Imaginative Play is Thinking Play

Imaginative play is the backbone of most of the play we see in our preschool classrooms. It might be making art or building with blocks or playing house or putting on costumes and creating entire worlds. It's the opposite of our cultural stereotypes of "school" because it's not about "just the facts." On the contrary, it's about counter-factual thinking, which is, as it sounds, using our imaginations to create something that isn't, in fact, real.

They use their imaginations to paint a "spooky ghost with spider legs" or build a Lego laser or bake a pan of play dough muffins. They play games in which they are mommies or baddies or baby snow leopards. Sometimes critics of play-based learning point this out as a nothing more than a silly waste of time, but nearly everything around us that isn't nature is a product of counter-factual thinking. Someone had to first imagine a vehicle that propelled itself with a motor before it could ever become a reality.

Imaginative play is more than invention, of course. It's also how children come to understand their world. When they pretend to cook they are exploring, from the inside, something that is obviously important to understand. Dress up play is a gateway to storytelling and ultimately literacy. It's also a part of how we develop empathy and understanding of others. 

The imaginative play of children often seems dreamlike as they cobble together their play from fragments of past experiences, loose parts, compromise, and agreement. In imaginative play there can be two queens, talking gorillas, and healthy cookies. An orange rind can become a rainbow. A stick can be . . . well, almost anything.

Yesterday, I wrote of our memories as something we construct, or as experimental psychologist Frederic Bartlett put it, an "imaginative reconstruction," born anew, altered, adapted, and improved, each time we evoke them. He also argued that imagination is a product of memory. Indeed, the process of assembling bits and pieces into a cohesive product of imagination is, in our brain, remarkably similar to the process we use to call up memories. 

As neuroscientists Charan Ranganath puts it, "the hippocampus and the DMN (default mode network) . . . function at the crossroads between memory and imagination by allowing us to extract the ingredients from past experiences and recombine them into new creations. In other words, our brains are not memorization organs, but rather thinking organs, and imagination, not being a silly waste of time at all, stands at the center of it.

When we attempt to make children stop playing in order to force-feed them academics we are, in a pathetic adult-centric way, attempting to control their memories, the raw material they have at their disposal for thinking. And what dull stuff it is. Foolishly, we declare that all children must be forced to know this or that, ignoring the fact that our brains have evolved to be singular, to take in meaningful information and transform it in unique and idiosyncratic ways (i.e., by thinking) into something else. That is the entire story of human evolution.

And that is exactly what children are doing as they engage in their imaginative play. They are making memories and meaning, meaning and memories, in a creative cognitive process, which is, at the end of the day, what our brains are meant to do.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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!

"Well, He Won't Do That Again"

"Well, he won't do that again."

We've all said, or at least thought it. And more often than not (but not always) we're right. Like when a child goofs around on the edge of a fountain on a cold day and falls in. We expect that unpleasant experience to "teach" them a lesson. At least, we hope, it's less likely that they're going to need us to caution them about it the next time. Either they're going to avoid it or they're going to use the information they gathered the next time to exercise a bit more caution

This doesn't mean that we don't care about their tears. Of course, we comfort the child. Dry them off. Get them new clothes. But we don't need to add to the unpleasantness by attempting in our heavy-handed adultness to "drive the point home" with a lot of "So what did we learn today?" style scolding. That just shifts the focus from the actual lessons learned to whether or not the adult is pleased with them, which is a different thing. 

In his book Why We Remember, neuroscientist Charan Rangnath, writes, "We are wired to learn from our mistakes and challenges -- a phenomenon called error-driven learning." It's learning that derives from actively doing (playing on the edge of a fountain) rather than passively memorizing (listening to a safety lecture). If a child really wants to play by the fountain, no amount of our cautioning will teach them as effectively as that error.

Memory is a strange thing. Most of what you will do today will never become part of your memory. The boy who fell in the fountain will likely never fully recall the events leading up to his fall. He will, if necessary, be able to construct a "memory" involving walking to the bus stop with his classmates and riding to the Wooden Boat Center, but that will mostly be his brain determining what "must have" happened rather than what "actually happened." 

Our brains have not evolved for literal recall, which is why we struggle with things like remembering the name of that movie with that actor from that other movie. Or as cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness."

No, what this boy will remember of the events leading up to his fall will be largely cobbled together from what is called his semantic memory, which is "our ability to recall facts of knowledge about the world, regardless of when and where that information was learned" and applied "across a range of contexts." In other words, other field trips and bus rides will play at least as large a role in what he remembers.

When he recalls the fall itself, however, and perhaps the immediate aftermath (the shivering, the discomfort, the consequences), that will be called up by his episodic memory, which is "the kind of remembering that allows us to call back, and even reexperience, events from the past." It's still a construction, but one that requires us to "mentally return to a specific place and time." Episodic memory is what we generally refer to when we talk about "our memories." (Although, this too is a construction, or an "imaginative reconstruction.")

Much of what passes for education in our schools involves training children to do something that isn't natural to the human mind, which is precise recall, usually assessed by testing. The problem, as Rangnath puts it is that "tests are optimized for last-minute learning that enhances short-term performance at the expense of retention." And as we know, most of what we store in our short-term memory is gone within days, if not hours.

"Lasting benefits come from error-driven learning, during which we are not always going to be successful," writes Rangnath. "We learn and retain more from the struggle of pushing ourselves to the edges . . . than we do by memorizing and regurgitating on command." This is a big part of why play-based learning, which could really just be another name for error-driven learning, is so powerful.

"Perhaps," concludes Rangnath, "instead of rewarding success, we should normalize mistakes and failures and incentivize constant improvement. Rather than emphasizing mastery, we need to celebrate the struggle -- working to learn, rather than to prove you have learned something."

In this case, he's writing about his university students. Fascinatingly, he is not opposed to testing, but rather believes that we do testing in the wrong way. In his work, he uses tests not as a foundation for grades, but rather as learning tools in which his students are free to be wrong. He's found that "when we look under the hood of the hippocampus . . . we see that the benefits of testing do not come from making mistakes per se, but rather from challenging yourself to pull up what you have learned." The more often we do that, the more likely it is that we will be able to recall it.

"Well, he won't do that again."

The boy tested his world. He fell into cold water on a cold day. The consequences tell him it was a mistake. But this is different than a university test with its precise answers. As adults we might think there is a "correct answer," that the boy has learned to never again goof around on the edge of a fountain. We may even try to drive that point home, but that may not be how he sees it. His urge to goof around on the edge of the fountain may remain, but what he has done, through error-driven learning, is gain information that will make it less likely that he fall in the future.

He may still hop up on that fountain if, say, it's a warm, sunny day when the consequences of a fall won't be so uncomfortable

He may still hop up on that fountain if, say, he feels he has developed a better sense of balance.

He may still hop on that fountain if, say, the adults turn their backs, because, at the end of the day, he was curious about testing a different kind of limit.

Perhaps the worst thing we do in education is make children afraid of being wrong. They worry about bad grades, adult disapproval, or even punishment, instead of being free to struggle toward their own learning. Error-driven learning is play-based learning. It's not the successes that matter, but the pursuit of success that gets us out of bed in the morning. And that's where the learning is.

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The Preschool Autism Summit is going to be great! Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I can't wait to dig into all 30 of these sessions. I know I'm going to learn a lot . . . And I know I'm going to be a better teacher for it. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for 3 days of outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass right here.

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!

Making Our Preschools Worthy of Autistic Children

Play-based preschool should be the default. Research consistently tells us that young children -- all young children -- need play and lots of it for both intellectual and healthy social-emotional development. 

Unfortunately, ignorance and fear continue to drive too many parents to seek out factory model schooling for their children in the misguided hope that they'll get a leg up on the competition for getting into Harvard or Stanford. These settings, in contrast to play-based settings, do not serve all young children, which means that kids who need to move their bodies, who need to learn with their hands and hearts, who need to be outdoors, who need to learn with all their senses, who need to followed their curiosity, and whose neurotype doesn't match up with command-and-control models, wind up being a "problem." 

The superpower of play-based learning is that it adapts to the child rather than forcing children to adapt to the school. This is why so many of these "misfits" thrive with us. I can't tell you how many children wound up at Woodland Park after having been essentially expelled from other programs. And many of those children over the years were autistic.

When I first started teaching, I didn't really understand autism, even though, looking back, I can see that I worked with dozens of children who were likely autistic, but since play-based theory requires that we adapt our environments to support children in their self-directed learning, these kids never showed up as "problems." Indeed, these children were some of my most important teachers.

Back then, about 1 in 150 children were identified as autistic. In the intervening two decades, autism research and awareness has had its day. Today, about 1 in 30 children will be identified as autistic. This is because we've come to increasingly understand autism as a spectrum of traits, with each autistic person possessing a unique pattern of strengths, challenges, and support needs. And that can't be standardized for the "generic autistic child," because such a human doesn't exist. In other words, the infinite flexibility of play-based learning makes it the right approach for all children.

There continues to be a great deal of research and debate in the autism community, which is normal when the science is moving so rapidly. It can be confusing for classroom educators to keep up, especially given the amount of misinformation that's out there.

This is why I was so eager to take part in the upcoming Preschool Autism Summit, July 12-15.  This free online gathering features presentations from 30 experts, bringing together the latest research and approaches to working with autistic preschoolers and their families. My session is called Making Our Play-Based Preschools Worthy of Autistic Children and I will also be taking part in a live panel discussion. 

Please join us!

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The Preschool Autism Summit is going to be great! Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I can't wait to dig into all 30 of these sessions. I know I'm going to learn a lot . . . And I know I'm going to be a better teacher for it. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for 3 days of outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass right here.

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 Deep Sense of Who You Are"

As a child, my family moved around a lot. I'd called four places home before my first day of kindergarten. I attended three different elementary schools and three different middle schools. My parents, themselves, had grown up in a small, tightly-knit farming community in which everyone knew everyone. To this day, they are still in touch with some of their childhood friends. In contrast, I'm in touch with none of mine. In fact, I can't even remember the names of some of the kids I once called "best friend."

I sometimes wonder if I've missed out on something, especially when my wife gets together with her lifelong besties, but the experience of being the "new kid" is so much a part of who I am that I can't really imagine what it would be like to share such a long history with anyone other than family members. My greatest life lesson, I think, was how to make new friends wherever I go.

For this I credit my mother. Mom was determined that we would have friends wherever we went. If the new neighbors didn't show up on the front porch with casseroles, she would make her own casseroles and show up on theirs. She went out of her way to connect with other families with kids. As we got older, she signed us up for team sports wherever we moved, not as a way to learn the dubious lessons of competition, but rather so that we would have the opportunity to make friends. 

Not everyone enjoys sports, but fortunately we did, and throughout my childhood, my social life tended to emerge not through school, but rather through baseball, soccer, football, basketball, and swimming. Of course, there was competition when another team would come to play, but the core of the experience was daily practice where we built relationships with one another around the cooperation of teamwork. There was never any expectation that we would go on to become professional athletes, nor were we graded or tested. The idea was to have fun with friends.

Some time ago, before I began my journey as an educator, in the spirit of paying it forward, I volunteered to coach what is called a "select" baseball team comprised of middle schoolers only to find that youth sports have changed in horrible ways. These kids and their parents already had their eyes on the big leagues, or missing that, at least college scholarships. It was an unpleasant experience for me, but even more so for the kids who, frankly, demonstrated very little joy, and even less friendship. This wasn't the baseball I grew up knowing. When I tried to lighten things up, parents would pull me aside to let me know that they appreciated the sentiment, but really, they didn't want their child to "miss the opportunity," so, you know, knuckle down. Ugh.

One of the foundations upon which our educational system is built is the myth that we live in a "competitive society" so we must get the kids ready for that. Now, I've never been a stock market day trader, nor have I had the misfortune of being part of a corporate hierarchy. I've never been a professional athlete or a contestant on RuPaul's Drag Race. Indeed, the only time that I found myself in genuine, ongoing competition with my fellow humans was during my time in school and only then when I began to understand that I was being judged (graded, tested) in comparison to my classmates. But outside of school, I've found that competition beyond the occasional friendly board game, is not a meaningful part of my life.

Mister Rogers once said, "You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are."

Competition only gives us, at best, a superficial sense of who we are. It teaches us that if we aren't a winner then we're a loser. But even more harmful is competition's lesson that our fellow humans are impediments, stepping stones, and rivals. It makes "things" of them, it dehumanizes them, and it ultimately prevents and perverts our relationships. What my mother knew was that the only way one can ever discover the key to that deeper sense of self is through relationships.

For the most part, those of us who work with young children understand what my mother understood: relationships are the foundation for any life worth living. When we observe children at play, we see that they are driven, not to competition, but rather to cooperation and teamwork. That is where they find joy. When competition emerges, it always does so as both a threat to their games as well as their relationships. In these cases, when we allow the children to solve their own problems, the unpleasantly competitive games either come to an end as children exercise their freedom to quit, or, impressively, they scramble to remove the prospect of winners and losers, restoring the cooperative balance to their game. 

This, not competition, is the reality I've discovered everywhere I've gone in life. It's inhuman systems, like conventional schooling, that create the illusion that competition is everywhere. When it's just us humans playing together, the only thing that matters are our relationships, built through cooperation and teamwork. And through that our deep sense of self emerges as the only guide we will ever need to make choices that will bring us joy.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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!

Dear Grown-Ups

The 5-6 year olds Abby works with in Bellingham, Washington wrote this wonderful letter:

Dear Grown-Ups,

Kids need you to know:

We can jump off tiny waterfalls.

We can use shovels and real tools.

We can help you

We can do hard things

We can make breakfast in the morning

You can trust us more than you think

We need time to play

We need playdates

We need time to slow down

Please stop hydrating us all the time

Please stop talking so much sometimes

We can hear you

Our ideas matter

We have cool ideas

We deserve to make some of our own decisions

Please listen when we say no

Please treat us properly not just boss us

Sometimes we don't want help

Sometimes we want to picture it ourselves

We can touch thorns without getting spiked

We can find a way to reach things high up

Magic is real

We love you

And also:

Say yes more!

Love,

The Kids

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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!

Practicing Courage

A little over a week ago, my wife Jennifer shook me awake shortly after midnight. "Someone is outside!" 

Sure enough, there was person just outside our bedroom window, which is a glass slider, dressed in black from head-to-toe, including a balaclava covering his face. Classic "bad guy" attire. I banged on the window, shouting, "Get out of here! Get out of here!" He glanced my way, but otherwise ignored me as he went through our stuff.

As Jennifer called 911, I ducked into the closet where I keep a baseball bat. For the better part of four decades, I've joked that this was our "security system," but this was the first time I'd resorted to it. I returned to the window, hoping that the sight of me wielding a bat would suffice. I banged on the glass again, warning him we were on the phone with the police. He completely ignored me as he moved about looking, I assume, for something to steal. I wouldn't have cared so much if he'd just taken something and run off, but his continued, unconcerned presence felt dangerous. 

I waited until he moved away from the door, then flung it open and stepped outside. Jennifer later told me I "leapt" out shouting a fierce line from the Quentin Tarantino movie we'd watched together before going to bed. I don't remember that. All I knew was that I needed to be ferocious and loud. 

Over the years, I've occasionally imaged how I'd use that bat to protect my family, but the reality was something else. Instead of backing away or running off, the man came toward me, taunting, "I'm sooo scared." In that moment, I recognized the situation I was in. There was a very real chance that he would wrest control of the bat from me. In a flash, I realized that my only hope was to swing as hard as I could. 

I've played a lot of baseball in my life (hence the bat) and I put everything I had into it, aiming for his head. His hands came up protectively, but I could also see that he meant to grab the bat. Fortunately for both of us he withdrew his hands and dodged away only to then immediately take another step back toward me. But I was ready, bat poised. He took a couple steps back into the lawn, staying out of reach, then began to dance about a bit, again taunting, "I'm sooo scared. I'm sooo scared."

I know I spoke to him. Probably something like, "The police are on their way." Finally, he danced off, then cockily, over his shoulder, he called out, "Have a nice night!"

I imagine that some of you, having read this, are thinking, "Well, that was stupid" or "Teacher Tom got lucky." You might even be thinking, "Good thing he didn't have a gun." And you're not wrong. But still . . .

The Ancient Greeks, and Plato in particular, identified what they called the four "cardinal virtues": wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage. In our psychological age, we tend to think in terms of temperament, our innate tendencies, but the ancients spent more time considering character, those qualities we cultivate.

The interesting thing about these virtues is that they all exist at the mid-point of a continuum. In the case of courage, it stands between the extremes of cowardliness and rashness. It might have all gone terribly wrong, but had I stayed safely inside shaking my fist, I suspect I'd not be feeling so good about myself. And I do feel good about myself. I've felt particularly alive for the past week or so. One after another, my neighbors have told me that I was both a fool and a hero. 

Goethe wrote, "Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." I've been feeling the reality of that.

We tend to avoid talking about "virtues" in the modern world. That's probably because Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas adopted and adapted Greek philosophy for theological purposes and in our secular age, especially in our schools, we steer clear of anything that smacks of religious indoctrination.

That said, we continue to value wisdom, justice, and temperance, even if we don't use those labels, while courage is something that's been, in many ways, commandeered by the kind of machismo found in movie action heroes. It's almost embarrassing to talk about courage. Even writing this, I worry that I'm coming off as boastful.

I'm not sharing this story here to encourage anyone else. In fact, I've already talked one neighbor out of purchasing a bat of her own and told others that I'd never do it again. I'm telling this story because I see how narrow our definition of courage has become. As the Ancients understood it, courage is that trait that's called for whenever we face uncertainty. It's not an absence of fear or doubt, but rather, an action in the face of fear and doubt. When a child climbs a tree, when they ask another child to play with them, when they attempt new things, they are being courageous. And each act of courage leads to another. That's where the magic is.

None of us are courageous, but rather we practice courage. It doesn't mean that we must all take up bats to chase away intruders, but rather that when we're faced with uncertainty our best bet is to swing as hard as we can. It might not always go to play, but the more we practice, as with all the virtues, the better we get at it. This is what our children are doing as they play together, practicing courage and discovering the genius, power, and magic it brings with it.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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 Lively Alert Fearless Curiosity of Children

Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as one of the "godfathers of AI," famously said, "The jobs that are going to survive AI for a long time are jobs where you have to be very adaptable and physically skilled, and plumbing is that kind of job."

People who write for a living, especially those who are creative writers, like novelists and screenwriters, are, rightfully, concerned that these new tools will take their jobs. And they aren't the only ones. The jobs of anyone who works with their mind is in jeopardy. 

Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, HVAC technicians, mechanics, chefs, and other "embodied" professions that require dexterity, spatial reasoning, and an ability to handle messy, unpredictable environments -- like crawling under the house to improvise a repair -- seem to be, at least in the near term, relatively safe from being replaced by AI.

I'm also going to include early childhood educators in the safe category. For one thing, our work is physical work. But more to the point, our work depends on relationships, judgment, empathy, and responding to unique (messy) human situations. These are not things AI will be able to do anytime soon. 

But that's not primarily what we're worrying about when it comes to AI. We're mostly worrying about how a world in which AI is appearing in every context is going to impact the cognitive development of today's children. For instance, I recently read an article in which the author made the case that children who are growing up today risk never learning to "think for themselves." It's a valid concern, but it echoes the concerns that educators have had about every technological development. 

Socrates, the most celebrated educator of us all, was famously opposed to the introduction of the phonetic alphabet. That's right, literacy, the backbone of what we moderns call education, was going to make the minds of our youth feeble. From the perspective of today, this concern seems hilariously misguided, but he wasn't wrong. Being educated in Ancient Greece meant possessing the ability to memorize. For instance, an educated Athenian could recite the entirety of The Iliad and The Odyssey from memory. Today, we're so lazy of mind that if we're going to quote Homer, we have to look it up. That, to Socrates, was tragic.

But it wasn't just literacy. The printing press, according to no less an "educated" person than René Descarte, resulted in so much inferior work being published that it distracted the serious mind. Again, in his day, being educated meant being well versed in "the classics," whereas this democratization of mass printing meant that the young had access to all kinds of dubiousness. From the perspective of education as he understood it, he was, like Socrates, correct.

The Enlightenment itself, this explosion of science, reason, and art, was going to separate the young from their God. And again, they weren't wrong because religious instruction was the foundation of education in those days.

Locomotive travel was going to make us all batty. Novels were going to rot the minds of our youth. When pocket calculators were introduced educators clutched their pearls.

Indeed, every major (and even minor) human development has been met with valid worry about how it would impact the education of the young. It's too soon to know if AI is really going to be on par with literacy, the printing press, or The Enlightenment. The hypers are hyping, but I'm old enough to remember when Microsoft founder Bill Gates, in 2001, hyped the Segway as being "as significant as the PC." (The Segway?) My guess, however, is that AI will prove to be a transformative tool. And it will, without a doubt, change both our children and how we educate them.

But taking a step back to look at education in our modern world, it's not as if we've designed our current system to encourage children to think for themselves. I mean, there's a ton of test taking, a ton of right and wrong answers, and a ton of standardization. The goal for most kids is grades, graduation, and jobs, none of which require original thinking. Indeed, original thinkers, those who doubt, who argue, who refuse, who dance to the beat of a different drummer, are penalized by modern schooling. They're all too often failed, drugged, punished, and generally made to feel inadequate. So it's not just AI that discourages "thinking for themselves."

In other words, our schools are less about learning and more about jumping through hoops, which is exactly what AI is good at. No wonder children, like adults in the workplace, are eager to adopt this tool that will help them more easily achieve the highest goal of school, which is to graduate with high marks. Actual learning is obviously, at best, secondary.

It's also important to point out that in today's world, schooling is mostly about preparing children for the workforce. At least that's what standard schools and policymakers seem to think. They can't talk about education without referring to those "jobs of tomorrow." The whole purpose of our schools is to produce young adults with the proper degrees so that they can get the very jobs that AI is going to be doing. If I were a kid graduating right now, I'd be pissed if I'd kept my nose to the grindstone and my eye on the prize only to discover that I should have been in trade school all along.

My point is that AI, like the technologies that came before it, is exposing our flawed approach to "education" and it's freaking people out.

In play based preschools, our students are self-motivated learners. We need no tests or grades or carrots or sticks because the whole point is self-directed learning, asking and answering our own questions, and learning, not with a job or degree in mind, but for the sheer joy. This is something AI will never be able to do, but it can be a powerful tool in a world in which human curiosity is finally set free.

We have to decide what we want our schools, what we want education, what we want childhood, to be about. AI is obviously a threat to our current system, but what happens if we set our children free to learn as humans were meant to learn?

"Education means only this," writes novelist Doris Lessing, "that the lively alert fearless curiosity of children must be fed, must be kept alive. That is education."

What if that is what stood at the center of our understanding of education: that lively alert fearless curiosity of children? If it did, would we be worried about AI at all?

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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!