Does Modern Schooling Create Mass Mediocrity From the Raw Material of Genius?

On the short list of history's geniuses, most of us would include Leonardo da Vinci. He is perhaps the most famous polymath to ever live -- a painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, engineer, technologist, and mathematician of the highest order. He is the embodiment of the High Renaissance. Today, he is best known for his painting the Mona Lisa, a masterpiece that to this day defines what a masterpiece is all about. But his other existing works like The Last Supper are every bit as sublime not to mention the volumes of notebooks he left behind detailing everything from helicopters and nautical innovations to adding machines, anatomical studies, and optical discoveries.

I think it's safe to say that most of us would be pretty proud if our kid grew up to be the new da Vinci, right? I mean, he represents the pinnacle of the much ballyhooed STEM (or STEAM) schooling that we hear so much about. Although, to be honest, Leonardo himself never went to school. He was a "studio boy" in an artist's workshop, eventually becoming an apprentice. It's unknown whether he chose that particular career path or if he just fell into it by way of relieving his lower-class single mother of the burden of his upkeep.

All told, the great genius da Vinci produced fewer than 25 paintings, most of which were unfinished and still in his possession upon his death. The Mona Lisa remained one of those unfinished works, even after some 15 years of fiddling with it. Of the works he actually "finished" most only saw the light of day in his lifetime because his patrons threatened to stop funding him. Indeed, he spent much of his life dodging debtors. His notebooks full of innovations, inventions, and discoveries were exactly that, notebooks in which he doodled his ideas, never intended for the public eye. It's likely that he would today have been diagnosed with ADHD, so scattered and varied were his interests and activities.

What a deadbeat! At least if judged by today's productivity standards, da Vinci was a classic failure-to-launch dreamer, full of high falutin ideas, but obviously without the grit or rigor to pull himself up by his own bootstraps or whatever. Just imagine what he could have accomplished had he only been more motivated.

It's a sucker's game, of course, to play 'what if' with history, but what if Leonardo had had the benefits of modern schooling?

I think it's safe to say that he would not have be Leonard da Vinci. Certainly, he might have found a vocation that kept the debtors off his back. Maybe he would have become a painter with his own commercial studio, cranking out above average allegorical motifs and portraits to decorate the hallways and mantles of the wealthy, perhaps even developing a line of budget paintings for more humble households. Or maybe he would have joined the military or become an engineer or an architect or a botanist, all vocations for which he showed an aptitude. But I think it's safe to say that he would not have become the great genius Leonardo. His teachers would have seen to that. He might have been more productive, but it's quite clear that fiddling, perfecting, and doodling were the methods behind his unique and world-changing genius. 

Without that, he would not have been the wonderfully fallible Leonardo da Vinci, but rather just another promising young man who made a decent living.

It's tempting to say, Oh, but that's just Leonardo the genius. He's the exception. Most kids left to their fiddling, perfecting, and doodling would just waste their time on video games. Maybe. It's also possible that our educational system that focuses on productivity and paying the bills as the key measures of success has created mass mediocrity from the raw material of genius. 

What if that other iconic genius Albert Einstein was right: "Every child is born a genius." What if the real trick of education is to not waste it on productivity and paying the bills?

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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 Greatest of Savage Tribes"

"The world-wide fraternity of children is the greatest of savage tribes, and the only one which shows no signs of dying out."

I came across this quote in a book published in 1965, which quoted it from another book written in 1959. It's attributed to a person named Douglas Newton, who may be the same author Wilfred Douglas Newton who was publishing during the early part of the last century. In other words, I really don't know who wrote it, but it rings true, even if my modern sensitivities make me cringe at the term "savage tribes."

For most of my career, I've considered young children to be the last of the unspoiled humans, the people who are the closest to the origins of our species. I've been privileged to spend much of my adult life in a position to observe these natural humans who still have not learned many of the lessons of "civilization." I've strived to create natural habitats in which they can thrive without absorbing the dubious lessons of modern life; specifically those of glorified competition and the elevation of the individual over the community. Even before we understood the harm handheld devices were causing us, I eschewed screen-based technology in the classroom out of fear it would add unnecessary artificiality to this natural "fraternity." Over the course of decades I've seen that no matter how much society changes, no matter what the rest of us take for natural and normal, no matter how convinced we've become of the slurs casually hurled at children from adult bigots, these young children remain our last hope to stay connected to our "natural" state.

I remember the first time that a young child turned to a camera to make a face the way people do on social media. I remember meeting a five-year-old whose parents had been preparing her for an Ivy League future from birth. They literally moved to Seattle specifically to attend my school because they had become concerned that she didn't know how to play -- or "do anything" according to her father -- without adult direction. Douglas Newton was certain that this "savage tribe" would never "die out," but I don't know. We're doing our damnedest to kill it off.

Yesterday, during an online talk on play based learning, educators commented using the "chat" function while I spoke. At least a dozen spontaneously complained, "Children don't know how to play any more." It's not the first time I've heard that.

Of course, I know that young children still know how to play. I know these children. I hear of these children. Fellow educators share delightful stories of children's play with me all the time, but the colonization of childhood is clearly well underway. Just as European colonizers sought to forcibly "convert" those "savage tribes" to the ways of Christianity, capitalism, and Western science, we are currently seeking to do the same to our youngest citizens.

It begins with the casual way we allow one another to display their hatred of children. Comedians and other wags regularly declare, "I hate children." We let our friends say, "I won't eat in a restaurant that allows kids." We don't bat an eye when chauvinists call children "feral," "dirty," or "ignorant." If these things are said about any other category of human we readily identify it as bigotry, but when it comes to children, it's perfectly fine to refer to them as "disrespectful," "uncivilized," or "savage." This is how colonization always begins.

It's not an accident that William Golding's shockingly misanthropic and child-hating work of fiction, The Lord of the Flies, is currently being revived in blockbuster movie style. I can't tell you how often naysayers have evoked this novel to disparage my work with children. They say, "Ever heard of Lord of the Flies?" as if that settles the debate. I guarantee, every play based early childhood educator will hear this during the coming year. (In the real world, young boys did find themselves trapped on a deserted island and the results were much more hopeful.)

The next step after "othering" children, is to "correct" them. In this case we replace their natural inclination to learn through play with the tedium of worksheets, rote learning, and testing . . . "for their own good." And they must do this indoors. Just as generations of indigenous people have been made to behave and believe in abeyance to the colonizer's standards, our young children are undergoing the same process. They will never be fully civilized, of course, but at least we will have "saved their souls." I worry that we have already reached the point that we will need to turn to anthropologists to unearth what we have lost. And indeed, if young children really don't know how to play, we are lost, both morally and as a species.

I recently worked with teens and young adults who were unable to share any stories of risk taking from their younger days. In fact, one young woman told me that she doubted that my own stories of youthful risk-taking were true. I recently spoke with a young mother who said, "I'm a parent in 2026. My child never does anything without me except go to school." We've all heard the stories of the police being called because children were allowed to play in their own yards. These are all anecdotal, but by the time the actual data catches up, I'm concerned it will be too late. 

It's not too late, but without action it's coming fast. We already have the first generation of fully colonized children having their own babies. When the stories of our own youth are dismissed by the current generation as not credible, we are in danger of never knowing first hand what it means to be fully or authentically human.

Our play based preschools must be havens, protected preserves of childhood. They are the last place we find natural humans. I hope this Douglas Newton fellow is right, that this world-wide fraternity of children will never die out, but they are endangered. We must all fight to protect them and it starts right now by taking a stand where we live, to stand up and say, "No."

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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!

"I Don't Know About That"

One of the hard truths I've learned over the past three decades is that research rarely persuades anyone of anything. If it did, we would have universal play based preschools. The data in favor of play in the early years is overwhelming. This clinical report from the American Association of Pediatrics (first published in 2018 and reaffirmed last year) is as definitive as science gets, citing nearly 150 peer reviewed studies.

I've provided this report to dozens of doubtful parents and educators over the years, many of whom have come back with an "I don't know about that" objection that let's me know that they  are not persuaded.

Continuing to push academic-style instruction down into the early years is a direct cause of mental illness in young children. Period. Play, and lots of it, is the antidote. That's what we know even if far to many people still "don't know about that."

The same thing appears to be happening with screen-based technology, and specifically smartphones. The data is overwhelming: we should be keeping young children away from them the same way we keep them away from alcohol and loaded firearms. Harm is being done. Jonathan Haidt's well-researched book The Anxious Generation is only two years old and in the intervening two years, the evidence of the harm these devices are doing to our young people is has grown exponentially. 

I get it. Smartphones are an easy way for parents and other adults to occupy a bothersome child, especially in a world in which "go play outside" can get you arrested for child endangerment. We obviously need more safe places for children to play outdoors in the kind of unsupervised way past generations did, but do we really need to stick phones in front of kids in restaurants, on airplanes, while driving in the car? I recently went to a movie in a theater and sat next to a pair of elementary-aged girls who spent most of the two hours on their phones. I just read a social media post from a teacher who says that when she releases her two-year-olds to their parents at the end of a school day most of them are immediately given their parent's phone. 

This is neglect. Children need to interact with real people. They need to have conversations with their loved ones. They need to be free to engage with the real world around them. That's what the research is telling us even if "I don't know about that."

But what is far more outrageous is what our schools are doing. Based on what we know about the harm that screen-based technology causes our young children, it is child abuse to provide these devices in schools. That's right -- abuse. There is no evidence that children learn better from screens than from human beings, books, or other more traditional methods. A recent Wall Street Journal investigation (the actual article requires a subscription, but this link provides a decent summary) found that students in US schools are using their school-issued devices during class time to view massive amounts of questionable content, including tens of thousands of YouTube videos a month. One child was found to have watched 200 in a single morning.

Of course, those who will not be persuaded by evidence simply argue that it's the teacher's fault, that they must do a better job of controlling the kids, because heaven forbid they have to give up those damned screens. The screens make the children quiet and passive, which is why parents resort to them. Studies consistently show that the use of screen devices in schools does not lead to improved learning, and many find they reduce learning. In other words, these devices are not only harmful to mental health (which should be enough), but also to educational prospects.

It's time for parents to start suing schools. 

In March of this year, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta (the parent company of Facebook) to pay $375 million after finding the company liable for concealing what it knew about child sexual exploitation and endangering children on its platforms. In that same month a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and YouTube to pay $6 million in damages to a young woman (and her mother) who sued based on the addictive nature of their products. If our schools are going to allow that kind of harmful crap into our schools, then they should be held liable for the damages. It's no different than feeding the kids poisoned lunches. We know for both a scientific and now legal fact that our children are being harmed.

And still, those who will not be persuaded will strive to keep the screens, while controlling the children and the content. Why? They're unpersuadable. They are not interested in what's best for children, but rather what's best for them. "I don't know about that" has become the go-to defense of the indefensible. 

And now we come to the nub. Why are screens so good for these educators? Because they have massive classes and expensive curricula they have to get through. The class size is because our elected leaders refuse to adequately fund education. And the damned out-of-the-box curricula from for-profit companies demand that teachers march the kids through it without any regard for the individual children in their care, meaning that a few get it, while most are either bored or confused. Screens "solve" both problems: they create passive children and deliver cookie-cutter lessons. Who cares about learning when you have a well-managed classroom and digital evidence that you "delivered" the content. Frankly, I don't blame kids for watching YouTube videos instead.

Research rarely persuades anyone about anything, but fear-mongering does. Fear-mongering over "falling behind" and "school readiness" is why we have the academic push down into our preschools. Science tells us that the healthiest, most educational thing we can do for young children is to let them play in a screen-free environment, but that, apparently, isn't a persuasive message. I've tried now for decades to be positively persuasive here on the blog. I don't want to fear-monger, but maybe, for the sake of our children, it's time to start.

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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!

Bookends for Living a Meaningful and Moral Life

In her novel Middlemarch, George Eliot writes, "The young ones have always a claim on the old to help them forward." She also rhetorically asks, "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?"

As bookends for living a meaningful and moral life, you could do worse.

We all begin as helpless newborns, completely dependent upon the adults who have brought us into the world. Without them, we roll over and die, and so too the future of our species. From an evolutionary perspective, of course, we need our offspring to not just survive, but to also thrive, which is why caring for children must be the chief project of every civilization. 

On Mother's Day, The White House launched an initiative to encourage certain of us to have more babies. They say there is a population crisis. They seem to think women just need more positive motherhood vibes. 

In the rest of nature when birthrates drop it's because the world has become inhospitable for babies. It's a response to the individual and collective assessment of their offspring's prospects. When species are under stress, they often shift their energy away from reproduction toward survival. In many species breeding is skipped or delayed, or fertility may decline due to hormonal suppression. Mammals may stop ovulating, birds may not lay eggs, embryos are reabsorbed. We know that under extreme conditions like famines, war, or chronic stress, humans are known to shut down reproduction. When survival is uncertain, reproduction generally becomes more conservative.

There are exceptions. Some species, like insects and rodents produce more offspring when conditions are unpredictable, employing a kind of "boom-or-bust" strategy. That seems to be this administration's approach. They're obviously banking on "rah-rah" patriotism and motherhood to encourage more babies, instead of doing those things that might create a more hopeful future like childcare, nutritional assistance, tax credits, parental leave, healthcare, and climate action. 

Instead, they're aggressively working to take away abortion rights, contraception, and bodily autonomy, all of which are attempts to deny women the right to choose what is best for both themselves, their prospective offspring, and the species' future.

Families increasingly find themselves under financial stress, which in our world is a genuine threat to survival. It means that basics like food, shelter, and healthcare are beyond the reach of too many. It only makes sense to avoid having more babies. Economists are forecasting, for the first time in modern history, that today's young will live less prosperous lives than the generations before them, not to mention the fact that we live in a world that is increasingly hostile to children and families. Under these conditions, the choice to not reproduce is a valid one.

"More babies" should never be our goal, but in a world in which free women have the right to choose, increasing birthrates are a leading indicator of a hopeful future. A declining birthrate should sound alarm bells, not about reproduction, but about the world we are creating.

"The young ones have always a claim on the old to help them forward." "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?" It's between these simple ideas that we create a future in which humans thrive.

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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!

Living in a World of Rainbows

Children are always making rainbows. They draw rainbows with pencils and markers, color them with crayons, and paint them on easels. As I've travelled the world, visiting preschools from Greece to China, from New Zealand to Iceland, I find rainbows adorning the walls and bulletin boards, happy arcs of color, often with a self-portrait of the artist, or even the artist's whole family, standing under them, smiling.

We've all seen them, and often. It's tempting to wonder why they do it, although it's entirely unnecessary to know. The fact that children everywhere make rainbows, I think, is enough.

And they don't just make them with "art" materials. Every day, someone will call out, "I've made a rainbow tower!" or explain "This is a rainbow in a box."

In nature, rainbows are somewhat rare, only appearing when the conditions are just right, only lasting for a short time, and only visible from certain angles, but at preschool they are everywhere, in everything, making our world brighter.

Sometimes when children talk of rainbows, they are referring to the classic shape, but more often than not they are talking of all those colors, side by side, beautifully, joyfully, a concept that is incomplete with even one of them missing.

We spend most of our time working on projects together and sometimes we need to decide upon a color. Our process always starts with someone proposing their favorite which is followed by another color and another. We list them all, usually intending to then vote for which one it will be, but invariably when it comes time to select just one, the children always opt for rainbow, the consensus choice, the one that includes us all.

It's tempting to wonder why they do it, why children surround themselves with rainbows, but do we really need to wonder? I think we already know why.

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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!

When We Know the Full Story

As a boy, my brother and I owned a game called Rebound. It's a tabletop version of shuffle board that one plays using small plastic disks with ball bearings in the center, rolling them to bounce off a pair of rubber bands before they scoot into the scoring zone. It has survived to find a second life in our classroom. Despite hundreds of children having played with it over the years not only has it remained intact, but we still have all 16 of the small game pieces.

I suppose some might consider it a kind of miracle that nothing has been lost or broken, but it's not magic. Whenever I make the game available to the kids, I tell it's story, the one about how it's my old toy, how my brother and I used to play with it, how it is 40 years old, and special to me. I ask them to treat it gently and to try to not lose the pieces. They then play with it, sometimes rowdily, sometimes until all the pieces are on the floor, but at the end of the day, for going on two decades now, all the pieces have always been there.

One time, I forgot to tell the story of the game. Within minutes, I heard the sound of the Rebound board crashing to the floor. Fortunately, it didn't break, and I used it as an opportunity to inform a few of the kids of its background. Not long later, however, I discovered that several of the game pieces were missing. We looked everywhere for them, but no luck. I began to suspect that one of the children had snatched a fistful to use elsewhere in the classroom, not maliciously, but rather in the spirit of loose parts. I imagined I'd find them later, perhaps years later, in a container somewhere or squirreled away in a nook. Still, I was feeling a bit melancholy, even as I attempted to be philosophical. After all, I wasn't going to get to keep those things forever.

We still didn't find the pieces when we tidied up, so when we re-gathered on the checkerboard rug to de-brief before going outside, I told the game's story, hoping that one of them would recall what he or she had done with the lost pieces. I strived to tell the story in a matter-of-fact manner without suggesting any sort of suspicion or blame. I just wanted them to know that I missed those pieces and why. The children listened, several offered theories about where the lost ones might be, some offered to make me some new ones, but none offered any clues to the mystery.

Several minutes later, however, as we gathered in the mud room to gear up for the weather, one girl presented me with the lost pieces, saying, "Here they are." She had indeed squirreled them away, not in the classroom, but in her own cubby, intending, I suppose, to take them home as treasures. She had admired them, had wanted them, had secured them for herself. Children often take things home in their jacket pockets, small things, usually of little value like bottle caps or florist marbles. I'm sure she had considered these game pieces in that light, small, plentiful, insignificant things that no one would miss. When she heard my story, however, she readily returned them, knowing that they meant more to me than they ever would to her.

People often describe young children as selfish, forever putting their own needs and desires above those of others, but it's not, on balance, true. Usually, what we label as self-centered is really just a result of them not knowing (or not being developmentally capable of understanding) the full story, which is, I think, probably true of most humans most of the time.

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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 Role of Memory and Imagination in Learning Through Play

For several days in a row, the girl had positioned the ends of a plank of wood on car tires to make a balance beam upon which she played. She didn't object when other children wanted to try out her invention. Indeed, she welcomed them, giving tips and otherwise sharing the expertise she had developed over the course of her days of trial-and-error experimenting.

One day, a group of boy stacked three tires one atop another then abandoned it to do other robust things. The girl contemplated the tower of tires for a moment before moving one end of her plank to the top of the stack, while leaving the other end on a single tire. Then, using the skills and knowledge she had been developing over the course of the preceding days, she attempted to balance up the incline.

We can never know what is going on inside the head of another person, but it seemed as if she had asked herself, "What if I put one end on that stack of tires?" She had built this scenario based upon what she already knew about planks and tires: she knew something, then used her imagination to expand her knowledge.

We see young children do this all the time. They bring what they know from home into our home center where they play "What if . . . ?" games with housekeeping. They bring what they already know about shape and color to the art table where they play "What if . . .?" with new media and materials. They begin with what they've learned about relationships inside their family, then play "What if . . .?" with the people they find at preschool.

According to those who study brain function, the systems used for memory and imagining heavily overlap, especially in and around the hippocampus. In fact, research suggests that the cognitive process of remembering is almost identical to the process of imagining. In both cases, the brain is constructing a story: one about what did happen -- or, more accurately, what is likely to have happened -- and the other about what might happen. This fascinating insight helps explain why our memories tend to be so faulty. It also suggests that the purpose of memory isn't so much accuracy as it is to provide us with stories that make sense of the present.

When the girl was practicing with her balance beam, she was gathering information, which her brain stored in memory for future reference. She then used exactly the same parts of her brain to recall the pertinent information (as opposed to accurate information, although it might have been that) to construct a "What if . . . ?" scenario that she then carried out. This process creates new memories to serve as raw material for future imaginative play.

In other words, memory isn't just storage, as our test-taking school culture would have it, but rather a process of construction. When children engage in imaginative play, they practice assembling bits of experience into coherent stories, which is precisely what effective learning requires: connecting new information to prior knowledge. Imagination lets us simulate possibilities ("What if . . . ?"), which obviously stands at the heart of problem-solving and transfer of knowledge, the hallmarks of learning. The more vividly and meaningfully something is imagined, the more pathways the brain uses to encode it, and in contrast to the practice of rote memorization, imaginative play tends to carry emotional weight (joy, tension, curiosity) which strengthens memory formation.

In other words, imaginative experiences like those we see when children are free to play expand the brain systems required for future learning. So often schooling in our culture takes the form of direct instruction (lectures, worksheets, text books, testing) in the misguided notion that memory (or remembering) is simply a process of data recall. The constructive nature of memory is ignored entirely, which explains why so much of what we "learned" in school is lost within days of having passed the test. When children play, they imagine, and when we imagine we construct our own learning: they are, in truth, practicing how learning itself actually works.

The girl discovered that walking up her new, steep ramp was difficult, but that she could make it to the top by crawling or scooting, but she continued experimenting. After a time, the boys returned to discover what the girl had constructed from the beginnings of their own construction. And together, they asked, "What if . . . ?" An explosion of imagination that carried on for days.

Memory gives children something to think with. Imagination is how they learn to think with it.

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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!