Malpractice

"Why, precisely, was I sitting in this classroom . . . The question was never answered. I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance." ~Ta-Nehisi Coates

Schools have rarely been concerned with curiosity. This has been true since the very beginning of this experiment of schooling. When European colonizers founded schools for the children of the indigenous people they had subjugated, they were explicit in their assertion that the goal was to make these wild, primitive children into productive workers, field hands and house servants. Perhaps they had "higher" aspirations for their own children, but the ultimate objective was the same: to tame them. They were unconcerned with curiosity. Indeed, they warned that "curiosity killed the cat."

It's a phrase that came into use alongside the development of schooling. The idiom emerged during the later part of the 1800's, at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution, a time when large capitalistic enterprises were on the rise, and the need for compliant workers was growing. Tragically, many who study these things believe that the phrase evolved from a much earlier, and more accurate, idiom "care killed a cat" found in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing (as well as similar expressions found in works from the late 16th century). In this case, however, the word "care" is used the way we today would use the word "worry," which is to say that the cat expression we use today is the exact opposite of its original meaning.

In her book Changing Our Minds, cognitive psychologist Naomi Fisher posits that for most of our history, we didn't try to school our youngest citizens, largely because we found them untamable. It is impossible to force three-year-olds to sit quietly, facing forward, affecting to listen, but today, cruelly, many are trying, drilling even our babies with phonics and counting and other abstractions which their forming minds are simply incapable of grasping. Preschoolers are about connecting with the world around them and academic things, almost by definition, are disconnections, steps taken back from life in order to gain a disconnected perspective. Life itself requires us to step into it. And the mechanism by which we step into life itself is curiosity.

Our schools are explicitly designed to kill curiosity because it's curiosity that makes us non-compliant. It's curiosity that causes us to challenge authority, to question the way things are done, and to become frustrated with the status quo. And when our curiosity is killed, the disconnection begins to kill us. Headlines in the US recently sounded this very alarm when a comprehensive, longitudinal study of Tennessee's highly academic preschool curriculum was found to be harming preschoolers. This and other studies have found, over and over, that these kinds of developmentally inappropriate practices (or rather malpractices) are causing anxiety and depression at rates never before seen in young children, which is exactly what one one would predict when curiosity, and therefore connection with life, is killed. 

I used the word malpractice above and I'll be using it here again and again because that is exactly what it is. Worse, it is intentional malpractice all in the name of compliance. Early childhood educators can no longer go along with this malpractice. We must reject it, forcefully, and we must use the word that names it precisely, which is "malpractice." Our gentle euphemisms like "developmentally inappropriate" are not enough. When we intentionally and systematically kill curiosity we are killing children. This is not a metaphor: anxiety and depression (or as Shakespeare had it, "care") are genuine killers.

Curiosity may not always be convenient for us, it may not prepare children to sit silently in their seats compliantly. In fact, it most certainly will not. But to intentionally kill curiosity with our rules, rigor, and "right" answers, especially in the name of the most inhuman thing of all, compliance, is malpractice. 

I know that this post will make some educators angry. That's fine with me. I'm drawing a line and I know on which side I stand. I stand on the side of play, autonomy, and curiosity. My hope is that there are other readers here who will take this as a call to action. We are unaccustomed in our profession to holding the power, but right now we do. If nothing else, they need us to make their economic system work. We can refuse to engage in malpractice in the name of compliance. If they fire us, there are other jobs that will welcome us, and the curiosity of children, with open arms, but to continue serving our schools concerned with compliance is malpractice.

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