Educating Children to Come Alive

We tell ourselves that we send our children to school so that they will be educated. We tell ourselves that children must be educated in order to thrive. We tell ourselves, out of habit, that this means providing all children with a kind of broad brush exposure to the humanities and science alongside the make-or-break skills training of literacy and mathematics. Many view schools as institutions of socialization. Many look at it as vocational preparation for the work-a-day world that is their future.

If we're honest, we'll concede that children are in school because their parents need the free child care -- that's what rose to the surface during peak Covid -- but otherwise it's rarely discussed, because to admit to this is to give too much power to low-paid, low-prestige teachers, mostly women and often women of color, upon whose shoulders our entire economy rests. This is why the post-Covid emphasis has not been on improving our schools or the working conditions of teachers or the lives of children, but rather on the entirely made-up hysteria about how the kids have "fallen behind."

I've spent my professional life as a preschool teacher, which most people take to mean that I'm preparing children for their future in elementary school, which will, in turn prepare them for their future as middle and high school students, which, and we cross our fingers that this is true, will prepare them for college where they are expected to really, finally, focus on what they're going to be when they grow up. Then, after these two decades of preparation, we release them into life itself where they find that most of what they've been made to learn, most of the habits they've formed, most of the socialization they've done, is entirely irrelevant. 

And that's when their real education begins. 

One of the first lessons upon leaving school is that most of what we "learned" in school is largely useless: indeed, researchers tell us that some 90 percent of what a child "learns" in school is forgotten, usually within a few days of taking the test. There are those who argue that all those years of schooling are somehow, nevertheless, foundational, but there is no evidence that learning naturally happens in this hierarchical way, nor that the particular foundation provided by standard schools is the right or proper one. 

This is what I mean when I say that most of what we call schooling is the product of habit.

As a preschool teacher, I've never been interested in preparing children for anything. These children do not come to me in order to prepare for life, but rather, to live and that is what I strive to provide for them, a place to live: a safe-enough place in which they are free to learn what and how they see fit, to ask and answer their own questions, and to engage their fellow humans. Life itself, for young children, is to play with it and in it, to get messy, to make mistakes, to persevere, and to ultimately feel what it means to come alive.

I've never spoken with parents about what their child needs to work on because that's not mine to determine. The children themselves are the ones responsible for that. If they want to climb that tree, if they want to make that friend, if they want to understand how a plant grows or an insect flies, that's life itself. Engaging in life itself is the only way anyone has ever learned what makes them come alive, and the world needs more people who have come alive.

When I write or talk about this, there are always those who shake their heads, "But how do they learn to do the things they don't want to do?" This is something that I never learned despite my decades of schooling. Indeed, I would assert that what people mean by "learning" this skill(?) is to become resigned to a life dictated by others. Whatever the case, the implication is that many, if not most, people don't have the privilege to come alive: they are stuck in jobs or marriages or psychologies or cycles that place them at the whim of others, doing things that others tell them to do, sacrificing their precious life in the name of . . . what? This is the recipe for alienation, depression, and loneliness, a plague that even the US Surgeon General has named an epidemic. I refuse to be the one teaching children this lesson -- I want to inoculate them against it.

I want the children I teach to know that this kind of school life is no life at all, that if they're prevented from coming alive, from living this one life as an impassioned, self-motivated human being, then it's time for a change. The habit of schooling teaches children to quietly put their nose to grindstone, but I want them to kick and scream and complain. The habit of schooling teaches children to wait, to put off happiness (which for too many, means until retirement, if then). I want them to know, right now, that it is not just their right, but their responsibility to come alive.

So much of schooling is about identifying a child's weakness, then compelling them to focus on that, to catch up, to not fall behind, which means that for too many the first two decades of life is being taught that we don't measure up to these random habitual standards. I want the children in my life to focus on, not their strengths or weaknesses (as judged by others), but on doing what makes them come alive.

What if we all understood that this, coming alive, was the purpose of education?

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"Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices

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