"They'd Better Learn What the World Out There Is Really Like."

Most children, most of the time, are eager to grow up. Adults, on the other hand, tend to not be so keen on the idea. Naturally, we know that it's inevitable, and it's why we put so much of our blood, sweat, and tears into parenting or teaching, but if we had our way, we would extend childhood just a little longer, keeping them in their precious garden for as long as possible. We express this wish in many ways, I most often hear it come out in the well-intended admonishment to "let them have their childhood," an expression I myself have used here on this blog and elsewhere.

We've come to think of childhood as a sort of special, protected place where we put our young humans as they develop into adults. Ideally, we say, childhood should be a time when our youngest citizens needn't worry about the pressures and grind of adulthood, where they are protected from such concerns as paying the bills, political upheaval, and the other angsts of modern life. This isn't, of course, true for many children, as poverty and other disfunction brings the world crashing down upon them, but our fondest wish is for children to all be free to pursue their passions in a safe and beautiful place. In the great scheme of things, the whole idea of "childhood" is a relatively new one, a story about human beings that we've only been telling ourselves for the last few hundred years, with the idea of an extended protected childhood emerging even more recently. And by and large, I'd say that most of us consider this to be a sign of progress, even if we sometimes bemoan the excesses of such phenomenon as helicopter parenting.

Of course, children were not consulted in this process of building what John Holt called, "the walled garden of childhood," and now they know nothing else. We take it as perfectly normal that humans must spend the better part of their first two decades on this planet, mucking about in a place that is not the "real world," but rather a dumbed down facsimile. From their cribs, to their homes, to their schools they go, as we protect them in the cocoon of childhood, and if one of them should seek to break free, we tell them "No, you may not vote in the next election even if you have a strong opinion." We say, "No, you may not get a proper job with proper pay," "No, you may not live where you wish," "No, you may not have adult friends other than the ones we pick for you such as teachers and the ones we already know," "No, you may not own property of your own," "No, you may not walk away from school and find your own way to educate yourself." When they object, we tell them it's for their own good.

And we believe it's true: the world is full of pitfalls and dangers that our children, having always lived in their walled gardens, are unaware and to which, in their innocence, they may fall victim. How do we know about these pitfalls and dangers? Well, because we, as adults, no longer live in a walled garden and have ourselves, or known others, who have fallen victim to the pitfalls and dangers, forgetting that our own parents likewise tried to protect us within the walled gardens of youth to no avail.

I'm not the first person to point out this dynamic. Indeed, most reflective parents and teachers have thought similar things, wondering where the balance is. Often, we see that the walled garden as overly-protective, but instead of releasing our children from it, we arbitrarily make it more unpleasant. How do we do this? By adding arbitrary challenges like tests and competition and grades. We want to see attributes like "hard work," "grit," and "accountability," not as they naturally occur, but as meaningless make-work and drudgery. As John Holt writes:

. . . (T)he people who built the garden to protect the children from the harsh reality outside begin in the name of that same harsh reality to put weeds, and stones, and broken glass, and barbed wire into the garden. "They'd better learn . . . what the world out there is really like" . . . But if our concern is to teach them, not protect them from the bad of the world, why not let them out into it where they can see and learn for themselves?"

The human newborn is the most helpless of any newborn in the animal kingdom. They need adults to protect them, and we do, but it seems to me that we've gone too far. The destiny of every child is to leave our protection and fend for themselves in the big, bad world. And children still need their childhoods, but if the goal is to prepare them for life outside the garden, perhaps we need to consider that the real world, life itself, is a better teacher, and leave the garden gate open more often.

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The live portion of Teacher Tom's Play Summit is over, but it's still not too late to join Lisa Murphy, Akilah Richards, Maggie Dent, Raffi, Suzanne Axelsson, Peter Gray and the rest of us. What if the whole world understood the power of trusting children with the freedom to play, to explore their world, to ask and answer their own questions? What if everyone respected their right to learn in their own way, on their own time? What if we remembered that children must have their childhoods and that means playing, and lots of it? Every one of these people are professionals who have placed children first. You will walk away from this event transformed, informed, challenged, and inspired to create a world that respects children and sets them free to learn and grow. Together we can, as presenter Raffi sings, "Turn this world around!"

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!

"Where We Remember We're All Connected"

During the pandemic, my wife and I have taken to referring to our dog Stella as our "emotional support animal." These have been the best of times for her. The three of us have pretty much been 24-hour-a-day companions for months now. When tensions have risen, as they do amongst humans, Stella has gone into action, providing expert emotional support by making herself available for connection, insisting upon it at times, refusing to be rebuffed because what she has to offer by way of emotional support is too important to be left to the moods of the humans. 

And, time and gain, Stella is always proven correct: when I give in and take her for a walk or play ball or massage her belly, I do feel buoyed. My troubles might still be there, but they seem a little bit smaller. She reminds me to apologize, to repair the damage I've done, and to re-connect. 

That's some pretty expert emotional support.

We all know the importance of connection, but Stella lives it. Wherever my wife and I are in the house, she positions herself at a physical halfway point between the two of us, ready on a moments notice. When we sit down to eat, she sprawls out under the table with parts of her body touching both of us. When we have dinner guests, she makes sure she is touching all of them as well. She reaches out to us several times a day, just to remind us that we're connected, forcing us to take a break from our disconnection, and to live a little. She is telling us, clearly, "This is what it's all about, you guys."

Am I anthropomorphizing my dog? Probably, but that doesn't diminish the deep wisdom in the emotional support she provides us. And what does she ask for in return? For us to connect right back with her.

Maybe you're laughing at me, but I think I'm safe in saying that most mental healthcare professionals would agree with Stella that connection comes before anything else. 

In the aftermath of the Teacher Tom's Play Summit, I've finally had a moment to pick up the much praised bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Her narrative opens with her own childhood and ancestral stories about wild strawberries. I'm transported back to my own childhood where I find a similar connection to the pine trees that towered over my South Carolina neighborhood. They provided shade, needles, bark and pine cones. We climbed them, tied things to them, and hid behind them. Birds, squirrels, and insects lived in them. Periodically, a branch would fall or be cut and we would get a closer look at life in the canopy. Over the course of weeks, we would play with that branch, building with it, harvesting from it, turning it into wands or weapons. When the winds blew, the pines talked to me, although not as loudly as the chestnuts and cottonwoods I would later have in my life. When it rained, they protected me, although not as well as the cedars and firs amongst whom I live today. When they were wounded, they oozed sticky sap, a scent so heady it made me light-headed.

Those trees were my teachers and, like with Stella, they called upon me to connect by speaking every language except the human one. Indeed, it seems that of all the things that live on Mother Earth, only humans need to remember to connect. It hasn't always been this way, but as we've moved increasingly indoors, as we've told ourselves the divisive fictions about money, commodities, and property, about competition, poverty, and war, we've forgotten the source of all knowledge. 

This is indigenous wisdom, this imperative to connect, with plants and animals, with rocks and soil and the air we breath, with water and fire. When I ignore Stella, when I'm too wrapped up in my disconnection to heed her, she persists. My disconnection stories try to conclude that she is simply being a pest, that she is bored, that she is trying to take something from me, but that's a false narrative. The real story, the story of connection, is that like the rest of nature, she is offering me a gift. She is offering me medicine. Humans, despite our self-aggrandizing narratives are emphatically not the center of creation, we are not the apex. Stella sees that we are in peril, playing on the ledge of disconnection, and she's there to pull us back before we plummet to our certain demise. 

Laugh at me all you want, but I'm not writing in metaphors here. These are lessons I've learned from Stella, pine trees, and the rest of the natural world. This is the real education. It is connection, not data, not information, not a lesson plan or curriculum. Our disconnection makes us forget. It makes us, frankly, stupid. Connection is the only way that learning ever happens. In our hubris, we've forgotten how to learn from nature, replacing it with the pathetic story of direct instruction, as if our language alone can contain knowledge, that we can somehow measure it with numbers, that bigger, stronger, older people get to tell the smaller, weaker, younger people what to do and what to know. Nature knows what we've forgotten, that all knowledge, all wisdom, all learning, comes through connection. That is how the wild strawberries and pine trees teach us.

When we walk our neighborhood, Stella dives into it with all of her senses, following trails of scent I can't smell and reacting to sounds I can't hear, connecting, fully, and according to her curiosity. Connecting, connecting, connecting. It's what I see the free children do as well, those younger humans who've not yet learned our ugly stories about disconnection and division. They heed the call of Mother Earth: embrace and be embraced.

Dr. Laura Markham said to us at the summit, "Humanity's engaged this big experiment where we remember we're all connected." It's a statement of persistent optimism, one that for me echoes that of Mother Nature. When we finally remember, we will find that the wild strawberries are right, that the pine trees are right, that Stella is right. 

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The live portion of Teacher Tom's Play Summit is over, but it's still not too late to join Laura Markham, Lisa Murphy, Akilah Richards, Maggie Dent, Raffi, Suzanne Axelsson, Peter Gray and the rest of us. What if the whole world understood the power of trusting children with the freedom to play, to explore their world, to ask and answer their own questions? What if everyone respected their right to learn in their own way, on their own time? What if we remembered that children must have their childhoods and that means playing, and lots of it? Every one of these people are professionals who have placed children first. You will walk away from this event transformed, informed, challenged, and inspired to create a world that respects children and sets them free to learn and grow. Together we can, as presenter Raffi sings, "Turn this world around!"

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!

Thinking Outside the Man Box

I used to wear my hair longer than I do today. Indeed, there were times when one could call it a flowing mane. This meant that people regularly called me "ma'am." Waiters would approach me from behind as I sat with my wife, greeting us breezily, "What can I get you ladies to drink?" It happened often and each time they would catch sight of my bearded chin, an expression of horror would cross their face, and then they would descend into stammering awkwardness.

You see, those are fighting words. Not for me, I would laugh and accept the free drink they proffered in apology, but for many men to be compared to a woman is the height of disrespect. I learned pretty young that the worst insult was to be called a "sissy," or any other aspersion on your masculinity. Well before I was a teen, I knew that to be compared, in any way, to a girl, required either an angry response or a comeback insult that was worse -- and there were few things worse than being called "a girl" or "a pansy" or "pussy." As we got older, homophobic slurs were added to the mix.

To be a "man" meant, as far as I could tell, doing whatever you could to distance yourself from femininity, which was associated with most emotions other than anger. Fear was too girly. Sadness, too prissy. Even indecisiveness or thoughtfulness or basic kindness could make you a target, for your peers as well as adults. Reflecting on my experiences growing up as a boy, I'm horrified by how much of my waking energy was spent on the project of avoiding the shame of being labelled as not masculine enough. And, to be honest, even today I'm not entirely sure what masculinity means except as a reaction against femininity.

In her book How to Raise a Feminist Son, journalist, professor, and presenter at Teacher Tom's Play Summit Sonora Jha, writes, "In many cultures, we rob boys of the range of human emotions and connection . . . And how are boys often trained in "masculinity?" By distancing themselves from femininity." 

I don't have a son, but I am one, I grew up among sons, and I have spent decades working with other people's sons. I have strived, as an educator, to create spaces in which all children can express themselves, not as a gender, but as individual children. We celebrate the expression of emotions. We eschew shaming. We don't bat an eye when a "boy" spends a day in a princess dress. Yet I see the work of our culture as one-by-one these boys struggle to be "big boys" or "man up" or "get over it." There are few things that break my heart more than to watch a two-year-old who wears his heart on his sleeve, slowly retreat over the course of his preschool years into the kind of emotional guardedness that we attribute to masculinity. We are trying, believe me, but in the end the culture outside our little bubble is strong. 

I like to think we make a difference, but I know the research finds that even those of us who identify as feminist or non-sexist, tend to reinforce, in both overt and subtle ways, the idea of what is often called the "Man Box." And much of that box is constructed of this idea that to be a man is to reject anything that might be considered feminine. Stanford researcher Dr. Judy Chu says, "We teach boys to abandon women, and the first woman he must abandon is his mother." As she points out, we all crave connection, but to "be a man" requires that our boys avoid connection. And we all know that disconnected people tend to be lonely, isolated, self-destructive, hostile, and even violent, the definition of "toxic masculinity," and the sad and dangerous condition in which too many men find themselves.

As Sonora Jha writes, this kind of masculinity "isn't what boys are made of but what they are made into."

One of the strongest predictors of whether or not a boy grows up to embody toxic masculinity is whether or not they have experienced caring relationships with other boys and men. Sonora talks to me of how her own son, a young man, has male friends with whom he can talk about feelings: even their fears, even their sadness. She says they call one another out on the use of sexist or homophobic language. It is all so alien to my own experiences as a young man. It gives me hope, even as I see the damages wrought by the twisted things we do to our boys in the pursuit of a brand of masculinity that is killing us.

As important adults in the lives of boys, we cannot protect them from the toxic messages in our culture. It is in the air we breathe. But we can talk about it. We can point it out. We can give them the space to cry, to cower, and to trust us with their emotions. We can teach them the "radical notion," as first articulated by activist Marie Meiselman Shear, "that women are people," and that to define oneself as a rejection of half of humanity to reject half of yourself.

Men, in particular, need to make an effort to break the cycle. When we role model our own vulnerability, our own compassion, caring, and connections, we show our boys that a different world is possible. When we, like Sonora's son and his friends, point out false narratives and stereotypes, we give our fellow males a glimpse of that loving, connected world outside the Man Box. 

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The live portion of Teacher Tom's Play Summit is over, but it's still not too late to join Sonora, Lisa Murphy, Akilah Richards, Maggie Dent, Raffi, Suzanne Axelsson, Peter Gray and the rest of us. What if the whole world understood the power of trusting children with the freedom to play, to explore their world, to ask and answer their own questions? What if everyone respected their right to learn in their own way, on their own time? What if we remembered that children must have their childhoods and that means playing, and lots of it? Every one of these people are professionals who have placed children first. You will walk away from this event transformed, informed, challenged, and inspired to create a world that respects children and sets them free to learn and grow. Together we can, as presenter Raffi sings, "Turn this world around!"

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!

Magic, Fairies, and Releasing the Full Potential of Humanity

Among the many honors I've had in my life, being present as a very young child discovers soap bubbles is right up there. They are magical things that we adults have forgotten how to see. They are there, we can see them, but when we try to touch them they are gone. They appear from out of no where, reflecting the world strangely in their convex surface as they fly without wings or motors, just going where the wind takes them. Then, like fairies, they are gone.

Another of these honors is being present as very young children discover birds and dandelion seed puffs, and the sound their own voice makes in an echoey place: all of it magic and fairies.

As we grow into adulthood, we stop experiencing magic and fairies. The world becomes increasingly predictable, mundane, and tick tock. If I do this, then that happens. I've always done it like this, and it always happens like that. Parents, if they aren't too busy to drop to their knees, which is the best vantage point for discovering magic and fairies, often spend a few years in this world, but as their children grow, they once more return to their upright adult stance, reducing the magic and fairies to memories that themselves evoke memories of their own childhoods. 

But the magic is gone. The fairies are gone.

Those of us who work with young children, however, if we remember that it is our honor to simply be present, can live in this place of magic and fairies. 

Today is the final day of Teacher Tom's Play Summit, an international online gathering of tens of thousands of early childhood educators and parents. We have been listening and sharing about all sorts of things, but behind it all, there is magic and there are fairies. Presenter Akilah Richards says that adults have "colonized childhood" and in the process we have popped all the bubbles, chased away the birds, pulled the dandelions, and installed acoustic tiles. We colonize childhood when we insist that magic and fairies only live in storybooks. We colonize childhood by insisting that we know what they need to know, how they need to know it, and by when.

And we are diminished by it, all of it, children and adults alike.

Raffi Cavoukian, platinum record and Grammy-nominated troubadour best known for his evergreen hits "Baby Beluga," Bananaphone," and "Down By the Bay," is offering us a vision for a transformed world based upon his philosophy of Child Honouring. In his summit interview which goes live today, he tells us how it came to him in a vision. He talks of a world in which we prioritize the needs of young children, returning them to their proper place, not as colonized people, but free people who stand at the center of our society. He talks of a world in which we adults honor and respect our youngest citizens.

Researcher and author Peter Gray tells us that for most of human history children lived alongside adults as they worked, played, and lived their lives. This is the natural habitat in which children learn best. It is also the habitat in which adults can stay connected to the magic and fairies that we have forgotten how to see.  This is what Raffi is calling for. It is what I am calling for. It is what the children are calling for if we would only take the time to listen. 

I know that the idea of moving children back to the center of society where they belong sounds like an impossibility to many adults. We've grown so estranged from childhood that we can't imagine getting work done with children in the room. We can't envision how children will spend their days if not walled off in their care centers and preschools. We fret about all that literacy and mathematics they'll be missing out on. But most tragic, I think, is that most of us have no idea how much better our own lives would be with magic and fairies in them. It's only with children at our side that we experience the true, day-to-day, awe and wonder of it all.

I'm on board with Raffi. Please join us today: Child Honouring. It's through reconnecting with children, who in turn reconnect us to magic and fairies, that we unleash the full potential of humanity.

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Today is the final day of Teacher Tom's Play Summit. It's not too late to join us for Raffi, Suzanne Axelsson, Roberta Pucci, and Jackie Bennet. What if the whole world understood the power of trusting children with the freedom to play, to explore their world, to ask and answer their own questions? What if everyone respected their right to learn in their own way, on their own time? What if we remembered that children must have their childhoods and that means playing, and lots of it? Teacher Tom's Play Summit  is a free, online conference that takes place June 20-25. Click here to get your free pass to our incredible sessions with early childhood and parenting experts and thought leaders from around the world. Every one of these people are professionals who have placed children first. You will walk away from this event transformed, informed, challenged, and inspired to create a world that respects children and sets them free to learn and grow. Together we can, as presenter Raffi sings, "Turn this world around!"

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

We're Planting For Our Children and Grandchildren, Our Future Elders

Yesterday evening I was talking with my friend John Yiannoudis, the proprietor of the Dorothy Snot preschool and kindergarten in Athens, Greece. One of the things he and I share is that we both came to education later in life, after having had other careers. John's background is in business and while I've sometimes tried to argue with him about economics, at the end of the day, I've always wound up seeing his point.

As I'm writing this, we're on the cusp of Day 5 of Teacher Tom's Play Summit, an international online event that was conceived with the idea of igniting or furthering a transformation in how we educate and parent young children. Of course, I have no illusions that a one-week event in our little corner of the internet is going to prompt the global epiphany that we must give up on our idea that children are ours to control, that we need to bring children back to the center of society, and that we can and should trust children with freedom. I've been going on about the need for a transformation in my own way for decades now. The collective efforts on behalf of children represented by our summit presenters amounts to centuries of advocacy for children, parents, and educators. 

I believe that I've seen evidence that we have, in our ad hoc efforts, moved the needle in some areas. For instance, it wasn't that long ago that I could ask a roomful of early childhood educators, "How many of you call your program 'play-based'?" and see only a few raised hands. This doesn't mean they weren't play-based educators, but rather that they were using euphemisms line "hands on learning" and "experiential education" because the word "play" seemed too frivolous. More recently, however, when I've asked that question, nearly everyone raises their hands. And there are pockets of real success around the world, like New Zealand with its truly child-centered Te Whāriki national ECE curriculum (as discussed at the summit by Brenda Soutar and Wendy Lee, who also both had a hand in creating it). Other summit presenters talked about Anji Play in China, Reggio Emilia in Italy, forest schools in the UK and the US, not to mention homeschooling and unschooling.

The data, the research, the evidence, anecdotal and otherwise, is all on the side of giving up on our hubristic notions that adults always know best. Our elders across the globe remember a time when children were permitted their own childhoods. Every one of our summit presenters has talked about positive signs, giving us real world examples of the power of trusting children with the freedom to learn about life through their own curiosity and play, to fully connect with nature, other people, and themselves. Several of our summit presenters feel like we are at or approaching a "tipping point." 

The facts and momentum seem to be on our side.

The thing is, when I step back and try to take in a more panoramic view of the lot of children in our world, I have to squint to see the real progress we've made. As John told me yesterday, "From a businessman's perspective, of all the types of institutions there are, education is the slowest to change." Every other type of business has been dramatically transformed over the past decades. Indeed, they are in a constant state of transformation and they adapt to a changing world in order to survive, yet the experience of education for most children around the world has remained stuck in a model that was created during the Industrial Revolution. There have been ebbs and flows over the decades, but schools and the way "education" is conceived of in schools, has proven to be exceedingly resistant to change.

As I approach my 60th birthday, I'm growing increasingly impatient with the pace at which change is happening. If we are nearly at a tipping point, and I have no reason to believe that we aren't, then maybe I, maybe we, can be the force that finally pushes it over. This was why my wife Jennifer and I felt that now was the time for a summit like Teacher Tom's Play Summit. Our call is for early childhood educators and parents to unite. There is no force on earth that can stand before us if we do.

We may be nearing a tipping point. We may be on the verge, as a society, of fully embracing Raffi Cavoukian's philosophy of Child Honouring by bringing children back to center of our lives. But it may also be true that "on the verge" is a relative term. "It's a journey. It's not a destination . . . And we certainly have not reached it if it is," says Brenda Souter from her perspective as a Maōri educator in a nation that is striving to overcome the sins of its colonial past. Whether we've been successful or not is a judgement for what Aboriginal educator Jackie Bennet calls "our future elders." What we are doing today is planting seeds for a crop that we ourselves may not harvest. 

This summit is one of those seeds. In the coming months, we can, together, tend the soil, water it, and make sure it gets light. But otherwise, like with our children, it is the seed's destiny to grow. I'm clear that change is needed. I see it in every child I meet and in every adult who loves them. I may not live to see the harvest, but it's not for me anyway. We're planting for our children and grandchildren, our future elders.

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There are still two days left in Teacher Tom's Play Summit. It's not too late to join us. What if the whole world understood the power of trusting children with the freedom to play, to explore their world, to ask and answer their own questions? What if everyone respected their right to learn in their own way, on their own time? What if we remembered that children must have their childhoods and that means playing, and lots of it? Teacher Tom's Play Summit  is a free, online conference that takes place June 20-25. Click here to get your free pass to our incredible sessions with early childhood and parenting experts and thought leaders from around the world. Every one of these people are professionals who have placed children first. You will walk away from this event transformed, informed, challenged, and inspired to create a world that respects children and sets them free to learn and grow. Together we can, as presenter Raffi sings, "Turn this world around!"

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 Takes A Child To Raise A Village

When our daughter Josephine was young, not even two-years-old, she began to pester me, her stay-at-home parent, to "Go somewhere!" I took that to mean that she was ready for preschool, but one after another my wife, mother, and mother-in-law kiboshed the idea with the argument that Josephine was one of the lucky ones, "She has a stay-at-home parent." Why in the world, they asked, would I want to turn her care over to a "stranger."

I knew nothing about preschool at the time. I didn't attend one as a boy and even my "kindergarten" was a loosy-goosy optional few hours a week where we mostly just built with blocks, colored, and chased one another around the playground. Mom barely had time to shop at the Piggly Wiggly before having to pick me up again. And that's the only thing I knew for sure about preschool: you dropped your child off for a period of time, then picked them up.

It was while trying to accommodate Josephine's natural born urge to get out there and interact with other people, that I met a mother who, along with her son, was enrolled in a cooperative school, the attractive feature being that parents attended along with their children. That concept was approved by my triumvirate of important women, and so I found myself in a world of families, a community centered around caring for our children together. It was this experience that led me to pursue a career, a calling really, as an early childhood teacher and since cooperatives were the only model I knew, that's where I ended up. I genuinely don't really understand how people do it without the community.

"It takes a village to raise a child," is a well-known African proverb, one that I've lived for my entire professional life. At any given moment, my classroom has always been populated by children, mothers, fathers, nannies and other caregivers, grandparents, younger and older siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and family friends, all together building with blocks, coloring, and chasing one another around.

Education activist, President and Co-founder of the Rybakov Foundation, and presenter at Teacher Tom's Play Summit Ekaterina Rybakova is working to transform Russian schools in ways that make my heart sing. She is working to make schools "more open." Says Ekaterina, "Most of us who are not involved in the education system are highly critical of school. We criticize very easily, we raise grievances very easily, but we support school very little." Schools, in turn, "feel constant pressure, constant reproaches, and accusations" which causes them to become defensive and "fenced off" from the rest of society. This, says Ekaterina means that schools are "not connected to society" in a meaningful way.

We see this phenomenon here in the US as well, with teachers, administrators, and school boards too often feeling they must circle the wagons against the onslaught from the rest of the world.

From where Ekaterina sits, and I'm right there with her, the main focus for schools should be providing the opportunity for our children explore what it means to "enter into human relations" with the world beyond their own family. She talks of schools as communities that include not only children, teachers, and parents, but alumni, local businesses, entrepreneurs, and other community members. In other words, a real community, a real village, rather than the artificial ones too often found in school in which we've grouped our children, as Sir Ken Robinson used to say, "according to their manufacture date."

"I think the main problem is that most of us who are not professionally engaged in education consider it not their business. They believe that it should be provided by the government; it should be provided by teachers. But no matter how hard they try and how many resources they allocate, it will always be insufficient . . . Education should become our common goal, and every adult should consider themself as a teacher."

I'm reminded of author, psychology professor, and world leader in cognitive science, Alison Gopnik's assertion that "caring for children has never, in all of human history, just been the role of biological mothers and fathers. From the very beginning it's been a central project for any community of human beings. This is still true. Education . . . is simply caring for children broadly conceived." Our modern world has wandered away from that central project. My triumvirate of women were not wrong in their objection to the prospect of dropping Josephine off at a preschool because more often than not these schools are walled off places that have little to do with life itself. Indeed, as we've seen during the pandemic, much of society regards our preschools and childcares simply as places to warehouse the kids so their parents can get back to work, leaving them to professional caretakers like myself, who do our best, but we alone will always be, as Ekaterina says, "insufficient."

It's been more than 20 years since Josephine and I first set foot in our cooperative preschool. Prior to that it had been 20 years since I'd had young children in my life in any sort of meaningful way. As I began to once more have children in my life, I felt all those empty parts of me filling up again. Yes, we adults have much to offer children, but what we forget in our modern world is how much children have to offer us. Young children possess genius we have lost, curiosity that is not jaded, and a perspective that hasn't been skewed by "the way things have always been done." Yes, we adults help make them better people, but they do the same for us. I have no doubt that most of our world's problems could be solved simply by moving children back to the center of our lives where they belong.

It's undeniably true that it takes a village to raise a child, but it's equally true that it takes a child to raise a village. When we finally understand this, we will be ready to build a truly healthy society.

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To watch my entire interview with Ekaterina, please join us at Teacher Tom's Play Summit. What if the whole world understood the power of trusting children with the freedom to play, to explore their world, to ask and answer their own questions? What if everyone respected their right to learn in their own way, on their own time? What if we remembered that children must have their childhoods and that means playing, and lots of it? Teacher Tom's Play Summit  is a free, online conference that takes place June 20-25. Click here to get your free pass to all 24 of our incredible sessions with early childhood and parenting experts and thought leaders from around the world. Every one of these people are professionals who have placed children first. You will walk away from this event transformed, informed, challenged, and inspired to create a world that respects children and sets them free to learn and grow. Together we can, as presenter Raffi sings, "Turn this world around!"

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!

"My Kids Were Born With Unschoolers' Hearts"

"My kids were born with unschoolers' hearts," says Sarah Beale in her conversation with me at Teacher Tom's Play Summit as a member of a panel of parents who are unschooling their children.

It begs the question, "Aren't they all?"

According to author and researcher Peter Gray (who also speaks at the summit) approximately five percent of American parents are currently homeschooling their children, but from the surveys he's seen, that number is expected to double in the coming year, largely as a fallout of the pandemic. Unschooling is a subset of homeschooling, although the terms are often used interchangeably. With as many as 10 percent of parents opting their children out of conventional schooling, I think it's important that we listen to them, which is why I invited Sarah, Natalie Pipkin, and Philip Mott, as well as author and podcaster Akilah Richards and Peter Gray to speak with us at the summit.

"We traded in meaningless curriculum for meaningful conversations," says Natalie, whose children started off in a conventional school. What sparked her decision to homeschool was her son coming home one day to say, "Mama, they're always lying to me. Why do you keep sending me back there?" As Natalie describes it, this moment was a trigger for reflection. She realized that she was regularly having to correct the things her child was learning in school. "That's what my mom did my whole life. That's what her mom did. You kind of feel like you have to do this. The only option is you go to school, you deal with what they teach you. Then you have to go home and reframe it and reteach it." Not only that, but despite enrolling her children in a diverse school, "it was obvious who was being treated differently." 

Sarah's oldest daughter didn't particularly enjoy school, although "she was coping" and "getting great feedback." It wasn't until she witnessed her son's "joy and the love of learning gradually dim," and especially when he would come home from school to say "I don't want to be alive," that unschooling became a "no brainer."

Philip's children have never been in school. It was his discovery of "respectful parenting" that caused he and his wife to decide their children would skip school, although, as he said, he wouldn't stand in their way if any of them wanted to try school out in the future.

Some of the things these unschooling parents have to say about schools can be painful for many of us who have committed our lives to being educators, but from where I sit, they jibe with much of my own critique of conventional schooling. 

Many consider unschooling to be a more radical form of homeschooling although, as Peter Gray discusses in his session with me, it is essentially the way humans have been educated throughout most of human history. In fact, the whole idea of mass schooling young children is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that is not based upon any sort of systematic study of how children learn or what is best for young children, but rather the factory model alongside which it emerged during the Industrial Revolution. Over the course of a couple generations, Western society went from one in which what today call "unschooling" was the standard, to what is essentially the model we use today, with children being divided up by age groups, isolated from the rest of society, sitting in desks, and being expected to perform mind-numbing, repetitive tasks. Of course, we've tweaked and fiddled with this model around the edges, but it remains today very much as it was back then.

Everything else about the world has changed in the intervening century and a half, but our schools have remained more or less the same despite the mountains of evidence that we are doing it all wrong. The sad truth is that most parents don't have the option to homeschool or unschool, even if they do have reservations about conventional schooling, even if their children are not thriving. Indeed, most parents have no choice but to simply nod along sympathetically when their kids ask, like Sarah's son did, "Why do they keep telling me how to do this stuff I know how to do? It's a waste of time." Most are caught in the cycle of "reframing and reteaching." Most have no choice but to send their kids to places that do not respect children the way they deserve to be respected.

Equally sad is that I don't believe I know a single teacher who doesn't essentially agree with these parents who have traded meaningless curriculum for meaningful conversation. My friends who teach in public schools in Seattle, for instance, nod along to these critiques. They see the waste of time, they see the racism, both overt and systemic, they agree that children should be treated more like, well, people. When I ask them why they don't just quit, the answer is always the same: they do it because they feel that by being inside the system they are in a position to protect children. That's both a noble and frightening thing. I have one friend in particular, who is adamant that if she wasn't there to "teach the important stuff inside the cracks" the children would be "chewed up and spit out."

This isn't right. To borrow a metaphor from the Industrial Revolution, these parents who are opting out and unschooling or homeschooling their children may be the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. 

School clearly doesn't work for all children, but what does it tell us that even the kids who are "getting great feedback" are only coping? For most adults, this just seems like something normal: school is something one must simply endure for the first couple decades of your life. What an incredibly sad commentary.

I can't help but admire these parents who opt out, who tell themselves the truth about school and about their own children. It's about time that we all started looking at the truth and then acting upon it to make school work for all children.

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To watch my entire interview with our Unschool Panel, please join us at Teacher Tom's Play Summit. What if the whole world understood the power of trusting children with the freedom to play, to explore their world, to ask and answer their own questions? What if everyone respected their right to learn in their own way, on their own time? What if we remembered that children must have their childhoods and that means playing, and lots of it? Teacher Tom's Play Summit  is a free, online conference that takes place June 20-25. Click here to get your free pass to all 24 of our incredible sessions with early childhood and parenting experts and thought leaders from around the world. Every one of these people are professionals who have placed children first. You will walk away from this event transformed, informed, challenged, and inspired to create a world that respects children and sets them free to learn and grow. Together we can, as presenter Raffi sings, "Turn this world around!"

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 Children Tell Me They Would Rather Be Outside

I once spent a couple days informally polling the kids at school. My question was simple: "Would you rather play outside or inside?" Every one of them answered, without hesitation, "Outside." It's the answer I would have given as a child. It's the answer I would still give today. 

The average American child spends 4-7 minutes a day in unstructured play outdoors. Why so little? The main theory blames screen-based technologies, but when I asked the same kids in the same survey if they would rather play with their friends, play a video game, or watch TV, nearly all answered, "Play with my friends." (Although one thoughtful respondent summed it all up by saying, "I would rather play video games outside with my friends.")

Now, I'm sure that my own casually collected data, which I've repeated now with several groups of kids, is skewed because of how much our community values and supports being outdoors, but we're also in Seattle, home to Microsoft, Amazon, and Expedia, not to mention major offices for Google, Apple, and Facebook. These children come from tech savvy families. They all know how to use computers, tablets, and smartphones, yet when asked, they say they would rather play outdoors with their friends. 

From where I sit, blaming technology for the lack of unstructured outdoor play is, frankly, a cop out.

If we're going to blame anyone, we need to blame ourselves. Schools, in particular, are culprits, as classroom time increasingly consumes entire days, leaving almost no time at all for recess. Seattle's public school teachers recently went on strike and one of their demands was a minimum of 30 minutes of outdoor play a day for elementary school children because many kids were apparently not even getting that. It's better than 4-7 minutes, but still strikes me as heartless. Children need hours outdoors, every day, not minutes.

Does anyone still need to be persuaded that children should be spending more time outdoors? Studies consistently show that kids who spend more time outside are smarter and happier. They are more attentive and less anxious. They are more confident, more creative, demonstrate a greater sense of responsibility, and, of course, being outdoors promotes overall physical fitness. But I think most of us know this. It's almost common knowledge, yet the kids are still only getting 4-7 minutes a day outside.

Director of the Berkeley Forest School, co-founder of the California Association of Forest Schools, and speaker at Teacher Tom's Play Summit Liana Chavarín told me about her own childhood in East Los Angeles, not exactly a nature preserve, yet she still enjoyed a childhood outdoors, playing outside of her family's apartment complex or in vacant lots. She says, "We didn't grow up seeing nature or the outdoors as something separate from us." 

Today she spends all day, every day outdoors with young children, some not even a year old, but she tells us that you don't need a forest or a bush or a meadow to get the benefits of outdoor play. "The most important outdoor space," she tells us, "is the one you have access to," whether that's a backyard, a balcony, or a few potted plants. I think this is a lesson for adults as much as it is for children. 

Why aren't parents demanding more outdoor time? Why aren't teachers? Our kids are spending 7 hours a day in front of screens because they have no other choice. Too many families don't have access to safe outdoor places and too many schools refuse to use the spaces they have, but I think more deeply, we have, tragically, lost our connection to nature. It's not the technology, it's that we've forgotten who we are.

"This is an indigenous practice of being together with children on land," says Liana, "to build connection with nature, to build relationships with nature, especially in this time of disconnection . . . We can still connect through the land and the creatures." 

Indoors is always an "owned" space, an adult space, and when children don't have access to the outdoors, if they are to experience any kind of freedom, it's going to be through screens, which have become a stand-in in for backyards, vacant lots, and other places where children can feel what it means to be free. Liana explains that outside is "a neutral space. It's not the teacher's space. It's not a school space . . . It is our space. It's ours together." And that is both connection and freedom.

This, I believe, is why the children tell me they would rather be outdoors. They don't care about what the research says. They don't care about being smarter or more confident or more responsible. No, they want to be free. They want to connect. Children need to experience freedom, they need to experience connection, and when we cut them off from that, they seek it out in the only place left, which is through a screen.

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To watch my entire interview with Liana, please join us at Teacher Tom's Play Summit. What if the whole world understood the power of trusting children with the freedom to play, to explore their world, to ask and answer their own questions? What if everyone respected their right to learn in their own way, on their own time? What if we remembered that children must have their childhoods and that means playing, and lots of it? Teacher Tom's Play Summit  is a free, online conference that takes place June 20-25. Click here to get your free pass to all 24 of our incredible sessions with early childhood and parenting experts and thought leaders from around the world. Every one of these people are professionals who have placed children first. You will walk away from this event transformed, informed, challenged, and inspired to create a world that respects children and sets them free to learn and grow. Together we can, as presenter Raffi sings, "Turn this world around!"

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!

Until We Find Our Way Back To Our Villages

Whenever I have the chance to pontificate on what's wrong with our world, part of my answer always comes down to the fact that we've removed children from the center of our lives. Every day, we send the kids to school, the adults go to work, and the grandparents are in retirement communities (or live halfway across the country). Not only that, but because children are no where near the center of life, many new parents haven't had actual children in their lives since they were children themselves, meaning that their sweet bundles of joy arrive as a kind of alien presence.

Humans have evolved to live in villages and neighborhoods that include people of all ages and stages, but the modern world scuttled that, leaving too many of our families, apart, alone, and inexperienced to face the world. No wonder parenting today is so incredibly stressful. It's not meant to be a job done by only one or two adults. It's the job for a village.

It was not an accident that my wife Jennifer and I returned to Seattle where our parents and siblings lived to have our baby, but discovering our village was a happy accident, one that shaped, well, everything. When we enrolled in the Latona Pre-3's Cooperative Preschool, I had no way of knowing that we had found our village. I hadn't even known we needed one.

When our daughter moved on to kindergarten, I stayed behind, becoming a teacher the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool, where I spent the better part of the past two decades. If you want to know more about how our school works, click here. If you want to learn even more, click here and read the posts from the bottom up.

Perhaps the aspect of our cooperative preschool system that I am most grateful for are all the incredible parent educators who worked with me, both as a parent and as a teacher. These wise women, and they have all been women, made it possible for parents to become their best selves and for me to become Teacher Tom. As I told Tania Hino, parent educator, consult for cooperative schools, founder of "Somos Mujeres Latinas, and presenter at Teacher Tom's Play Summit, "One of the things that parents always said to me after they left our school to go on to kindergarten was that the thing they missed the most wasn't our great playground. It wasn't Teacher Tom. It was parent education."

This, perhaps more than anything else, is what we've lost when we've lost our villages and neighborhoods. Throughout human history, children have been at the center of society and everyone had a hand in raising them. When parents were overwhelmed, there were always grandparents, older siblings, aunts, uncles, and friends at hand to help out. When parents had questions or concerns, the community was always there. Without our villages, we've turned to books and blogs for the advice and assurance that was once a matter of course for new parents.

Having parent educators and parents together in the classroom with the children at the center, as we do in cooperative preschool, is a move back towards our village roots. Yes, we are there to focus on the children, but at any given moment, Tania and educators like her, will be sitting one-on-one with parents who are struggling, be it with their child, their marriage, or anything else in their interconnected lives. We come together regularly as a community in the evenings to discuss the matters that impact us all, like a child who is biting or timid or who has just been diagnosed with something. We all learn to administer this child's Epi-pen or that child's seizure meds or simply how to best sooth them when they're upset. The blinders of confidentiality that one typically finds in school settings are necessarily dropped in favor of a transparency that reveals us all to be human, all to be uncertain, all to be in this together. Parents are there for one another when emergencies arise, caring for one another's children, giving them lifts, feeding them, and treating them as one of the family.

This sort of parent education and support is one of the most vital things we've lost when we, as a society, decided that we would raise our children in pink collar ghettos while we retreat to our adult's only workplaces and grandparents wait until the holidays to see their grandchildren. 

Caring for the children should stand at the center of any healthy society. For many of us, however, it's hard to imagine a world constructed in any other way. This is the way our parents did it, and maybe even our grandparents, but when one considers the sweep of human history, we see that children were always there: in our meetings, at our workplaces, and as invited guests at all our parties. They were there not just to be cared for, but also to remind the adults what is really most important.

This is the kind of interconnected environment in which we would all thrive best, adults and children alike. If we are going to heal the world's problems, from violence and war to climate change and racism, I'm afraid that solutions will elude us until we find a way back to our villages.

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To watch my entire interview with Tania, please join us at Teacher Tom's Play Summit. What if the whole world understood the power of trusting children with the freedom to play, to explore their world, to ask and answer their own questions? What if everyone respected their right to learn in their own way, on their own time? What if we remembered that children must have their childhoods and that means playing, and lots of it? Teacher Tom's Play Summit  is a free, online conference that takes place June 20-25. Click here to get your free pass to all 24 of our incredible sessions with early childhood and parenting experts and thought leaders from around the world. Every one of these people are professionals who have placed children first. You will walk away from this event transformed, informed, challenged, and inspired to create a world that respects children and sets them free to learn and grow. Together we can, as presenter Raffi sings, "Turn this world around!"

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!