"Desire is Everything"

My wife and I have recently remodeled and are in the process of redecorating our home. We impulsively bought a couple of very cool chairs from a consignment shop. We didn't know we wanted them until we saw them. In fact, even after they were in our living room, it took us both a couple days to love them. The rest of what we purchased, however, was ordered online, mostly from Amazon.

I've never been a "shopper." I don't take pleasure walking up and down aisles just to see what's on offer. My favorite store is our local Ace Hardware, where I'm met at the door by a friendly salesperson, who not only knows where everything is, but can actually help talk me through my project to make sure I'm getting exactly what I need. Whether it's a 17¢ eye screw or an expensive power tool, I'm in-and-out, and quite confident I won't be coming back until I need something else.

With online shopping, however, I've found myself browsing. Each time I click on something I need, the algorithms offer me suggestions for things I might want. One of those wants, for me, was a titanium cutting board. Unlike with the light switches, shelving, and other practical things I've recently ordered, I found myself dwelling on this sleek object during the space between when I clicked the "buy now" button and its arrival. I imagined myself slicing and dicing on it, holding it, and even cleaning it. In short, I spent 24 hours desiring this, literally, shiny new object that would enhance my day-to-day life. Of course, as every modern person has experienced, from the moment this desired object arrived in its crude cardboard box, wrapped in too much plastic, I felt disappointment. It's been a couple days now. I'm not sure I like it better than my old wooden cutting boards.

Anthropologist David Graeber tells us that for much of human history, that long span of time before capitalism came to dominate so much of our lives, "the idea that one could resolve the matter (desire) by 'embracing' the object of his or her fantasy was missing the point. The very idea was considered a symptom of a profound mental disorder, a species of 'melancholia.'"

This is what I've experienced in the aftermath of attaining my titanium cutting board. It's a far cry from a profound mental disorder, but there is definitely something melancholic about it. Each time I've used that damn, dissatisfying cutting board, I've caught myself wondering if I've just chosen the wrong brand or price point. Maybe I just need to try a different titanium cutting board . . . It's taken some effort to not click on the cascade of titanium cutting board ads that now clutter my feeds because even as I've acquired the object of my desire, the desire remains . . . and the algorithms seem to know it.

Graeber tells us that medieval psychological theory understood that we were meant to contemplate our desires, but not to strive to sate them because it's in the nature of our desires to be insatiable. In contrast to needs, there is always something more to want, something more the covet, something more to conquer. No matter what we buy, we always just miss the point of our longing, leaving us with a melancholy that can only be satisfied with a new longing. This is what our distant ancestors would have identified as "depression." Shopping malls have always made me feel instantly exhausted: maybe I'm just responding to being surrounded by all that depression.

The stereotype is of children having tantrums over not getting the toy they desire, but that isn't who they are. We make them that way; not you and me specifically, but our consumer culture that runs on this low grade melancholia in which we only live fully in the interim between longing (as distinct from needing) and consumption. 

I use that phrase intentionally -- "live fully" -- because to live fully means to be full of insatiable desires, wants, and dreams. Our lot in life is not to burn up our short existence vainly trying to snuff out our desires through consumption, but rather to contemplate them, to muse upon them, and to be inspired by them. When we succeed in keeping our young children at a distance from media as pediatricians recommend (an increasingly difficult thing in today's world), we see natural, non-depressed humans who are consumed, not by consumption, but by their own curiosity and wonder. 

The other day I was talking with a friend who is a decade older than me. She said, "I still like sex, but it's the desire I miss. The older I get, the more I realize that sex is nothing. If I had to choose, I'd take desire over sex any day. Desire is everything."

I've been writing this as the morning turns from full dark to a sunrise that is now revealing this newly re-decorated room that surrounds me. It's all still new enough that I'm content with everything I see, but especially those two cool chairs that I never desired, but now possess. I catch myself gazing at them several times a day, not sitting in them because they're more like works of art than furniture. I'm reminded of a small bit of tree root I found as a child that looked to me like a cute little bird. I still have that accidental bird and I still sometimes hold it in my hand, feeling the smooth part that is its breast and the pointy bit that is its slightly opened beak. Just outside my window, is our grapefruit tree, another thing I never desired, but now possess. I didn't really care for grapefruit juice, but now I crave it.

Those chairs, that bird-root, this grapefruit tree. I do desire them I suppose, but the desire has come complete with its own satisfaction. Or perhaps, more accurately, my desire for them has grown out of my possession of them. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer famously wrote, "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." He was writing in the early 1800's, long before this modern age of consumerism. Capitalism, mercantilism, and colonialism were on the rise, however, and I wonder if this man's most famous quote reveals an ignorance of what was to come. Perhaps it's still true that we can't choose what we desire, but I think it's pretty clear that we can, unless we are on guard, have desires inflicted upon us, which is what that titanium cutting board was all about. I suppose it's possible that this disappointing object will eventually come to hold a place like the one occupied by those chairs, that bird-root, and this grapefruit tree, but it seems unlikely because my desire grew in the shallow soil of marketing and has already sunk under the nagging melancholia. 

It's now been decades since my family agreed to no longer purchase holiday gifts for one another. We continued to buy toys and books for the kids, but our adult gifts are handmade from materials that, by agreement, cost less than $10. There is no shopping involved. An unanticipated thing has happened with the children. One-by-one, they've all opted out of the store bought gifts, desiring instead to join us adults.

In the end, that is what consumerism robs us of. It seeks to keep us living in the interim between the "buy now" button and opening the box, treating our desires like some sort of low grade fever that is never to be cured, but rather kept under control one purchase at a time. As my friend said, desire is everything. This is what our toddlers know that we've forgotten.

A flock of geese just flew by my window, low and loud. Right now my desire right is to fly. 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Do-It-Yourself!

I've always enjoyed tackling home improvement projects, but have generally shied away from electrical work because of the whole risk of electrocution thing. A couple weeks ago, however, I tackled the job of trading out a half dozen regular light switches for dimmers. As DIY projects go, it's a classic, hardly worth boasting about, but I nevertheless felt proud of myself and so, as a 62-year-old man, I called my father who is my DIY role model.

I grew up with art on the walls created by my father. For instance, he tried out Jackson Pollack's drip-dribble technique on a small canvas that hung in our den. He reupholstered a living room chair. He made a game room table with an inlaid chess board. He invented a football-themed board game based on statistics that were activated by a roll of the dice, predating Dungeons & Dragons and fantasy football by decades. He built an electric train table in the garage that could be folded up to make room for the car. He undertook glass cutting, stained-glass, donut making, and ice cream churning. Not to mention all the day-to-day fix-it projects.

Of course he came by it naturally. Both my parents grew up on Midwestern farms where they produced most of their own food, repaired their own vehicles and farm machinery, made their own games and toys, and, as Dad mentioned in our conversation, sewed and mended their own clothing.

Dad was the youngest of five children, four boys and a girl, and as such, much of the clothing he wore growing up were hand-me-downs, mended time and again, until they were beyond repair, whereupon they were used to make rag rugs and other useful things. In his book Secondhand, journalist Adam Minter writes: "The ideas that a garment or other object was a resource that should be renewed at home was eroding. In the process, the sentimental value associated with clothing declined as quickly as the material value. After all, it's easier to discard a store-bought shirt than one made at home by a mother, a wife, or a sister."

As a preschool teacher, I try to imbue my classrooms with this sort of DIY mentality. It's a place, not for consuming stuff, but rather for finishing or continuing to use stuff. Much of the curriculum supplies, the stuff of our program, are hand-me-downs in the sense that they've come from the attics, garages, and cellars of the children's families. Of course, we purchase paints, paper, tape, and tools, but the bulk of what we interact with are objects with a history, things that were once something else, belonging to someone else, but are now ours to transform with our hands and curiosity. 

In the same spirit, I've always tried to schedule maintenance calls for when the children were present. We once made a plumber's day when the entire class came into the bathroom to watch him install two new toilets. When a chunk of concrete needed to be removed to make way for our outdoor stage, we got to watch, hear, and feel the jackhammer (from a safe distance, of course). Even when we purchased new, super-sturdy outdoor furniture that needed to be assembled, we did it together at the workbench over the course of a week. Likewise, if there was something to be repaired, like the cast iron water pump or a cherished plaything that needed some TLC, I did it on the workbench with the children gathered around. 

At one point, a parent donated an old wooden row boat which we plunked in the center of our sandpit. We painted it, we tried to preserve it, but between the rough play and the elements, the  wood, over the course of a few years, inevitably began to soften. Soon parts were breaking off. Slowly at first, and then suddenly, it disappeared entirely under the sand, although enterprising diggers with a memory of that old row boat, would occasionally unearth relics of a bygone time. Our worm bin is similar place for watching stuff (foodstuffs and yard waste in this case) return to the earth.

Our culture of store-bought commodities designed to be trashed rather than repaired and repurposed has made it increasingly rare for our children to witness how our everyday things transform themselves over time, perhaps picking up a few dings, dents, and rents along the way, perhaps become threadbare or finicky or rusty, but also becoming a part of the story we're living. Our personal histories, at least in part, are stored in objects that have been with us for a long time. 

When we care for objects, when we repair and repurpose them, and especially when we make them ourselves, we transform soul-less commodities into treasure.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

That's What it Means to Flourish

It took her awhile to get going. For the longest time she stood against her mother's knee, watching the other children as they made their way around the space. At one point a fellow toddler took an interest in her. It seemed as if he had forgotten that he clutched small, wooden vehicle in each hand when he impulsively reached out to her, but by the time his hand was in her face, he was handing her a car which she took into her own hands. 

As the boy continued making his way around the classroom, the girl dropped into a squat at her mother's feet and gave the car a push across the floor. She crawled to where it came to a stop, then pushed it again, then again, until she was halfway across the room from her mother. From there she discovered play dough, then finger painting, then the soapy water in our sensory table. For a time she went back and forth between the paint and the water, dirtying, then washing her hands in a classic turn-it-on-turn-it-off cycle. When children do this, I always find myself humming Tom Hunter's song:

Build it up

And knock it down

And build it up again

Knock it down

And build it up

And knock it down again . . .

It was the first week for these two-year-olds and they were all, according to their individual lights, exploring and flourishing as they played.

This is all very familiar to anyone who works with young children. Some researchers distinguish between exploration and play. Exploration, they say, is behavior that asks the question "What is this?" while play asks the questions "What can I do with this?" But the line is so fine, I find it a distinction without a difference.

And that's our prerogative because play -- like love, communication, art, and pretty much any other foundational human experience -- is notoriously difficult to define. Indeed, for play researchers, their results are often dictated by the definition with which they begin, which accounts for the fact that their experiments and studies often produce contradictory results.

In Gordon Burghardt's groundbreaking work The Genesis of Animal Play, he defines play behavior as "non-functional," voluntary, not obviously like the animal's other behaviors, repeated with modifications, and that it only occurs when the animal is well-fed, safe, and healthy. That final condition is an interesting one because it seems to suggest that play emerges only after the first three levels of Abraham Maslow's famous "hierarchy of needs" are met. It's only when the animal feels physically, psychologically, and socially safe that the play instinct emerges. 

I saw that with our little explorer. It was only once she felt secure enough to move away from her mother that her play (or exploration) began. What she did was non-functional, self-selected, unlike her other behavior, and repeated with modifications. In the words of Maslow, she was, with her other needs met, free to satisfy her needs for self-esteem and self-actualization.

This is all well and good, of course. It's the kind of deep thinking and observation that play-based educators do all the time, but to someone not versed in our profession, what this girl was doing -- what all the kids were doing -- probably looked pretty aimless.

Aimlessness is not something our culture values. Our work-hard-to-prosper mindset doesn't leave a lot of room for aimlessness. We dream of the glorious aimlessness of, say, a beach vacation, but struggle with the reality of aimlessness. We might set off on an aimless stroll around the neighborhood, but destinations and errands often steer us. One of my neighbors, a retired gentleman, simply can't go for a walk without also collecting the garbage he comes across along his way. "I might as well be useful," he says. We all find ourselves, at least sometimes, craving the end to schedules, obligations, and the overall tyranny of usefulness, but our cultural training makes it challenging, if not impossible. I'm just going to lounge by the pool, but I'll also file my nails or catch up on my email or check in with mom. And for many off us, moments of true aimlessness are accompanied by feelings of guilt or shame.

Many discover a kind of aimlessness in meditation for a few minutes a day, and it's obviously a re-centering and restorative practice, but it's not the same thing as the aimlessness of play . . . At least according to my own, ever-changing definition.

When I watch children wander from one thing to another, noticing novelty, pausing when their interest is piqued, doing things over-and-over for a minute or an hour, then moving on to something else without being concerned with usefulness, I see behavior that may be tolerated in toddlers, but is often vilified in poplar culture. Aimlessness in adults is often lumped in with laziness. Parents worry that their teenager doesn't seem to have any "direction." We worry that without ambition, without purpose, life will become a wasteland of regrets and broken dreams.  Aimlessness looks like self-indulgence, even as we crave our own leisure.

In her book Flourish, philosopher and publisher Antonia Case writes, "(T)he habits bred into us by the modern world have left us unable to enjoy leisure properly. We’re either working, preparing for work, commuting to work or recharging our batteries for another round of work. Otherwise, we’re just zoning out in front of a screen. What’s more . . . many of the activities that we deem to be leisure are in fact just another version of toil. Jogging to lose weight, hosting parties in order to "netowork,” learning yoga to be an instructor — these activities are undertaken instrumentally, with a specific goal in mind. Leisure, on the other hand, is done for nothing other than the sheer joy of immersion."

Greek philosopher Epicurus said, "It's not what we have, but what we enjoy that constitutes our abundance."

We live in an era that can be characterized as a dictatorship of productivity, which means that many of us spend our days doing things we don't enjoy. It's always what people come up with when they criticize play-based childhoods: how will the children learn to do the things they don't want to do? In fact, pretty much everything that happens in normal school is predicted on the idea that children won't want to do it. That's why we have so many educators who feel that their main job is controlling the kids. This doesn't make anyone feel happy or abundant.

Our modern mythology tells us that accomplishment, power, and stuff will bring us happiness, but as any toddler knows, it's enjoyment that does that. Pleasure. "The more time you spend attending to the things that make you happy, the happier you will be," writes behavioral scientist Paul Dolan, "Change what you do, not what you think." As every psychologist knows, what we focus on grows. As every toddler knows, aimless doing, playing, is how we discover joy. When I ask parents what they most want for their toddlers, the answer is usually something like, "I just want them to be happy." They mean it, but when I did a little deeper, I usually discover that what they mean is that they want their children to flourish.

Case asks, "Is this the secret to flourishing? To set one's sights beyond the self, to the world around us? While yogis and mindfulness experts may do this by focusing attention on the breath and the immediacy of the moment, a similar approach, but one that is no les effective, is to focus attention on objects and ideas and subjects that interest us, to be attentive to those who are our immediate space, allowing us to escape the empire of self . . . To be utterly absorbed in the external environment is an act of self-denial to be sure, but one without the moralistic overtones."

Looked at this way, looked at from the perspective of our toddlers, we see that aimlessness, contrary to our ideas of it being some sort of failure, moral or otherwise, is in fact how we care for ourselves. It is how we discover what gives us joy, and it's there that we ultimately find our purpose in life. Our myths tell us that we must set goals, but how can we know that the person we will become in the interim will find those goals worthwhile? Unless our goals are immediately achieved, we often find that by the time we attain them they no longer bring us joy. 

It's a cultural sacrilege to think this way, but my toddler friends seem to know that aimlessness, or authentic play, is to be valued above all. It is the top of the pyramid where self-actualization resides. It is the surest, albeit wandering, path to a life of delight, pleasure, leisure, joy, purpose. That's what it means to flourish. And this is, to me, is what education should be all about.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

The Angry Ship Builders

Charlotte said, "I'm going to build a ship," and got to work arranging the blocks.

Ships have always been a popular way for the kids to use our large wooden blocks. It's a simple build which normally involves arranging the blocks into a deck, flat on the floor. Each time Charlotte would place a block, however, one of her classmates would step on it, which frustrated her. 

"Hey, I'm building a ship!"

There was a lot of action in the block area and it got so she was chasing someone off her ship every few seconds. She responded by upping the intensity of her objections.

It didn't seem like anyone was intentionally provoking Charlotte. The situation was more a result of attempting to work on a solo project in a crowded, active area. After having been reprimanded several times by Charlotte, Henry paused for a moment to survey this corner of the rug, and in doing so he seemed to suddenly see the world from Charlotte's perspective. "I'm going to help build the ship." And with that he began arranging blocks.

Without directly acknowledging Henry, Charlotte began to chase the other kids off, still angrily, by saying, "Hey, we're building a ship!"

And Henry took on the tone as well, "Hey, we're building a ship!" Now we had two intense ship builders. 

Soon Audrey joined them, pushing large blocks into place. She said nothing, but wore a fierce, tight-jawed expression as she worked.

"Hey, we're building a ship!" "Hey, that's our ship!"

As the three angry builders made their herky jerky progress, Lilyanna, who had been dancing about the block area to the beat of some internal rhythm, and therefore largely oblivious to the builders, had as a consequence been chased off the burgeoning ship more times than I could count. As she turned a sort of pirouette on the ship deck, the builders said once more, loudly, "Hey, we're building a ship!"

Lilyanna was offended, putting her hands on her hips defiantly, commanding, "Stop!" Saying "stop" forcefully is a technique we teach the children for when someone is hurting them, frightening them, or taking their things. Some kids, however, find it so powerful that they try it out in any circumstance in which they find themselves at odds with others.

This lead to a silent stand-off, with the three builders standing face-to-face with Lilyanna, angry faces all around. Finally, Charlotte said, as if castigating the world, "This is our ship! Mine, Henry's, Audrey's and Lilyanna's!"

Then the four angry ship builders got back to work.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

"The Ability to Forget and be Forgotten is Integral to Social Transformation"

In her book Monsters Claire Dederer considers the question of what to do about artists who have created beloved works of art, but who have also been revealed to be, well, monsters. Woody Allen is one of her prime examples. At one point she uses the metaphor of a beautiful piece of lace that has been stained. It still might be a beautiful piece of lace, but it’s nearly impossible to not notice the stain. 

Dederer points out that many, too many, of our artistic icons have turned out to be monsters. We all know about Allen, Roman Polanski, and Bill Cosby because their transgressions are relatively recent. Maybe we’ve even taken part in “canceling” them. But even if we don’t approve of so-called “cancel culture” I doubt that any of us can fully enjoy their work the way we once did – the stain is always right there. But many of us are unaware, or have forgotten, that Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and even William Shaespeare have left stains on their masterpieces. Do we forgive them because it happened so long ago? Or did we, collectively, just forget? And is forgetting okay? And if so, how long ago does it have to be for that forgetting to be okay?

As people who work with and care for young children, we are in the business of forgiving and forgetting. Of course, we don’t let a preschooler's missteps stain them. Even our teenagers get to leave most of their transgressions in the past, or at least they did until the advent of the internet where nothing is forgotten. 

Reflecting on my own teenage years, I'm happy that the internet didn't exist in those days. I don't know if I would be the man I am today if I wasn't free to leave my mistakes behind. Much of therapy involves dredging up those old memories and that will always be a part of social-emotional healing and growth, but there is a growing body of psychological research that finds that forgetting negative experiences is perhaps just as important to our social identity development because to remember every shameful or humiliating experience would be immobilizing. 

In her book The End of Forgetting, Kate Eichhorn writes, "I understand that forgetting can . . . be incredibly dangerous but there are times when the ability to forget and be forgotten is integral to social transformation."

I worry about our young people who are, increasingly, living in a world that never forgets. Growing up, we were often warned about how our behaviors would wind up on our "permanent record," but that was a boogyman compared to today. I can't imagine the pressure young people must feel to manage their reputations because a single slip-up can genuinely have lifelong ramifications. Risk taking is essential to cognitive and social development, but today, the stakes of failure are so much higher than for past generations that it's no wonder we are seeing what Jonathan Haight calls "the anxious generation." He lays the blame largely on a loss of childhood autonomy and smart phones, and I don't think he's wrong, but the prospect of a permanent record on steroids certainly plays a part in the rise in anxiety in our youngest citizens. The impact of "celebrity" on young people is well documented. Today, we have an entire generation that is faced with life "in the public eye."

One of the benefits of being allowed to forget our shameful and humiliating moments is that it creates the freedom necessary to transform ourselves into new and better people. That's nearly impossible if there are those out there who continually remind us about that one time we behaved like a "monster."

It’s been decades since Woody Allen was accused of his crimes. Has the stain faded? Should it? If we still enjoy his movies, are we condoning his past behavior? Are we forgetting about his victims and justice?

It’s easier to forgive preschoolers, of course, because they’re so young. Their brains aren’t fully developed. Even if they hit or bite or abuse a classmate, we don’t let that stain them. They’re not monsters; they just made a bad choice. They didn’t know any better. But when should they know better? There are teens who are tried in court as adults. I guess we assume that they should have known better. On the other hand, we commonly expunge crimes from the records of teens under the assumption that they have learned their lesson and they don’t deserve to start life with a stain. But today, courts may forgive and forget, but there is no undo button for the internet.

I don't think I'll ever forgive Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, or Bill Cosby. I remember what they did. Youthful indiscretions are a far cry from using one's position of power prey on the weak and vulnerable. That's a stain I can't not see. Perhaps future generations will be able to enjoy their art without condoning their monstrous behaviors the way I do with Picasso, Hemingway, and Shakespeare. Maybe I'll feel differently when they are in their graves. In the end, perhaps it's only then, when they can do no more harm, that we are able to start separating monsters from their art.

But no child is a monster. As preschool teachers and parents of young children we forgive and forget every day. Indeed, it's our responsibility to help young children move beyond their impulses, their mistakes, and their "monstrous" behaviors. From day-to-day we forget and forgive, setting our children free to live today anew as better people. 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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

Is the Book at Death's Door?

People keep trying to tell me that the book, as a way to deliver information, edification, and entertainment, is doomed to extinction. Radio, then television, and now the internet were all going to supplant books. Not only were these more technologically advance media going to replace the kind of deep, committed reading demanded of books, but they were training us to have shorter and shorter attention spans creating a sort of self-perpetuating spiral.

TV programs run for 30-60 minutes. The commercials are 30 seconds. Pop music songs tend to top out at around two and a half minutes. Social media scrolling is a process of attending for fractions of seconds before moving on. The groundbreaking children's educational program Seasame Street was the first to give up on the long form, introducing us to a habit of quick cuts that, in part, formed us into what we at one time called "the MTV generation." No one had the time or attention span for books anymore. At least that's what they said. Marshall McLuhan created an entire critique of media and culture that saw this as not just inevitable, but natural and good.

Book stores, both large chains and mom-and-pop operations, have struggled in recent decades, although that seems to have more to do with the impact of Amazon because, despite the warnings, book sales have remained strong since the dawn of the 2000's, enjoying a significant resurgence during the pandemic. In fact, 2022 saw us buying a record number of books -- over 800 million -- and while 2023 saw a small dip, overall book sales remain higher than 2020.

If you've been a reader here for any length of time, you're likely aware that I'm an ardent book person. My wife shares my affinity for books, although she has largely shifted her book consumption to her Kindle. And that's part of how book publishing continues to thrive, finding alternative ways to deliver their product. I remember when paperbacks began changing the publishing game by offering books in a more portable and less expensive format. E-readers and audio books have done the same, making it possible for more and more of us to access books in more and more times and places. Instead of hurting book readership, these "rival" technologies have made it increasingly easy for book lovers to find books they love and one another, as book clubs (celebrity and otherwise), websites, and social media groups seem to be everywhere.

I'm a bit of a holdover in that I continue to prefer reading old-fashioned hardbacks. For my purposes, hardbacks are a mature technology, one upon which improvement is impossible, but you won't find me begrudging anything that makes reading books fit people's lives. Books, for me, are a pure good, like love or play, that need not be defended.

I'm writing about books because I recently read an article in The Atlantic (yes, I also read paper magazines!) written by Rose Horowitch entitled The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books (here's a link to the online version). She interviewed 33 literature and humanities professors who say that over the past decade students are landing in their classes who have never been expected to read an entire book. I've heard of this phenomenon before from another article in The Atlantic entitled Why Kids Aren't Falling in Love With Reading. 

Back then I wrote, "Today, children are being introduced to books and stories one paragraph at a time. They might be reading something as wonderful as Peggy Parish's Amelia Bedelia, but when you have to stop and answer questions, in detail, often word-for-word, about random paragraphs, there's no way you can learn to care about the characters or the stories. (Katherine) Marsh writes about a class in which the kids were reading Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, but they were told by the teacher that they would be doing it over the course of months, and probably wouldn't have time to finish it. What the hell? How can you read any book, and that book in particular, without reading it to the end? . . . No wonder children aren't growing up to love reading."

In this more recent article, Horowitch lays that blame squarely at the door of such governmental education policies as Bush's No Child Left Behind, Obama's Race to the Top, and Bill Gate's Common Core, all of which emphasize "informational texts and standardized tests. This has caused too many teachers to shift away from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author's main idea -- mimicking the format of standardized reading comprehension tests." As Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor told her, "in doing so, we've sacrificed young people's ability to grapple with long-form texts in general. She quotes one teacher who has spent his career in New York and Boston public schools as saying, "There's no testing skill that can be related to . . . Can you sit down and read Tolstoy."

The word "sacrifice" is spot on here. I've long referred the academic regime that has taken over our schools in recent decades to "test score coal mines" in which corporations make money, and school districts receive money, and teachers get rewarded, off the backs of children's alienating labor. It doesn't matter how efficiently a child can analyze a paragraph if they have never been exposed to it in the much larger context in which it exists. I mean, Horowitch interviewed professors at the so-called "elite" universities which tend to attract the best test takers, and these students are increasingly unwilling and unable to read anything that requires the kind of persistence, focus, and, yes, ambition, required by whole books. We have specifically taught them that reading books is unimportant because it won't show up on the test. It is not the kids' fault: it is the fault of our schools.

Of course, schools have never been very good at encouraging book reading. The only books I've ever left unfinished were the boring ones assigned by a teacher. To truly "read" a book, I've found, my curiosity must be engaged. 

For my entire life, people have been warning about the death of the book, only to see it not just survive, but thrive, adapting itself to changing technologies and habits, bringing people into entire, fully-connected and satisfying worlds of both fiction and non-fiction. The book has taken on and survived every technological challenger -- radio and TV and the internet. Who would have guessed that it would be our schools that finally killed books?

Of course, they aren't dead yet. We are, after all, only two years beyond the book publishing industry's most profitable year on record and sales have continued to be strong, but I worry that the experiences of these university professors is a kind of canary-in-the-coal-mine phenomenon. After all, concerns about the demise of books has always proven to be unfounded. As Columbia professor Nicholas Dames says, "Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new . . . (And) yet I think there is a phenomenon that we're noticing that I'm also hesitant to ignore." So let's not ignore it.

I love reading books. Just holding one in my hand gives me a satisfying feeling of knowledge and wisdom. Maybe it's just me. Maybe they're right, the book is ultimately doomed, it's just taking its sweet time in finally succumbing.

If you're like me, however, and see value in books, whole books, all kinds of books, even and especially books that contain ideas and people with which and whom we disagree, then there is something we can do. It is as simple as continuing to read picture books with young children, cover-to-cover. Read the same one over and over. Read dozens of different books in a single setting. Let the children in your life catch you reading. Talk about the books you've loved, the stories that have shaped your life, changed your mind, or left you inspired. Talk about the books that made you sad, made you angry, and kept you awake at night. Leave books, all kinds of books, lying around to thumb through, to get curious about. 

I know that some of what I've written here might be alarming or depressing, and like I said, let's not ignore it, but the truth is that I have great confidence in books. Even the "science of reading" killjoys and charlatans won't be able to destroy books no matter how hard they try. In a cultural battle between books and schooling, I'll place my money on books every time. 

I've just started reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring which was published in 1962, the year of my birth. I was inspired to finally read it by Jenn Shapland's new book of essays entitled Thin Skin. I've also just begun to read Usula LeGuin's Earthsea series. When I look across the room at my bookshelf (part of which is pictured above) I see worlds I've experienced, author's and character's heads in which I've been a privileged visitor. I see a vast, deep, and connected world in which I'm free to roam. So let's not ignore the concerning things, but let's also know that books are mighty. They are a perfected technology and plaything. And they are here to stay.

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies," writes George RR Martin, "and one who doesn't read, lives just one." 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Every Child Understands a Hero's Journey

Max is sent to his room for making mischief. His walls become the word all around and Max, a young boy, steps out into it, boarding a boat that sails on an ocean that tumbles by, sailing night and day, in and out of weeks, and almost over a year to where the wild things are. We don't know if he is afraid or not, but the wild things roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth. He doesn't fight, nor does he run away, but rather tames them with the magic trick of staring into their yellow eyes and commanding them to be still. He is now king of the wild things and they celebrate with a wild rumpus. But then Max finds he wants to be with those who love him best of all. So he sails back home over and through all those nights and days and weeks. And when he gets there, despite the passage of all that time, his dinner is still hot.

You will recognize this as a synopsis of Maurice Sendak's classic hero's story Where the Wild Things Are. It was first published in 1963 when I was a baby, not even a year old. My mother didn't read it to me, but I read it to my daughter. I wrote the above synopsis from memory, not because I read it again and again (although I have read it countless times to hundreds of young children), but because it is what the American mythologist Joseph Campbell calls a "hero journey," the story with which we are all familiar.

Children continue to love this story because they understand it is their own story. They wake each morning in their familiar home, surrounded by those who love them best of all, then venture out into a world of obstacles, mysteries, and even terrors. Sendak's text doesn't tell us that Max is afraid, nor does it mention his bravery. We don't know why Max sets out on his journey, nor what he expects to find there. The sparse text of the story, slightly over 300 words, leaves most of the emotional content to the reader to fill in, other than right there at the end when we find the word love. But we all know how he feels, even the youngest children, who by the time they are able to understand the story, have already lived it, over and over again.

Campbell's life's work was about demonstrating that stories of the hero's journey are common throughout all cultures and times: this going out into the world, overcoming obstacles, facing fears, having experiences, then returning home again. Are we better or wiser for the journey? Maybe, probably, but that's not the point. As Campbell saw it, the hero's journey is a metaphor, the metaphor, for a life will lived. 

"What I think is a good life is one hero journey after another," wrote Campbell. 

It would have been much easier and safer for Max to have remained at home in his room, even as a forest grew around him. But there is never a question of whether or not he will set out. Ease and safety are not options for a hero. He did not set out because he was a seeker. He did not set out because he was particularly brave. He had not lost anything that needed to be found. He was not after riches or glory (the destinations that we always feel compelled to append to our modern hero journey's, confusing the point). He was not after love: he already had that. In Campbell's words, he is doing nothing more or less than following his bliss. Max the hero is someone who is called to set out, not knowing when he will return. When a private boat comes tumbling by he steps into it, pursuing his purpose, which is, simply, to accept this journey that is his and his alone.

When I read Where the Wild Things Are to young children, I'm often moved by the eagerness with which they attend. They have never known a time when they did not understand, from experience, the hero journey. They've been out in this magical world, afraid and brave and curious and homesick, over and over again, through night and day, in and out of weeks, and almost over a year. They have tamed wild things. And they have returned home where they are loved. 

A good life is not one of having or being, but rather of doing. It's not made of goals and plans, but rather the setting out on the journey that beckons us to sally forth, to experience the wild things we find there, returning home again, maybe better, maybe worse, but always with the satisfaction of having lived. 

A good education, it seems to me, is one that does not let us forget that to truly live is to accept one hero journey after another, not for glory or gold, but because our hearts call us to the journey.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!