The Purpose Of Learning Is Joy

One of the big ideas behind play-based learning is that humans, and young children in particular, are learning all the time. 

When an infant lies in its crib watching shadows on a wall, for instance, we assume they are learning. We see their gaze, we witness changes in the movement of their appendages and we take that as evidence that they are learning. They don't need an adult to hang over them making silly sounds or to dangle a woodland animal mobile over their face in order for learning to happen. By virtue of the fact that the shadows are holding the infant's attention, we can surmise that the baby's curiosity is aroused, which is how the human learning instinct manifests. When the sun goes behind a cloud and the shadows momentarily disappear, we observe changes in the infant, their arms and legs stop moving, their eyes search, their gurgling momentarily stops as they try to understand, to find what is lost. And when the sun remerges, we once more see the changes, the evidence that learning is happening.

What exactly any individual infant is learning from those shadows on the wall is anyone's guess, and we would probably guess wrong anyway because the moment we try, we must put our guesses into words, and language is something a newborn hasn't yet acquired. There are no words for what that baby is thinking, so it is impossible for us to know what they are learning, and frankly, it's none of our business.

We waste everyone's time when we try to put a pin in learning, to assign a purpose to it. This is a concept that we adults often have a hard time comprehending, I think, this idea that not only is all learning deeply personal and individual, but it is also ultimately unknowable to anyone but the person whose curiosity and, therefore, thought is engaged. They may be able to tell us what they have learned or are learning, but most of the time, like with our infant, learning has no purpose other than joy and that cannot be turned into data.

We are born to seek joy and learning brings us joy, thinking brings us joy, understanding brings us joy. To the degree that we've made learning hard work is the degree to which we cheat children of their joy. 

That learning, in an evolutionary sense, makes survival more likely, is a happy accident, just as our opposable thumbs and capacity to cooperate with one another are a happy accidents. We don't possess these traits as a species for the purpose of survival, but rather they are traits that have survived within us. Survival itself is a happy accident.

We have evolved curiosity and the capacity to pursue the satisfaction of our curiosity, like we evolved hunger and the capacity to pursue the satisfaction of our hunger. And just as we don't survive without hunger we don't survive without curiosity. But in both cases, the urge, the instinct, is about pursuit and satisfaction, not survival; not utilitarian purpose, but rather the one purpose that really matters to any of us, which is to experience joy.

As adults we might make a decision to learn something for what appear to be utilitarian reasons. For instance, I might learn Spanish in preparation for a trip to Mexico. I make that decision to learn Spanish because I believe, based on what I've learned so far in life, that doing so will increase the odds of a satisfying trip. I am learning Spanish, therefore, because it is about my self-selected pursuit and the satisfaction of that pursuit. Even if the immediate satisfaction I pursue is a greasy buck, I must, at some level anticipate that this money will, somehow, some day, lead to joy. 

Otherwise, there is no point, and that is the path to depression. 

Should I presume to teach Spanish to a young child who has not chosen to learn it, I take curiosity, and therefore joy, out of the equation. I distract them from the shadows on the wall and force them to attend to my silly sounds and dangling woodland animal mobiles. When I do this, I cheat the child of their own, self-selected pursuit, which means, no matter how well-intended I am, leading them away from joy.

Curiosity is an imperative. It is one of the few universal purposes. It makes survival more likely, but survival itself is not a purpose. 

When we leave our babies to contemplate shadows on the wall we free them to play, to pursue their own thoughts, and to create their own understanding. The purpose of all learning, at bottom, is nothing less than joy.

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If you're interested in learning about what you can do, right now, to create a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For the past 20 years, I've been working in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? Click this link to register and to learn more. Discounts are available for groups. Registration for this cohort closes on March 31 (today!), so act fast!

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!

What We Really Need Is To Bring Children Back To The Center Of Our Lives

If I go into Nordstrom and tell the shoe salesperson that I want high heels, their job is to say, "How high?" because the customer is always right. When I go into my doctor, however, and tell her I want Medicine X, her job is to say, "You might want Medicine X, but what you need is a splint."

In education, too many of us act like shoe salespeople when really need to start being more like doctors.

I've had the opportunity to visit schools in a dozen countries, on four continents. I've been to schools in most of the Canadian provinces and half the US states. I went to each of those places to talk to teachers and administrators about play-based preschool education. And everywhere I've gone, I've been generally well-received. Indeed, most of the time, those education professionals already know most of what I've come to talk about, yet I'm there because despite being knowledgeable, skilled professionals, many of their schools are still struggling to implement play-based education and I'm there to provide a nudge in the right direction. Some schools I visit are already fully play-based. I'm invited to those schools, to inspire educators to keep up their good work. They need the boost because most of us work in bubbles and even as we do the right thing, we find ourselves under constant pressure to introduce "just a little" developmentally inappropriate literacy instruction or add a tad more rigorous grading or homework or whatever. Play-based education, despite the overwhelming evidence to support it, is always under attack, even in the most friendly places.

I often ask my fellow early childhood educators about the barriers they face. Sometimes they blame regulations or their government's standardized curriculum. Sometimes they grumble about this or that administrator who refuses to look at the evidence. Sometimes they even blame corporations who are earning billions on the unmitigated disaster of high stakes standardized testing and various curriculum-in-a-box scams. And invariably, among the challenges these educators say they face are "the parents."

It seems that too many parents have come to see their children's schools as a kind of department store where the customer is always right. They've bought into the fear-mongering about "school readiness." They've heard about the higher reading scores at the school down the street. They've seen movies about the no-nonsense disciplinarian with a heart of gold who whips those kids into shape. They've watched online videos about the importance of "grit" and "a growth mindset" and "accountability," and even if it's all a little mixed up in their heads, they know they want that for their kids. And, of course, they've all been to school, so naturally they know a thing or two about a thing or two. Not all parents, of course, but enough that time and again "parents" show up as barriers. And all too often, it seems, professional educators find ourselves in the role of shoe salesmen, giving them what they want, or at least making them think they're getting what they want, even if we know that the shoe they're insisting upon will eventually cripple them.

Now, I'm not insensitive to the parent's plight. Most of us aren't professional educators. How can we be expected to sort through all the nonsense that's out there, not to mention the societal habit of traditional schooling, one that will likely take several generations to kick even with the right motivation. And yes, these are their children, the most precious thing in their lives: of course we must listen to them, consider their views, and understand that they are at least in part driven by fear. At the same time, education professionals are professionals in the way that doctors are. It's not our job to just give our customers what they want, but rather help them understand what it is that their children need in order to learn at full capacity.

From a teacher's perspective, perhaps the most important parts of the cooperative model of early childhood education is that parents are not just invited, but required to work in the classroom alongside the professionals as assistant teachers. There is nothing like being on the inside as a kind of apprentice to really understand how much they don't know, but how much they didn't know they didn't know, not just about their own child, but about children in general. Over the past couple decades, I've watched thousands of parents become educated about the kind of evidence-based learning that is characterized by play-based education. They've come to understand not only is their child a genius, so are all the others. They see that their child might be "behind" in some areas, but so are all the others. And they have front row seats to the incredible natural development of young human beings that takes place when we stop doing school to them and instead allow them to ask and answer their own questions in a beautiful, varied, and loving environment.

In our cooperative, parents rarely show up as barriers. In fact, the opposite is true: more often than not they are champions and allies, sometimes poking at sore spots or pointing out challenges, but always knowing that they must also take an active part in the solution.

Sadly, many American children are growing up in preschools and child cares, places to which their parents are connected primarily by email, the occasional phone call, and the quarterly parent-teacher conference. If we are going to truly transform education, this is something that must change. As it now stands, most parents are being educated about education by non-professionals: policymakers, journalists, and corporate hacks who haven't spent a day in the classroom, but who control the message nevertheless. They get elected on rhetoric about how our children are falling behind. They earn money by kindling the fear of missing out. They attract eyeballs with alarmist headlines. And the consensus of these education dilettantes is that some version of habitual schooling must continue, albeit with these extra grindstones added. Is it any wonder that parents show up as barriers to evidence-based education, which is to say play-based education, because they've been very poorly educated about education.

One of the primary projects of every human society is to care for children. For some ninety-nine percent of human existence, we understood this, which is why children always stood at the center of life. Today, in our wisdom, we have farmed this essential human activity to the fringes. Those who care for and educate our children are low-status, low-paid, and scarcely afforded the respect a professional deserves. We wonder what's wrong with modern society, well I'm here to argue that when we removed the care of children from the center of our lives, we removed the heart of community. We will continue to be "sick" as long as we keep insisting on Medicine X when what we really need is to bring children back into the center of our lives.

One of the ways to do this is to bring parents into their children's classrooms in a meaningful way. People will argue that I'm taking a privileged stand here, that too many parents find themselves too burdened with multiple minimum wage jobs to find the time. I can't imagine a better use of our education dollars than to then to simply pay these parents for their time.

People will argue that employers will never give parents the time off to attend preschool. Right now, that might be true, but here in the Pacific Northwest where there are thousands of thriving cooperative schools, many employers do make these allowances, often motivated by their own memories as co-op parents.

People will argue that employers will fight against us, fearing that having children at the center of their employees' lives will be too distracting. It sounds to me like these employers need to be educated, because whether they know it or not, parents are already distracted by being parents, not to mention the extra guilt and anxiety that comes from having their beloved children so far from the center of their lives. I would argue that employers who can be made to see the light will find that this transformation will result in happier, and therefore more productive workers.

For every objection, there is a solution, but the only way to find it is to keep talking about it. Again, I'm not saying that this is a silver bullet, but there is a lot we can learn from the cooperative model and it's commitment to educating not just children, but entire families.

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If you're interested in learning about what you can do, right now, to create a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For the past 20 years, I've been working in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? Click this link to register and to learn more. Discounts are available for groups. Registration for this cohort closes on March 31 (tomorrow!), so act fast!

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

"I Guess They Taught Themselves"

Some time ago, we took the children on a field trip to the local post office. We were a group of some 20 children and eight adults. The woman giving us our tour introduced herself as Ms. Lui, before insisting that the children get in a line. It was an inauspicious start. The kids had no idea what to do. Even we adults were at a loss. Queueing up isn't part of what we did at Woodland Park.

I could see Ms. Lui was irritated with us. She tried to remain cheerful, but it was through gritted teeth. When I explained that we didn't know how to line up, I reckon she thought me the worst teacher in the world.

As a play-based educator, I strive, against a lifetime of training to the contrary, to resist the temptation to exert power over the children which is what we do when we insist on things like marching in lines or sitting in straight rows. It's what we do when we insist on zippered lips, dress codes, or asking permission to use the toilet. School is notoriously a place of rules and regulations, of teachers in the role of drill sergeant, or, if I'm being honest, prison guard.

I am responsible for the children's safety and general well-being, of course, and in that capacity there may be times when I cannot allow a child to do certain things, like jumping off the roof of a three story building, but by default, any power that comes my way by virtue of my titles of "teacher" or "adult" is to be returned to the children in the form of empowerment.

I can make an argument for this position from moral grounds, but my genuine motivation is simply to be a good teacher. I'm familiar with the research on the effects of people possessing more power than others and I've concluded that when I exert power over children, especially the capricious and arbitrary kind of power exerted in most classroom, I'm doing direct harm to the children's educational prospects.

As Rutger Bregman writes in his book Humankind: "One of the effects of power, myriad studies show, is that it makes you see others in a negative light. If you're powerful you're more likely to think most people are lazy and unreliable. That they need to be supervised and monitored, managed and regulated, censored and told what to do. And because power makes you feel superior to other people, you'll believe all this monitoring should be entrusted to you . . . Tragically, not having power has exactly the opposite effect. Psychological research shows the people who feel powerless also feel far less confident. They're hesitant to voice an opinion. In groups, they make themselves seem smaller, and they under-estimate their own intelligence."

That adults should exert power over children is so ingrained in us that many cannot imagine it any other way, but by doing so we make the children smaller, we make them feel ignorant, and we undermine their confidence. 

We've all experienced educators who are convinced that the children are lazy, that they can't be trusted, that they must be constantly monitored and managed. It's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. 

I asked Ms. Lui if we could just promise to stick together as a group. She didn't think that would work at all. She wanted us, on the spot, while on a field trip to a place of great excitement, to instruct them on how lines worked. Fortunately, there was a painted line one the floor so we asked the kids to stand on the line. Most of them tried it out for a moment or two, but as empowered children they were far more attuned to their curiosity than standing on a line. Some wandered off. Some pointed and asked questions. Others negotiated with their friends over their exact position on the line. After several minutes of this cat herding project, I turned to Ms. Lui and said, "This is the best we can do. Do you really need us to march in a line?"

It was a simple question, but it stumped her. After muttering something about "keeping order" she shrugged, adding, "Can you at least tell them not to touch anything?"

That I could do, although even then, I returned the power to these empowered children: "There's a lot of stuff around here that could hurt you. Ms. Lui wants you to ask her before touching anything." I did not command them, but rather gave them information.

She shook her head as she led the way. At every point-of-interest, from the sorting machines to the post office boxes, the children asked, "Can I touch this?" or "What would happen if I touched that?" At first her tone was slightly scolding, but gradually she began to relax, even seeming to take pleasure in the children's obvious curiosity, their confidence, and their willingness to voice their ideas and opinions.

In preparation for this visit, we had written letters addressed to ourselves. Ms. Lui showed us the outgoing mail slot and the children, unprompted, lined up, one-behind-another, to deposit their letters. She was by now in fine spirits. I joked, "See? We can line up."

She lowered her eyebrows at me, "I thought you said they didn't know how to line up."

I replied, "I didn't think they did. Maybe they just didn't need to know it until now."

This time when she shook her head it was with a sense of wonder, "I guess they taught themselves."

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If you're interested in learning about creating a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For the past 20 years, I've been working in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? Click this link to register and to learn more. Discounts are available for groups. Registration for this cohort closes on March 30, so act fast!

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 Disruption That Young Children, Their Families, and Educators Need

"The local public schools are recruiting police officers and fire fighters as substitute teachers."

"We have 75 open teaching positions and no applicants."

"We're an 11 person teaching team and I know that at least 5 who aren't going to return next year."

"They're already holding combined classes of 40+ in the gym because there aren't enough teachers."

"They think they can get people to come back by offering more money, but that's not why my teachers tell me they're leaving."

Recently, I've begun to travel again. I've enjoyed speaking at conferences and professional development events via Zoom, of course, but I'd almost forgotten how much better, how much more well-rounded and fulfilling it is to meet with educators in-person, to really see their faces, to engage in easy back-and-forth, to . . . (Dare I say it lest it prove a dream?) . . . actually greet my colleagues with a hug.

But all is not right in our profession right now, even as things are returning to some semblance of normal. The other thing about being with people, sharing breaks together, breaking bread, and generally hanging out, is that both brighter and darker truths are spoken.

Based on those conversations, snippets of which I've included at the top of this post, as well as conversations happening in online forums such as Twitter, the preschool world, if not the entire educational world, is in for a massive transformation in the coming months. Indeed, it's already started. There are a whole lot of educators just waiting for the end of the school year to turn in their keys. It's just a matter of how many walk away from a profession they once loved despite the chronically low pay and long hours.

I've been doing this a long time and never before have I heard the kind of buzz I'm hearing right now. If even a fraction of it is true, and it's already coming true in many places, there are going to be thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of communities that are going to have to go to extraordinary measures to keep their school doors open. If we learned anything during the pandemic it's exactly how absolutely essential our schools are for our economy to function, at least as it's currently configured.

Why are teachers fed up?

The answers are varied. 

Many are plain exhausted from the past two years of pandemic teaching, of the unrealistic demands and expectations that have been heaped on our profession as we've tried to do what is best for children during unprecedented times. We've had to, on the fly, essentially re-invent schooling, and quite often without much support from administrators, policymakers, and communities. 

Others have discovered that they can earn a much better living with much lower stress elsewhere.

Some are concerned about violence and threats of violence, especially from guns.

A lot of those who are leaving tell me they are sick of being required to inflict developmentally inappropriate academic-style curricula on preschoolers. They can no longer take part in an educational approach that defies the evidence of what our youngest citizens need, which is play and lots of it. 

But the straw that is breaking the proverbial camel's back, it seems, are the increasing attacks on what was left of our professional autonomy. Legislatures are passing laws about what we can and cannot say to children, some even going so far as to mandate that we lie to them. In some places, educators are being required to get their lesson plans pre-approved weeks if not months in advance, with punishments being meted out to anyone who happens to deviate, which is what any good teacher will do as they seek to be responsive to the children. Entire categories of education are being placed off-limits, often for political, not pedagogical purposes. There are threats of cameras being placed in classrooms in order to catch-out any little slip-up. And all of this is being mandated by non-professionals, people who have no educational training, experience, or, frankly, standing. 

This is not something that will be fixed by suddenly offering higher pay. If that were the main motivator, this exodus from teaching would have happened long ago. This was already a profession in which 50 percent of new educators leave the profession after only five years. This was already a profession that is ranked among the most stressful. This was already a profession, especially in the early years sector, that is grossly underpaid: in many states the average pay is around $25,000 per year, which is awfully close to the poverty line.

This is the bad news, but perhaps it is also the good news as well. Entrepreneurs are always talking about the need to "disrupt" an industry. Perhaps this is just the disruption we need, but it will be nothing but disaster if we are not capable of taking advantage of it. When I talk to the educators who are staying, they tell me they are staying for the children and for the families of the children they serve. They are staying because the children and their families need them. 

If we are going to make this disruption work for both educators as well as children and their families, we are going to have to begin to re-build bridges between teachers and parents. It is going to take a concerted effort because, as one tired teacher recently said to me, "It seems like a lot of parents just want to dump their kids off on us, while a small, vocal minority think they're our bosses and get to tell us what to do -- even if it's harmful to children."

It doesn't have to be like this. Teachers and educators are natural allies: at bottom, we all want what is best for the children, yet it seems that increasingly we are talking past one another, we are ascribing bad motives to one another, we are suspicious, demanding, and dismissive. And meanwhile, the kids are stuck in the middle.

In the early years, what is best for young children is for educators and parents, grandparents, and carers to be on the same page, to work hand-in-hand, to communicate, support, and collaborate. Indeed, if we cannot manage this, I fear, this disruption will lead to a painful educational, economic, and societal upheaval with no solution in sight because, frankly, simply throwing money at it isn't going to make things better. 

This is, at least, the hopeful thinking behind my course The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. Based upon my decades of experience working hand-in-hand with parents, grandparents, and carers, this 6-part course offers my best thinking on what educators can do to start bridging the divide, to heal the wounds, and create a community of learning based on mutual respect and understanding. This is, in fact, exactly what the research tells us that young children need -- a community, a village. This, I firmly believe, is exactly the disruption that young children, their families, and educators need.

"I'm not in this for the money," an educator said to me, tears in her eyes. "None of us are. We are here for the children. I wish more parents understood what we do and why we do it. I just want their kids to have a genuine childhood, full of play and love. Isn't that what they want too?" 

It's too late to avert our crisis, it's already upon us, but in crisis there is opportunity. I sure hope, for the sake of all of us, that part of the solution is a return to the village, because, as the African proverb rightly has it, "It takes a village to raise a child." That is the disruption we need and it will start one school community at a time.

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If you're interested in learning more about creating a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For the past 20 years, I've been working in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? Click this link to register and to learn more. Discounts are available for groups. Registration for this cohort closes on March 30, so act fast!

Creating Communities Of Mutual Concern

"We still had a blacksmith in our town in those days, if you can believe it." 

I was talking to the great grandfather of one of my students. Most of the time, the grandparents aren't much older than me, but here was a man 30 years my senior. I make a habit of talking to older people about their childhoods. I like seeing how they tend to light up. I learn about recent history through intimate stories, and I'm especially drawn to childhood memories. 

"My friends and I used to walk into town to watch him work. He opened his doors up wide to get some ventilation. They were like barn doors. There was a counter, then behind it was the fire and the anvil. We boys would stand in the doorway to watch. Sometimes he'd come out and talk to us. His arms were like this." He showed me with his hands, then chuckled, "At least one of them was. And he was always covered in soot and sweat. For a long time, I wanted to be a blacksmith when I grew up."

Another grandparent told me about how she used to go around to the back of a neighborhood ice cream parlor where the woman who worked there would secretly give her free samples and where they would often talk "about this and that. All kinds of things. She was like having a grown up sister."

John Holt wrote in his book Escape from Childhood: 

"Children need many more adult friends, people with whom they may have more easy relationships that they can easily move out of or away from whenever they need to or feel like it. Perhaps they found many of those in extended families, among various grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, and so on. Perhaps they found them living in smaller communities, villages, or towns, or neighborhoods in larger cities. But these communities, in which people have a sense of place and mutual concern, are more rare all the time, disappearing from country as well as city. The extended family has been scattered by the automobile an the airplane. There is not a way to bring it together so that children may live close to numbers of older people who will in some degree have an interest in them and care about them."

The scattering of our villages, through automobiles and airplanes, yes, but also through an economic system that demands more and more from adults during what are the typical child-rearing years, is something that concerns me a great deal. If caring for children is among the most important projects of any human civilization, and it is, then how can it be that we're tending to increasingly push children away from the center of life, cordoning them off in "schools?" If this pandemic has showed us anything, it's that the primary reason schools exist anymore is to get the kids out of their parents' hair so they can get to work. 

We know we all need the kinds of connectivity, the kinds of relationships of trust and kinship that can only be found in a community, village, town, or neighborhood, yet most of us start our days by sending the parents into one corner (work) and their children into another (school), one serving economic necessity while the other is left in a hothouse of like-aged children. On top of that, our automobiles and airplanes continue to scatter our small nuclear families far and wide, leaving the rest of our villages -- grandparents, aunts, uncles, and the like -- far away, only accessible by appointment. There are no longer opportunities to stand in the blacksmith's doorway or learn about life from an ice cream scooper. 

This was always my vision for the Woodland Park Cooperative School, a place where families could convene, where both children and adults could forge friendships with one another. Over the years, when I've written here about our preschool, I've focused mostly on the children, avoiding using photographs that show too many adults, but I'm showing a distorted picture of how our community really works. Visitors who see us up close and in person have always remarked on the number of adults around the place. At any given moment children might be playing with one another, but there are others "playing" with adults: cheek to cheek in the garden, tasting the cilantro blossoms from a plant that's gone to seed; working together to get a snack on the table; wondering together about where that jet in the sky is headed. These are often real friendships by anyone's definition of the word, easy relationships formed for a day, a week, or a year. There are always some children who feel so connected to "Paul's mommy" that they ask for her when they arrive. There is disappointment when "Sarah's daddy" isn't there that day and joy at being reunited when "Kisha's grandma" is there.

We know there is something broken in society. We want to blame the press, social media, video games, politics, or declining morals. We all know we are divided, that we are lacking connection and community, even as it continues its long, slow disappearance over decades. We too often believe, I think, that this break up of villages is the effect of some greater cause, but I find myself wondering if it's the other way around. Maybe it was our choice, as a culture, to scatter ourselves that came first. But whatever the case, I think it's clear that a return to the village, in whatever contemporary form, is the balm and cure we need.

I have seen that our preschools can, at least in part, serve the role of community based on mutual concern. That, at least, is much of the thinking behind my course, The Empowered Educator -- Partnering With Parents (see below). We can't all be cooperative schools, but we do stand in a unique position to bring children, parents, and even grandparents together by placing our children at the center of our lives. As John Holt points out, children need this, but it doesn't take much reflection to realize we all do. Children, families, and educators: I can think of no better foundation upon which to build our future villages.

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If you're interested in learning more about creating a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For the past 20 years, I've been working in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? (Click this link to register and to learn more.) Discounts are available for groups.

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!

Even If They Are Between The Ages Of 6 And 18

A couple days ago I was talking with clinical and cognitive psychologist, and author of the book Changing Our Minds, Naomi Fisher.

She asserted that most of us are more or less fine with allowing preschoolers to play, which is to say, engage in self-directed learning. She then pointed out that this is also how we expect adults to learn. We don't compel them to attend school unless they want to, they can learn whatever they want to learn, they can quit when they want, they can learn through videos, books, conversations, or whatever method suits them.

"The only humans we don't trust to educate themselves are the children in between."

There is no science or research or data that suggests that we are, between the ages of 6 and 18, suddenly rendered incapable of learning through our own activities and processes. Nor is there any evidence that what we do to children in the name of school improves their educational prospects over simply leaving them to it.

In play-based preschool, what children need from us is, as I wrote yesterday (quoting Alison Gopnik), is "a protected space for love, safety, and stability" in order to thrive, each in their own unique way. We know that when those needs are met, children will follow their curiosity and the adults' job is to provide an environment that contains a variety of "beautiful" materials and opportunities. Likewise with adult learning, we expect them to rely on their self-motivation and see our responsibility as little more than providing access to materials and opportunities like libraries, the internet, and community colleges. 

But with those kids, those kids in between, we bizarrely abandon curiosity and self-motivation in favor of rewards and punishments, compulsion, one-size-fits-all curricula, and environments that are little more than chairs, tables, textbooks, and lectures. It's almost as if we've created a completely arbitrary and tedious ordeal that we force this particular category of humans to endure in order to once more be free to learn.

One in ten American children will drop out of school and countless others will learn that they simply aren't very bright. A few will thrive, of course, but most are just trying to get through. They are unmotivated and we've made them that way. The really sick part is that there are those who see these children struggling and conclude that the solution is to start putting them through the ordeal at younger and younger ages. 

Doesn't it make more sense to study the motivated learners and apply those lessons to all humans, even if they are between the ages of 6 and 18?

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If you're interested in learning more about creating a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For the past 20 years, I've been working in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? (Click this link to register and to learn more.) Discounts are available for groups.

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 Can't Make Children Learn, But We Can Let Them Learn"

In her book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik writes:

"Love doesn't have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose. The purpose is not to change the people we love, but to give them what they need to thrive. Love's purpose is not to shape our beloved's destiny, but to help them shape their own. It isn't to show them the way, but to help them find a path for themselves, even if the path they take isn't one we would choose ourselves, or even one we would choose for them."

"(O)ur job as parents," she writes, "is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space for love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children's minds; it's to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it's to give them the toys and pick the toys up again after the kids are done. We can't make children learn, but we can let them learn."

This is good counsel for teachers as well.

Parents, of course, are expected to love their children, but I know that many teachers, although I hope not most, are uncomfortable with the idea that love should stand at the center of their relationship to the young children in their lives. But that is exactly what young children need: love and lots of it. We are social animals, evolved for life in tribes, villages, and extended families. As Gopnik writes, "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." Love is the thread that holds it all together and any idea of early childhood that tries to replace it with arm's length relationships does not acknowledge the fundamental truth about who we are.

In a world in which our villages have been broken apart, with parents spending their days segregated into workplaces, children segregated into schools, and grandparents scattered far and wide, our children still need that community of human beings. This means that, until the revolution comes, families and early childhood educators must be that community if we are to provide our children with what they need to thrive.

I don't know if that's an ideal scenario or not, but it's where we are right now.

I've spent my entire professional life in cooperative preschools, communities of families in which, in Gopnik's words, "Education . . . is simply caring for children broadly conceived."

This is the idea behind my course entitled The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. I know from experience that educators and parents can be the community our children need to thrive, but it's sometimes hard to see how we get there from here. This course is an opportunity for educators to begin to make it happen.

Love doesn't have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose: and that purpose is to give one another what we need to shape our own lives.

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If you're interested in learning more about creating a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For the past 20 years, I've been working in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? (Click this link to register and to learn more.) Discounts are available for groups.

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 Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents

Based on my informal and unscientific surveys of early childhood educators, one of the biggest hurdles to fully realizing play-based education is "the parents." Not all the parents, of course, but there are apparently a lot who might like the idea of their children playing, but who have bought into the "fall behind" snake oil. This leads them to apply pressure to us to become "more academic" in defiance of the science behind how young children learn.

I've found that one of the best things one can do for your play-based program is to consciously manage those expectations, right from the start. For us, the process of getting parents on our bandwagon starts with our spring orientation.

I use this opportunity to tell the assembled parents that I will not be teaching their children literacy, although they will be laying the foundations for literacy through their play, their dramatic play in particular; every time we read to them or tell them stories, or when they tell stories to us; each time they get excited and say, "Hey that's my letter!" or "That's your letter!" I won't be teaching them, but they'll be doing exactly what they need to do to read when their brains are ready.

I tell them that I will not be teaching their children math, although they will be practicing their math skills every time they count something out, put things in order, arrange things in groups, worked a puzzle, make or identify a pattern.

I tell them I am particularly uninterested in teaching STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) skills so they would be ready for those "jobs of tomorrow," although again, through their play they will be engaged in teaching these things to themselves. When one studies children at play, it's impossible to not see them as scientists or engineers, asking and answering their own questions, engaging in experiments, figuring out fundamental truths about our world and the other people. 

I tell these parents that I'm singularly uninterested in vocational training. The proper career aspiration for a preschooler is princess or superhero. The jobs for which their children will be applying two decades from now do not yet exist and anyone who tells you they can predict the employment landscape that far into the future is blowing smoke. The jobs my 24-year-old daughter is considering did not exist when she was in preschool. The careers my high school counselors suggested that I pursue would have left me unemployable today. But more importantly, we don't educate our children so that they can take their role in the economy, but rather so that they can perform their role as citizens.

We then talk a lot about "community" at our parent meeting. In fact, nearly everyone who speaks finds that word in their mouth, not because it's part of a coordinated effort, but because it is the real foundation of what we do at our school. We're a cooperative which means that we are owned and operated by the parents who enroll their children and these parents will attend school with their children, serving as assistant teachers. We are not just a community of children, but in a real sense, on a day-to-day basis, a community of families, assembled together around the common goal of supporting our children as they learn the foundational skills of citizenship.

At it's most basic, this means that we strive to form a community in which our children can practice living in a world with other people, learning how to get their own needs met while also leaving space for others to meet theirs. Nothing is more important, not just for individuals, but for our larger society. A good citizen is someone who thinks critically, who thinks for herself; a good citizen is someone who asks a lot of questions and who questions authority; a good citizen knows that it is not just their right, but their responsibility, to speak their mind, even when others disagree; a good citizen likewise knows that they must listen, especially when they disagree; a good citizen knows that they contribute to society in ways far more vital and varied than as a worker bee. It is from citizens with these traits that strong communities, strong democracies, are made.

I tell our assembled parent community that their children will be learning these things as they play together, creating their own community, and that it wouldn't always be pretty. Their children will come home covered in water, mud, paint, snot, and even upon occasion, blood. Their children will find themselves embroiled in conflict. They will be learning through joy, yes, but also tears. They will, as they must, mix it up with the other children, sort things out, make agreements, and help one another. They will teach themselves to be self-motivated, to work well with others, and begin to understand the importance of being personable, all of which are, not accidentally, the most important "vocational" skills of all.

I tell the assembled adults that our job is not to teach them anything, but rather to love and support them as they perform their inquiries, test their theories, and figure out what works for them and what doesn't. We're not there to push or command or mold, but rather to create a safe space in which the children can play, together, in the context of their community.

If this sounds like the kind of community you want to create for the families that bring their children to you, please check out my 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. It takes a village to raise a child and this is where it starts.

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If you're interested in learning more about creating a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For the past 20 years, I've been working in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? (Click this link to register and to learn more.) Discounts are available for groups.

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!

"Guys, Guys, I Got A Plan"

We make rules in our classroom, together, by consensus, and among the first agreements we make with one another is, "No taking things from other people," an echo of the Biblical commandment to not steal. There are anthropologists who argue that prior to the advent of the Agricultural Revolution around 10,000 BC there was no such thing as "stealing" because there was no such thing as property, but, I expect, the urge to snatch some rare or special thing from the hands of another, if only to take a closer look, was still an urge with which our hunter-gatherer ancestors needed to deal. And that's really what we're usually talking about in preschool. Stealing implies taking something with the intention of illicitly and selfishly transferring ownership while snatching falls more into the category of uncontrollable curiosity.

Whatever the case, in our modern world these two distinct urges get lumped together, especially in the minds of young children who, through their play, are forever attempting to tease out both personal and social meaning. Yesterday, a group of boys were huddled together in a corner of the playground they have "built" for themselves.

"Guys, guys, I got a plan. We need to take those jewels."

"What jewels?"

"Those guys, over there, they have a bucket of treasure and we need it for our team."

They were referring to their friends, boys with whom they often play, but who were on this day playing separately. They had spent the past half hour or so collecting small shiny objects in a bucket. They were bits and bobs that anyone can pick up from the ground around our place -- florist marbles, beads, pieces of toy jewelry -- but they had named it "treasure" and now it was this treasure that these other boys were scheming to make their own.

There were a few moments of intense conversation, quiet, secretive. I couldn't hear their words, but their intentions were clear: they were planning an incursion to wrest control of that bucket, which they were going to hide and hoard somewhere in their hideout. Before long they attacked running toward the boys with the treasure, whooping, making fierce faces, wielding sticks like weapons.

The boys with the treasure looked confused at first, backing away a bit.

"We're going to take your treasure!"

"No, you're not! It's our treasure!"

The moment was tense as the two sides stood face to face. These guys often played fighting games together, but I knew these children, I'd taught most of them for three years. Physical violence wasn't in the offing even as their bodies, tense and aggressively posed, seemed to indicate it. It was a moment both real and pretend, this stand-off above the sand pit. I recall moments like this from my own childhood. I knew their hearts were racing. I know that some of them at least were feeling that they were now in over their heads, that they didn't really want to "steal," but just to snatch, to see and feel and hold the treasure that these other boys had made from debris that had always been there.

It lasted a few seconds as everyone stood posed, then one of the attackers dropped to his knees, dropping out, and began running his fingers through the sand. Then one of the defenders backed away, turning his back. One by one by one I saw their shoulders drop as the tension left their bodies, leaving only two boys still standing in opposition to one another, while the others milled around no longer part of the game.

"We're using this treasure!" the defender said forcefully. "You can use it when we're finished!"

"Okay!" his friend answered from under his glowering brow as if making a threat, "We will!"

And then it was over, the aspiring robbers returning to their base, apparently satisfied with waiting for their booty and the treasure collectors once more scouring the ground for sparkling items to add to their cache.

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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