The Hulk

"I'm The Hulk!" 

His parents hadn't taken their three-year-old to see the movie, but the marketing had nevertheless penetrated into his awareness, capturing his imagination, which clearly interpreted The Hulk as an image of power worthy of emulation. Or rather, in this boy's case, embodiment.

"I'm The Hulk!" he would declare as he swaggered through the classroom door each morning, flexing, his legs spread wide, taking up as much room as his tiny body could fill. He insisted on being called, "The Hulk," not Hulk, not The Incredible Hulk or the Green Goliath, and definitely not the name his parents had given him. Most of the time, The Hulk did the same kinds of things the other kids were doing, albeit punctuated by bodybuilder stances and the regular declaration, "I'm The Hulk!"

This was very early in my teaching career and this boy happened to be the brother of my own daughter's best friend, so I knew this boy quite well, having spent countless hours at his house, dining with him, vacationing with him, and even trick-or-treating with him. Interestingly, he hadn't dressed as The Hulk for Halloween. Similarly, he didn't insist on being called The Hulk in any circumstance other than while at school. His bedroom was full of green merchandise, including a giant pillow fist that made the sound of breaking glass when you punched something with it, but pretending to be The Hulk was apparently reserved for school.

It's estimated that the average adult spends almost half of their waking thoughts reliving memories or planning for the future, with the rest, presumedly, dedicated to the present. I'm unaware of any such estimates regarding three-year-olds, but from what I've observed, and based on the simple fact that they have fewer memories to reflect upon, and less experience upon which to base their anticipation for tomorrow, much more of their conscious thinking time would, by the process of elimination, have to be spent on the present. And for a child like this one, a large chunk of his time in the present, especially in school, was spent pretending. 

As researchers and professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California, Berkley, Alison Gopnik writes in her book The Gardener and the Carpenter, "By far the most important and interesting problem for young children is figuring out what's going on in other people's minds. Theory of mind, as it's called, is the ability to figure out the desires, perceptions, emotions, and beliefs of other people. It's quite possibly the most important kind of learning people ever do . . . (T)he period from eighteen moths to five years is the great watershed for developing theory of mind . . . Children who pretend more have a distinct advantage in understanding other people."

I often think of this boy who embodied The Hulk. Certainly, he was exploring how it might feel to be a large, physically powerful entity, something that he objectively was not. Sometimes the other children would be frightened of The Hulk, cowering or even crying. When that happened he usually dropped the act for a time, seemingly confused, often insisting softly, "I'm not really The Hulk." Sometimes he would say the tagline, "Hulk smash!" but he was rarely actually violent. Indeed, when the other children would wrestle, he'd stand nearby, flexing, but would decline to actually engage. He loved few things more, however, than another child who would go face-to-face with him, being, counter-factually fierce and powerful and strong. 

"Thinking counterfactually in this way is a tremendously useful skill for adult human beings," writes Gopnik. "It's what we mean when we talk about the power of imagination and creativity. Counterfactual thinking is crucial for learning about the world. In order to learn we need to believe that what we think now could be wrong, and to imagine how the world might be different . . . In order to change the world, we need to imagine that the world could be different, and then actually set about making it that way. In fact, just about everything in the room I'm sitting in -- the woven fabrics, the carpentered chairs, not to mention the electric lights and computers -- is wildly fictional from the perspective of a Pleistocene forager. Our world started out as a counterfactual imaginary vision in an ancestor's mind. One way of thinking about pretend play is that it gives children a safe space to practice higher-order mental skills, just as rough-and-tumble gives baby rats a safe space to practice fighting and hunting, and exploratory play gives baby crows a safe space to practice using sticks."

The Hulk is a young man now. Despite his experience pretending to be The Hulk, he didn't grow into a large, green, be-muscled adult. I know that he tried out football in high school, but found it too much for him. He does, however, write and perform music, fierce powerful music that gets people up on their feet. The kind of music one might imagine The Hulk would make.

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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!

Can We At Least Agree to Stop Sucking the Joy Out of Their Lives?

I was sitting on a bench near a playground merry-go-round watching our three and four-year-olds play. A pair of boys decided they wanted a spin. They mounted the apparatus, then one of them turned to me, "Teacher Tom, you push us."

I answered, "Sorry, I'm busy sitting here. You'll have to find someone else."

As the first boy tried pleading with me, the second said, "I'll get my brother to push us. He likes doing the things I like," and jogged off in the direction of where their classmates where playing. He called out to them, "Who will push us?" They ignored him so he returned to the merry-go-round. As he mounted it, he gave it a little push with his foot and the two boys began turning slowly.

As the momentum began to die, a couple of girls found their way to the merry-go-round. Without being asked, they decided they were going to push it "fast." The boys were delighted. Working together, the girls managed to get it up to speed, then the two of them jumped on as well. More children began to arrive in twos and threes, many pushed before jumping on. One of the original boys, leaning into it, head tipped back, began to chant, "Oh yeah, it's spin time! Oh yeah, it's spin time!"

The children began jumping off and on as they spun. Many of them fell to the ground upon dismount, most doing so intentionally. Occasionally, one of them would be trampled as they lay there in the path of the pushers. Some of them cried out in objection, while others squealed with delight. It was the kind of wild, breathless fun for which these machines were designed, even if adult imposed rules too often forbid it.

They were learning something, because we are always learning something when we play. I could write a list here of all the things I imagine they were learning, or exploring, or discovering. I could put those guesses into a report of some sort. Indeed, if I were so inclined I would have already filed dozens of reports on the children playing together on the merry-go-round going back to September. I could then take all those reports and compare them to today's report and use this data to pretend that I know what they have been learning over the course of months. I reckon I could even devise some sort of pre and post-test that would allow me to compare the children's progress, identify those who are behind and assign those poor kids some merry-go-round homework so they could catch up with the others. Perhaps some would need tutors or the support of specialists. I might even decide to rank the children on various measures that I have identified as important about merry-go-round play, assigning each of them grades based on my assessment of where they fall on an arbitrary scale of learning I'd devised based on data that I and others have collected over generations. I could then use this data I've amassed to devise a merry-go-round curriculum, one that allows me to "teach" children how to play on a merry-go-round, imagine myself an expert, seeing to it that all the children became merry-go-round proficient . . .

This is ludicrous, of course. I could do all of that and not only would I be no closer to knowing what these children were learning, I would have wasted vast amounts of time that I could have otherwise spent doing something more productive, like scratching my ass. No one can ever know what another person is learning. Each of those children on the merry-go-round are learning something different, something unique, something that applies only to them and their lives, and even the person doing the learning often doesn't know what they've learned, and no amount of testing, grading, or data collection will change that.

This is the great fraud of our educational system, this hubristic notion that adults can somehow measure learning, yet for generations we have put children through the processing plants we call schools, marching them into the test score coal mines, subjecting them to our experiments like lab rats. It's led to a grotesque narrowing and standardization of what we call education based not on learning, but on what we can most easily measure.

I am comfortable knowing that children are learning because they are playing, and that's enough. Indeed, I have no choice because to believe otherwise, is to buy into the lie that anyone can possibly know what these children are learning. It would mean that I must take part in sucking the joy from their lives and I will not knowingly be a party to that.

"Oh yeah, it's spin time!" That's all I need to know.

******

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!

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, "Let them 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!

"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.

******

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!