What Kind of Human Being Creates a Peaceful World?

Last week the President said, “We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We’re fighting wars.”

As play based educators, our work is rooted in building a more peaceful world through how we educate our children.

Montessori schools seek peace through independence and self-discipline.

Reggio Emilia schools through relationship and community.

Waldorf schools through moral imagination.

Democratic schools (Sudbury) through freedom and shared power.

Forest schools through connection to nature.

Indigenous approaches through belonging and reciprocity. 

It's all play based learning.

They all ask the question, What kind of human being creates a peaceful world and how do we grow that human?

We are a big country. Peace is better than war. We can’t afford to not take care of our children. We must protect our children's right to play.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

It's Like Learning to Ride a Bike

She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life. ~Susan B. Anthony

I recently watched a neighbor teaching his grandchild how to ride a bike she had received as a Christmas gift. It got me thinking about my own journey as a cyclist.

My first bicycle was a red Western Flyer.

Dad was going to be out of town on a business trip, but he promised to teach me how to ride when he returned which meant I had a few days to get to know my new two-wheeler before I was to receive proper instruction. Riding a tricycle had been a snap -- just jump on the seat, put your feet on the pedals and go -- but the bicycle proved to be much trickier. I could straddle the bar with my feet on the ground. I could even lift my bottom onto the seat and one foot on a pedal, but, of course, when I lifted my other foot off the ground I fell over.

At one point, I figured out how to lean the bike against a tree trunk in such a way that I could sit on the seat, with both feet on the pedals, but there was no way to move forward from this position. I got pretty good at sitting on the seat with one foot on the ground, then rocking the bike to the other side where I caught myself with the opposite foot. I spent at least an hour playing with my bike in this way, but as for forward motion, as for two feet on two pedals, I was stumped.

Mom, witnessing what she must have interpreted as my struggles, gave me a tip: "Get a foot on one pedal then push off with the other foot to give yourself some momentum." I'd never heard the word "momentum" before, but in context I understood it as you have to get going a little bit before you can get going a lot. It made a certain kind of sense, but it also struck me as something of a paradox. How do you get going before you get going?

When Dad got home, he took me to a little used dirt road that ran along behind the newly-constructed elementary school that I was destined to one day attend. His idea was that since I was likely to fall a few times, a dirt road would offer a softer fall than asphalt. The first thing he did was ask me to show him what I'd figured out on my own, which to my mind wasn't much. I showed him how I could sit on the seat properly if I leaned the bike against a tree. I showed him how I could rock back and forth. And then I attempted Mom's "momentum" move, giving it my all, resulting in my falling into the dirt. 

As he dusted me off, he said, "You already know everything you need to know to ride a bike. You know what it feels like to sit on your bike. You know how to take your feet of the pedals to catch yourself if you start to fall. You know how to balance a little. And you know how to fall."

He said, "Okay, so let me be the tree." He held the bike upright as I climbed on, putting both feet on the pedals. "I'm going to rock you back and forth a little bit and you use your feet to catch yourself." We did that a few times. "Now I'm going to help you with momentum. I'll push you a little bit while you pedal." And that was the moment that I really understood what that word meant. He held the back of the seat as I moved exhilaratingly forward. It was a sunny day and I could see his shadow on a dirt, behind me and to the side, connected to the shadow of me on my bicycle. I then forgot about Dad for a moment, turning my attentions to the road ahead. 

When I looked back for his shadow it was gone. I was riding on my own!

Then came a surge of thrill and panic as I wobbled and fell. We tried it again, but this time I started with one foot on the ground while Dad again helped me with momentum. This time he let go almost right away. I felt the momentum. I was riding again! As I got farther and farther away from Dad it occurred to me that I didn't know how to stop. I knew the bike had "coaster brakes" but it was like with the concept of momentum: I got it in concept, but I couldn't get my body to do it. Indeed, I couldn't stop my legs from pedaling forward, so I steered toward a patch of roadside grass and leapt for it, leaving my two-wheeler to careen along without me until it lost momentum and fell.

It was time to head home for dinner. Dad promised me that he'd teach me how to properly stop the following weekend.

Not knowing how to stop seemed like a very minor problem to me. After all, the riding was the important thing. And besides, I did know how to stop. It involved leaping into the grass and every house along our cul-de-sac had grass lawns. I could leap off anywhere I might want to go, which is what I did all that week. One of the older kids called me "James Bond," which I took as a cool compliment even though I had no idea who James Bond was. It wasn't long before several of the other kids had adopted my dismount technique. We even started competing to see who could get their bike to continue the farthest without a rider.

The following weekend, I showed Dad what I could do. I'd figured out how to use the brakes to slow down. I showed him how how I could go really fast. And I showed him my James Bond dismount. He congratulated me, saying, "You've learned to ride a bike."

I don't actually remember learning how to stop and dismount properly, but at some point along the way, I obviously figured that out as well. 

What I didn't know until I watched my neighbor putting his grandchild in the position to learn about momentum, balance, braking, stopping, speed, practice, falling, and freedom, was that I'd also learned a lot about teaching. I'd learned about the importance of letting go a little before the learner thinks they're ready. I learned that teaching is indistinguishable from loving. And I'd learned, that instructions and concepts are mere words until they are put into action. 

Or as the late great Bev Bos would say, "If it hasn't been in the hand and body, it can't be in the brain."

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

"We Are What We Learn"

"Be yourself," writes Oscar Wilde, "everyone else is already taken."

Lao Tzu, the seminal Chinese philosopher, is quoted as saying, "When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everyone will respect you."

And then there is Taylor Swift: "Just be yourself, there is no one better."

It's advice that we've given one another since the dawn of time. We tell our children to listen to their inner voice, to not be influenced by their peers, to be proud of who they are. Indeed, it's such common, every day wisdom that most of us take it for granted, yet so very few of us actually get to live it. 

For one thing, there are rules and social conventions that forbid certain expressions of self. This is especially true when we're young. When children, who are just trying to let their own light shine, make too much noise or move their bodies too assertively, they are too often chastised. In other words, we teach them that while they should strive to be themselves, they can't do it in school, in church, in a theater, a museum, or, frankly, pretty much in any public space, especially if how you express who you are could possibly offend the sensibilities of others.

As Fran Lebowitz, a woman who has made a career of being herself, says, "Being offended is part of leaving home." And while that is true, most of us would rather not offend our fellow humans, even if that is part of who we are, which is why we learn to temper who we are at times if only out of courtesy.

But the real difficulty in living up to the challenge of being yourself is to first figure out who and what your self actually is. When we are born, before we can even understand the concept of self, I would argue that this is the moment when we are most ourselves, but after that it's about learning. 

As Doris Lessing writes, "We are what we learn."

A child of abuse learns that they are a victim, that they somehow deserve it, and, more often than not, without a lot of therapy, they grow up to abuse others. They are what they learn.

A child of privilege learns that they are superior and that they somehow deserve it. They are what they learn.

A child that is over-protected learns that they are always in danger. A child who is not interested in school work learns that they are stupid. A child who is loved unconditionally learns to love unconditionally. They are what they learn.

Your self isn't something you are, but rather something you learn, and you don't always have a choice about what you learn. This is most obviously true in standard schools where the adults have decided what you will be by choosing what you will learn and then judging who you are according to meat-cleaver measurements like grades and test scores.

No wonder it's so incredibly difficult to "be yourself." When do we ever get the opportunity to learn what that is? If we really want a world in which each of us has come alive, childhood should be about discovering who we are and that means allowing the children themselves, to the degree possible, to choose what it is they will learn. In other words, let them play, because self isn't something to discover, but rather something we create. That's the only way anyone has ever learned to be themself. 

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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

Every Child is a Scientist

"Let's build a tower to the ceiling!" (physics)

"I made mud!" (chemistry)

"We found ladybugs in the garden!" (biology)

"Mommy said no, but grandma said yes!" (social science)

Every child is a scientist. This has been true since long before the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, long before the Islamic Golden Age, the Ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Mesopotamians. 

The word "science" has be co-opted by the professionals in recent centuries, codified and made dry and dull with officious processes, reviews, and dense jargon. They sell the myth of "objectivity," the pretense that they are considering nature from the impossible perspective of the gods. In school "science" plays out as "correct" answers, laboratory processes for which the results are already known, and mathematics so abstract as to make the world around us unrecognizable.

The great mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, "(A)ll training in science should begin as well as end in research, and in getting hold of the subject-matter as it occurs in nature." Whitehead famously defined nature as not a thing outside ourselves, but rather a process that intimately involves us.

When children have permission to play, they cannot help but begin with scientific research. When they say, "Look what I did!" or "Look what I found!" or "Guess what, Teacher Tom?" they are sharing their moments of Eureka! And as educators our responsibility is to acknowledge that moment by saying "I'm looking at what you did," "I see what you found," and "I can't guess what, but I'll bet you can tell me." Ours is not to judge or correct them. It is not to take-over by extending or scaffolding them in a direction of our choosing. They are the researcher, they are the scientists, and we are, at most, their lab assistant. Although most of the time we serve them best by marking the moment with them, then letting them go to the next place their curiosity takes them.

Curiosity and Eureka! driven science stands at the heart of early learning. It's a hands on, full body, life-derived process. The discoveries are localized, previsional, and apt to suggest further lines of inquiry. It's what humans have done since long before we knew it was anything more than life itself.

I once taught a two-year-old who used his index finger to push on the nose of a classmate as if it was a button. I imagine that a loved one had showed affection to him by booping his nose. In this case, however, the other child cried. The boy's was clearly confounded by this response. For the next several days, he tried his nose booping experiment over and over. As we adults scrambled to convince him to keep his hands to himself, he continued to make his study, trying it out on different kids, trying different amounts of pressure, combining it with different facial expressions, choosing different situations. And then, one day, his research into booping was complete. I knew this because he stopped doing it. Perhaps he concluded that booping was a welcome act of affection under certain circumstances, but not at school. Maybe he had, in the process, developed new theories about how to show affection. I don't know and it's none of my business.

What I do know is that our schools seem to have lost sight of what science is all about. It's not the exclusive domain of scientists, textbooks that are out-of-date before they are published, or sterile laboratories. Science happens anytime a person, no matter their age or education, is free to pursue the satisfaction of curiosity about the process called nature. This is what children are doing when they play.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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

What Makes a Good Preschool Teacher?

Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable. ~David W. Augsburger

Not long ago I had a series of conversations with business people about teaching. I've been a preschool teacher for over two decades, yet I had a hard time with some of their questions, and specifically those centered around the idea of what exactly it is that makes a "good teacher." It's in the nature of business people, it seems, to want to take things apart, to figure out how they work, to reduce them to their essentials, and then find ways to replicate them, preferably very efficiently and for profit. 

They were good conversations, useful, casting a new light on our profession for me. Are there some things that all good teachers do? I genuinely don't know. Maybe. I don't even know if someone can be taught to be a good teacher, even as I know that many, many of us demonstrate the skills. Generally speaking, it's widely assumed that it takes at least five years in the classroom to even know if someone is a good teacher or not, because nothing replaces experience. It seems that apprenticeship, working alongside veteran teachers, can accelerate learning, but as for "teaching" them to be teachers, I don't know.

I mean in all honesty, although I go by the moniker Teacher Tom, I'm not sure I do much of what these business people would define as teaching, which is widely understood as a synonym for "instructing." I know that the children I've worked with have grown and learned. I even have a pretty good idea what they've learned in some cases, but as for successfully instructing them, I have a very short, undistinguished track record. Can I prove that the children have learned? Can I prove what they've learned? No, at least not to the satisfaction of someone who is looking for the kind of hard data that business people tend to like behind the things they do. Traditionally, we've done it by starting with "learning objectives," providing instruction, then testing to see if the kids meet our objectives. I've never done any of those things because, while it produces data on the effectiveness of certain types of direct instruction, it forces children through a process that is the antithesis of how we know children's brains are designed to learn. Will we ever be able to produce acceptable hard data on children learning through play? I don't know.

I do know that I've spent very little time over my career in the role of instructor. People have suggested that maybe a better word for what we do would be facilitator or coordinator or perhaps more whimsically, guide on the side. I put quite a bit of energy into preparing the environment for children, getting it ready for them, providing what I think they will need on any given day to pursue their self-selected interests or answer, through their play, their own questions. I can do this because I've spent the previous day paying close attention, observing, studying, striving to understand their motivations, individually and collectively. I've never, however, taken it on as a systematic study, but rather an intuitive one with a sniff test that manifests along the lines of "Oh, the kids are going to love this!" or, equally as often, the singular version, "Billy is going to love this!" Could this be made into a systematic, replicable thing, a chart or something with boxes to tick? I don't know.

Is there anything that all good preschool teachers do? It's a question worthy of thought. I know that the foundation of what I've always done is to simply strive to treat children like people. What do I mean by that? It mostly means that, like with non-child people, I don't get to tell them what to do. It means I should avoid offering unsolicited advice, because most people, most of the time resent it. If I ask them questions, they should be real questions in the sense that I don't already know the answer and I have a reasonable expectation that this child can tell me what I need to know. And the most important thing is to listen to them, to shut up and let them say all the words they want to say to me about what's on their minds. (This is something that I actually do much more consistently with children than I do with adults.) And then to let them know through my words and actions that I've heard them.

Can this be called teaching? I don't know, but it's what I do and I know it's what the great teachers I know do. As Mister Rogers said, "Listening is where love begins: listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors." And at the end of the day, this is why I struggle so much to answer the questions these business people ask me. Love can't be qualified or quantified, although I think it can be replicated, quickly: it is infinitely scalable. Love is like play. It is a pure good that can't be defined or measured, even when we know it when we feel it. That is what a great teacher of young children will always be: someone who loves us and who is loved in return.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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 Blind Spot

Karntakuringu Jukurrpa

Long before the advent of alphabets and literacy, human wisdom was stored and passed along as stories told from one person, one generation, to the next. Our modern, Western prejudice has long been that these stories, or "yarns," as author Tyson Yunkaporta calls them, may be entertaining or enlightening, but that they that are unreliable when it comes to passing along so-called "facts," especially of the scientific variety. 

I mean, after all, the great breakthrough that we call the "scientific process," the tradition of Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, strives to assume a position of objectivity, of pure logic. It is a tradition of observation, replicable experiments, and learned debate. Indeed, one of the primary missions of science is to separate mythology from "fact."

In his book Sand Talk, Yunkaporta tells us about the oral tradition of his Apalech clan (from what is today the far north of Queensland, Australia) that stretches back at least 7000 years, long before Western people began writing things down:

"We yarn about the sentience of stones and the Ancient Greek mistake of identifying “dead matter” as opposed to living matter, limited for centuries to come the potential of Western thought when attempting to define things like consciousness and self-organizing systems such as galaxies. Western thinkers viewed space as lifeless and empty between stars; our own stories represented those dark areas as living country, based on observed effects of attraction for those places on celestial bodies. Theories of dead matter and empty space meant that Western science came late to discoveries of what they now call “dark matter,” finding that those areas of “dead and empty” space actually contain most of the matter in the universe."

Indigenous peoples from around the globe tell ancient stories like this. The Ojibwe and other midwestern tribes tell stories that go back to the end of the last Ice Age, 10,000-12,000 years and perhaps beyond, yarns from "time immemorial".

Western science is only now beginning to catch up with much of this indigenous knowledge.

Yunkaporta writes, "In contemporary science and research, investigators have to make claims of objectivity, an impossible and god-like (greater-than) position that floats in empty space and observes the field while not being part of it. It is an illusion of omniscience that has hit some barriers in quantum physics. No matter how hard you may try to separate yourself from reality, there are always observer effects as the reality shifts in relation to your viewpoint."

Today, many of us hold science up as the gold standard of factual knowledge. And not without some validity. The scientific method has lead directly to the technological advantages that made both actual and cultural colonialism possible. Even us non-scientists seek to erase doubts about what we are going to say by starting off "Science tells us . . ." We shake our heads over those who take medical advice from anyone other than "trained" professionals. We teach oral traditions as literature or religion rather than an alternative perspective on truth.

Most scientists are humble enough to not pretend to know the "truth." They see their role as pursuing truth with the understanding that whatever we think we know today will be, at best, a stepping stone to a greater truth, if not an outright mistake. But there's little question that Western culture as a whole has embraced its science as a kind of supreme system for knowing things.

In their new book The Blind Spot, a scientist (Adam Frank) and a pair of philosophers (Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson) explore what they call "the blind spot" of modern science in light of the story science has told over the past two centuries or so. This blind spot is made up of four main aspects of the progress of science (and most specifically physics) from the Ancient Greeks to the present day.

The first aspect of this is what mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called "the bifurcation of nature." This refers to the assumption that we can separate human experience from nature. For instance, science tells us that atoms and light waves are "real," whereas experiences like color or hot and cold are merely psychological, manufactured by our minds, and thus not a part of so-called "objective reality." An example that comes to mind is that my doctor tells me that the placebo effect is "just in your mind" even if my lived experience is that the sugar pill, because it cured my ill, is real medicine. As Yunkaporta points out, the world since Einstein has shown us the process of bifurcation leaves us with an explanation of the world world, the quantum world, that makes no sense to those of us who live our day-to-day lives as an inseparable part of nature.

The second aspect of this blind spot is what the authors call reductionism (or the term I prefer, smallism). This refers to the process of attempting to understand larger systems by breaking them down into smaller and smaller parts. The idea is that the smaller the part, the better it represents reality, while our experience of larger systems -- like the human body or the planet Earth -- are just fabrications of our minds. But smallism has taken us to a place in which larger systems simply shouldn't exist as they do . . . Yet they do. There is something about these larger systems that we are missing as we squint into increasingly powerful microscopes.

The third aspect of science's blind spot is what Yunkaporta describes as "impossible and god-like": objectivism. This is perhaps the most profound absurdity of science, the idea that we can somehow step outside of reality in order to take a God's-eye view of things. What the quantum world is teaching us is that there is no place and no time at which a human can stand that is not inside the reality in which we exist. We are always inside it. The metaphor (or perhaps not a metaphor) that comes to mind is that no matter how much we know about what our brains do, we have no idea how it creates consciousness. That's probably because it's impossible for consciousness to take an objective view of consciousness. It's like asking a flashlight in a dark room to find something that doesn't have light on it. Since every direction it turns has light on it, the only conclusion is that everything has light on it.

The final component of the blind spot is what the authors call the reification (I prefer thingification) of mathematics. This means that we mistake the increasing abstractions of math as the skeleton upon which reality hangs rather than a product of our idealized scientific workshops or laboratories. Math can only explain things for which the scientist is seeking explanation, but to do so requires "controlling" for the rest of reality. To paraphrase Fran Lebowitz, let me assure you, in the real world there is no such thing as math. As an abstraction, math is one of the major tools for bifurcating us from our lived experiences.

Indigenous stories tell us of people without this blind spot, who accepted that they, and everything, is part of an un-bifurcatable system of reality in which there is no difference between living and non-living, in which everything is inseparably connected, in which our lived experience of doing, thinking, and being, of color and hot and cold, are as real and essential to understanding reality as atoms and light waves. This is the world of young children who have not yet fallen victim to the blind spot.

In their book The World of the Newborn, Daphne and Charles Maurer write about newborns:

"His world smells to him much as our world smells to us, but he does not perceive odors (as we do) . . . His world is a melee of pungent aromas -- and pungent sounds, and bitter-smelling sounds, and sweet-smelling sights, and sour-smelling pressures against the skin. If we could visit the newborn's world, we would think ourselves inside a hallucinogenic perfumery."

Western science tells us that sweet-smelling sights are not objective aspects of reality. Tens of thousands of years of human experience, and every young child, begs to differ.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Mistaking Subject Matter for Meaning

I recently took a long walk. As I walked, my mind, as one's mind does, wandered. I assume that traffic continued whizzing past me on the roadway alongside which I walked, but because my mind was elsewhere I can't say for certain. I can only assume so because there had been traffic the last time I checked in with the present moment and there was traffic the next time I became conscious in the present. But the truth is that I was, while my mind wandered, somewhere else.

Consciousness is an incredible thing. Even as my body was moving, step-over-step, along a sidewalk, my mind was busy elsewhere: reliving a moment from my childhood; anticipating a conversation I expected to have with my doctor later in the day; regretting an embarrassing comment I made the night before; fearing the implications of a news story I read earlier that morning. Indeed, most of the time I was walking my conscious mind was everywhere other than that sidewalk along a busy road.

Of course, part of me, the unconscious part, was at least vaguely aware of what was going on around me. When I came to a crosswalk, I briefly returned from my time travels to attend to the present as I located the crosswalk signal, checked both ways for cars, and calculated the proper moment to continue. But even before I was on the other side of the street, my mind was, once more, elsewhere.

As author and researcher in psychology Julian Jaynes writes: 

"Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of . . . It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that the light is everywhere . . . Right at this moment, you are not conscious of how you are sitting, of where your hands are placed, or how fast you are reading, though even as I mentioned these items, you were. And as you read, you are not conscious of the letters or the words or even of the syntax of the sentences and punctuation, but only of their meaning. As you listen to an address, phonemes disappear into words and words into sentences and sentences disappear into what they are trying to say, into meaning. To be conscious of the elements of speech is to destroy the intention of the speech."

The project of modern schooling is one of directing children where to shine the flashlight of their consciousness and in the process we destroy meaning. We provide their minds with subject matter. In preschool that might be "the letter of the day" or the life cycle of a butterfly. We then proceed to tell them what they are to think of this thing. Then, finally, we grade them on how well they are later able to recall, on command, the salient points.

In no other aspect of life, other than school, do we demand this of human consciousness. For instance, I am currently writing this blog post. A moment before writing that last sentence I realized that the words on the screen had no meaning. They had become simply the place where my eyes were resting as my mind, always traveling, was back in the classroom looking around for an example to make my point. I then became aware that I was elsewhere and redirected my gaze out the window where they rested on the view. My mind was then transported briefly to the future where I saw, based on how the sky looked, that it was going to be a sunny day. When I returned my eyes to the screen to write the above sentence that begins with "For instance . . ." the words once again had meaning. And by the time I got around to writing this current sentence, my mind has been around the world, even inside your mind, predicting how you, the reader might react to this or that choice of words. The reality is that I spent most of my writing time, not writing at all, not even really thinking about the words. In fact, most of these words I've written here came to me when I was emphatically not trying to think of them.

When Jaynes writes "To be conscious of the elements of speech is to destroy the intention of the speech" he is putting his finger on one of the great myths about learning and thinking. I've found that one of the worst ways to come up with an idea or solution is to "think" about it like we expect children to do in school. The French call this phenomenon "genius in the stairwell." We've all had the experience of having our best thoughts flash upon us while, say, in the shower. We've all walked out of an interview only to curse ourselves over all the things we should have said. Our best thinking is rarely the product of conscious thought.

Thinking, real thinking, deep thinking, is rarely a conscious process. This is why play is so much more powerful than direct instruction. Play frees our minds to travel, to bounce about between past and present, here and there, now and then, as our bodies engage the present. Direct instruction attempts to chain our magnificent minds, our time traveling minds, our creative, critical, connected minds, to a single point in time. It limits the beam of our flashlight to this meager crumb of reality while the traffic whizzes past us; while the bird soars overhead; while the candy goes untasted. And perhaps worst of all, we punish and drug children when their minds do what minds are designed to do, which is to play.

The reason that a child at play, to quote Lev Vygotsky, is "a head taller than themself" is because when we play our minds, brains, and bodies are finally free to think and learn at full capacity.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!