Collective Imagination

There is no civilization beyond the one that we collectively imagine. It's this ability to collectively imagine that truly makes Homo sapiens unique among the species on this planet. Growing up, people insisted that it was the accident of opposable thumbs that was our special adaptive advantage, but it's more likely that our ability to think counterfactually, to consider things that don't exist, is what really makes us, for better or worse, such a dominant species. I'm not the only one who argues that this, along with our unsurpassed ability to cooperate with one another across space and time, is what puts us, again for better or worse, where we are today. Most of what we consider society, most of what we consider human order, is nothing more than a product of our collective imagination communicated across space and time.

The idea of money is a classic example of our collective imagination at work. At one time or another, we've all held paper currency in our fingers and wondered how it could possibly have value. Objectively, it's just a useless piece of paper, yet we've all agreed upon its worth. Increasingly, we don't even use that piece of paper, but rather simply the pure idea of money, making our transactions electronically, moving numbers around inside of computers and then simply agreeing that a fair transaction has been made. Consciously and unconsciously, our parents, and then the wider world of humans, taught us about money, not as a product of collective imagination, but as a hard fact about the world. We labor, we fret, we beg, borrow, and steal for this imaginary thing called money.

Before money, according to the stories we tell from within our civilization of collective imagination, we bartered with one another for the things we wanted. But that's a distortion of what came before, a perspective that only makes sense from within the context of a world in which money exists. Anthropologist tell us that prior to money, "commerce" was a complex system that was not measured in the tit for tat way required by money. For instance, debt, a curse of a system of money, was once viewed as a blessing. When someone did you a kindness or lent a helping hand, they weren't placing you under their thumb, they were rather tying you more closely to the community. Interdependence was one of the foundations of these earlier collectively imagined societies. The more debt you had, the more closely connected you were, and you, in turn sought to grant others the blessing of interdependence by doing and giving for and to others. If you tried to show off, if you tried to stand out, if you tried to leverage people's debts, you risked ridicule, ostracism, and even, in extreme cases, banishment. The invention of money was, once more for better or worse, a kind of declaration of human independence, a separation of the individual from the collective, yet it was all, and is all, a product of our capacity to collectively imagine.

There is no way out of imagined order, of course. Even if we are capable of revolution, of breaking down the walls, we emerge to find ourselves within another imagined order and another and another. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to create something new and better: all it takes is collective imagination. 

I've been thinking about our collective imagination since last week's Play First Summit. I'm thinking of speakers like Ijumaa Jordan who spoke of the system of white supremacy that we've collectively imagined into existence. I'm thinking of Chazz Lewis who urges us to teach our youngest citizens the art of protest. I'm thinking of Sonya Philip who told us she feels like a lone voice advocating for play-based education in India. I'm thinking of Maggie Dent who envisions growing altruism in the next generation of Australians. I'm thinking of Elena Maschwitz and her hope that Argentina is primed to create new "mental models" for their society. I'm thinking of Chris Bennett who seeks to create an entirely new method for organizing the care for and education of young children. I'm thinking of Cheng Xueqin who is in the process of transforming the lives of young children in China. And I'm thinking of Wendy Lee who told us of how the nation of New Zealand has undertaken an intentional process to create Te Whariki, a woven mat curriculum underpinned by the radical notion of young children as competent, confident learners, and to "measure" their success not with tick boxes, grades, and tests, but rather by the unique stories of each individual and interdependent child. Each of them, each of us, is working to break down the walls of the collectively imagined world in which we find ourselves.

The metaphor of the woven mat keeps returning to me: a place for us all to stand, made from many strands. There were nearly 75,000 of us at the summit: 75,000 strands brought together in space and time. I hope that we've all returned to our corners of this imagined reality both dissatisfied and inspired. The weaving together of these strands has already begun, we are collectively imagining something new, which is the most human thing of all. Seventy-five thousands strands is not enough, of course, but it's a start. 

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Although the summit is over, you can still join the dialog. Go to The Play First Summit page, register for free, then choose the all-access pass that is right for you. You will then have unlimited lifetime access to our conversations with twenty of the world's top early childhood and parenting thought leaders, including Janet Lansbury, Peter Gray, Lisa Murphy, Ijumaa Jordan, Maggie Dent, and Cheng Xuequin (Anji Play). This is not just another series of lectures, but rather a collection of conversations about our challenging times, how they are impacting young children and families, what we can do about it, and how we might seize this moment to transform the early years into what they ought to be for children everywhere. 

Also, Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in the UK, Iceland, and Europe thanks to my friends at Fafunia! It's also available in the US and Canada. If you want to go directly to the Fafunia page click here.  And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well.

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 Walled Off Garden of Childhood"

In 1973, I was 11-years-old, living with my family in a suburb of Athens, Greece. My brother was 9 and our sister was not even four. We lived a couple of miles from the American Club, a place that ex-pats from English speaking countries congregated. We primarily frequented it to use the swimming pool, movie theater, and book store. Us boys were pretty much free to go there whenever we wanted and we thought nothing of hopping on our bikes to, say, check out the latest comic book offerings. Our little sister, we all thought without ever even saying it, was too young for such solo excursions.

One day as we played in our garden, she asserted that she knew how to get to the American Club all by herself. My brother and I, not always being the gentlest of older siblings, doubted her, but when she persisted, we challenged her to back up her boasting and lead us there, which she proceeded to do. This was not a direct course, it was rather one that required many twists and turns, and covered, like I said, a couple miles. We boys began by teasing her, but as she competently led our expedition farther and farther, our mockery turned to respect. She guided us all that way without one false turn.

I share this story as an example of how we regularly underestimate the capabilities of young children to understand and navigate the world. Indeed, that is one of the reasons we create what John Holt called the “walled off garden of childhood,” a place where we keep our children to protect them from the outside world: a place where we round the corners and pad the edges, where toys replace the actual stuff of life, where things are dumbed down and kept simple, where we seek to protect their precious innocence from the “harsh reality outside.” When children are given the chance, they time and again prove themselves more than competent even as we bustle about in their wake as their keepers, cautioning them to not touch things, or to stand back, or to be careful, oblivious to the fact that, more often than not, they are already not touching things, standing back, and being careful, all on their own, prior to our busybody expressions of doubt about their competence.

A couple years ago we took a group of four and five year olds to an art gallery in Seattle, a place that touts itself as a place for such field trips. Prior to going in, they asked the children to avoid running, yelling, or touching the artwork, all of which are the sort of standard issue admonishments one finds on signs for adults before entering such places — nothing wrong with that.  But then, the security team took it upon themselves to shadow us, following us from place to place, forever leaping in whenever one of the children got “too close” to a painting or sculpture. They had not warned us about getting close to things. Indeed, the adults around the gallery were often standing with their noses mere inches from the canvasses as they made their studies, but any time one of the children came within even a few feet of a piece, a member of the security detail was right on top of them. Whenever a child, in their excitement, walked briskly, they were warned not to run, again, something the adults in the place were permitted to do without so much as a peep. And we were followed everywhere we went by a staccato of shushing, anytime anyone of them expressed delight in something they saw or thought or felt about the artwork, while adults were allowed to crack their jokes and express themselves unmolested.

The children took it in stride. After all, they were all accustomed to being treated this way because this is how we adults tend to behave toward children when they stray outside the walls of their garden. But we adults, in contrast, found ourselves becoming increasingly anxious, on edge, stressed out by the stress of the security team. We, as adults, were absolutely not comfortable being treated as if we were incompetent, and it finally became too much for us so we took the children outside for a snack and didn’t return.

When we treat children, or anyone for that matter, as incompetent we teach them incompetence, yet the belief in their incompetence is so ingrained, that most of us take it as normal that children are not yet ready to function outside of their garden without our constant, stress-inducing vigilance. Yet time and again, when I’ve had faith in children, when I’ve held them  as competent, far more often than not they show me that they are.

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Although the summit is over, you can still join the dialog. Go to The Play First Summit page, register for free, then choose the all-access pass that is right for you. You will then have unlimited lifetime access to our conversations with twenty of the world's top early childhood and parenting thought leaders, including Janet Lansbury, Peter Gray, Lisa Murphy, Ijumaa Jordan, Maggie Dent, and Cheng Xuequin (Anji Play). This is not just another series of lectures, but rather a collection of conversations about our challenging times, how they are impacting young children and families, what we can do about it, and how we might seize this moment to transform the early years into what they ought to be for children everywhere. 

Also, Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in the UK, Iceland, and Europe thanks to my friends at Fafunia! It's also available in the US and Canada. If you want to go directly to the Fafunia page click here.  And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well.

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!

All We Have to Do is Open the Doors

My earliest memories are of playing outdoors and barefoot. I remember walking to the end of my driveway, a concrete slab that held warmth, but not heat, stepping gingerly onto the blazing asphalt street, running on my tippy toes to the other side, then stepping thankfully into the cool of a neighbor's lawn where I slowed down to let my soles be soothed by the tickle of grassy blades. You had to watch out for "stickers," which is what we called the thorny blackberry rhizomes that encroached into even the best maintained lawns. Stepping on a pinecone was more painful, but avoiding them was simply a matter of keeping an eye out, while the only real defense against the camouflaged stickers was to develop a nice, thick callous on the bottoms of our feet.

Mud oozing between our toes.

Sand eroding from beneath our feet as a wave draws back from the beach.

The slippery, weedy bottom of a road side drainage ditch.

The rough security of granite as we grip it with our toes.

Speaking at The Play First Summit, Marghanita Hughes says that being barefoot outdoors in nature connects us to the earth. It reminds us that we are not separate from nature, but rather a part of it. "Today," she says, "we have, sadly, a disconnection." Prisoners in maximum security prisons spend more time outdoors than the average American child; half of all children worldwide spend less than an hour a day outdoors. This is a genuine deprivation, one that impoverishes all of us.

I don't think anyone doubts that this is a tragedy. The research is clear, overwhelming, and irrefutable. All of us, and especially children, need hours of outdoor time every day. It's a boon to the mind, body, heart, and soul. It makes us smarter, stronger, and happier. Indeed, it's so obvious that I almost feel foolish for pointing it out, yet once again we're faced with an enormous gap between what we know children need and what we provide for them.

Of course, this has become par for the course when it comes to our youngest citizens. The scientific evidence tells us that children need play, and lots of it, in order to thrive, yet they are spending more and more time at younger and younger ages bent over the rote "desk work" assigned to them from on high. The evidence tells us that, in Marghanita's words, "Creativity blooms in the soil of freedom," yet our children spend more time confined than our prisoners. We know that children need to move their bodies, that they need to breathe fresh air. Of course, of course, of course . . . Everyone knows these things, yet worldwide we are heading in the opposite direction. Why?

Caring for children is the central project of every civilization that has ever existed. Being outdoors is irrefutably in the "best and highest interest of children." It's easy to make happen. All we have to do is open the doors. It's cheap. In fact, it's free. It's plentiful. And in this era of pandemic, it's important to point out that viral transmissions are less likely when outside. Everything tells us that we need to open the doors, take off our shoes -- or bundle up, or slather on the sun screen -- and send the children outside.

In conversation after conversation, the experts and thought-leaders that came together at the summit spoke of the need for early childhood educators to become activists on behalf of children. I know it makes many of us uncomfortable. As Lisa Murphy points out, "What makes us really good caregivers, makes us horrible advocates." Our profession attracts the kindest of hearts. We're at our best while immersed in this moment, serving and supporting children. This is our greatest strength and greatest weakness. But we don't need to march in the streets to be good advocates. We can just open our doors more often. We can be inspired by Marghanita and make art in the woods or on the playground. When we do this, even for an extra hour, or even an extra half hour, a day, we are standing up for the children in our care. And once we've done that, we can take another half hour, then another, slowly inching our way forward.

Maybe activism doesn't always have to involve boisterous chants and fists in the air. Sometimes it can be as quiet and subversive as children tiptoeing silently across a lawn. We just need to open the door.

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Although the summit is over, you can still join the dialog. Go to The Play First Summit page, register for free, then choose the all-access pass that is right for you. You will then have unlimited lifetime access to our conversations with twenty of the world's top early childhood and parenting thought leaders, including Janet Lansbury, Peter Gray, Lisa Murphy, Ijumaa Jordan, Maggie Dent, and Cheng Xuequin (Anji Play). This is not just another series of lectures, but rather a collection of conversations about our challenging times, how they are impacting young children and families, what we can do about it, and how we might seize this moment to transform the early years into what they ought to be for children everywhere. 

Also, Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in the UK, Iceland, and Europe thanks to my friends at Fafunia! It's also available in the US and Canada. If you want to go directly to the Fafunia page click here.  And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well.

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 Invention of the Human

In his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, literary critic Harold Bloom makes the argument that the great storyteller literally invented the modern human being. It's a grandiose claim, one that crosses the line into ridiculous, but at the same time, it's undeniable that the telling and re-telling of his stories has had an outsized influence on Western civilization. His language has become our language. It's almost impossible to speak English without relying upon metaphors, turns-of-phrase, and linguistic concepts of Shakespeare's invention. His characters like Hamlet, Falstaff, Juliet, Shylock and the Nurse have become archetypes around which we spin most of the stories we tell today. His plots are, both consciously and unconsciously, not only the soil from which contemporary plots emerge, but form a foundation for the stories of ourselves and others.

Of course, human storytelling predates Shakespeare by millennia. Indeed, Homo sapiens have been telling stories since the invention of language, and probably even before, making sense of our world, placing our experiences in context, weaving them into narratives that inform and create and explain and question. These stories invented not just Shakespeare himself, but all of us. In other words, Bloom is not wrong when he asserts that Shakespeare invented the human, he just leaves out the part about how every single one of us is a storyteller and as such we are all the inventors of "the human."

There are stories we tell and stories that tell us. And they are all part of the same story. 

We are born into the story of our mothers, our parents, our families, each of whom was born into the story of their mothers, parents, and families. It's the first story that begins to tell us, but even before we have language, we also begin to tell our own story within those stories. For most of us, the stories our families tell us become our own stories, for better or worse: they are stories of love and hate, fear and comfort, discovery and loss. We live our entire lives in many cases without ever knowing the extent to which those stories have told us. Yet we are the creators as well. We each view existence from a unique perspective and even when we consciously try to re-tell the old stories, we cannot help but alter them, to shape them into our own stories, to make them fit or to make them new, to invent a human unlike any other that has ever existed, which in turn becomes part of the story of everyone we touch.

In her conversation with Sally at The Play First Summit, Suzanne Axelsson asserts, "Education is a series of stories," a profound declaration, one that calls us to consciously step outside of our own stories and listen with curiosity to the stories of the important children in our lives. Too often, she says, we as adults are so focused on telling our own stories, upon insisting upon the primacy of the stories we already know, that we fail to attend to the stories of those we are here to serve. I've found that when I remind myself to listen with my "whole being" as educator Eleanor Duckworth phrases it, blocking out the noise of all those other stories, I find myself swept up in the children's stories which are, without exception, as powerful and inventive as anything Shakespeare ever wrote. When I listen like this, the children's stories, even their non-verbal stories, become part of my story, which in turn becomes a part of the ongoing story of humanity. And it is the listening that makes it so.

Axelsson goes on to talk about the difference between dialog and debate, saying that the former is about listening to understand, while the later is about listening only in order to respond. We all love telling our own stories, making our own arguments, but when that's all we do, we never learn anything new. As Axelsson says, it's only through dialog that we find ourselves saying, "I've never thought of that before," which is the epiphany that stands at the heart of education. When we listen to the stories around us, be they the stories of children or adults, our own stories become bigger. When we open ourselves to the stories of others, especially the stories of people who are not like us, our own stories become richer, more complex, more meaningful, and more true. We don't have to agree with everyone, but that's beside the point: the point is understanding and weaving the understanding into our own stories.

Listening to the 20 stories that emerge from the conversations that form the content of the summit, they become part of my own story and through me the stories of those who listen to my stories and so on. And I am not alone. Over the course of this week, one of my goals is to read every single one of the hundreds of conversation threads on our Facebook page, not with the intent to respond, but rather in the spirit of curiosity, dialog, and understanding. Tens of thousands of stories, all in the process of being told, from around the world, came together last week. I am committed to really listen to the new story we are beginning to tell together. And this story made from all of our stories is how we, together, will will become like Shakespeare, the inventors of the human.

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Although the summit is over, you can still join the dialog. Go to The Play First Summit page, register for free, then choose the all-access pass that is right for you. You will then have unlimited lifetime access to our conversations with twenty of the world's top early childhood and parenting thought leaders, including Janet Lansbury, Peter Gray, Lisa Murphy, Ijumaa Jordan, Maggie Dent, and Cheng Xuequin (Anji Play). This is not just another series of lectures, but rather a collection of conversations about our challenging times, how they are impacting young children and families, what we can do about it, and how we might seize this moment to transform the early years into what they ought to be for children everywhere. 

Also, Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in the UK, Iceland, and Europe thanks to my friends at Fafunia! It's also available in the US and Canada. If you want to go directly to the Fafunia page click here.  And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well.

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 Dialog is Continuing

Yesterday, Sally Haughey of Fairy Dust Teaching and I put some finishing touches on this first phase of the The Play First Summit, an online event that has so far drawn together nearly 75,000 people from over 100 countries. Our impetus was the pandemic, this critical moment in the Black Lives Matters movement, this time in history when everything, worldwide, is in flux. As early childhood educators, we've grown accustomed to being left out of the conversation, but as plans and rhetoric began to emerge from policymakers, agencies, and governments, we were alarmed at much of what we heard. And maybe even more alarmed at what we didn't hear: the best and highest interests of young children. As we talked, we realized we ourselves didn't really have any better ideas beyond feelings, hunches and educated guesses, but we were in full agreement that much of what was being discussed were decidedly bad ideas, even dangerous ideas, especially for children and their families.

What we were hearing were debates, which is a process of speaking and responding with the goal of winning the argument. What was needed was something, anything, that would ignite a dialog among the educators and parents of young children in the faith that a genuine process of speaking and (more importantly) listening, is the only way to forge workable solutions to global challenges. And we agreed that it wasn't something that could wait. It needed to happen now. 

Among the many things I love about my partner Sally is that she is a woman of action. Someone needed to step forward. Why not us? She's built a business on producing online teacher education, including courses and conferences, but had never tackled anything like this. And while I've spent the better part of my adult life working with children and their families and speaking at conferences, I barely knew how to make a Zoom call, let alone host a major summit. Still she asked, "Why not us?" 

When we reached out to our 20 presenters, none of them hesitated. Every single person we contacted not only agreed to take part, but shared our sense of urgency. In what was really only a matter of a few days our line-up was set. I can't tell you how grateful I am to them, each contributing not just their knowledge, wisdom, and expertise, but also their own uncertainty, their own questions, and their own concerns.

Sally's Fairy Dust team leapt into action, often working around the clock as they compressed what normally would be 12 months work into a mere three. They too felt the urgency of the moment. Without them, the summit simply could not have happened. They moved mountains. They are mighty. Thank you.

And then there are those tens of thousands of educators and parents from around the world who are also feeling that sense of urgency. From the moment we announced the Play First Summit, we've been overwhelmed in the best way possible. It is incredibly gratifying to know that we're not alone, that indeed, our feelings are shared by everyone who cares about the future of our youngest citizens. It is clear that this summit was necessary. We, the guardians of childhood, have come together, in unity and dialog.

It's not too late to join us right here at the beginning. And this is only the beginning. We didn't solve anything this week, but we did start to talk and listen. Over the course of this week, I'm going to be writing about some of the themes and ideas that have emerged for me over the course of the summit. The dialog is continuing in our Play First Summit Facebook group as well as, we hope, everywhere else guardians assemble. 

I'm reminded of the story Wendy Lee told us about the creation of Te Whariki, New Zealand's beloved early childhood curriculum. It is one of those rare things: a curriculum that nearly everyone impacted by it seems to embrace. Its creation was no accident. As Wendy tells the story it is the product of a process of dialog rather than debate, one in which New Zealanders from every segment of society were invited to take part. This is sort of process for which I'm hoping. Te Whariki, in the Maori language, refers to a woven mat, one created from the many strands of society. It's a mat upon which everyone can stand on behalf of young children and the future of our world. The dialog is continuing. Together we can weave our mat.

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Although the summit is over, you can still join the dialog by registering, then sign up for the all-access pass to gain unlimited lifetime access to our conversations with twenty of the world's top early childhood and parenting thought leaders, including Janet Lansbury, Peter Gray, Lisa Murphy, Ijumaa Jordan, Maggie Dent, and Cheng Xuequin (Anji Play). This is not just another series of lectures, but rather a collection of conversations about our challenging times, how they are impacting young children and families, what we can do about it, and how we might seize this moment to transform the early years into what they ought to be for children everywhere. 

Also, Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in the UK, Iceland, and Europe thanks to my friends at Fafunia! It's also available in the US and Canada. If you want to go directly to the Fafunia page click here.  And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well.

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!

Who's With Us?

These past two weeks have been a whirlwind. Today is the final day of the free part of The Play First Summit, a project that my friend Sally Haughey from Fairy Dust Teaching proposed to my wife Jennifer and me a mere three months ago. Three months. That's hardly enough time to plan a decent dinner party, let alone an international gathering of early childhood educators and parents. This is the sort of thing that typically takes a year or more to pull together, but we were feeling a rising sense of dismay about the state of the world and what it means, and could mean, for young children. As Lisa Murphy said in the kick off session of the summit, we are the guardians of childhood, all of us. If we don't speak for them, who will? It was a sentiment echoed throughout, from conversation to conversation, and not just from the presenters.

It's heartwarmingly, mind blowingly clear that we aren't alone. Nearly 75,000 people joined us at this urgently called summit this week, representing 97 nations. Ninety-seven nations. Depending on how you count, that's about half the countries on earth. That is truly a global gathering beyond our wildest expectations. About a third of those participants have been participating in our Facebook community group. Going in, I figured I would need to serve as a good host, initiating dialog and spurring conversation, but for weeks now, the page has been abuzz in a way that I've not seen even at live conferences. Instead of "managing" the group, I've spent this past week scrambling just to keep up with it all. I can't wait for things to die down a bit so that I can methodically go through every one of those discussion threads because there is, using Sally's word, a lot of "gold" there.

From the beginning, our hope has been that this isn't a one-off, that this summit could be a spark to ignite a worldwide movement on behalf of our youngest citizens. Whether that happens or not will be up to all of us. I've not yet had the opportunity to really reflect on this experience. It's all so fresh and my mind is pinging and popping in a way that makes it hard to organize my thoughts, but I imagine the relative lull of the next couple weeks will provide the opportunity. That said, several strong common threads have clearly emerged both from our presenters as well as in the Facebook discussions. There is no doubt that the Avengers have assembled, the guardians have emerged, and there are a whole lot of us prepared to stand up together, around the world, in defense of childhood.

I'm looking forward to this final day of conversation and dialog that lies ahead of us. As I write this, we are 15 minutes away from releasing four more dialogs with presenters from three different continents. It's not too late to join this dialog which will continue for the months and years to come. We need your voice, young children need your voice, families need your voice. 

Rae Pica, who is speaking today, invites us: "Let's spark an early childhood revolution!" Who's with us?

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This is the final day of part one of The Play First Summit. It's still not too late to join us for this free event featuring twenty of the world's top early childhood and parenting thought leaders, including Janet Lansbury, Peter Gray, Lisa Murphy, Ijumaa Jordan, Maggie Dent, and Cheng Xuequin (Anji Play). This is not just another series of lectures, but rather a collection of conversations about our challenging times, how they are impacting young children and families, what we can do about it, and how we might seize this moment to transform the early years into what they ought to be for children everywhere. To see the full list of speakers and to register, click here.

Also, Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in the UK, Iceland, and Europe thanks to my friends at Fafunia! It's also available in the US and Canada. If you want to go directly to the Fafunia page click here.  And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well.

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!

Sales Resistance

Back in the early 80's I had a summer job as a door-to-door canvasser for the Oregon State Public Research Interest Group (OSPIRG), a consumer protection lobbying organization in the mold of Ralph Nader. A group of us would be dropped off in a neighborhood right around dinner time with our maps and clipboards and we were to knock on every door with the goal of soliciting $15 memberships. I had mixed feelings about what I was doing. On the one hand, I fully supported the work of the organization. On the other, I was fully aware that my presence on people's doorsteps just as they were sitting down to dinner was, to put it mildly, an annoyance.

I appreciated the people who would firmly say, "No thank you," and send me on my way, but most Oregonians were too polite to interrupt me in my banter, which was a sort of verbal foot in the door designed to not let them get a word in edgewise until I'd gotten to my point, which was to ask them to cut me a check. This was the point that most people would finally get to say something like, "That sounds like important work, but I can't afford it" or "I'll need to do more research," which I knew were attempts to say, "No." But without the actual word "no" I'd been taught to press forward because these people, according to the man who had trained me, were showing that their "sales resistance" was wavering. 

"Sales resistance" is something we've all developed to a greater or lesser extent. Most of us don't like being "sold," especially when we're just going about our business, like sitting down to dinner. I'm actually surprised that more people didn't just slam the door in my face back in my door-to-door days. I know that I feel accosted when targeted by those street corner versions of myself younger self who spring up around downtown Seattle, trying to persuade me to support this or that cause. It's intrusive, and on those rare occasions when I've engaged with one of them, their banter strikes me as insincere and manipulative. In other words, it's not a genuine interaction, but rather one in which I'm cast as a player in someone else's agenda.

It's a dynamic that plays itself out in classrooms wherever educators place their agenda ahead of their relationship with the children in front of them. Most of us know that many children have their own version of sales resistance when confronted by adults with an agenda. They are the ones who, in their own way, say, "No thank you," and close the door in your face. These are the ones we tend to label as unmotivated or defiant, the kids who simply refuse to do the worksheets or sing along during circle time. They have other things to be doing. Others are more polite. Yesterday, in our Play First Summit Facebook group a teacher shared the story of a boy who kept saying, "Turn the page," as she read a storybook to the group. She took it as a sign of his enthusiasm for the story until she got to the end when he said, "Finally! Now we can go play!" 

As a door-to-door salesman, I made my money on two kinds of people: those who genuinely supported OSPIRG's mission and those who simply didn't have enough sales resistance to say "No." From the former, I obviously accepted their money gladly, but the latter made me sick to my stomach and were the reason I didn't last the summer in that job. These are the children I worry about the most, the ones who have been worn down by the persistence the salesperson, who quietly go along, perhaps not shining, but not making trouble.

Anyone who reads here often knows that I believe that school should be a place where children follow their own agendas and that adult agendas, if they have a place at all, should be secondary to those of the children. It's why I'm opposed to the kind of top-down, data-driven curricula I see out there, where teachers must march children through predetermined material. It's just a big sales job, placing children in the role of those poor people who I interrupted at dinnertime. I'm proud of the hundreds of children I've sent into the world with a keen ear for BS, who know that their own agenda is important, and who have a healthy ability to resist a sales pitch.

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Day four of The Play First Summit is upon us. It's still not too late to join us for this free event featuring twenty of the world's top early childhood and parenting thought leaders, including Janet Lansbury, Peter Gray, Lisa Murphy, Ijumaa Jordan, Maggie Dent, and Cheng Xuequin (Anji Play). This is not just another series of lectures, but rather a collection of conversations about our challenging times, how they are impacting young children and families, what we can do about it, and how we might seize this moment to transform the early years into what they ought to be for children everywhere. To see the full list of speakers and to register, click here.

Also, Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in the UK, Iceland, and Europe thanks to my friends at Fafunia! It's also available in the US and Canada. If you want to go directly to the Fafunia page click here.  And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well.

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

"It's a Wall to Keep People Out"

The two of them, a boy and a girl, built a wall. They had the entire checker board rug to themselves, they had all the baby wipe box blocks to themselves, and they decided together to build a wall to, in their words, "keep the others out."

The goal was to build it so high that "no one could get over" and for quite some time no one even tried. They used all the blocks and had all that space.

A classmate finally came to examine the wall.

"It's a wall to keep people out," they said, "You can step over it and come in." When that first friend accidentally kicked part of the wall down in the process, they decided they needed a door.

More friends joined them, using the door in the wall built to keep the others out. Soon there were a half dozen of them inside the wall. Someone said, "This is our new play area."

There were no other toys in the walled play area and the blocks were all incorporated into the wall. All they had was one another, the checker board rug and that wall that was not really keeping anyone out.

They decided to make it a place for dancing. I put on some West African marimba music. They danced within the wall in their own spaces and in their own styles.

One boy found a box full of small, plastic rainbow people and brought it inside the wall. He began arranging them along the top of the wall saying, "These people are our audience." Some of the kids helped him arrange the rainbow audience while the others danced.

As is usually the case with four and five year olds, it isn't enough to play together without also touching one another. The dancers danced together until it evolved into a kind of pig pile under which one of them was trapped. She didn't cry, but they saw pain in her face and decided to play more gently.

Amazingly, after a good 45 minutes, the wall with its precariously balanced rainbow audience was still standing. By now there were at least a dozen kids inside the wall that had been built to keep the others out, the wall in which they had built a door, a wall inside which they had danced and grappled and empathized and compromised.

Then, as is every wall's destiny, they kicked it over with such an eruptive suddenness that it alarmed us all. I had walked away just prior to that moment and returned, worried that they would somehow need big, responsible, adult me in the aftermath of that wall coming down, but I saw only smiles on beet red faces as they made rubble of that wall that could no longer even pretend to keep anyone out.

Moments later a cry went up, "Let's build a tower!" And together they did.

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Day three of The Play First Summit is upon us. Please join us for this free event featuring twenty of the world's top early childhood and parenting thought leaders, including Janet Lansbury, Peter Gray, Lisa Murphy, Ijumaa Jordan, Maggie Dent, and Cheng Xuequin (Anji Play). This is not just another series of lectures, but rather a collection of conversations about our challenging times, how they are impacting young children and families, what we can do about it, and how we might seize this moment to transform the early years into what they ought to be for children everywhere. To see the full list of speakers and to register, click here.

Also, Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in the UK, Iceland, and Europe thanks to my friends at Fafunia! It's also available in the US and Canada. If you want to go directly to the Fafunia page click here.  And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well.

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!