"How Can I Know What I Think Till I See What I Say?"

Yesterday, educator, author, and lecturer Alfie Kohn posted this on the site formerly known as Twitter:

"Essay" comes from the French word meaning "to try." But that spirit of tentativeness is crushed when essays are graded and the point isn't to explore but to snag an A.

I've always thought of what I write here on this blog as humble "posts" or, privately, "reflections." After all, the original idea of a blog, or weblog, was to be a sort of online journal. At least that's the spirit in which I started writing back in 2009 and, for the most part, continue to this day. Every now and then, a reader will refer to a piece as an "essay," which tends to slightly embarrass me because an essay, as we were taught in school, is a formal thing with a standardized format, one that is first outlined, including a thesis, evidence supporting that thesis, and a conclusion. 

I've rarely done that here. On most days, I sit down with a thought or question or story in mind, then spend an hour or so musing about it through the words I type onto the screen. I rarely know where I'll end up as I write the first paragraph. I've always thought of it as a kind of internal Socratic method, in which I write a sentence then wonder if it's true, wonder what questions that sentence raises, then write other sentences addressing those questions, and so on until I've come around to a conclusion. 

It's true that I often end up in places I'd not intended to go. And it's also true that there are many abandoned posts, left unpublished because either I stumped myself or came to conclusions that I feel are too trite or humdrum for publication.

In his 1926 book The Art of Thought, professor emeritus at the University of London, Graham Wallas quoted a "little girl" as saying, "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?" This little girl has since been quoted and paraphrased by numerous well-known writers, including E.M. Forester, Joan Didion, W.H. Auden, C.S. Lewis, and Mark Twain.

That's exactly how I feel as I write here, so in that sense, what I'm doing is writing essays. I'm making an attempt, experimenting, reflecting, and trying out ideas, connections, and arguments. Kohn's point is spot on. The educational benefit of writing an essay should not be to prove what one has learned by regurgitating it onto paper so that it fits in an outline, but rather to explore concepts, to think, to try to find some nugget of truth, even if that truth is to ultimately conclude "I still don't know." 

It's that spirit of open-minded inquiry that I hope to encourage young children to take with them into the rest of their lives. This is what it means to be educated and it's a process that's never complete. This is why I say that my main job as an early childhood educator is to understand how and what children are thinking about, where they are in their journey, not so I can race ahead of them and, arrogantly, show them the way, but rather in order to maintain pace alongside them, shoulder-to-shoulder, wondering with them as they explore the amazing process of their own minds at work, testing and trying and exploring.

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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. 

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