To Weave Our Selves Into the Fabric of Life Itself

Time has passed over me," she thought, trying to collect herself; "this is the oncome of middle age. How strange it is! Nothing is any longer one thing. I take up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in the ice. Someone lights a pink candle and I see a girl in Russian trousers. When I step out of doors -- as I do now," here she stepped onto the pavement of Oxford Street, "what is that I taste? Little herbs. I hear goat bells. I see mountains. ~Virginia Woolf, Orlando

We tend to think of our selves as discrete dots of life amongst the other dots of life, existing along an inevitable arc of birth, living, and death as independent beings that exist for a moment and are gone. Yet with every inhalation we draw the rest of the world into us -- pollens, spores, gasses, and all those microscopic bits and pieces that we call dust. With every exhale we spread ourselves out into the world. Our senses are in a constant state of taking in and our bodies are in a constant state of giving out until it's hardly possible to really know where we end and the world begins. 

Is it any wonder that our minds are the same way. 

There are days in the preschool that can only be credited to the workings of a hive mind, projects woven or built from the raw material of "I have an idea!" and "Let's make a bad guy trap!" and "Yes, and I'll be your little sister!" We see it with bees and ants, we understand an aspen grove as a single root with tens of thousands of stems, but we often fail to see the awe inspiring, interconnected beauty of our own species at its best.

We see it most clearly in children's play, when the adults get out of their way. We see it when one child places a wooden plank over a log to make a lever or seesaw or kind of catapult to launch small objects into the air. Then, instantly, they all know about levers or seesaws or catapults. Our habit of thinking ourselves discrete makes us credit the first child while labeling the others as imitators and tagalongs. It's the same bad habit that causes us to make them stop playing so we can judge them through tests and with grades. We literally miss the forest (or the root system) for the trees.

As adults, we have forgotten the vast majority of what we were taught in school, but we remember our friends, we remember the ideas and things that had personal meaning, and we remember our play. Of course, we "remember" much more than what we can at any given moment recall, but it takes someone to light a pink candle in order for us to again see a girl in Russian trousers. It's a memory we've stored externally and is accessible only through the lighting of pink candles. Young children have fewer memories than those of us who are middle aged, but as they play, they are connecting their minds, their selves, with people, places, and things: inhaling and exhaling, hearing and being heard, seeing and being seen, smelling and being smelt, tasting and being tasted, feeling and being felt.

Psychologist Karl Groos wrote, "(T)he animal does not play because he is young, he has a period of youth because he must play." The past several decades has seen a dramatic decline in childhood play. Compared to children in the 1970's, unstructured outdoor play has fallen by more than 50 percent. It's probably not an accident that we are today confronted by a rapidly spreading, and extremely dangerous, epidemic of loneliness. Through play, we become larger, not because we are individual, but because we are integral.

The 19th century philosopher Hegel went so far as so propose that our perception of individual objects and people is an illusion and that the only real thing is the whole, or what he called the Absolute.

We have a period of youth because we must play and we play in large measure not to learn or to grow or to conquer, but rather to connect: to weave our selves into the fabric of life itself, the Absolute, to become an aspect of the hive mind, to inhale and to exhale through time and space and people.

******

 This is your last chance to join the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents and grandparents. It's a particularly powerful course to take with your entire team. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, click 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!

"The Most Beautiful Thing in the World is Conflicting Interests When Both are Good"

The poet Jack London wrote, "(T)he most beautiful thing in the world . . . is conflicting interests when both are good."

Many of us have learned to be conflict averse. We find is unsavory, ugly, anxiety producing, or just plain unpleasant. I include myself in that category. The result is that, in the interest of avoiding conflict, we ourselves surrounded by people with whom we tend to agree. We seek out news sources that slant in our direction. We smile through gritted teeth instead of taking the bait of conflict. It seems like not a day goes by that someone from my social media circle declares that they've had enough of all the sound and fury in a goodbye-cruel-world-message. Conflict is unsettling, uncomfortable, and bears within it the seeds of abuse and violence.

Maybe some of us are born conflict averse, but you wouldn't know it from a play-based preschool classroom where conflict stands at the center of the work we are doing together. At any given moment, someone is bickering. As responsible adults we draw nearer as we hear the voices raise, alert to the potential for things to turn nasty. We try to nip it in the bud, stepping in with our adult solutions. We set timers, we make the children wait in lines, we invoke the rules, we redirect their anger and frustration onto ourselves with judicial determinations declaring winners and losers. All in the name of peace.

But peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the ability to resolve conflict by peaceful means. I would attribute this quote to someone famous, but it seems that it's a notion that has its origins in humanity itself. This is what Jack London was talking about when he finds conflict beautiful. When we are too quick to step in, even if we do so in the name of justice, we often rob children of the opportunity to discover that beauty. Indeed, all collaboration, all cooperation, starts with conflicting of ideas. We both want to be the pilot of the airplane we've built from blocks. We all want to be first to go down the slide. Only one person at a time can wear the blue princess dress. The beauty is discovered in the process of pushing, pulling, and shaping those conflicting ideas into agreement.

As adults, too many of us, I think, have learned the wrong lessons about conflict. One way or another, we've bought into the Hobbsian mythology that the natural state of humanity is for our bickering to inevitably escalate into abuse and violence, when, in fact, our glory as a species is our ability to use conflict to come to agreements.

As the responsible adult, I'm charged, first and foremost, with the children's safety. Hitting and kicking hurt people. Threatening and bullying harms people. Those things aren't safe, so that's where I must draw the line by saying, "I can't let you hurt people." The proceed to not let them hurt people. The challenge is that if I step in too early in the name of "nipping it in the bud" I risk teaching children to turn to authority instead of toward one another.

It's a balancing act, one that requires us to step closer, to be alert, but more importantly to have the nerve to wait before intervening, even as voices are raised. We're not always going to get it right. Sometimes there is hitting or grabbing. That's when we know for certain that they need us. I can't tell you how often I've caught a child's arm in mid-swing. But more often than not, I've found that if I allow children the space to engage their own conflicts without my intervention, violence is not the outcome, especially with children who have experienced the line that we draw in the name of safety. If we don't allow them to walk right up to that line, however, how else are they going to learn when they need to really defend their great idea, when to stand down, and how to listen to what the other person is saying about their ideas in order to make it part of your own. This is the only way agreements have ever happened.

My most rewarding days as a teacher are those when our morning of play are so full of conflict, which is to say, so full of ideas, that they spill over into our community meetings, our circle times. I'm inspired by the children's capacity to share their perspectives, to listen to the perspectives of others, and to work toward agreement. One of the approaches that has worked amazingly well when there is a clear divide, is to ask the children who want to, say, play "bad guys" to sit on one side, while those who are afraid of the bad guy play to sit on the other. Almost always, there will be those who don't care, so they will form their own, usually larger, group in the middle. As we take turns pushing and pulling our ideas, invariably there are those who crawl from one group to another as they listen to the dialog, shifting from pro to con and back again as their own ideas of the conflict grow bigger. 

Once everyone has had their say, I might ask, "These kids over here think X, while these kids over here think Y. What can we do?" This is when the beauty happens as children offer their solutions. "I have an idea!" they shout. Or, even better, they phrase it as an invitation, starting their sentences with the contraction, "Let's . . ." Let us.

One time the kids agreed that if you wanted a turn on the swings, you had to ask, "Can I have a turn?" three times. If you did that, the other person had to make way. If you only asked twice, no deal. If you phrased it as, "I want a turn" or "May I have a turn?" it didn't count. As adults, we assumed that this quirky agreement would fail, but we quickly discovered that as long as we stayed out of it, it worked beautifully.

The late, great folk singer Utah Phillips sang, "I will not obey, but I'm always ready to agree." This, for me, is an idea that stands at the center of my approach to play-based learning. There is great beauty in conflict, if only we learn to find it.

******

When we think of play, we naturally think of carefree frivolity, but anyone who has spent any time around children at play knows that bickering is central to the process of learning to live with the other people. As important adults in the lives of children, our job is not to prevent conflict, but rather to support children as they learn to find beauty in the process. This is central to my approach to play-based learning. This week is your last chance to join the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents and grandparents. It's a particularly powerful course to take with your entire team. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, click 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!

This Difficult Business of Other People

Marcus was working on a cardboard block tower. Lilyanna was helping.

They built it as high as they could, arriving at a point when they struggled to reach the top. It was really quite beautiful, these 2-year-olds spontaneously coming together in common cause like this, not talking, just doing. It takes a combination of concentration and speed to build something that tall, with another person, in a crowded classroom where everything is being continually jostled. But when they arrived at that point where their bodies were not tall enough to reach, their agendas diverged. Marcus clearly wanted to pursue the challenge of continuing to make it even taller, while Lilyanna joyfully pretended to fall, intentionally pulling the building down with her, where she lay on the floor laughing as the blocks rained down on her.

Marcus reacted by lowering his eyebrows, appearing irritated and slightly aghast, I think not at Lilyanna, but rather, if I had to guess, at the lost opportunity. He'd perhaps been planning to find a chair or something else to stand on in order to reach even higher. With a metaphorical shrug, he went back to rebuilding, with Lilyanna once more pitching in. They went through this full cycle 6 times, each go around reaching that point where their agendas diverged and the walls came tumbling down.

The general ethic of our classroom is that if you build it, only you can knock it down, but we don't really have a way to deal with this, when they build it together toward different purposes. I suppose I could have, after a couple repetitions, suggested that each child build his or her own building, but I didn't, mainly because Marcus didn't seem particularly upset. In fact, he appeared rather philosophical, and usually when young children repeat a play pattern over and over, I interpret that as a sign that they are trying to learn something that is personally important.

It's impossible to have a judgement here, to side with one child or another. Each was pursuing his own perfectly legitimate, viable agenda. It was incredible when they merged, and that they merged for so long. Together, for a time, they built higher and faster than either could have alone. I even suspect that had Lilyanna been able to hold off just few minutes longer, those agendas would have again converged and they could have knocked it down together, because that has often in the past been the destiny of Marcus' towers, but that is the way life with the other people works.

All human problems and all human glories result from the great truth that we go about our individual lives working our own unique agendas. From our first cries, using our only tool for connecting with the other humans, we seek out sensations, connections, and even objects that in some way satisfy those agendas, and we pursue them relentlessly. We have our conscious agendas and our unconscious agendas, overt and covert, ones we announce proudly and those we shamefully leave unspoken. And these agendas shape how we engage with the world. There are so many agendas working at so many purposes at any given time, that it seems a miracle that we ever get together on anything at all.

This is a big part of why we're in preschool, to learn to work our agendas together; to learn how to find where they match, because together we can do things that we can't alone, but also to learn how to deal with those inevitable times when they diverge and the building comes crashing down around us. This stands at the core of a play-based curriculum.

There are some hard, complicated lessons to learn about agendas. There are times, of course, when we must stand and fight, but we also must learn to pick our battles. There are times when we must step aside. Sometimes we must conclude, as Marcus finally did, that we will not be able to complete our agenda today, and learn when to walk away, hopefully to return another day. Most often we need to talk, to compromise, to find a way to alter our agendas in order for them to imperfectly merge in order to achieve a kind of "second best" result that leaves all parties both satisfied and dissatisfied. And, naturally, the more people, the more agendas, that must be included, the more difficult it gets. This whole business of living with the other people is an emotional tangle, full of pointy parts to navigate, made even more challenging as we begin to understand that those other people are navigating too. But as difficult as it is, it's important because it's exactly the process of picking our way through this jumble of agendas that teaches us empathy, and even compassion, which is just another complication in this complicated business.

Some days I have no idea how any towers ever get built in the world. It all seems so impossible.

Yet we keep doing it, throughout our lives, re-engaging in this difficult business of other people.

******

This is the work of early childhood and is a key part of my approach to play-based learning. This week is your last chance to join the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents and grandparents. It's a particularly powerful course to take with your entire team. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, click 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!

On Most Days I Teach Nothing at All

I never pretend to know what kids will learn on any given day and, honestly, any teacher who does is either deluded or blowing smoke. No one can possibly know what another person is going to learn. You can hope. You can plan. You can lecture yourself blue. You can even, if you're especially clever, trick someone into learning something, but the idea that one person can "teach" something to another, except under narrow circumstances, is one of the great educational myths.

There is a quote that is most often attributed to the Buddha, but is more likely of Theosophical origins, that goes: "When the student is ready the master will appear." I like these kinds of quotes that persist because they are true even when they can't be traced back to the utterances of Buddha, Socrates, or Einstein. This one is even so true that there is a corollary: "When the master is ready the student will appear."

Some days I accidentally "teach" something to a kid. For instance, I once improperly used the term "centrifugal force" (when I actually should have use "centripetal force") while a child was experimenting with a hamster wheel and the kid, months later, was still misusing my term while performing his experiments, even as I repeatedly tried to correct him. But most days I teach nothing at all except, perhaps, what I convey to my students by role modeling. I've tried, believe me, to convey specific information to kids, like when I tell them that dirt is primarily made from volcanos, dead stuff, and worm poop, but most of the time the only things that stick are the things about which the kids are already asking questions.

And still, despite my utter lack of "teaching," the kids who come to our school are learning. How do I know? I watch them. I listen to them. I remember when they didn't know and then I hear them saying and see them doing things that demonstrate that now they do. And even though I'm not teaching them, they mostly learn exactly what I want them to know.

What do I want them to know?

The joy of playing with other people.

The frustration failure and the redemption of perseverance.

Emotions come and go and they are important.

I'm the boss of me and you're the boss of you.

Our agreements are sacred.

It's not only important to love, but also to say it.

It's not my job to "teach" these things. It is my job to love them and to do what I can to create an environment that is stimulating, beautiful, and safe enough: a place where children can ask and answer their own questions about the world and the people they find there. A place not of teaching, but of curiosity, exploration, experimentation, and discovery. We call it play and it's how we learn everything a preschooler needs to know.

******

This philosophy of "not teaching" is a key part of my approach to play-based learning. Please join the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents and grandparents. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, click 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!

Playing, Together, In a Safe and Beautiful Environment

The long-term effects of the things we do to children in schools is a notoriously difficult thing to capture in research.

Generally speaking, however, we as a society have concluded, based on our collective behavior and with little evidence, that more academic training at earlier ages is the way to go. We assume that if we want kids to be good at school (a dubious goal at best) then we must give them lots of practice in preschool, which has lead in recent decades to two-year-olds being expected to sit at desks to be the targets of formal literacy and mathematics training. It has lead to our youngest citizens spending the bulk of their days indoors, focusing increasingly on things like worksheets and memorization drills. And it is harming them.

Many of us, including readers here, have looked on with horror. Preschoolers are simply not developmentally ready for this type of schooling. We see evidence that these unrealistic pressures are one of the leading causes of the current spike in childhood anxiety and depression. When we point any of this out, when we say that the push toward academic preschools is harmful to children and prevents them from working on the foundational social-emotional learning that young children need, proponents of top-down, adult-directed academic style schooling insist that it's the price we must pay for the long-term benefits, especially for disadvantaged children. They point to studies that show that children who are exposed to these "school readiness" types of curricula have a leg up with things like letter recognition and print awareness.

They can legitimately assert this because the research on the short-term effects consistently shows that children from academic preschool programs do enter kindergarten with certain advantages over those who have spent their preschool years playing. The part of the research that they ignore is that whenever an attempt has been made to study the long-term impact, we see that those advantages disappear rather quickly leaving the drill-and-kill kids largely indistinguishable academically, and worse off by other measures, from comparable peers who were not enrolled in academic-based programs. 

This is a consistent finding, going all the way back to the Perry Preschool Project, still the gold standard for long-term research on the impact of preschool. This study continues to track low-income children from a play-based program since the mid-1960's. They were the first to find that academic advantages faded rapidly once the kids moved on to elementary school. It's a result that has been replicated repeatedly, right up to a recent study on Tennessee's Pre-K program for children from low-income families that not only recreated this result, but found that by 3rd grade the children who attended the academics based program performed worse on both academic and behavioral measures than classmates who were never in the program.

In other words, the Tennessee Pre-K program harmed the children it sought to help.

The children studied in the Perry Preschool Project, however, the ones who attended a play-based, child-centered program also lost their short-term academic advantages, but continued, into adulthood, to reap the benefits of their behavioral head start. They had fewer teenage pregnancies, were more likely to have graduated from high school, to hold a job and have higher earnings, to commit fewer crimes, and to own their own home and car. They are more self-motivated, better at working with others, and, generally speaking, are more personable. 

The key, I think, is that these kids got to play when they were young, which is the soil from which healthy, happy, well-adjusted adults grow. 

If you want to read more about the research into the harm caused by academic preschools, I urge you to take a look at this piece in Psychology Today from author and researcher Peter Gray.

I know that many of the people who read here do not need more research to tell them that young children need play and lots of it. We are in the classroom every day, seeing the benefits with our own eyes. But as the Biden Administration here in the US gears up to offer free universal state-run preschool for 3 and 4-year-olds, there is a great danger that they will ignore the evidence in favor of yet more academic-style schooling for our youngest citizens. This will harm the children and it's harm that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

I also know that many people who read here will, however, hold their noses and support anything that offers free childcare for low income families. 

We are compassionate people. We know that the families of our low and middle-income students are struggling financially and free preschool, even free drill-and-kill preschool, will be a boon to them. Experience tells us, however, that nothing is really free, no matter what party is in charge. This "free" preschool will come with so-called "accountability" requirements that will invariably mean, among other things, high stakes testing (high stakes for those whose funding is on the line). This will mean sitting preschoolers in desks to be trained to pass tests. This will mean top-down school prep curricula, a grindstone that is completely inappropriate for these children who need to play. And we know from research that this will harm the children we seek to help. 

Still, many well-intended educators have told me that it is a price we should be willing to pay for the economic relief that universal preschool will provide low and middle-income families.

Indeed, one of the Biden administration's strongest arguments in favor of universal preschool is the economic benefits it will bring to families. I can stand fully behind free universal childcare. This is something we should have done long ago. But labeling this as "school," even "preschool," is a real and present danger to the children and families we are hoping to help because our society has consistently demonstrated that it will do harmful things to children in the name of schooling. 

My idea is to call it what it is from this economic perspective: child care. Maybe if we do that, we will shed some of the baggage that comes with society's definition of schooling. Maybe if what we are funding is "child care" we will be free to focus on the foundational social and emotional needs of young children in a developmentally appropriate way, which is to say create programs in which the adults know to get out of the children's way and allow them to learn as young humans are meant to learn, by playing, together, in a safe and beautiful environment.

******

One of the most powerful aspects of my Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning course is that it supports entire "teams" of educators and caregivers to get on the same page when it comes to offering the kind of play-based learning young children need. It gives educators the tools to reveal, explain, and defend their play-based program to parents and other stakeholders who have been taken in by the "academic" snake oil. Parents will likewise find this course empowering as they will learn to become effective advocates for what their child needs. Please join the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based learning pedagogy, designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents and grandparents. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, click 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!

Play is What Connects Learning With Living

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. ~John Dewey

People tend to have one of two responses when I tell them I'm a teacher. Either they say something like, "Good for you . . . Such important work," or they roll their eyes and puff out their cheeks in comic mimicry of exhausted frustration and say something along the lines of, "You must be a saint."

Neither of these responses ever strike cords for me. 

I mean, I've certainly been an important adult in the lives of thousands of young children, but it rarely feels like work. Or rather, it's the work everyone must do whenever other humans are involved, the work of being a human being living in the world with others. It's the work of relationships and community. 

That's not work, that's life itself.

What we do with and for young children, I believe, is vitally important, don't get me wrong, the most important thing in the world, but to say that creating relationships and building community is work is to take the misanthropic position that life itself is toil and trouble. 

Of course, I realize that these people who call me a saint are responding to their ideas of teaching, such as the widely held notion that schools are a kind of factory in which learning is manufactured like any other widget. Teaching, in this model, is the equivalent of being a worker along a super long assembly line, mind numbing, repetitive, with incomplete adults gradually taking shape over decades. And when we try to do it that way that's exactly what teaching becomes: hard work for both us and the children. 

When they say, "You must be a saint," they're talking about the other widely held notion that children are fighting against their learning and that it must require divine patience to coax them open enough to shove the learning in.

Sadly, in many of our public schools, that is exactly how it's done. These very people who misunderstand teaching as a manufacturing process, who view children as incomplete humans who fight learning every step of the way, are the policymakers and education dilettantes who are, bizarrely, in charge of deciding what happens in the classroom. Life itself, in this model, is something that begins at 18; everything up to then is preparation.

When we understand our "work" as life itself, all of that goes away. When we view children as fully formed human beings due the dignity and respect due to all human beings, learning becomes one with living. Everyone is still exhausted at the end of the day, but not because we've labored, but rather because we've lived. Labor saps our life, while living, well . . . It's living.

The work of relationship and community is the real work of a play-based educator. We live our days in the flow of life, connecting, listening, and striving with all our being to understand these fully formed humans with whom we find ourselves. And that's what the children are doing as well -- connecting, listening, and striving to understand. When we turn it all into work and preparation, we are paddling against the flow of life, and yes, it becomes toil and drudgery for everyone.

Connecting, listening, and striving to understand: this is what we all do from the moment we are born until the day we die. This is life itself.

******

. . . And play is the mechanism through which children connect, listen, and strive to understand. It is our education instinct made manifest. Are already a play-based educator or an educator wanting to bring more play into your work? Are you a director or owner who wants to get the whole team on the same page? Are you a parent, grandparent, or caregiver interested in providing children a playful childhood? Please consider joining the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning. This is a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed to make you think deeply about the role you play in the lives of children, and give you the inspiration, insight and tools needed to create an environment of genuine play for the children in your life. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, click 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!

It's All an Experiment

The opposite of play isn't work, it's rote.  ~Edward Hollowell

This might sound like an odd thing for a teacher to write, but I sometimes get the idea that knowing stuff is the enemy of education. There is little gratification in it for me when I've envisioned how children will do something, then they proceed to do it in just the way I've imagined. Certainly I could claim it as some evidence of experience on my side, but it also makes me worry that it's also evidence of rote on the children's side. 

I'll leave it to future teachers to worry about teaching the kids to follow instructions if that's what they feel they need them to do. Much better things are happening in our school, it seems, when instructions are minimal and I'm constantly proven wrong in my expectations. Fortunately, when working with young children in a play-based environment, that's more the norm than the exception. 

Our classroom, every day, should be one big experiment, a place where things are not known by either the kids or the teachers, a place where we fiddle and argue and poke and prod our way toward knowledge, and where everything we come to understand is only a part of all the other things we're striving to know.  It should be a place with lots of room for failure, frustration, and conflict. It should be a place with lots of room for wonder, epiphany, and friendship.

When a reporter asked Thomas Edison how it felt to have failed over a thousand times in his quest to invent the lightbulb, he famously answered, "I didn't fail a thousand times. The lightbulb was an invention with a thousand steps." Except we're not even trying to invent anything here, but simply discover, in the spirit of pure science, conducted for the purpose of getting closer to our own truth and nothing more.

Or maybe we are trying to invent something, after all, and if we are, it's not the sort of thing that can be put into words, but rather felt or intuited. I suppose it has something to do with inventing ourselves both as individuals and as a community. It's something that can only be invented by conducting thousands and thousands of experiments; by taking thousands and thousands of steps.

And even though billions of humans have come before us, if we are playing together, we are discovering and inventing a thing that has never been discovered or invented before: us.

Anyone who tells you they have a system or method or sure-fire technique for educating children isn't talking about education at all. They're talking about standardization and efficiency. They're talking about assembly lines and cookie cutters. Anyone who doesn't start with the idea that it's all an experiment isn't talking about education at all. They're talking about rote.

******

. . . And play is the mechanism through which children connect, listen, and strive to understand. It is our education instinct made manifest. Whether you are just starting out as a play-based educator, are a veteran of play, or are a parent/caregiver interested in providing children a playful childhood, please consider joining the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning. This is my 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed to make you think deeply about the role you play in the lives of children, and give you the inspiration, insight and tools needed to create an environment of genuine play for the children in your life. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, click 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!