What Preschoolers Know About the Future of Reading

I subscribed to The Atlantic for quite awhile, but recently let it expire when I decided to limit my consumption of "political news." I don't have the time or bandwidth. I'm too busy playing with children and reading books.

That said, they currently have a long article up about the demise of reading books. It's called The End of Reading is Here. All I've read is a longish excerpt because the rest of it is behind their paywall, but if I did want to read it I could find it at my local library. 

I don't, however, expect it to say anything surprising. People have been predicting the end of phonetic alphabet based literacy for some time. Probably the most famous is Marshall McLuhan who, in 1962, the year of my birth, in his mind-blowing book The Gutenberg Galaxy, introduced the idea that electronic media are returning us to a kind of "tribal" or "post-literate" culture. 

As early childhood educators, we know what it's like to exist in this kind of society. We spend our days surrounded by highly intelligent, yet illiterate humans, who create their culture through stories, music, gesture, curiosity, and play.

The adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet by the Ancient Greeks (~800 BCE) happened in a culture that stored and transmitted its knowledge, stories, and history via an oral tradition, not so unlike what we experience on a smaller scale in our classrooms. The creation of the Greek alphabet, however, with its letters representing vowel sounds, introduced a more efficient, but far less nuanced way to store and transmit. As McLuhan points out, 24 letters, even when we consider digraphs, trigraphs, and blended consonants, can't even come close to representing all the sounds we're capable of making with our voices, not to mention non-verbal communication. This means that as powerful as it is, the phonetic alphabet has greatly narrowed what and how we communicate compared to an oral culture. 

The temptation is to become concerned about the decline of literacy, but it was never going to last long as a human "fad." I mean, if The Atlantic is right (or even ahead of game by a few centuries) the kind of literacy we fret over in schools will have only been a "thing" for less than 1 percent of our species' history. At best, it will be considered a kind of bridge between the Ancient Greeks and electronic media.

The decline in novel reading in favor of movies and programs is one of the ways we're moving beyond reading, but I'm really curious about how we'll handle things like laws, contracts, and other bureaucratic things. The future will tell, but not in my lifetime.

Reading books is on the decline, but not in my home. I'm a product of the age of books. My wife reads even more than I do. Our walls are lined in books, most of which we've read, many we've re-read, and there remains an enticing sufficiency of "aspirational" reads. It makes me feel both wealthy and smart. 

I like having read The Gutenberg Galaxy with its dense, convoluted sentences. The kind of things that AI would try to chop up into more easily digested bits. The often ponderous prose of Moby Dick (Herman Melville) presents an ordeal for the modern reader that is every bit as difficult and messy as the lives of the whalers it depicts. I've tackled that white whale of a book twice, including, both times, the famously skip-able chapter on cetology. 

It's become popular to advise modern readers that there is no shame in not finishing a book if it doesn't spark something, but c'mon! Some of the greatest reading experiences of my life have involved real struggle. When I first tackled Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, I got to the halfway point only to realize that I had absolutely no idea what was going on. In frustration I began re-reading it from the beginning each morning, while simultaneously continuing to read in the evening from where I'd realized I'd gotten lost. Amazingly, this process revealed the novel's incredible architecture, its themes, and its story, in a way that I would have missed entirely had I not taken action or worse, stopped reading. I consider having read the book in this way to be one of the crowning achievements of my intellectual life.

The truth is that much of what we call classic literature, both fiction and non-fiction, is written for a different generation of readers, one that pre-dates me. Just has the oral culture of the pre-literacy Greeks produced people with the capacity for feats of what we would today see as prodigious memorization, the culture of literacy produced people capable of appreciating prodigious sentences.

Thomas Paine's Common Sense was published in 1776 and almost instantly became the best selling book up to that point in history. It was praised for its conciseness and clarity. Today, of course, it could never be published as it is. Editors (and AI tools) would demand shorter paragraphs, shorter sentences, fewer nested sentences, an eradication of semicolons and rhetorical flourishes, more frequent headings and white space, more concrete examples, and simpler syntax. 

Modern readers, for the most part, don't often make it beyond the first few pages of Common Sense, unless it's required reading. Of course, we're capable of understanding it, but sustaining engagement with long, layered sentences is a societal muscle that has atrophied in the intervening centuries, especially since the advent of radio and then television. What pre-electronic media cultures once found to be rich and rewarding reading now just feels like unnecessary effort to many of us. I feel that this is why I often struggle with older texts, at least until I get going. I'm lucky that I've discovered the joy of getting over the hump enough to delight in nested sentences, long paragraphs, and semicolons. 

"The medium is the message" is McLuhan's most famous line (sometimes phrased as "The medium is the massage.") His assertion is that new media don't merely change what and how we consume information, but they reshape our minds. This is clearly seen in this brief flash of human existence during which books were king.

Middle and high school teachers as well as university professors are reporting that many of their students simply refuse to read entire books any more. Even as recently as when I was at university in the early 80's, we were regularly assigned reading lists with a dozen books. I once read 20 books for two classes over the span of three months. Students from 200 years ago, I suspect, would have been ecstatic at the prospect of so many books, much in the way that we get excited today when a new season of our favorite network show drops. 

The evidence that this kind of print literacy is on the wane could not be more clear. It's not caused by intellectual laziness, but rather the kind of transformation of our species that attends the introduction of every new technology.

When I'm among preschoolers, I often find myself pitying them. So many are destined to move on to elementary school where they will be hammered with literacy instruction and made to feel badly about themselves when they find it difficult. Others will find reading easier, even enjoyable, but the "work" of reading books, I fear, will get them too. Just as I was born into the first generation for whom Latin was no longer considered a standard part of education, it's quite possible that these children could be among the last for whom reading books is prerequisite for being deemed "educated." It's quite possible that some of them will never read a book.

I also see the future when I'm with them, telling stories and jokes, negotiating, making agreements, then doing it all again the next day. They are citizens of today's world, becoming citizens of tomorrow's. 

In my lifetime, I've seen television become the dominant media, followed by personal computers, the internet, smartphones, and now AI. One could say that my life has been lived almost exactly at the hinge between what might be called the late age of print and the early age of electronic media. I feel lucky to have escaped Latin, one of the oldest rites of passage of print culture, but I'm even more lucky to have grown up with books. People my age are both products of the age of books and children of the beginning of its decline. Today's youth are living during a similar hinge. Maybe everyone always has.

I'm often accused of being too wordy here on the blog, of dragging my sentences out with comma after comma, of taking detours and side roads instead of getting straight to my destination. I try, sometimes, to accommodate the modern reader with more white space and fewer rhetorical flourishes, but sadly, I'm afraid, I've read far too many books for that.

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The Preschool Autism Summit is starts on Sunday! 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!

Our Minds Have Minds of Their Own

Several years ago, we had a scare while on a field trip. A boy, racing to the bus stop, attempted to get around one of the adults by shooting for a narrow gap between her and the roadway. While both his feet were off the ground, her hip swung slightly in that direction, knocking him into the street. I'd been watching the whole thing and managed to snatch him back to safety. Seconds later, a garbage truck came rumbling past.

It wasn't exactly a close call, but it did cause us to review our safety protocols, especially around traffic.

A few days later, at our leisure, the boy and I were discussing the incident. He casually asked, "Do you remember when you knocked me into the street?"

That's not what had happened! "No, I rescued you."

"No, you bumped me and I went into the street, but I got back on the sidewalk just in time."

It's not surprising that he remembered the event. We tend to form memories around unexpected or unusual things, what memory researchers call novel experiences. Yet, his specifics were all wrong. I had had the benefit of extensive conversations with the boy's mother (who had been the one who released his hand to let him race), the parent whose hip had nudged him while in flight, and other adults who had witnessed it. We were in agreement about what had happened, yet this boy, the protagonist at the center of the story, had formed a memory in which he was his own self-saving hero.

As a species, we've evolved memory, not so that we can commune with the past, but rather to help us orient to the future. As adults, we had used our memories explicitly for this purpose, cobbling together our best recollections in order to tighten up our safety measures for the next field trip. The boy, however, had taken the exact same novel incident and formed a memory, however inaccurate, in which he had kept himself safe with quick, effective action, a picture that may very well secure his safety in the future.

Memory researcher Charan Ranganath says our hippocampus, the part of our brain most associated with memory, prioritizes memories for "the unexpected oddball pictures." Surprising events trigger a sequence of neural responses that increase learning. 

Non-surprising events reflect things that we've "seen" in the past, but by now seem old hat, which goes a long way toward explaining why many of us find so much of what we are taught in school to be irrelevant or boring. The novelty of yet another equation or rule of grammar stands no chance of cutting through the novelty of, say, a friend passing us a note or a raven spiraling in thermals in the sky outside the window.

This is why so many educators in normal schools work to remove "distractions." They forbid note passing. They close the shades. They hope to focus students' minds by leaving them little else to think about, narrowing the world as much as possible to the lesson at hand. Meanwhile, the children, whose brains are wired to prepare for the future are busy seeking out unexpected oddball pictures, like dust motes swirling in a ways reminiscent of those ravens or a friend trying to pass notes via eye contact and smirks. More experienced teachers then strive to introduce "novelty" to their lessons by, say, stern warnings, cracking jokes or forcing participation, all of which may focus young minds for a moment, but are no guarantee that their takeaway memories will have anything to do with the lesson being taught.

Our minds have minds of their own. They shape memories, learning, from raw experience, each in their own way as they attend to novelty after novelty, question after question, satisfying curiosity, always looking for knowledge that will serve their future.

Things like grades, the promise of rewards, and the threat of punishment have an impact, of course. Experienced students have learned that these external motivators are a kind of payment they receive (or suffer) for proving (or not) to the teacher that they have retained in their short term memory what is intentionally being taught. However, this leaves long term memory relatively untouched.

This is why the anxiety of school endures so much longer than the lessons themselves. It's why some of us, still, 40 years later have dreams about sitting for a test only to realize we're totally unprepared. It's why we remember that raven spiraling or that note from a friend far more clearly than anything the teacher was saying. We've evolved to remember novelty.

Play-based learning dispenses with the pre-planned lessons, the grading, the testing, and, ideally, even the rewards and punishments, replacing it with each child's quest to fill their memories with useful knowledge, which requires actively attending to novelty while largely ignoring the mundane. After all, no matter how much adults wag their fingers about the future, these children will be the ones creating the future and the future is the entire purpose of learning.

I doubt that the boy who recalls saving himself remembers much of anything about the day leading up to that moment of danger, even though we had spent the morning at the Center for Wooden Boats using hammers and nails and rowing ourselves in umiaks around the south end of Lake Union. I mean, for five-year-olds who attend the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool in Seattle, hammers, nails, and getting out on the water is nothing new. Almost getting run over by a garbage truck? Now that's exactly the kind of thing for which his hippocampus is eager to make into something useful. 

That the boy's memory involved his own agency is an important lesson for his future, even if it is not entirely accurate. That we adults used our memories to improve our safety measures is an important lesson for our future.

When we are free to play, we free the mind to do exactly what it has evolved to do: to notice novelty, get curious about it, ask our questions, then store the memory in a way that will help us orient to the future. That's learning.

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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!

Knowing How to Play This Game

"Wait a minute! I know how to play this game."

The children were standing around a table upon which were the tokens, dice and other parts and pieces from the board games Monopoly and The Game of Life. The night before, I had discovered, in my building's garbage room, that one of my neighbors had thrown out these brand new board games. I assume that it was the young couple from down the hall who had been talking for some time about hosting a game night for their friends. 

And as a preschool teacher, I'm not above a little dumpster diving.

If you're familiar with these particular classic games, you know they aren't designed for preschoolers, but I thought the kids would nevertheless get a kick out of the little houses and cars, the roulette wheel spinner, the stacks of phony money and whatnot. I had set the actual game boards aside, replacing them with a piece of white mat board that a previous group of children had used for an art project involving table and crayons.

"I know how to play this," the boy insisted, as if convincing himself. He was taking in the scene, his eyes and hands darting from piece-to-piece, "I know how to play this." 

Of course, he could not possibly know how to play this game because there was nothing to know; there was no game there. It wasn't a game at all, but rather a collection of game pieces. What he was reacting to was the idea of a board game, something he derived from previous experiences with these same, or similar, game pieces. He was making connections between his memories and the present. He was seeing patterns, interpreting them through the filter of experience, and, right there in front of everyone, constructing knowledge. "I know," he said.

Humans are born knowing no visual stories so the world they see is just a bunch of blobs. Likewise, smells and tastes begin as meaningless sensations. Newborns have, however, had the experience of listening to their world in utero, muffled by the womb, and so they are born knowing to attend, for instance, to their mother's voice: they turn their heads toward the familiar sound because a story about that voice has already started to form. 

The human brain is a pattern-recognizing machine, one that cannot abide a story vacuum. So, just as the boy constructed the story of a game from those mixed up pieces, a baby begins, from the moment of birth, even before, constructing the story of mommy, connection, and love.

As adult humans, it's obvious to us that the raven in the tree over our heads is not actually smaller than the raven in the grass near our feet. Indeed, we treat perspective as a scientific and artistic truth, but the ability to perceive that is a story we constructed for ourselves. It's a story we've learned. 

Not all the stories we tell ourselves throughout our lives turn out to be true. The patterns we think we've identified, the connections we've made between things, might turn out to be wrong, or at least not the same as the way other people do it, resulting in a different story. Our conflicts are always disagreements over stories.

By the same token, our greatest achievements emerge from working together to fill the vacuum with a common story. As the boy began to share with the other children about this game he "knew," they began to join in, asking questions, making their own assertions, and even negotiating exactly what this game was all about. The story of the game that emerged was not the one that we adults with our more detailed experience with board games in general, and these board games in particular, would have told. This was a fresh, new story.

So much of what passes for education is adults trying to tell their same, old, tired stories to the children. Stories that may or may not be true. A play-based curriculum is one in which the children are free to do what our brains are designed to do, which is to construct their own learning. This is how our species progresses.

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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!

Hunger is the Best Sauce

We spent our holiday weekend in a nearby mountain village with a group of friends. On Friday evening we met at one person's home for food and drink. We then met the following morning for the charming local parade where we likewise gathered around food and drink. Later that evening, we met again for a grill feast. And on Sunday morning, we wrapped up the festivities with a group brunch.

Russian author Leo Tolstoy is among those philosophers who considered it to be a kind of secular sin to eat without appetite, which is what I've been doing for the past few day. I mean, the food was amazing all around, but there were moments when I found myself chewing for reasons that had nothing to do with hunger. For instance, I finished my hamburger out of a misguided sense of courtesy toward my host. I had a second desert because, well, two people had brought special desserts. I didn't drink that Bloody Mary because of thirst.

And the wages of my "sins" is an overstuffed, bleary-headed lethargy which will last until I once more feel the pangs hunger. Indeed, this morning as I write this, I'm, for the first time in days, feeling the beginnings of appetite. It's a feeling that I'm going to allow to grow for a bit. I might even wait until I'm ravenous because I know that a corollary to Tolstoy's framework is that hunger is the best sauce.

We talk a lot about curiosity in the world of play-based learning. I've often described it as a manifestation of our drive to educate ourselves. There is survival, which causes us to find food, procreate, and avoid danger, but beyond that, curiosity is what motivates us to bridge the gap between what we know and what we'd like to know. Psychologist George Loewenstein sees curiosity as an unpleasant state that compels us to take action, in the same way that thirst and hunger drive us. And like with thirst and hunger, once our curiosity is satisfied, we feel, however briefly, sated.

"Everything is explained now," said musician Tom Waits in an interview. "We live in an age when you say casually to somebody, 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I'd just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now." 

It's one of the greatest challenges of our information age. Just as most of us can instantly satisfy our barest inklings of hunger, we can now do the same with our curiosity. From an evolutionary perspective, thirst and hunger are about the motivation to take action to seek out food and water. When it's always at the tip of our tongue, however, we lose our motivation. We then find ourselves eating and drinking for reasons that have nothing to do with, you know, eating and drinking. The same goes for curiosity: it's the motivation to get our questions answered.

Normal schools are set up as correct answer factories, serving children endless information with no regard for the natural process of curiosity and wonder. Since our internal drive to learn, our curiosity, is sidelined, our schools must then devise complex systems of external motivations (grades, competition, punishments, rewards, and pleased adult) to get incurious children to do the work. And that's what learning becomes in this context: work. 

No where in modern schooling do we allow the time and space for curiosity to grow. Indeed, children who display actual curiosity, who actually wonder, are generally shushed and re-directed. Research consistently finds that rewards, punishments, and other external motivators, reduce instrinsic motivation: they replace the joy of learning with the work of learning.

We've heard a lot about the neuromodulator dopamine over the last decade or so, often within the context of what's popularly called a "dopamine hit." We wring our hands over the "easy" dopamine of, say, social media scrolling, but that's at least in part a misunderstanding of the function of dopamine. Dopamine is central to the hunger that is curiosity. As neuroscientist Charan Ranganath puts it, "(I)f dopamine motivates us to learn, then maybe the boost we get from curiosity isn't from getting the answer to the question we're interested in, but rather from the question itself." In studies, dopamine circuits seem to be triggered by the questions that make the participants curious, rather than by learning the answer.

In other words, curiosity is about what we often call thinking. This is what early childhood education pioneer Eleanor Duckworth was talking about when she said that correct answers are far less important to education than the thinking that leads to answers, even objectively wrong answers. 

"Chasing information to satisfy our curiosity," writes Ranganath, "can sometimes have bigger effects on memory than learning in order to get an external reward . . . curiosity improves memory for both the mundane and the interesting, whether you're eight years old or eighty-eight. In contrast, external rewards seem only to enhance memory for information that we re not curious about . . . Our findings suggest that the people who show the biggest learning benefits from curiosity also score high on a personality trait called openness to experience."

And openness to experience, wonder, is a far better predictor of learning even than simply being interested in something. 

Play-based learning puts curiosity at the center where it belongs. Unlike the standard school approach of stuffing children whether they're hungry or not, play-based learning provides the time and space for the "thirst" for knowledge and the "hunger" for learning to naturally emerge. It's what motivates us to bridge that gap between what we know and don't know. Curiosity, like hunger, is the best sauce.

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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!

"Appreciation is a Holy Thing"

After reading a story, then singing our final song together, the children came forward to hug me, not one at a time, but all together, and there we were, a massive scrum of bodies, wrapping one another up in our arms.

Since my first year teaching, this was the way the two-year-olds said goodbye to me at the end of the day. I never asked for it or encouraged it in any way other than, I suppose, to be open to it. It always started on the first day of class each year because there was always that one child who genuinely felt the urge to hug me, to receive a hug from me, then others saw it, thought, "I want some of that," and came for their hug as well. I said the children's names as they approached, "Here's my Sarah hug, my Nora hug, my Alex hug . . ."

Mister Rogers said, "I believe that appreciation is a holy thing." We were saying goodbye to one another, of course, but we were also saying thank you, expressing our gratitude, showing our appreciation, not in payment for any particular favor, but simply for the time we had together. It started spontaneously, then, as the year progressed, became a sort of ritual, each child making it their own. There were some who rushed to be first, others who waited for the crowd to thin. Some didn't want to let go. Some come back for a second and third and fourth hug. A few didn't want to hug, preferring a high five or simply eye contact. Some were moved to hug their classmates.

It was a beautiful way to end our time together, topping one another up before heading off into our separate lives.

******

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!

Happy Interdependence Day!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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!

"Since We're Neighbors, Let's Be Friends"

For the past several years, I've been limiting my news consumption to about 5 hours of local news a week, usually "watched" while I'm preparing dinner. 

Yesterday, there was a story about a nearby town's preparations for the nation's oldest continually running July 4 parade. From the looks of it, the parade is mostly local groups, marching through the streets, making their music, performing their dances, and waving their flags, while the rest of the town comes out to wave their own flags and cheer. The key figure in the story was an older woman who has been part of organizing the festivities for the past several decades. The story concluded with her saying, "We're just as excited today as they were back then."

There was another "World Cup" adjacent story about a young teen whose health issues have made it impossible for her to play her beloved soccer. She has now started a drive to raise money to help others in her situation. The concluding thought from this girl, "I'm just happy I can help others."

There were more stories, of course, but I'm going to stop there because I'm tearing up as I write this. I often find myself tearing up as I watch my local news. There are, of course, darker stories. There was, for instance, the frozen food warehouse that recently burned down. That story was mostly interviews with the people who live around the facility. The smoke was bad, but some of the people say that the stench of tons of rotting food is worse.

But compared to national news, the overall slant of my local news is much more positive, probably because it's always about my "neighbors." Even national news stories are offered from a local perspective featuring interviews with local people whose lives are directly impacted. This is so much more elevating than professional pontificators who seethe and shout based on some sort of abstract political theory or other. As you know, national news tends to thrive on setting up everything as conflict and performative debate between partisans. It raises your blood pressure, but otherwise goes no where. 

What I enjoy about my small doses of local interviews is that the people on my screen aren't shy about not having all the answers, of being internally conflicted between this or that approach, and overall showing their genuine emotion and concern. Even when I suspect they don't vote the way I do, I still get to see their fuller humanity on display, which naturally allows me to better understand where they're coming from. This is what it means to me to be well-informed about the issues.

This is why I get teary. I get teary because these are the actual people amidst whom I live. And I like them. I like that they're my neighbors. Every year, right around the 4th of July holiday, I find myself getting teary. I know our great "experiment" in democracy is far from perfect. I know that people continue to be poor, oppressed, and left out. I feel for them and strive to use my own political agency to rise them up, set them free, and bring them in. I've shared many of these actions here on the blog over the years, for what it's worth.

I get teary because despite our ongoing failures, I'm moved and even amazed by this audacious thing we are trying to do as a nation. For 250 years, a relatively short time in the scheme of human existence, we have, in our way, as a nation of we the people, attempted to self-govern. It's messy, even ugly at times. And the way our media, politics, and technology has evolved makes it even messier and uglier. But when I turn to my neighbors, when I turn to the people amidst whom I actually live, I continue to be inspired by what we're capable of striving toward, who we are capable of being. Democracy will always be an experiment. It will never be perfect. The promise isn't happiness, but rather the collective pursuit of happiness.

This weekend, I'll be celebrating, not with family, not with old friends, but with my neighbors. 

Among my greatest inspirations is Mister Rogers' whose work with young children was rooted in the metaphor of the neighborhood. In his daily program Mister Roger's Neighborhood, he gave us a blueprint of how the medium of television could be used to pull people together rather than divide them. "Since we're neighbors, let's be friends." It's both a simple and breathtaking aspiration.

It's the neighborhood, the people amidst whom we live, the people we see at the local coffee shop, grocery store, out walking the dog, for which we are made. When I think of democracy, that's who I think about. When I get teary, these are the people, these every day people full of doubts, emotions, fears, and passions, that touch me the most. 

I worry that so many of us don't have the privilege that so many people my age had of growing up in real neighborhoods. They still exist, but they're much harder to find these days.

This is why I believe that the central purpose of every preschool is to be that local community for this generation of young children. To be a place where we learn about and from real people, rather than the cartoon cutouts that come to us through a media that thrives on stereotype and division. Our preschools can be the place where young children first learn that the messiness of self-government need not turn ugly; where empathy and compassion grow best; where real people come together to talk about their concerns, their ideas, and their needs; where negotiation, compromise, and ultimately agreement stand at the center of our relationships with one another. Our preschools can be places in which young children are marinated in community.

I've always approached preschool as an experiment, both for me, and for the children, because that's what our democracy is: an experiment in living together. It's an experiment in which the beaker sometimes blows up in our faces, in which the results are not always what we expected, and in which we the people are the only ones who have the power to do something about it. It's from this foundation of being good neighbors that we can hope for a better tomorrow.

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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.

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