Children are Not "Blank Slates"

You often hear young children spoken of as "blank slates." As parents and educators, as adults who are presumedly "full slates," our job is then to get to writing -- or even, to somehow encourage them to write -- in order to correct their proverbial blankness.

But no one is ever a blank slate. Life is an immersive experience. Our minds are never blank, nor are they ever full, from the moment we're born (and likely before) until the day we die (and perhaps afterwards).

Certainly, a two-year-old perceives the world differently than a sixty-two-year-old, but that difference, as implied by metaphors like "blank slate" or "empty vessel," is not ignorance. 

Is the seed ignorant? Of course not. Seeds have the "wisdom" (for want of a better word) to "decide" when to germinate. You may quibble with my choice of words (wisdom, decide), but researchers have found what they call a "decision-making center" in dormant seeds that is capable of communicating and integrating information about temperature, moisture, sunlight, and their own hormones in order to make a decision about when and whether to germinate. Insect eggs, larvae, and pupae, likewise, show wisdom. Human development is no different. Being a two-year-old is essential to becoming an adult, just as being a seed or being an egg is essential to becoming a plant or an insect.

I recently came across a video of an educator testing a three-year-old on school-ish things like letter, number, and color recognition. The kid seemed to be enjoying himself, although we all know that there were others who found it tedious or even painful, they just didn't make the cut because, to a school-ish adult, those children are "behind" or "uncooperative" or "unmotivated." 

What if, however, we understood these children to be like seeds? Does anyone think that testing the seed helps it grow? And even the most accomplished gardener can't convince a seed to grow leaves, flower, or fruit before their time. Oh sure, there are hothouses and other artificial growing environments, but we all know that plants raised this way either must spend their lives in the hothouse or perish. And isn't that exactly what our standard schools are? Hothouses in which we vainly hope to one-up Mother Nature?

A good gardener, like a good parent or educator, knows that their job is to prepare the conditions for growth, to protect them as they grow, but it's the seed's job to do the growing, not according to our designs, but nature's. Seeds, like our children if we would just allow them to "decide" for themselves, already know what to do.

"Perhaps the mind is not merely a blank slate upon which anything may be written," writes naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch in his book The Voice of the Desert. "Perhaps it reaches out spontaneously toward what can nourish either intelligence or imagination. Perhaps it is part of nature and, without being taught, shares nature's intentions."

******

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!

If We Want Children to Read for Pleasure

My family moved to Athens, Greece when I was in 4th grade. This is when I first became aware of Scholastic Books. Mom let my brother and me order as many books as we wanted and so month after month, I would receive a stack of cheap paperbacks that I would then consume before the next Scholastic brochure arrived. I'm sure that at some level her motivations were educational, but I think the main point was that we were living in a country in where the media was in a language we didn't understand, and she wanted us to be at least minimally entertained.

I don't specifically recall many of the books, but there was an engrossing one about the Bermuda Triangle and another aspirational one about high school football. My lifelong fandom of The Who started with a very sanitized band biography. And I really got into Eric von Däniken's pseudoscientific theories about space aliens having visited earth in ancient times. In other words, none of it was great literature, but I didn't care. I was reading for pleasure.

When the books arrived, I would stack them on a table in my bedroom, then move them to another stack as I completed them. I might not remember much of the content of these books, but I've never forgotten the feeling of accomplishment upon reading the final words on the final page. I would close the back cover, then hold the finished book in my hands for a time to reflect on the world in which I'd recently dwelt. I still do that.

As George R.R. Martin, the author of The Game of Thrones books, put it, "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, the man who never reads lives only one." That's how reading has always felt to me. It means entering the imagination or intellect of another human for a time, hanging out, discovering a new perspective on the world. It's different than watching a TV show or a movie, which, for all their merits, are collaborations that require far less involvement from their audience. You can fall asleep and the movie still makes it to the end. Reading a book to the end requires effort.

One of the most important reading journeys of my life was Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, a dense, difficult work, translated into English from the original German, written by  a very smart man. I struggled to concentrate, I read and re-read sections, even entire chapters as I found myself losing focus. By the time I got to the middle chapters in which opposing philosophers -- Settembrini and Naphtha -- engage in long-winded and convoluted debates on topics I didn't really understand, let alone care about, I began to despair. In frustration, one morning, I started reading the book again from the beginning. In the afternoons, I would pick up where I had previously left off, so that I was, in effect, reading the book twice at once. Reading in this way, I was finally able to "get" the book: it's architectural, intellectual, and artistic beauty became clear to me, but it was only accessible through sharing the "ordeal" with the characters. There are those who insist that it's "no sin" to put down a book that bores you, and I have left some books unfinished, but I've also learned that many of my most profound reading experiences -- Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Middlemarch -- involved some slogging and plodding alongside the characters in order to get to endings that, and I quote my father-in-law on this, "move my soul."

I'm currently on a reading tear, having finished four books, back-to-back, in which there was no slogging at all -- A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch, Φ (Phi), Guilo Tononi, The Voice of the Desert, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw (a play, but it reads like a novel). Each one of these books was, in its way, a page turner. I couldn't put them down, nor did I want them to end. 

The latest edition of The Atlantic includes a story entitle "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books." The reporting is mostly anecdotal, but the university professors interviewed are raising concerns that many incoming students are incapable of reading entire books. The article blames technology and the pandemic, but mostly points the finger at the fact that fewer and fewer middle and high school educators are teaching "whole texts," opting instead for excerpts, short stories, and anthologies . . . Of course, they say they are doing this because kids today are too distracted.

Oh, I want to jump on this bandwagon so much, but when I look back on my own history as a reader, my school reading was a separate matter. Of course, I read The Lord of the Flies, A Catcher in the Rye, and The Old Man and the Sea, like most former public school students my age, and I didn't hate them, but it was the reading that I did outside of school that made me a reader. Reading what other people assigned to me was always a slog, and not the self-selected kind.

I want to castigate those teachers who don't expect their students to read entire books, but I also believe it's wrongheaded to think you can spark a love of reading whole books without simultaneously granting children the freedom to choose what they will read. That's what those Scholastic Books (and libraries) did for me. I also read The Hardy Boys and the entire Wizard of Oz series, books that today might be labelled "young adult," a category that at least one expert in The Atlantic article seems to dismiss.

What my Mom understood was that it's the reading that's important, even if it isn't all Jane Austen or Toni Morrison. Any book can become a slog when it's being "taught." I have no doubt that the Harry Potter books will soon find their way onto reading syllabi, if they haven't already, and that will effectively kill them as pleasure reading for an entire generation.

If we want kids to read books, we have to let them be in charge of the books they read. Our local library used to "challenge" kids to read 25 books during the summer. It didn't matter what kind of book and the results were self-reported. The reward? A coupon for a scoop of ice cream at a local parlor. I took great pride in finishing all those books . . . And while I enjoyed my ice cream, that wasn't what made me spend so much of my summer break curled up with books.

I have no doubt that smartphones and whatnot are distractions from reading, but there have always been easy distractions competing with books. I mean, we had the whole of outdoors and all the neighborhood children available to us, which, if we allowed the same free access to today's children, would, I'm certain, be a much bigger lure than any screen. But books actually brought us inside, even on our holidays, because our schools hadn't yet ruined books for us. Books weren't mere schoolroom resources, but rather doorways to freedom.

From the article: "Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader's own. 'A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics . . . Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges our sympathies.' . . . Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey: they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-call deep reading -- sustained immersion in a text -- stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not."

This is why it is important that we read books, entire books, but none of us like reading books we did not choose for ourselves. 

As preschool teachers, most of us read dozens of entire books nearly every day. Children bring books to us, asking us to read them aloud, and we do, and they don't let us get away with only reading an excerpt. They want, as they should, the whole thing. This is the way preschools prepare young children to become readers. Sadly, our elementary, middle-, and high schools have become so obsessed with teaching "academic skills" that they have come to approach books in the same way: not as world's to explore, but as just something else on which children will be judged. That's why the students in the article might be able to "decode words and sentences," but still don't know how to enter into a book, let alone finish it.

If we are serious about raising children who read whole books, we have to let them choose the books they will read, for pleasure, and without judgement.

I'm reminded of an exchange in Shaw's play. A character asserts, "My experience is that one's pleasures don't bear thinking about," to which another character replies, "That is why intellect is so unpopular."

Indeed, I fear that we have systematically removed pleasure from reading by turning it into an academic exercise. That is why it's so unpopular. 

******

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!

A Motivation Problem

I've told this story before, but it bears repeating.

I once randomly met a teacher from a local high school at a social event. I knew that one of my young relatives, then a 15-year-old, attended the school, so naturally I mentioned him.

The teacher shook his head, then said, "I worry about that kid." 

I didn't know the boy well, but I'd been seeing him at family gatherings two or three times a year for over a decade and I'd never noticed anything to worry about. Yes, he was a bit "nerdy," but in the absolutely best sense of that word. I knew him as a boy of passions. It seemed like each time I spoke with him he was enthusiastic about some new hobby or other -- outer space, collecting knives, electric trains, bicycles, playing guitar -- all self-motivated. He was, in a nutshell, the type of kid this play-based educator didn't worry about in the least.

When I asked his teacher for more, he answered that he was "too quiet" and "shut in," that he didn't seem particularly engaged with school, and that he had a "motivation problem."

I countered by telling him about the intellectually curious boy I knew.

"I had no idea," the teacher said, "I wish he'd open up to me!"

As luck would have it, I saw the boy a week or so later, I shared what his teacher had told me, saying, "I think he just wants to know the real you."

The boy grimaced. "I don't want my teachers to know anything about me. If they know what I like, they'll use it against me." He explained, "Whenever teachers know what a kid likes, they try to take it away and use it as, like, a reward for good grades or something." 

In my own mind, I added, Or threaten to take it away as a punishment. 

It was a keen insight. I didn't try to talk him out of it.

I was reminded of him yesterday when a reader commented on one of my posts from earlier this week. Her son's IEP (Individualized Education Program) calls for regular "movement breaks." She's recently learned that his teachers were dangling these mandated breaks as a "reward" for completing this or that assignment. Now, I don't know the law where she lives, but in many places an IEP is a legal document. Withholding movement from anyone should be criminal, but in this case it very well might be.

And lest you think this is a one-off, every day young children are having their recess time -- their free movement time -- taken away or curtailed for the very same reason. One of my former preschool students had his "outdoor time" revoked because, as his teacher said, "He won't sit still in class." Movement is not a choice. It's a necessity. There has never been a scientific study done that finds that holding a body still improves cognitive function. Indeed, the research finds just the opposite: every human ever tested thinks more clearly while their body is in motion. An educator who restricts a child's movement isn't after thinking, they're after obedience, which is thinking's opposite.

As my young relative figured out for himself, standard schools are so addicted to rewards and punishments that they are "worried about" self-directed learners. They are so committed to carrots and sticks that they simply can conceive of a child who is motivated from within. Our schools are so afraid of children actually thinking for themselves that they treat even that -- free thought -- as a kind of stimulus-response behaviorist tool. Once you've obeyed me, I'll let you think. When I ring this bell, you will drool.

What an incredible waste of childhood. What an incredible waste of life. The last time I touched base with my young relative he was off on his motorcycle for a weekend of rock climbing with his girlfriend. 

I've never taught a child who was not a self-motivated learner. I've never been tempted by rewards and punishments. Our play-based preschools are models of the way schools could be. 

******

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!

Allowing Ourselves to Be Awed

Yesterday morning, a pair of well-fed coyotes trotted past my open door, no more than 10 feet from where I sat writing a blog post. They didn't turn to look my way, although they must have smelled my presence. It was only after they passed out of sight that I noticed the shouting of the ravens, a half dozen or more, working together to drive the intruders away.

I hear the ravens every morning during these spring days. They're always going on about something, but I guess I've learned to ignore them because even as they sounded the alarm about predators in the neighborhood, I didn't take note until the danger was literally upon my doorstep. Indeed, I really only attended to their cawing once the coyotes, the danger, was gone.

Or not gone. They had passed from my sight, but I knew they remained nearby because the ravens' intensity didn't abate. Not only did I hear their raven voices, but also the fierce flapping of their wings and the frantic scratching of their talons on my roof as they took turns dive-bombing the canines who must have been along the side of my house without windows. Then one of the coyotes reappeared, not running, but definitely hurrying, once more passing where I sat without looking my way, ravens with wingspans as wide as the coyote was long chasing after it.

It's peak nesting season for the ravens. There is a nest in a tree outside my backdoor. They have been exhibiting courtship and territorial defensive behaviors for months now, all of which they do noisily, which probably explains why I've learned to ignore them.

The ravens, of course, were protecting something far more important than mere territory. They were protecting their loved ones. My heart, of course, was with them.

Shortly after the coyotes had been driven off, I pulled our dog away from the remnants of what I took to be a rabbit not far from the front door, bits of fur still clinging to it. Maybe the ravens weren't protecting their young. After all, if there are any fledglings, they're at the top of a tree, out of the reach of any coyote, which, of course, the ravens knew. Any danger to their young will come from above -- a hawk or a mocking bird. Maybe, after all, they were harassing the coyotes for a share in the kill. 

The local rabbit population has been robust this spring, which would explain the arrival of coyotes, who normally avoid our dog-infested neighborhood, to thin the herd.

The cycle of life is as brutal as it is beautiful.

I've shared in this post a few "facts," but most of what I've written here is what George Bernard Shaw called metabiology. I've engaged in speculative reason about animal behavior from the perspective of a man sitting on a sofa. A proper scientist would likely be disappointed with me as I've cobbled together a story about nature that borrows from observed phenomenon, of course, but also includes such non-scientific concepts as "loved ones," "brutality," and "beauty." But I've gone even more off the rails than that: I've engaged with the mystique of nature.

"Just as the realm of speculative reason lies beyond the facts of science," writes naturalist and author James Wood Krutch, "so also, beyond the realm of speculative reason, lies the realm of emotion. To me that realm is no less important than the realm of fact or the realm of speculative thought, though to discuss what one experiences in the realm of emotion one must either depreciate it and explain it away, as the pure rationalist does, or one must accept what one can only call the mystique as opposed to the rational of the human being's intercourse with the universe around him."

Krutch wrote this some 70 years ago. He wrote in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, blending science, personal experience, speculation, philosophy, and emotion, to create an understanding of nature that places awe, joy, and beauty at the forefront. He writes, "If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either."

It's a perspective that borders on what "pure rationalists" mock as pantheism, a belief that the unity of the universe is, for want of a better word, god. 

I've had the privilege of having spent thousands of hours observing and playing with children in natural places, not to mention amongst the cedars, lilacs, insects, raccoons, squirrels and other living things that shared our urban playground. We even once had a bald eagle devour its prey in some overhead branches, showering us with what I believe were pigeon feathers. There amidst the children, I experienced the "mystique of intercourse with the universe," the joy, the awe and wonder, the beauty, which includes likewise those things we sometimes mistake for brutality.

It's only when modern humans are involved that brutality comes into it. The eagles and coyotes may kill, but when they do they are culling the weak, the aged, the sick, and unborn. Our human sadness is mitigated when we know that this ultimately strengthens the herd, helping to insure that the strongest genes survive and that suffering is minimized. They take only what they need for this day. Then the ravens and other scavengers ensure that nothing of those sacrificed lives is wasted. That bit of bone and fur was gone when returned to look for it a few moments later. 

Modern humans, however, shun the "easy prey," opting instead to hunt and kill the strong, weakening the herd, while often taking much more than they need. That is brutality. 

It is the brutality of a consumer society, one that attempts to exist outside the cycle of life.

One of our modern heirs to Krutch, Leopold, and Thoreau, is botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer who writes, "In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness."

That is what I witness when I'm with children in nature: fullness, gratitude, contentment. Our schools are products of a consumer society and as such the self-styled rationalists, the people who never enter the realm of the mystical, insist on the strictly "practical" -- ciphering and spelling and shaping proper letters. As Krutch puts it, things confined exclusively to that which is 'relevant to the child's daily life.'" This too is a brutality, a severance, one that leads inevitably to emptiness. The economy might need that, but human beings do not.

"Perhaps the mind is not merely a blank slate upon which anything may be written," writes Krutch. "Perhaps it reaches out spontaneously toward what can nourish either intelligence or imagination. Perhaps it is part of nature and, without being taught, shares nature's intentions.

"How could the part be greater than the whole? How can nature's meaning come wholly from man when is is only part of that meaning? . . . Only in nature do we have being." And the simple beauty is that all we need do to satisfy our emptiness is to open our doors, go outside, and allow ourselves to be awed.

****** 

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!

Here We Go Again: Blaming Everything But Standardized Schooling

"Students are not where they need to be or where we want them to be." This is a quote from the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics regarding the National Assessment of Educational Progress report released in January.

"Generation Alpha" is what we're calling children born since 2010, which covers everyone from 0-15, the group that is currently being "schooled." I've been in education long enough now to know that this concern about students not being "where they need to be" is an alarm that's sounded with each generation. The problem, of course, is that their needs have nothing to do with it. They really never have when it comes to the core mission of standard schools. This talk of children's needs is just school-ish lip service. The important part of the commissioner's quote, the true part, is that students aren't where the testing regime (the "we" in this quote) "want them to be." 

Here are a few other quotes from standard school education types included in a recent Newsweek article hyping the Generation Alpha fears:

"There's a noticeable shift in student engagement and accountability."

"Many students today appear apathetic and disconnected from their own learning."

There has been "a noticeable change in student focus and engagement in school."

In other words, our youth are reacting to schooling the way they have reacted since the beginning compulsory mass schooling, which is, let's face it, about adults telling them "where they need to be" without bothering to consult them. It's the same tired, old story of curmudgeonly "school marms" humbugging over the youth of today. 

In this article, the "experts" quoted (all of whom are, not incidentally, major TikTok creators) are mostly blaming Covid, a lack of "consequences" and "accountability" (e.g., punishment), and technology. No one directly blames the parents, although there is some grumbling about kids using technology at home for "entertainment" after spending "their entire learning day" on screens. (I hope this is some kind of exaggeration because if young children are spending their entire "learning day" on iPads, that is gross malpractice.) Likewise, no one quoted in this article specifically blames the children themselves, although it's just beneath the surface.

"When students learn that minimal effort still yields promotion and that they can be chronically absent without consequence, they stop seeing the value in showing up -- mentally or physically." This is the school-ish mindset in a nutshell: learning is hard; the point of school isn't learning, but rather earning the grades and posting the scores that lead to "promotion"; and the only way to get kids to jump through our hoops, to get where they "need to be," is through carrots and sticks. 

I blame the schools. 

I blame these TikTok teachers. I blame the commissioner and her tests and data collection and standardization. The closest anyone in this Newsweek article comes to suggesting that maybe, in some way, school itself is to blame for the apathy and lack of engagement is to say, "It's not about abandoning tradition -- it's about adapting it." 

No, it is about abandoning it, at least if we are going to do something about the centuries long problem with lack of student engagement. There has never been a golden age of children enthusiastically loving standard schools. It has always been a bore. And there is nothing "traditional" about schooling, which is why I use the term "standard" when discussing what they do. For most of human history "school" was life itself and that doesn't bore anyone. It has, however, become a "tradition" to sit children in desks and inflict our "wants" on them with little concern about their wants or needs, then complain when they aren't interested in living the first two decades of their lives in a state of forced labor, obedience, and irrelevance. It's an entire system built on the adage, "I'm doing this for your own good." And as we've all learned, when someone threatens us with our "own good" we're well advised to run like the wind.

There is so much ignorance and lack of insight in articles like this that pop up in a cycle as predictable as the sunrise. One of these TikTok educators complains about screens while at the same time noting that his school has given every student an iPad. What the hell? He throws up his hands, "I do not think we were ready for the negative impact . . ." Who knew, right?

Students have never been enthusiastic about standardized top-down curricula and testing. No human has ever thrived in an environment of constant judgment and assessment.

I have never experienced the problems these educators are reporting. I have always, generation after generation, taught children who were enthusiastic about what they were learning, who worked hard, and who easily set their screens aside because what they got to do in school was even more engaging. That's because they get to play, especially outdoors, and to take charge of their own learning, which is how Mother Nature has designed us to learn, a fact that standard schools refuse to acknowledge, except perhaps by inflicting more adult-directed crap like "movement breaks" or worksheets featuring cartoon characters. 

In an environment of self-directed learning, learning is its own reward. It is always relevant and motivating because it is derived from life itself.

"Many students struggle to find value in traditional subjects," says one TikTok educator, "unless there's a direct, tangible payoff. If they can't see how reading or writing will translate into a paycheck or immediate benefit, they're often uninterested. Intrinsic motivation -- the kind that keeps you learning even when something gets hard -- is fading." 

The ignorance in this statement is astounding. She cannot see beyond the framework of rewards and punishments, of carrots and sticks. She obviously doesn't even know what "intrinsic motivation" means. She seems to be complaining that Generation Alpha isn't responding to her punishments and rewards -- Skinnerian external motivators. And clearly, she has no idea what might actually be relevant to a child. It certainly isn't a paycheck.

If you missed this article, don't worry. Another one just like it, full of the same handwringing will be coming around soon enough, blaming everything but standard schooling itself. After all, Newsweek is in the business of eyeballs, as are TikTok creators, and complaining about "kids today" has a proven track record that goes back at least to the Ancient Greeks.

"With the way social media algorithms work, students are being fed nonstop content that's not only entertaining but also specifically tailored to their interests," complains another scold. That is exactly what play-based or self-directed learning does as well, albeit without the necessity for screens or media corporations. This is where intrinsic motivation comes from. It's the way real, deep, relevant learning has always happened, since long before standard schools came along and replaced it with tedium, carrots, and sticks.

Let the TikTok-ers humbug. The rest of us will go out and play.

******

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 Height of Wisdom

It wasn't that long ago that the best and the brightest of Western science were convinced that "lesser" animals, a definition that included non-native Europeans, were not capable of feeling pain. Oh sure, it was argued, they may look and act like they are suffering, but the "scientific fact" of the day was that this was merely an instinctive response to stimuli that didn't reflect any sort of internal state. After all, only white humans had the capacity for the kind of conscious and individualized thought necessary to perceive such things as pleasure or pain.

This "science" was used as a rationale for all manner of cruelty. From what I can tell, this disbelief in the inner life of others is unique in human culture. Every indigenous tradition with which I'm familiar grants consciousness (or in some traditions a soul), not just to animals, but to plants, fungi, and indeed, all living things, up to, and including, the earth itself. Indeed, as a child meditating upon ant hills in our backyard, I was convinced that I was witnessing evidence of intelligence. 

One of the first big words I learned, however, was "anthropomorphism" (attributing human characteristics to animals), and it was something that intelligent people avoided doing. But anyone with eyes, anyone with a heart, anyone with an ounce of compassion can see that the so-called "science" on this was, and continues to be, horrifically wrong. Of course, the consciousness of my dog is different than my own, but to deny her capacity for intelligence, emotion, and intention, is a stupidity that even a two-year-old can see through.

In April of last year, The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness was announced at a conference at NYU. As of today, it's been signed by 573 scientists. All it does is declare that maybe, possibly, if looked at in a certain light, at least some other species seem to have the capacity for conscious experience and that this should be considered when making decisions involving animals. Naturally, the other 8 million or so scientists in the world consider this to be grotesque anthropomorphism. The declaration includes ten examples of "recent" scientific findings that support their point of view which you can find by clicking here, but my point is that "science" isn't a synonym for "facts" or "common sense." 

I grew up largely in suburban neighborhoods. Most of my first-hand experience with living animals was therefore with pets, insects, birds, and the occasional reptile. Nevertheless, my early childhood experiences with animals taught me, unequivocally, that they are more than instinct driven automatons, a fact that most scientists, it appears, do not accept as fact. My science teachers tried to disabuse me of my anthropomorphism, but nothing they ever told me has caused me to doubt my own first-hand experiences. "The science just isn't there" they claim. Many even scoff at those of us who know what humans have always known until the so-called European Enlightenment made Westerners feel superior to the rest of the world's "barbarians."

Science is one way of understanding the world, but it's far from the only way. When Walt Whitman proclaimed, "I am large, I contain multitudes" he was expressing a fact about life itself that science is only just now getting around to "proving." When the ancient Tlingit spoke of orca-people and bear-people they were expressing knowledge that Western science still doesn't know. When I stand with preschoolers releasing painted lady butterflies we have observed metamorphosing from caterpillars, they call out, "Bye-bye butterfly," demonstrating understanding that surpasses that of modern science. The truth is that most of what we call "cutting edge science" is really just a new way of looking at what some of us at least have already known. The arrogance of science is that its proofs and methods are the only way of deriving facts from the natural world.

I don't intend anything I've written here to mean that I dismiss science in the way many scientists dismiss other ways of knowing, but rather to make the point that science, and especially Western science, does not hold a monopoly on truth.

“When we are awake," writes neuroscientist Guilio Tononi, "and our eyes are open, they tell the mind what it ought to see . . . but they don’t do the seeing, no, that’s something for the mind alone. For even though the eyes may be shut, as when asleep, or injured . . . the mind still sees, and of its own accord decides what’s to be seen.”

One of my hobbies is to try to understand human consciousness. It’s not necessary to be up to speed on the latest neuroscience in order to be a good educator, especially since the “latest”, by the time it gets to us dilletantes, is already outdated. But I find it fascinating that so many scientists on the cutting edge of research resort to art and poetry in order to explain what they think is true. Tononi, for instance, the developer of the integrated information theory of consciousness (a theory that in some ways "proves" much more ancient knowledge), has written a book called Phi (Φ) based on Italian poet Dante’s The Divine Comedy with a fictionalized Galileo as the protagonist. 

The very notion that our minds, not our eyes, are responsible for seeing is mind-blowing. It’s as if reality is too complex and beautiful to be reduced to mere language or the methodology of Western science. Sometimes it can only be understood through art. Indeed, quite often artists (e.g., Walt Whitman) and especially indigenous artists (e.g., Australian aboriginal dot paintings) reveal “sacred knowledge” long before scientists even knew where or how to look. 

And, gloriously, we can even discover this phenomenon in the artwork of our own preschoolers, an example of which I shared last week.

Among the legacies of Western science is the notion that adult minds are "superior" to the minds of children. There are differences, of course, but to rank minds, to place adult comprehension over that of young children, to place human comprehension over that of animals, goes against lived experience. The greatest knowledge is understanding that truth, or reality, is a creation of perspectives, not competing with one another, but rather each providing another piece, a reflection, an amplification. Truth is large. It contains multitudes. And each time we add a perspective to our understanding, we ourselves become larger and more multitudinous. And there is always a new perspective with which to play. That is the height of wisdom.

******

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!

What Do You Do?

I spent the evening at a Memorial Day weekend barbecue in the company of several people I had never met before. We asked one another "What do you do?" which is our culture's shorthand for "What to you spend your weekdays working at, which is ultimately the question, "How do you go about acquiring food, clothing, and shelter?"

This dawned on me when one of my new acquaintances answered, "I don't do anything. I'm retired, just living off the fat of the land."

Of course, this man spends his days doing something. As we chatted, he mentioned grandchildren, golf, and gardening, he talked of travel and hiking. All of these things meet my definition of "doing," yet in his mind, in our collective mind, he's an idle man. In this, he is very much like most of the children I've known.

Indeed, this may well be the most decisive dividing line between children and adults. Kids just don't take work all that seriously, whereas for most of us grown-ups it's the center of our lives. Even if we love our jobs, we envy the kids their freedom, meanwhile we grind our teeth and wring our hands when they show any sign of being lazy, which is to say unproductive. We gripe that today's youth feel "entitled," that they don't seem to understand that they must work for their food, clothing, and shelter. We worry that our children are directionless, that they lack grit, or that they are more interested in their friends than their school work. These are all concerns, I would assert, related to answering the question "What do you do?"

Of course, in many cases it is illegal for children to contract to do proper work so we assign them chores -- some parents even pay their kids for completing them -- or we re-define school as a work place with grades as the paycheck. It's not the same, and the kids know it, because at the end of the day, they can't exchange their grades for their basic necessities. They see our re-framing for what it is: a flat-out lie. The consequence for not getting your chores or school work done is, at worst, punishment, whereas actual productive work, the kind of thing we say when someone asks us adults what we do, is life or death stuff.

Years ago, I went through a phase where I consciously avoided mentioning my profession when someone asked, "What do you do? I would say, "I read books" or "I like to cook," and my fellow adults would almost always follow up by asking, "Are you retired?"

It seems so natural to define ourselves by our work that we forget that for most humans throughout most of our history, work, the process through which we acquire the necessities of life, held a relatively insignificant place in the scheme of things. Marshall Sahlins' highly influential 1968 essay "The Original Affluent Society" made the point that despite claims to the contrary, technological advancement does not liberate us from work. Indeed, the story of modern man is one of spending more and more of our waking hours working. What we today call hunter-gatherers spent, typically, no more than two to four hours a day acquiring material necessities. Even Medieval serfs worked fewer hours in a day than we do and had far more holidays. One could argue that nearly every technological, political, or social development over he course of the past several centuries has resulted in us consuming more of our life in order to acquire food, clothing, and shelter.

I'm a big fan of food, clothing, and shelter, but if that's what it's all about, if that's all I "do," then what's the point? This is why we envy children. Life, as we've created it, is increasingly all work and no play. This is also why we worry that our youth won't have the grit or maturity required of our all-work-all-the-time society. What if they are so entitled that they think they get to continue playing?

This is all, however, just a story we tell ourselves. As David Graeber and David Wengrow write in their book The Dawn of Everything: "By framing the stages of human development largely around the ways people went about acquiring food, men like Adam Smith . . . inevitably put work -- previously considered a somewhat plebeian concern -- centre stage. There was a simple reason for this. It allowed them to claim that their own societies were self-evidently superior, a claim that -- at the time -- would have been much harder to defend had they used any criterion other than productive labor."

This is the story of colonization. Everywhere Europeans went, they found people who placed art, community, relationships, and play at the center of their lives rather than work. Instead of learning from them, we labeled them as backwards and lazy and sought to correct these flaws. In many ways, this is exactly what we do today with childhood, colonizing it with our grim story about work. We tell them, meanly, that school is their job, that learning is a matter of toil, that they can only play when they have done their work. But as we all know, the work is never done. For most children, when we open the door to school, we close the window of play, allowing it to only re-open again decades later, at life's sunset, the only time when it is acceptable to do "nothing" with our lives.

"What do you do?" We tend to relegate the question to holiday barbecues, but really, isn't it the question for every day. Isn't this the question we should be asking ourselves as we awake each morning? What will I do? There are valid answers other than work. We see it every day at preschool.

******

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!