"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.

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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

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