, rote task for which they had been prepared.

Business efficiencies continue to be the enemy of education today, although the "jobs of tomorrow" are no longer assumed to be in factories (those are being shipped overseas), but rather service sector employment where "standardization" is the buzzword. They're attempting to standardize it all, from teacher evaluations to high stakes tests and curricula, with the ultimate goal of turning as much of the process as possible over to for-profit corporations because they will, in the mythology of neoliberalism, manufacture that education even more efficiently.

The idea of efficiency in education is an absurdity. The core idea is that if we subject children of the same age to the same information in the same manner at the same time, and if we are sufficiently rigorous, we will produce the kinds of workers they imagine they'll want two decades from now. It's all based on a sort of sociopathic fallacy. Children are not incomplete humans; they are already fully formed just as they are. Children are not primarily on this planet to fill job vacancies; they are here to create the future. Children cannot be standardized; each of them is a unique and wonderful person on a unique and wonderful journey. And anyone who claims to know anything about those "jobs of tomorrow" is blowing smoke; by the time our children assume their adult roles, those guys will be in nursing homes baffled by a world that has passed them by.

The purpose of education, particularly of the public variety, has nothing to do with jobs, but it has everything to do with tomorrow. Children don't follow in our footsteps, but rather walk along beside us so that they are prepared to carry on the journey when we give out. We help them along the way, teaching them what we know, sharing our experiences, not manufacturing them to some sort of specifications based upon yesterday, but supporting them as they become the human they need to be today. As they get older, they begin to show us a future that we can't imagine, seeing both farther and wider than us, just as we saw farther and wider than our elders.

We should not be preparing our children for the jobs of tomorrow. We should be preparing them to create their own future.

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Listening Is Where Love Begins

Mister Rogers:

"More and more I've come to understand that listening is one of the most important things we can do for one another. 

Whether the other be an adult or a child, our engagement in listening to who that person is can often be our greatest gift. Whether that person is speaking or playing or dancing, building or singing or painting, if we care, we can listen.

In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.

Listening is a very active awareness of the coming together of at least two lives. Listening, as far as I'm concerned, is certainly a prerequisite of love. One of the most essential ways of saying, "I love you" is being a receptive listener.

Listening is where love begins: listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors.

(And) when we love a person, we accept him or her exactly as is: the lovely with the unlovely, the strong along with the fearful, the true mixed in with the facade, and of course, the only way to can do it is by accepting ourselves that way."

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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