Practicing Courage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

The Lively Alert Fearless Curiosity of Children

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if that is what stood at the center of our understanding of education: that lively alert fearless curiosity of children?

******

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!

Our Minds Extend Into One Another

It takes humans years before they fully comprehend their separateness from their caretakers. At least that's the widely accepted psychological theory. A newborn doesn't know that they are not their mother and vice versa. This is understandable, of course. After all, it wasn't long ago that they were growing inside of this other person where they were literally one, mind, body, and perhaps even soul. One of their first acts, upon emerging into this bright, noisy world, is to seek the intimate reconnection of nursing and other kinds of physical touch.

Even as we grow into toddlers, we continue to struggle to understand that we are independent people. It's part of why separation anxiety is so common. As we get older, we must learn that we are not our parents: we have our own bodies and minds.

We learn about our separateness. It is not a concept with which we are born. 

There is a growing body of research around the tantalizing idea that maybe human infants are on to something and that what we are teaching them about separateness is all wrong. Certainly, our bodies are separate from the other bodies, but it's beginning to look like this thing we call "the mind," our essential self, extends beyond us and into our environment, including, perhaps especially, the other people.

In an influential 1998 paper, cognitive psychologists and philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers posed the question "Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?", concluding that there is no identifiable line. This concept of the "The Extended Mind," as they labeled it, was at first laughed at, but has over the last quarter century come to be regarded as one of the most important recent insights into how the human mind functions.

It was the work of Russian psychologist and early learning pioneer Lev Vygotsky that initially set Clark's course. Famously, Vygotsky noted that young children learn with the help of what he called "scaffolding" from the outside world, such as the help of an adult or an object. Clark realized that even as adults we rely on the outside world to scaffold our own thinking, including things like writing which is impossible without an interplay between pen and paper or fingers and screen, objects that scaffold our minds.

What Clark and Chalmers realized is what babies are born knowing.

Our minds cannot be confined to our heads. Oh sure, the conscious part might feel like it's self-contained, but much of what we know, think, and recall is actually stored in the outside world. A prosaic example is when I write down my "to do" list. Other people might hold their list in their conscious mind, but functionally there is no difference between us -- we both have our "to do" lists. This is the same phenomenon that is taking place between us and our smartphones, tablets, and computers: our minds extend into them, making them an essential part of our thinking process. A more complex example of how our minds extend into the world, and indeed, other people, is while in conversation. That process of give and take becomes a melding of the minds an interplay that isn't contained within any one person, but rather takes place beyond the confines of our bodies. 

When we moved my wife's mother from her long time home to an assisted living facility because it wasn't safe for her to live alone, it became clear to us that a part of her mind was left behind in that house. Indeed, in hindsight, it's clear that the death of her husband was a trigger for her rapid decline into dementia, which is to say, the process of losing her mind. When we removed her from her environment, we unwittingly removed much of the scaffolding that supported her extended mind.

Some time ago, I wrote about what Eleanor Duckworth called "the collective creation of knowledge," that process by which young children learn together, thinking, discovering, and exploring, as if they have a kind of "hive mind." In the language of Clark and Chalmers, their minds extend into one another, scaffolding one another, erasing the distinction between your mind and my mind, blurring the lines that separate you from me.

Our schools are based upon outmoded models of how human minds think and learn. Specifically, we have bought into the idea of brains as organs that must be muscled up on academics, drilling, testing, and the artificial rigor that characterizes so much of what happens in school. We treat children like self-contained silos into which we must stuff teaching. However, when we understand, as newborns do, that learning is scaffolded by our environment and that our minds work most naturally when they are extended outward in all directions, including into that space that connects us with other people, we see that learning is, necessarily, a collective, collaborative process: not an academic one, but an experiential one.

The more I learn about learning, the more I find myself returning to the Reggio Emilia notion of the environment as a teacher on par with adults and other children. Indeed, in this theory of the extended mind, we see that adults and other children can actually be included in our notions of environment, which means that environment is the only teacher. And as every baby knows, we learn when we extend our minds outward, driven by curiosity and the irrepressible urge to merge our minds with the things and people we find there.

******

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!

Don Quixote

As if you didn't indulge me every day, today I ask for a little extra indulgence.

Our windmill is a former prop that was was regularly set afire in a performance based upon Don Quixote by the now defunct Cirque de Flambe. We've removed the heavy metal vanes and replaced them with swimming noodles.

The fire in the performance, I assume, represented the intensity of Alonso Quijano's imagination as he sallies forth into the world, believing himself to be the chivalric hero Don Quixote de la Mancha. I prefer to think that he is neither "a madman nor a fool," as the great critic Harold Bloom writes, "but someone who plays at being a knight-errant." Bloom, in his book The Western Canon cites Dutch historian Johan Huizinga who in his masterpiece Homo Ludens asserts that play is the source of all human culture.

Play is a voluntary activity, unlike madness and foolishness. Play, according to Huizinga, has four principal characteristics: freedom, disinterestedness, excludedness or limitednss, and order. You can test all of these qualities upon the Don's knight-errantry, but not always upon Sancho's faithful service as squire, for Sancho is slower to yield himself to play. The Don lifts himself into ideal place and time and is faithful to his own freedom, to its disinterestedness and seclusion, and to its limits . . .

There is no greater universal image than the Don's impossible dream quest, that thing that brings us all every day out into the world to unreasonably stand before windmills and fight them as if they be giants that "move more arms than the giant Briareus." If each of us is not standing from our beds each day, our minds afire with our dragons and Dulcineas, then we are the more sane Sancho Panza, the one who says, "the arms you fancy, are their sails, which, being whirled about by the wind, make the mill go." Throughout our lives all of us are sometimes the Don and sometimes Sancho, both of whom see the world with a clarity that makes the other seem mad or foolish. (Although I will point out that in the end, when the Don is at last defeated, he returns to "sanity," giving up his play, and dies, an indication, I think that Cervantes put the special star of life by his "insane" Don.)

And play is what this all about, the first novel, and perhaps the greatest thing ever written. It's about play's sanity, it's insanity, and it's bulls-eye central-ness to what kind of thing we are in the universe. That's why we still read Don Quixote and why when we see a storybook windmill, those of us who haven't forgotten how to play, always take a tilt at it.

I did not want our windfall of large pieces of canvas to become one of those prizes that I wind up curating while it sits on the shelves for months, if not years, awaiting the "perfect" moment, so I'd promised myself they'd get used as soon as possible. The children arrived to find their windmill a canvas wrapped giant in the center of their classroom.

We sallied forth on our adventure, paint brushes in hand, together dreaming our impossible dream.

We marched right up to this giant and made our marks, shoulder to shoulder, still seeing a windmill I suppose.

Perhaps we were a troupe of Sanchos as we set out, still seeing vanes instead of arms.

Playing, yes, but practically with our brushes and our quiet little cups of paint. There's a goodness and rightness about that; an innocence, certainly. It's the kind of place from which the best adventures start.

Some of us, in the freedom of our play, chose to swing around to the back stage side of things, where we found something magical to do, that being the moment when we first suspected that there was more here than a mere windmill.

And perhaps is was then that we began to understand that we were dealing with a giant.

It had grown right here before us. We needed to reach higher so we began to call for ladders to allow us to scale its ramparts.

It continued to grow as we painted and its many arms to spin like the giant Biareus. This would not be enough. 

That's when we decided to manufacture lances for ourselves, long sticks onto the ends of which we duct taped brushes to allow us to do proper battle with those long arms, all the way up in the clouds where they waved about so fiercely.

Of course, these particular children may not have been battling at all.

In fact, I'm inclined to believe they were not, but rather playing an entirely different story, but one, I'm sure nonetheless was a quest worthy of knights.

They just were playing; you know, building a little human culture.

Tell me this is not the stuff of legend.

We reached into the clouds indeed, our knight-errantry taking us to heights beyond ourselves, and many simply beside ourselves, like the peculiar incident that involved someone planting a green dot on someone's cheek unawares.

But the invention of this new slice of human culture was far from complete as we then proceeded to the launching of paint besotted projectiles, such as sponges, and something (I don't exactly know what; they predate me) in the toes of nylons that we generally use for splat painting (dipping them in paint, then dropping them onto paper from a height).

Look how boldly we stand here before the giant.

We are the Don.

Adding an extra challenge was the group of peasants who sought to ride their donkey's in the neighboring pastures, so we were careful to avoid collateral damage.

After each toss, we approached the giant to survey what we had managed.

And oh, we had some technique.

Amazingly, this one hit it's target!

Lest you get the idea that we were playing a kind of war game here, I should point out that I'm the only one of us (meaning me and the kids) who has read Don Quixote, so this fantasy combat imagery was only in my head, as it was in the Don's. Up to this point, all the tools we'd used -- ladders, long paint brushes, paint soaked projectiles -- were all discussed as attempts to paint to the "very top" of the canvas. I mention this because this last thing we did is quite martial and I don't want you to think we'd been the whole time building ourselves up into a combat-ish frenzy.

That's right, we took our dangerous spear throwing to a whole new level, taping paint brushes to the ends of our bamboo stakes, dipping them in paint . . .

. . . taking aim . . .

. . . and letting them fly!

It was an idea one of the kids had suggested and we just had to give it a try, you know, because we're the Don, and Sancho, for the time being, is no where to be found.

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!