The Recurrent Problem of Civilization

 

"The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough . . ." ~Margaret Mead

"Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary." ~Margaret Mead

As a man in a field that is overwhelmingly women, I've often been asked, "Why aren't there more men in early childhood education?"

My knee-jerk answer has typically been that it's about money. 

It's a defensible surmise given that preschool teachers are notoriously low paid ($38,140 a year/$18.34 an hour) and men (in heterosexual couples at least) are still the primary breadwinners. Indeed, the only reason I've been able to work in this profession all these years is because my wife has out earned me. 

That said, the pay gap has closed dramatically in recent decades. Today husbands are the primary income earner in barely over half of all marriages (52%), so that means my answer is shakier than it once was. 

For one thing, there's the chicken-or-egg question of what came first? After all, every profession in which women dominate, tends toward the lower end of the pay scale. And there are few professions with more of a gender imbalance than those that involve working with young children. In other words, do men stay away because the pay is low or because it's "women's work"?

I'm thinking about this because I recently came across Celeste Davis' piece on her Substack: "Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?" It's a short, thought-provoking piece about the startling fact that 60 percent of today's college students are women. When I was a boy, men enrolled in college at double the rate of women. Davis writes, "Scholars, journalists, college presidents and reddit thread philosophers have all come to the table to add their particular offering to the buffet of reasons why fewer boy are going to college," but the thing they all "skirt around" is the one thing that has actually changed: "an increase in girls."

She argues that across the board, when the presence of women reaches 60 percent in any profession the men "make a swift exit and other men stop joining." Among the professions in which this has happened are veterinary medicine, biology, interior design, psychology, social work and, of course, teaching, all of which were not so long ago were predominately "male" professions. 

The medical profession is currently 60 percent men, but 55 percent of all medical students for the past seven years are women. In 2024-25, over half of all new residents were women. Will medicine be the next profession to reach the 60 percent tipping point? And even more interesting will be watching to see if this historically well-paid profession becomes less so as women fill the ranks. 

Clearly there is more at work here than mere economics. It seems that many men and boys (especially heterosexual men and boys, although gay men aren't immune) don't want to be associated with "girly" jobs, often even when it means taking lower pay to work in a "boy" job.

Davis calls it "male flight," comparing the phenomenon to the "white flight" that tends to take place when Black and Brown people move into the neighborhood. As an institution becomes associated with women and femininity, men increasingly avoid it. Her larger argument is that the modern idea of masculinity teaches boys to avoid anything coded feminine. 

In other words, the answer is not the sort of glib, easy answer of "low pay," but rather something more complex and important. I don't think this is as simple as boys being afraid of getting girl "cooties," although I wouldn't dismiss that entirely. The deeper question, I think, is why and how are we socializing young boys to believe that to be masculine, they must reject nurturing, caring for others, and teaching?

In her book How to Raise a Feminist Son, Sonora Jha writes, "In many cultures, we rob boys of the range of human emotions and connection . . . And how are boys often trained in "masculinity"? By distancing themselves from femininity." The irony, she points out, is that what boys most want is to "fit in, and to connect" and they do that by showing that they don't care for connection." "Stoic" and "aloof" isn't what boys are made of but what they are made into."

Poet, essayist, and controversial founder of the so-called "mythopoetic men's movement" echoed Margaret Mead by asserting that the "fundamental problem in the continuation of a decent life everywhere in the world is the question of the socialization of young males." He went on to say, "It is not women's job to socialize young males. That is the job the older men."

In his view, we've entered a vicious cycle in which modern men find themselves "half-adults," who never fully mature, making it impossible to take on those traditionally "masculine" roles, including being a father, which has become a kind of vicious cycle. Essentially, Bly asks, How do we properly socialize boys into masculinity? 

We continue to hear this argument today, but I think that's the wrong question.

In her book, Jha cites the "Man Box" study, an ongoing, multi-country research effort looking at rigid societal expectations of manhood, its effect on young men, and the people around them. This "Man Box" is a collective set of beliefs and pressure society places on men to conform to rigid, traditional standards of masculinity, including such things as self-sufficiency, acting tough, physical attractiveness, adherence to rigid gender roles, heterosexuality, sexual prowess, and aggression used for conflict resolution. I have certainly had to deal with all of these pressures.

But the real question this study raises for me is, Why are we so determined to socialize boys into this definition of masculinity in the first place? It's not a particularly attractive set of traits. I mean, at first blush "self-sufficiency" sounds good, but to a young boy, it often sounds like "Don't ask for help" or "You're on your own" or "It's weakness to need others." Acting tough? That's just another way to drive people away. And ultimately, it's acting. Attractiveness? I mean, who doesn't want to be attractive, but at what cost? And we all know that gender roles, sexual shaming, and sexual conquest all deny ourselves and others their essential and unique humanity. And aggression and violence are simply not valid tools in the modern world. 

The mother of one of my students once told me, "I've never told my father that his granddaughter has a male preschool teacher. He would assume you're a pedophile." This is part of the "Man Box." I know there are many people, both men and women, who make this assumption about any man who would choose to work with young children. Indeed, before accepting my first job, I consulted with a mentor, a man, and asked him point-blank, "What do I do if someone accuses me?" He shook his head, "You would have to move to Bimini." Stepping outside the box can have real, harsh, and unfair consequences.

And as controversial as Bly is, he makes a point. “How can we expect boys to understand nurturing, connection, and non-violence as masculine possibilities if they so rarely encounter men performing those roles in the institutions where they grow up?” I know for a fact, that many parents chose to come to our school because I was a male teacher, just as some stayed away. When I asked why, the answer was typically something like, "I want my child to have a male influence," or "Men just have a different energy than women." It's the same sentiment behind the question, "How can we get more men in early childhood education?"

And we're back to another chicken-and-egg problem: We want more men in nurturing roles but without men in nurturing roles, many men will never imagine it for themselves. And so it goes.

When our daughter was born our circumstances made it logical and possible for me to be a stay-at-home parent. I worried about those "Man Box" pressures. I was concerned that I, along with our daughter, might find ourselves outsiders among all those women. I wondered if I was going to be judged and diminished as a man.

As a young man my father was focused on his career, which involved long hours and lots of travel. He was, however, an involved father. He played with us. He volunteered in his community. He tried new things. He was even our Cub Scout leader. But one day he said to me, "Tom, I think you're the luckiest man alive. I feel like I missed a lot of your growing up. You get to be there with your daughter." He was a conscientious, competent, curious, and caring man. I know that he sometimes felt trapped by the box, but what he taught me was that masculinity was ours to define. (Maybe that's the advantage of being "unnecessary.") And that's the man I still try to be. 

Mead asserts that "the recurrent problem of civilization" is what to do with the men? Maybe the problem is simply that civilization insists on trying to define what that is.

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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 ways 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!

"You Can Always Make Some More Blood"

"Don't worry Leon, you can always make some more blood."

I heard Luke say it in passing, consoling his friend as I was on my way to somewhere else. Not having heard what came before or after, it struck me as both hilarious and intriguing. I couldn't help but try to bring it up again. When next Luke and I met on the playground, I said, "You can always make some more blood."

"It's true, Teacher Tom! Your heart pumps and makes more blood. That's why you don't run out when you bleed." Luke knows a little something about bleeding. "And you know what else? Blood is really blue."

I was sitting on the ground with Audrey and a couple of other kids. Audrey interrupted, "No, blood is red."

"No, really," Luke said, turning to her persuasively, "It's blue inside, but when it comes out it looks red."

"Luke, it's red. I've seen it."

"No really, it's true, it's blue."

I thought I could clarify. "I think what Luke is saying is that blood looks blue when it's inside our body. See my vein?" I showed her my inner wrist. "Doesn't it look blue? Veins are how blood flows in our bodies."

Luke supported me, "That's right, Teacher Tom. That's what I'm saying."

But Audrey had other information. "No, that means the blood is flowing to your heart, and it's red when it flows away from your heart. That's the way blood flows: around and around." She drew a circle in the air with her finger.

Some of the other kids were fascinated with studying the visible veins in their wrists and I was distracted into that conversation, but the science debate continued between our two experts. By the time I re-focused on them Luke was saying, "I guess we're both right."

And Audrey replied, "Yeah, we're both right."

Friendship won out over being right, but not over science. Luke was, of course, correct in his assertion that blood inside the body -- as seen through the skin which reflects blue, but absorbs colors of other wavelengths -- appears blue to the human eye. And, of course, that is the nature of color: we only see what is reflected. It's why everything appears to be the same color, black, in the pitch dark. Audrey was correct in her assertion that blood flowing away from the heart tends to be a brighter red because it is highly oxygenated, while on its return trip it tends to be a sort of purplish-red because it is oxygen-depleted. 

It's tempting, as an adult with a little more information, to step in and correct the flaws in their arguments, to give them the correct, or more correct, or more complete answer. This is the sort of conversation that we so often pounce on as a "teachable moment," but I chose to let them conclude like this. Science is built on inquiry and collegial debate, just like this one. (The angry debate is for politicians and theologians who are too often more invested in winning arguments than understanding)

Luke and Audrey came to the table with essentially true, but incomplete information, which is how we all go through life every day. They each walked away with a little more truth, but their knowledge, like that of all of us, remains incomplete. That is what drives the educated mind, not the knowledge, but the incompleteness, the wanting to know. Education is about discovery. It is about knowing that I can think and find answers. When we leap in with our grown-up "knowledge" we too often rob children of what makes science, or anything for that matter, worth pursuing.

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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 ways 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 Truth Will Make Me Free"

Man is nothing else, but what he makes of himself. ~Jean-Paul Sartre

Among the founding principles of our American democracy is the ideal that we each be free to pursue "happiness." That's not a guarantee of happiness, but rather an aspirational statement, one that envisions each of us having the opportunity to choose our own course in life; whether that leads to happiness (however that is defined) or not is up to each individual. 

I don't think anyone believes that we have, as a society, fully achieved this particular freedom of pursuit, but it's an ideal that has the virtue of being noble.

I think about the "pursuit of happiness" nearly every day, my own and that of the children I teach. Indeed, I consider it my highest goal on most days, to do what I can to create a bubble within which we are all free to ask and answer our own questions, which is, I think, the key aspect of anyone's pursuit of happiness. Answering other people's questions simply makes you a tool of their pursuit. It's only through finding answers to our own questions that we come a little closer to our personal truth, and as Mister Rogers sang, "The truth will make me free."

As adults we tend to take a longer view, pinning our future happiness on a set of circumstances that, when achieved, will, we believe, cause us contentment and satisfaction; that will fill us with joy in the morning, love during the day, and peace at night. Children are more focused on their immediate futures and they typically don't spend a lot of energy contemplating even that, choosing rather to apply themselves to the pursuit, to their self-selected path, the one that is paved with their own curiosity. They understand better than we do that the word "pursuit" is best understood as a synonym for "search."

What I see children doing each day as they play is search for nothing more or less than the meaning of life. As sophomoric as that sounds, I've come to understand that this is what education in a democracy must always be about and the degree to which we lose sight of that is the degree to which we rob others of their right to their pursuit of happiness. Discovering the meaning of life, our own life, our one unique life, is what we're here to do. It's a question that we were born to ask and one that only we can answer for ourselves. And we can only do that when we are free to seek our own answers: in that direction lies the meaning of life.

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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 ways 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!

Compulsory Education

"We should banish the idea," writes Alfred North Whitehead, "of a mythical, far-off end of education."

We require our children to go to school, not just for their own good, but, ostensibly, so that they will be prepared for the rights and responsibilities of being citizens in a self-governing society.

At least that's the theory. Polling finds that the overwhelming majority of Americans favor compulsory education for children between the ages of six and eighteen. But if education is so important, why does it only apply to children?

What if, instead of declaring childhood the "end of education," we required all of us to continue going to school? I mean, if it's good for the kids, and good for democracy, then why not make it mandatory for everyone?

I can already hear some people saying, "Screw that! I don't need the government telling me what to do." Fair enough. Governmental overreach is one of the reasons we fought our Revolutionary War. But if we accept that argument (and I'm not saying we shouldn't), then why do we overwhelmingly believe that every child must spend their formative years under the yoke of compulsory schooling? 

Just as a thought experiment, what if every citizen was required to take a four-week (or six-month) paid educational leave every five years. Let's imagine for the sake of this thought experiment that employers were on board, holding your position for your return and that entrepreneurs would be paid a fair stipend. Let's also make it clear that this isn't mere professional development and there would be no fixed curriculum, but rather an open-ended opportunity to learn about whatever interests you. And you would continue to be obliged to do this even in retirement.

At 30 you might study constitutional history, ceramics, ecology or statistics. At 45, philosophy, child development, artificial intelligence or music. At 65, geology, poetry, evolutionary biology or local government. Some portion could involve gathering with people unlike yourself to discuss genuinely difficult public questions. 

We currently devote our compulsory education and resources almost entirely to the people with the least political power. Children can't vote. They can't sit on juries. They can't run corporations. They can't legislate. They can't serve on school boards. They can't even legally own property. Meanwhile, the people actually exercising all those powers have no corresponding obligation whatsoever to continue learning. It's not a reach to wonder if this stands at the heart of much of our political dysfunction.

We commonly justify compulsory childhood schooling by saying something like, Children don't yet know enough to know what they need to know. But surely that remains true of us at 40, 60 and 80. Indeed, one of the things education ideally teaches us is just how enormous the territory of our ignorance is.

The idea of compulsory schooling sounds somewhat reasonable when we talk about children, but quite authoritarian when applied to adults. What does this tell us about our attitudes toward both children and education?

The objection most of us would have, I think, is that we don't want our government mandating our own education, but let's try flipping it around. What if society was compelled to provide the conditions for lifelong education? Your employer couldn't say you're too busy. Lack of money would not exclude you. Childcare couldn't make participation impossible. Education would become something society owed you, not just in childhood, but throughout life.

And here's the key to this thought experiment. What if we made it radically free: you must learn, but nobody gets to tell you what to learn?

Here are libraries, universities, workshops, museums, laboratories, studios, teachers, craftspeople, naturalists, historians, artists, scientists, and communities available to you. Your job is to spend this month learning something. What that is would be up to you.

Suddenly, "compulsory education" doesn't sound quite so much like coercion. It starts sounding like a right that is so important that society insists you exercise it. And, to my ear at least, it begins to sound like an opportunity more than an obligation. The compulsion has subtly shifted from the learner to society.

Of course, the devil is always in the details, but so is god. 

And it raises the question: why can't our children's education be like this? Our current educational system is fully compulsory. We tell children what they must learn, when they must learn it, how long they have to learn it, and how they must demonstrate that they've learned it. 

If I proposed giving every adult a month (or 6 months) every five years in which they were required to pursue an education of their own choosing, would we experience that as an infringement on our liberty? Or would we see it as an astonishing expansion of it?

Speaking for myself, I'd answer the latter. I don't think I would be alone in welcoming the idea of periodically setting everything aside to fully exercise my curiosity, to expand my knowledge and skills, not for monetary gain, but for the joy of it. The fact that it would make me a better citizen is a wonderful side-effect. 

And it makes me wonder if perhaps the problem with compulsory childhood education isn't that it's compulsory, but rather it's what we've made compulsory.

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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 ways 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 Trouble With Being Right in a Wrong World

In the country of the blind, goes the proverb, the one-eyed man is king.

In his 1904 short story "The Country of the Blind" H.G. Wells writes of a sighted man named Núñez who finds himself in exactly this position. Instead of being crowned king, however, the concerned citizens find his claims about "seeing" to be delusional and propose removing the organs that are clearly the cause of his mental illness. The story ends with Núñez fleeing into the wilderness where he presumedly dies in the effort.

The message is clear: possessing an ability (or knowledge or genius) that nobody recognizes is more likely to cause others to see you as defective rather than superior. 

For instance, there are those, like Thom Hartmann, who assert that their ADHD is his superpower. The big idea behind his "Hunter/Farmer hypothesis" is that traits we label as distractibility, impulsivity, stimulation-seeking, hyper focus, rapid shifting of attention and risk-taking, would have been quite valuable to hunters, while the modern classroom and workplace only tend to reward the steadier "farmer" traits. Hartmann says the genesis of his theory was an attempt to give his ADHD-diagnosed child a less-disempowering story. "It's only a flaw," he concludes, "if you're in a society of farmers."

In a similar vein, several of my autistic adult friends and colleagues have at various times confessed that they often feel themselves superior to us "normies," especially when it comes to understanding things like complex systems or accurately remembering details.

None of this is to suggest that neurodivergence doesn't come with challenges, only that it cannot be viewed only as a deficit.

Thirty-five years after his short story was first published, Wells extended it with a new ending. In the revised version, Núñez escapes into the wilderness, but looks back to "see" that a catastrophic rockslide is about to destroy the country of the blind. He returns to warn them, but they don't believe him precisely because his warning depends on this delusional thing called "sight." Núñez escapes, but the rest are crushed under the rocks.

In the original version, the tragedy is Núñez's alone, while in the retelling the tragedy is everyone's.

There is, of course, an irony in using blindness as a metaphor for deficit in a story about the dangers of deficit thinking. Wells was writing more than a century ago, and his metaphor carries assumptions about disability that I don't share. What's interesting, however, is the deeper question his story raises: Who gets to decide which human capacities count as gifts and which count as defects?

Modern schooling is focused almost exclusively on defining and "fixing" the perceived deficits of children. We shame them. We tell them disempowering stories. We cast their superpower as a delusion, a flaw, and an illness. The one thing we rarely consider is that maybe it's us who must change.

This is one of the great promises of play-based (or self-directed) learning. When children are free to play, we aren't compelled to measure them against any single standard of what a child ought to be. There is a place in our country for the child who can't sit still, the child who becomes obsessed with a single idea, the child who takes risks, the child who notices what the rest of us cannot "see," the child who thinks and communicates and connects in ways we don't immediately understand.

Our job isn't to "cure" children of the things that make it difficult for them to thrive in the world we've made. Maybe our job is to join them in remaking the world in which there are no kings.

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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 ways 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!

Toward Wisdom Rather Than Mere Education

It's "fire season" here on the West Coast of the US. Currently, there are 32 active "large" fires burning, not to mention the dozens of smaller fires or the 50 or so large fires currently burning in other regions of the US.

The whole idea of a "season" during which destructive fires burn out of control is a modern invention. Up until the late 19th century, Indigenous people across the US, but especially on the West Coast, regularly engaged in prescribed or cultural burning as a tool for tending the landscape. These intentional small, low-intensity fires cleared undergrowth, encouraged grasses and other useful plants, improved forage for game, maintained open woodlands, made travel easier, stimulated plants used for basketry, and reduced insects and disease. And, of course, one of the consequences was that these small burns done during cooler, wetter months, consumed the fuels that otherwise accumulate and feed the catastrophic fires we today experience every summer.

When Europeans began colonizing North America, they thought they were "settling" pristine, untouched, wilderness, when, in fact, for thousands of years, the native population had been responsibly working cooperatively with the land, not just with fire, but in countless other ways. Europeans missed it because it simply didn't look like the sort of clear-cut and plow methods of "dominating" or "subduing" nature employed back home. They missed it so badly, that they criminalized Indigenous fire practices, creating the "fire season" that is currently destroying thousands of acres of precious forest and filling our air with toxic smoke.

Every species shapes its environment at least as much as its environment shapes it. Beavers are a famous example. They have been at work engineering and shaping the planet's surface for some 8 million years. 

And it's not just animals. Plants also "tend" their environments. "When grasses emerged between 100 and 70 million years ago," writes Ferris Jabr in his book Becoming Earth, "Rather than rely on robust and elaborate defenses (as did their plant predecessors), certain grasses negotiated a symbiosis -- an ecological partnership -- with large herbivores. These grasses offered grazers endless fields of tender green leaves that quickly regenerated when shorn (or burned). In exchange for this perpetual sustenance, mammoths and the megafauna trampled, ate, and otherwise deterred the grasses' main botanical competitors, such as shrubs and trees, and fertilized the fields with their copious dung." 

Humans seem to be unique in that we are able to be conscious about our efforts to shape ourselves and our environment, both for good and bad. 

Cultural burn practices emerged over centuries during which conscious humans observed and experimented with fire, not as a destructive force to be feared and fought, but rather an essential aspect of a thriving environment. It was an ongoing process of learning to, not manage, but live reciprocally with a fire-adapted landscape. 

This process led to a kind of collective wisdom that wasn't just passed down from generation to generation, but rather continued to grow and evolve, through the conscious practices of observation and experimentation.

In our rush to fill our children's heads with "knowledge" in the name of mere education, we continue the colonizer's practice of domination and management. So much of what passes for schooling is the intellectual process of clear-cutting and plowing in order to plant the crops we think we prefer. When a child isn't compliant, when a child is incapable of being a docile empty vessel to be filled, we treat it like an emergency, a fire to be doused or a weed to be eradicated. Many of the mental health and other challenges our children face today, are the result -- the wildfire -- of this approach.

The practice of observation and experimentation, however, causes us to ask, "What is this child telling us?" The practice of observation and experimentation leads us to explore how we can work with children rather than attempt to somehow manufacture them. When we place observation and experimentation at the center of our work, we discover that the children are likewise observing and experimenting: adapting and tending, which is the essence of all human wisdom. 

At the core of this wisdom is the awareness that there is always more to learn from observation and experimentation. It's the process of living, one that cannot be undertaken alone, but in cooperation, collaboration, and reciprocity with the other people, animals, and plants, not to mention the earth, the wind, and the fire.

******

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 ways 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!

Not Vanquished

I was once engaged in a massive battle for the ages, pitting my powers against those of a five-year-old boy.

It began when he declared that he was going to shoot me with his gun that had the "power of elephants."

I countered with the power of love.

He responded with a laser that had the "power of lightening."

I bewildered it with the power of love.

He retrenched with a cannon that was made from the "power of a tsunami."

I absorbed it with the power of love.

He summon up a rocket that was fueled by the "power of a tornado."

I embraced it with the power of love.

He attacked me with a sword forged in the sun, a light saber containing bees, a tank that shot earthquakes and finally a weapon made from all the power in the universe, except, he insisted, love.

When I stuck with love he finally fell, into my arms, laughing, not vanquished.

******

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 ways 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!