Too Many of Us Have Forgotten What Community Is

I've spent my entire classroom career working shoulder-to-shoulder with the parents of the children I taught. As a cooperative school, to enroll children in our classes, an adult, typically a parent, but sometimes a grandparent, nanny, or other caretaker, was required to attend a minimum of one day a week to serve as an assistant teacher.

I would not have accepted a job in any other type of school. Our daughter and I had attended cooperative preschool together. When I observe more typical classrooms, I can't help but think how much easier and better the experience for both the educators and the children would be with more parent participation. For one thing, there's the math: our cooperative enjoyed child-adult ratios from 2:1 to 5:1. The simple presence of so many arms, legs, and laps meant that we didn't need to interrupt our classroom flow every time a child needed help in the toilet or with tending to a scraped knee or simply being supported through an overwhelming emotion.

Because our ratios were so high, and because it was presumed that the presence of loving parents automatically reduced risks of all kinds, we were in a position to develop and enforce our own regulations and policies. Even our insurance company left us alone -- not once in 20 years did a representative of the company feel the need to inspect our school. They just kept renewing our policy year after year no questions asked.

But, the biggest advantage of the cooperative model, from the perspective of a classroom teacher, was that I got to work as a colleague with every child's primary caregiver at least once a week. And once a month, we all came together in the evening for parent education, a time to collectively discuss our children, and the intentions, theories, practices, and practicalities of what was happening both at home and in the classroom.

When I tell educators in conventional preschools about our cooperative, their responses tend to fall into one of two categories. Either they sigh and say something like, "It would be so nice to have more parent participation, but they're too busy," or they roll their eyes and say something like, "I've had it up to here with the parents already." The assumption is that our cooperative must only serve privileged families and/or that I must be some sort of charismatic leader or saint or something.

The truth is that 20 percent of the families we served in any given year received financial aid to pay tuitions that were already among the lowest in our city -- $200-$400 a month. And while there were always a few families that made ends meet on one salary, most were two-income households. The children, however, were privileged in the sense that their families had consciously arranged their lives, often taking pay cuts or working odd hours, in order to spend this time with their children, in a community of likeminded families. Our cooperative was still not right for everyone, but the parents in the co-op were every bit as busy parents elsewhere, they were just able to prioritize their schedule to include cooperative preschool.

As for my own skills in working with parents, I spent my entire first year finding it difficult to even make eye contact with many of the adults in the room. I worried every day that I was being judged, that I would make someone angry, that I'd be accused of favoritism or neglect or not teaching this or that in the right way. And while I certainly received feedback of all kinds from parents over the years, the real sense of things that emerged, and continued to emerge, was one of a community, working together as neighbors and colleagues, under the unifying umbrella of caring for our children. Our children.

For me, this is the greatest beauty of a cooperative. Every preschool becomes a community of children, but a cooperative becomes a community of families. Like the tribes, villages and neighborhoods of bygone eras a cooperative becomes a place where we, together, share the responsibility, pain, and joy of performing the primary function of every civilization that has ever existed: caring for our children. Our children.

For the past couple years, I've been receiving feedback on my posts insisting on the parent's right to bully educators about how and what they "teach" in their classrooms, which includes banning books, forbidding honest discussion of certain topics, and otherwise insisting, as one person recently did, that "Parents, not schools, develop a child's potential." It makes me sad, this narrow focus on my child.

Everyone knows it takes a village to raise a child, but it seems that too many of us have no idea why. Maybe they think it's just about having access to those extra arms, legs, and laps, but the real reason children need a village is that, by definition, a village provides children with an array of values, ideas, traditions and perspectives, many of which differ from those of their parents. That is the strength of community and it is the kind of education our children need.

The children from Christian families enthused about the Easter Bunny, for instance, while the Jewish children insisted that the Easter Bunny was a lie. I once sang a song in class that included the word "hell," and not in a religious sense. As I sang it, one girl's jaw dropped. It was clear that in her family it was a forbidden word. She was sitting on her mother's lap, however, and I read her mother's lips, "It's okay in this song." Some of our families were strict vegans. Some were gay. We all had differing racial and cultural backgrounds. 

That is the purpose of coming together like this, especially in the early years. We're not here to somehow collectively learn to count and recite the alphabet; we are here to begin to move beyond me and mine into the wide, wonderful world of we and us. This doesn't mean that we must change our minds. It doesn't mean that our own family heritage or values or beliefs are wrong. It doesn't mean that the Jewish children must now adopt Easter, that our daughters will now start using the word "hell" as an expletive, or that everyone must become vegan or gay or melting-pot gray. What it does mean, however, is that we must learn to live together, and even rejoice in our diversity.

The sad thing is that too many of us have forgotten what community is, even as, at some level we all crave it. It's sad because it seems that too many parents have the idea that they own their children, that they have the exclusive rights to "develop" them, and that the children themselves have no say in it. And in a misguided attempt to exercise control, these parents have decided that they have a right, even a responsibility, to shield them from anything that differs from their own narrow perspective. They fear diversity, which is to say, they fear community, they fear the village, because, at bottom, they fear that they will lose ownership of their child. It's sad because that loss of control is inevitable. It will happen sooner or later and the more they try to control their children, the more they try to "protect" them from our wide, wonderful world, the more complete, ugly, and painful the break will be when it comes. 

The greatest gift we can give our children is go out into our villages and neighborhoods alongside our children, living and learning as they live and learn. It takes a village to raise a child, even if that child is an adult.

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If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! "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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Play, Like Love and Happiness

Play is like love or happiness. We can't define it, but we know it when we see it, when we feel it, when we're in the midst of it. Play is likewise like love or happiness in that if you think about it too much, it has a habit of disappearing or morphing into something else. 

On Tuesday, I mentioned neuroscientist and psychobiologist Jaak Panksepp. He once conducted an experiment in which he invited people from various walks of life to watch video of rats interacting energetically with one another. He then asked them whether the rats were fighting or playing. The adults all called it fighting. The only group that correctly identified the behavior as rough-and-tumble play were young children. Play, again like love or happiness, is a matter of perspective. 

I'm not surprised by Panksepp's finding. Play, like love and happiness, can really only be understood by the person experiencing it. Adults are forever scuttling the games of children because they misunderstand what's happening or because they allow their catastrophic imaginations to get the best of them. 

As a child, I was one of a group of neighborhood boys who enjoyed playing tackle football. One day, Mr. Sain saw his son John, a slightly older and larger boy, dragging a half dozen of us along as we attempted to bring him down. Mr. Sain, on behalf of the entire neighborhood, banned tackle football for all of us. Obviously, he worried that John was going to injure one of us little kids, but he was already too late for that. We already knew that it hurt to attempt to tackle John. We also knew that if we worked together, if we hung on tenaciously enough, we could bring him down. We knew what we were doing was play and we knew that pain was a possible, even likely, consequence of this rough-and-tumble game. Mr. Sain may have saved us a few bumps and bruises, but he robbed us of the joy of successfully tackling John, while John was robbed of the joy of overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds. As well-intended adults often do, Mr. Sain taught us about "touch" football and "flag" football (non-tackling versions of the game). We tried them, but ultimately moved our game to yards that weren't in sight of the Sain's front windows.

Play, like love and happiness, are states that are achieved and understood through doing rather than through contemplation or study, especially from the outside looking in.

I once taught a group of four and five year old girls who called themselves "Mean Sisters." Their game was, frankly, ugly. They bossed one another around, excluded one another, and even sometimes called one another names. "Let's play Mean Sisters," they would invite one another, agreeing, then find a corner where adult eyes couldn't see them. They often spoke in whispers so that adult ears couldn't hear them. They knew from experience that we were all potential Mr. Sains, adults inclined to put the kibosh on their game. At first, I tried to divert them into more savory play, but whenever I stepped in with my adult observations or ideas or admonishments, they would stop, look at me in collective exasperation, and say, "Teacher Tom, we're just pretending." As you can imagine, the Mean Girls were a subject of much concern and speculation amongst us adults, but ultimately all we really understood was that these girls were all choosing, again and again, to play this game in which they knew that pain was a possible, even likely, consequence.

As important adults in the lives of young children, job number one is to keep them safe, so we step in when we think we see violence or bullying. Sadly, as Panksepp's experiment illustrates, we're not always very good at telling the difference between actual violence and bullying and play violence and bullying. We fear that they will be physically or emotionally hurt. Beyond that, our catastrophic imaginations cause us to fear that if we allow these games to continue, that they will grow up to be violent bullies and we want them to learn just the opposite lessons about life.

But here's the challenge: the world beyond the walls of our preschools is one in which violence and bullying are a reality. One thing we think we know about play is that it is the mechanism through which we've evolved to process what we encounter in our world and by which we practice the skills and habits that will allow us to navigate a world in which everything isn't all play, love, and happiness. As evolutionary biologists see it, this kind of play is the primary way that animals learn about altruism, tolerance, forgiveness, and fairness. By playing with conflict, we are learning to be better people.

After all, how can we ever comprehend light without darkness? How can we ever comprehend love without hate? How can we ever comprehend happiness without sadness? Play is the way we've evolved to explore life from all sides, including, and especially, the perspective of others. As boys playing tackle football with a bigger boy, we were learning, amongst other things, how to work together. As Mean Sisters, the girls were learning, amongst other things, how it feels from both sides. This is how play works . . . like love and happiness.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders (like Lenore!) useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast by clicking here or finding us anywhere you download your podcasts.

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!

Joy is the Emotion of Growth

We never had a teeter totter (i.e., seesaw) on our playground, but the children often made their own, usually by pivoting a plank of wood over a log. Sometimes they would put the plank over one of our swings and call it a "teeter swing." The contraptions could also easily evolve into "catapults" (by placing objects on one end, then jumping onto the other to launch it into the air) or "diving boards" (by having an adult stand on one end while the kids inched out to the other end to bounce off). 

As has happened with other classic playground equipment like swings, metal slides, and merry-go-rounds, manufactured teeter totters have more or less disappeared due to fear of litigation. Some will say it's due to injuries, but they simply won't be able to provide any reliable data showing that children's playground injury rates are any higher when teeter totters are present. Indeed, there is very little actual data at all about playground injuries, and what I have seen tends to place the risk of injury on a playground about equal to a child playing indoors at home.

I've never noticed the teeter totter to be a particularly dangerous plaything if played with as intended. After all, the script is an oscillation of up-and-down, up-and-down, up-and-down, a fine metaphor that can be applied to the ebbs and flows of life, but I never found it particularly exciting as a plaything unless, of course, you went off its one-dimensional script.

For me, the most fun one could have on a teeter totter was at the extremes: the bump as you hit the ground, then the bump as you reached the top. From this, my playmates and I would typically make it into a game of extremes rather than balance. We would send one another into hysterics by trying with all our might to launch one another into the air by allowing our end to crash to the ground with as much force as possible. You held on tight at the top because if the person on the other side was a "big kid" it could feel like you were about to flip into the air. It was probably this sort of play that caused adults with catastrophic imaginations to ban teeter totters, although as wild as our play got, I don't recall anyone ever getting hurt.

A second way we added spice to our teeter totter play was to walk or run across the plank. We would start on the end that was resting on the ground, then balance up the ramp until we got to the pivot point. Stepping across that point caused the raised end to descend to the ground so that you could complete your crossing. Again, in the spirit of challenging ourselves on this otherwise tedious playground contraption, we would increase our speed until we were essentially doing it pell mell.

A third off-script game was to try to balance in the center. It was fun for about 30 seconds, easily mastered. Every now and then we would count to see who could balance the longest, but we quickly realized that we could maintain the position indefinitely. Doing so was the most dull thing of all: standing in one place while micro-flexing your leg and torso muscles in order to stay in place.

Truth be told, teeter totters on the playgrounds of my youth were widely left alone. There was already enough tedium in school and if the teachers were going to scold us for attempting to add a bit of challenge and risk to our play then we would just do something else.

Many of us have become familiar with the concept of neuroplasticity over the past couple decades. Even as recently as twenty years ago, experts were telling us that humans didn't grow any new brain cells after about the age of 25, and that most of the cells we were ever going to have were grown during the first few years of life. We now know that this isn't true. What led scientists to suspect that we didn't continue to produce new neurons were studies done on apes in cages: when they began to look at apes who had been freed from their cages, they discovered that neuroplasticity was a lifelong phenomenon. 

And as psychotherapist and author Christine Caldwell writes in her book Bodyfulness, "While the definition of this term (neuroplasticity) restricts itself to nerve cells (neurons), the principle of plastic change likely occurs throughout the body as well. Change and even growth occur constantly and normally throughout our lives."

This lifetime of growth, however, is not a given. When we find ourselves in cages, metaphorical or real, like those apes did, cellular growth slows down or stops. That's because our brains and our bodies need self-selected challenges and self-identified novelty in order to grow new cells. As Caldwell puts it, "While we operate within genetic limitations, we are less limited than we previously thought. To a certain extent we can directly influence how many new cells we produce. We now know that we can learn new things during our entire life spans and retain capacities longer, even into our advanced years. Our daily experiences determine how fully we can operate within these expanded genetic limits. How can we influence our capacity to continue to change and grow? The key word here is challenge. In order to change something, we must challenge the status quo."

This is knowledge that children have that we, as adults in our society, tend to unlearn as we age. When a child goes off-script with a toy, when a child adds challenge or risk to an otherwise dull or previously mastered activity, when a child spins in a swing or goes up the slide or uses the teeter totter in "unauthorized" ways, they are doing exactly what they need to do to stimulate cell growth in both the brain and the body. They are challenging the status quo which is essential for any kind of growth to happen.

Of course, the children are not thinking about neuroscience, but rather following their education instinct, which is to seek out novelty and self-selected challenge.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately as I'm now a man in his 60's and more and more of the people in my life are retiring or thinking about retiring. They generally talk of a life of low stress, contentment, even happiness. But when I try to put myself in their shoes, I wonder about the lessons I've learned from young children. As essayist Rebecca Solnit writes in her book Owell's Roses, the state we call "(h)appiness seems to require having a well-ordered life avoiding difficulty or discord." It sounds a bit like the nowhere game of balancing on the middle of the teeter totter. She distinguishes it from joy which "can and does show up anywhere, often unexpectedly. In their book Joyful Militancy Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery draw the distinction thus: 'Joy remakes people through combat with forces of subjection (i.e., subjugation). Joy is a desubjectifying process, an unfixing, an intensification of life itself. It is a process of coming alive and coming apart. Whereas happiness is used as a numbing anesthetic that induces dependence, joy is the growth of people's capacity to do and feel new things in ways that can break this dependence.'"

In other words, joy is the emotion of growth and it comes from "combat" or challenging ourselves in new ways. As children play, especially as they concentrate on the challenges they are engaging, it would be impossible to describe them as happy. Indeed, happiness, especially as defined above, is not the natural state of the playground, but regular burst of joy are indeed a big part of it.

I worry that as adults too many of us seek that dull state of "balance" and avoid the bumps at the bottom and top. We so often attempt to sacrifice joy for the sake of happiness and growth for the sake of the status quo. Even worse, I fear that we sometimes try to impose this on the children, robbing them of joy and stunting their growth.

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, 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 Anxious Generation and Burning Down the House

In his bestselling book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt's central claim is that "overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world . . . are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation."

We've certainly all seen it in the children we work with. We've all worried about the spike in the number of young children diagnosed with anxiety and depression. I'm agnostic about Haidt's claim about the virtual world (although I've ordered my copy of the book and will read it with an open mind), but I have, for decades now, been pointing out the harms and dangers that seem to result from a culture in which childhood play and independence has all but disappeared. 

If you've not learned that you can do things for yourself, that's a frightening, disempowering feeling. Of course they're anxious.

Lenore Skenazy, along with Haidt, is a co-founder of the Let Grow non-profit. One of the things Let Grow does is work with schools to encourage children to begin re-connecting with the power of independence by doing something new "without a parent" (but, of course, with a parent's permission). On Teacher Tom's Podcast, Lenore told me that many elementary school children take on a cooking or baking project. She said she's been shocked by how many of these kids say, in all earnestness, that they worry they'll "burn down the house."

Of course, it's possible that someone could burn down the house while cooking, but my Mom was determined that I would grow up to not have to count on others to cook for me, so the kitchen was always a "yes zone." As a person who has been cooking and baking since I was a child, it never crosses my mind to worry about burning down the house. That's probably because of the thousands of times I've successfully prepared food without burning down the house. I'm not saying the results were always edible (there was the time I baked cookies using a cup of salt rather than a cup of sugar) but being teased by my brother was the worst of it. I suppose that if I really exercise my catastrophic imagination, I can imagine a burned down house in my future, but I'm certainly not wasting any bandwidth worrying about it.

This disappearance of childhood independence goes hand-in-hand with the disappearance of childhood play and a growing sense of our world as being far more dangerous than it really is. In my lifetime, we've gone from a normal childhood being characterized by very little adult supervision to one in which most kids will spend their entire childhoods under supervision. In that same timespan, crime rates have fallen, often dramatically, as anxiety has risen.

As groundbreaking neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp wrote some 20 years ago, "No one has yet explicitly conducted a play-deprivation study in our species, even though I do suspect we are currently in an unplanned cultural experiment of that kind. Too many youngsters of our species never get sufficient amounts of natural, self-generated play. If so, that be may one of the causes of our current epidemic of hyperkinetic kids with inadequate control over their own impulses."

People keep cynically asserting that "we didn't have all these diagnoses when we were kids." They're not wrong. Some of it, of course, has to do with the fact that we are now recognizing mental health issues in ways we didn't in the past, but much of it has to do with the spike in anxiety that is the natural result of what Haidt calls "overprotection."

Sadly, it's easier to become irrationally fearful and than it is to overcome irrational fears, but that's where we are today. I once said to Peter Gray, another co-founder of Let Grow and author of the book Free to Learn, that I'm worried that the only way to help parents and educators overcome their fears is to fear-monger about anxiety, depression, and hyperkinetic kids. He replied, "I feel like all I do is fear-monger."

It was a joke. No one wants to be a fear-monger, but at the same time, it's essential that we continue to talk about the real world consequences of childhoods without play and independence. In many ways, the beginning of healing the anxious generation is for we adults to work on our own anxiousness, to step outside our comfort zones a little at a time to permit our children to do things for themselves . . . even if there's a tiny chance that they'll burn down the house. 

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders (like Lenore!) useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast by clicking here or finding us anywhere you download your podcasts.

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 as an Inoculation Against Violent, Anti-Social Behavior

My wife and I recently saw the movie Sing Sing starring Coleman Domingo. Most of the other actors are men who were once highly violent, anti-social men which is how they wound up imprisoned in the notorious maximum security Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. Although the story is fictionalized, it is based on the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program that offers inmates the opportunity to produce and perform in theatrical stage productions. The movie shows how these men, by playing together in this context, learn to process their emotions in healthy ways, ultimately becoming less violent and more human. 

One of our family friends has been involved in a similar program for decades, offering his talents as a Shakespearian a director in the equally notorious Rikers Island Prison, also in New York. He spent his career working with theater students and professional actors, but said that no one approached the work more passionately than his convict actors. Our daughter, as part of her theater training, was a member of a traveling troupe that performed Shakespeare at Rikers and other prisons. She said that she had never performed before a more knowledgable and appreciative audience.

Back in the 1960's clinical psychologist and founder of the National Institute for Play Stuart Brown was involved in three different studies into the backgrounds of violent men. "What struck our separate research teams as unexpected was that . . . normal play behavior was virtually absent throughout the lives of highly violent, anti-social men regardless of demography."

It seems like every day brings us fresh news of tragedy at the hands of a violent, anti-social man. We blame their parents, we blame video games, we blame the economy, we blame schools, we blame society, we blame the victims, but I don't think I've ever known anyone to point to a lack of childhood play, even as the research seems to indicate that this is where we should be looking.

Play researchers theorize that one of the primary functions of play in animals, including humans, is the promotion of growth in the cerebral cortex, and specifically the pre-frontal cortex which is the seat of executive function. Strong executive function is what allows us to make plans and manage emotions. Highly violent, anti-social behavior is, more often than not, the result of someone who is emotionally out of control. Play, and dramatic play in particular, is how we grow our capacity for dealing with our emotions in heathy ways. Not only does play help us learn to manage our own emotions, but it makes us more sensitive and empathetic toward the emotions of others. The convict actors at Sing Sing may have missed out on their own childhood play, but the RTA program proves that it's never too late. 

The US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world and over 60 percent of ex-convicts nationwide wind up back in prison within three years of their release. In contrast, less than three percent of RTA members return to prison. This is an amazing result, one that speaks to the rehabilitating power of play.

More importantly, however, it suggests that childhood play can serve as an inoculation against violent, anti-social behavior. As Dr. Brown discovered, a lack of play leads to a lack of healthy executive function. Our schools should have a role in ensuring that all children have ample opportunity to play. Unfortunately, those who advocate for education as a way out of lives of poverty and crime all too often insist upon strict, "no-nonsense" approaches that focus everything on academics and discipline. Recess and the arts are the first victims of this heavy-handed, and ultimately misguided approach. A far more rational approach would be to double-down on recess and the arts.

What all children, all humans, need to develop heathy minds is the opportunity to play. It's through play of all kinds, including dramatic play, that we become the creative, self-motivated, productive citizens the world needs.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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!

How About, First and Foremost, We Agree to Not Suck the Joy From Their Lives

I was sitting on a bench near a playground merry-go-round watching our three and four-year-olds play. A pair of boys decided they wanted a spin. They mounted the apparatus, then one of them turned to me, "Teacher Tom, you push us."

I answered, "Sorry, I'm busy sitting here. You'll have to find someone else."

As the first boy tried pleading with me, the second said, "I'll get my brother to push us. He likes doing the things I like," and jogged off in the direction of where their classmates where playing. He called out to them, "Who will push us?" They ignored him so he returned to the merry-go-round. As he mounted it, he gave it a little push with his foot and the two boys began turning slowly.

As the momentum began to die, a couple of girls found their way to the merry-go-round. Without being asked, they decided they were going to push it "fast." The boys were delighted. Working together, the girls managed to get it up to speed, then the two of them jumped on as well. More children began to arrive in twos and threes, many pushed before jumping on. One of the original boys, leaning into it, head tipped back, began to chant, "Oh yeah, it's spin time! Oh yeah, it's spin time!"

The children began jumping off and on as they spun. Many of them fell to the ground upon dismount, most doing so intentionally. Occasionally, one of them would be trampled as they lay there in the path of the pushers. Some of them cried out in objection, while others squealed with delight. It was the kind of wild, breathless fun for which these machines were designed, even if adult imposed rules too often forbid it.

They were learning something, because we are always learning something when we play. I could write a list here of all the things I imagine they were learning, or exploring, or discovering. I could put those guesses into a report of some sort. Indeed, if I were so inclined I would have already filed dozens of reports on the children playing together on the merry-go-round going back to September. I could then take all those reports and compare them to today's report and use this data to pretend that I know what they have been learning over the course of months. I reckon I could even devise some sort of pre and post-test that would allow me to compare the children's progress, identify those who are behind and assign those poor kids some merry-go-round homework so they could catch up with the others. I might even decide to rank the children on various measures that I have identified as important about merry-go-round play, assigning each of them grades based on my assessment of where they fall on an arbitrary scale of learning I'd devised based on data that I and others have collected over generations. I could then use this data I've amassed to devise a merry-go-round curriculum, one that allows me to "teach" children how to play on a merry-go-round, imagine myself an expert, seeing to it that all the children became merry-go-round proficient . . .

This is ludicrous, of course. I could do all of that and not only would I be no closer to knowing what these children were learning, I would have wasted vast amounts of time that I could have otherwise spent doing something more productive, like scratching my ass. No one can ever know what another person is learning. Each of those children on the merry-go-round are learning something different, something unique, something that applies only to them and their lives, and even the person doing the learning often doesn't know what they've learned, and no amount of testing, grading, or data collection will change that.

This is the great fraud of our educational system, this hubristic notion that adults can somehow measure learning, yet for generations we have put children through the processing plants we call schools, marching them into the test score coal mines, subjecting them to our experiments like lab rats. It's lead to a grotesque narrowing and standardization of what we call education based not on learning, but on what we can most easily measure.

I am comfortable knowing that children are learning because they are playing, and that's enough. Indeed, I have no choice because to believe otherwise, is to buy into the lie that anyone can possibly know what these children are learning. It would mean that I must take part in sucking the joy from their lives and I will not knowingly be a party to that.

"Oh yeah, it's spin time!" That's all I need to know.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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 is Our True Superpower

The Netflix series 3 Body Problem envisions a scenario in which a more advanced alien civilization, originally seeking to co-existing with humans, decides they must instead destroy us because they've learned that we are capable of lying. Even our ability to invent fictional stories, like the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, frightens them.

Of course, most of us don't consider storytelling in the same category as lying, but from the perspective of these aliens, who apparently cannot deceive one another because every mind is fully open to every other mind, do not see a difference. They don't understand that when we tell our stories, everyone is in on the "deception." We know that what we are hearing is not technically true, even if it is true at some deeper level.

That said, the alien's have a point. I mean the incredibly straight-forward "Thou shalt not lie" is one of the Christian faith's Ten Commandments. Chronic lying is the death of marriage and friendship. No one will hire a known liar. We teach our children that lying is wrong. Making the mistake of trusting a liar can be deadly.

On the other hand, we know that even the most moral of us occasionally lie. Researchers find that the average person lies an average of 1-2 times per day, 60 percent of us lie at least once during a 10 minute conversation, 40% lie on their resumes, 90% lie on their online dating profiles, 50% of teenagers admit to lying to their parents. I got these statistics from this online article, which provides a solid looking list of sources, but I remain suspicious because I don't know the organization that published the article. And besides, we are all know that beneath the veneer of objectivity, statics can be the biggest liars of all.

Lying is a bad thing, even a frightening thing, although we must consider that the vast majority of lying is done to avoid punishment or to protect ourselves or others from harm. So is it really such a bad thing? I'm guessing, for instance, that those teens would lie a lot less if they weren't worried about being punished, which tells us something about the weakness of punishment as a tool of motivation. Our daughter once told a lie that made herself look bad in the eyes of others in order to protect her girlfriends and, frankly, I couldn't feel prouder.

Unlike those aliens, humans have always lived in a world of deception, if not outright lies. And the truth is that on a day-to-day basis, we're pretty good at knowing when we're being lied to. For instance, most of us instinctively know that boastful people are trying to "lie" about their insecurity. We understand that a shy person is likely vulnerable. We can usually tell the difference between a genuine smile and a phony one. Of course, there are times when the lie is convincing or the lair so trusted that we're deceived, but most of the time, especially when we are face-to-face with a person, we adults are pretty good at sorting out the truth from the lies. And part of that is because, most of us, most of the time, are pretty terrible liars.

In his triumphantly uplifting book Humankind, Rutger Bregman writes, "Humans . . . are anything but poker-faced. We constantly leak emotions and are hardwired to relate to the people around us."

Those of us who work with young children see this every day. It takes practice to "hide" our emotions, thoughts, and feelings, a skill that these new humans have not yet learned. Their emotions leak out in every facial expression and body movement: they are incapable of "lying" about their sadness, anger, frustration, and delight. Later, sadly, they will learn society's lessons about avoiding punishment and protecting themselves from ridicule ("Don't be a baby!"). As Bregman points out, however, most of us never get very good at stopping the leaks, the "lies" we try to tell about our inner state.

"But far from being a handicap," writes Bregman, "this is our true superpower." It is what allows us to connect and collaborate with relative ease. I know it's popular to bemoan our inability to "get along," but just look around at what we've done together. Everything we know as the modern world is the product of us being able to look at one another and, despite the prevalence of deception and lies, to discover the truth about one another, at least enough to build a skyscraper, drive on a freeway, or play a board game. And this can only happen because we have learned to read our fellow humans even when they try to deceive us.

The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke believed that human consciousness was built upon our memories. "You have to begin to lose your memory," he wrote, "if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all . . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing." 

This makes sense until one considers that even our memories are, to a greater or lesser extent, lies. The more we learn about how memory functions, the more we are coming to understand that what we think we remember are really just the stories we've told ourselves about what happened. Indeed, researchers tell us that the more often we recall a memory the more "fictional" it becomes as we wrap it in stories that help us make sense of what happened. Courtroom lawyers are well-aware of, and often exploit, the faultiness of eyewitness testimony. Phychologists are likewise well-aware of this phenomenon. I recently had lunch with an old friend who firmly let me know that one of my fondest memories of her "never happened." My wife and I have been together for nearly 40 years, sharing countless experiences, yet almost every day we discover that at least one of our memories of a shared event is a "lie," and likely, to at least some extent, they both are. 

Our memories, it seems, are really much more about creative storytelling that we like to admit. This is why I say that we can change the past: we do it all the time. I imagine that this would really frighten those non-human aliens. And maybe it frightens some of us as well, but there is a growing body of evidence that this process of re-shaping and even forgetting is vital to our social development. Kate Eichhorn, author of the book The End of Forgetting, writes, "(F)orgetting can also be incredibly dangerous but there are times when the ability to forget and be forgotten is integral to social transformation." Isn't forgetting the ultimate lie?

And I wonder what those aliens would think about our human capacity for counter-factual thinking, which is a scientific term for lying, when it comes to being creative or innovative. After all, in the broadest sense, when, say, the Wright Brothers had to first tell the "lie" of human flight before inventing a flying machine. In this sense, every new thing under the sun required someone to first have a fictional idea or vision.

But, of course, I'm stretching things here. Unlike those aliens, we know that storytelling, forgetting, and creative counter-factual thinking are not the same thing as lies. But even when it comes to actual lies, we understand, and usually even excuse, lies, "white lies," told to protect ourselves or others, or to promote a greater good. Even our youngest children know that the adults in their lives sometimes say things are are objectively not true and often call us on it or out us in embarrassing ways.

No, what we mean when we say "Don't lie" -- the lies we hate -- are those deceptions that are both intentional and are told for the purpose of harming or taking advantage of another person. And only a small fraction of the lies we tell, according the statistics, are done to gain power or advantage over others. Those are the lies that anger and frighten us. I don't blame a child for lying to avoid a spanking or the loss of a treasured privilege, and readily forgive lies told to protect from harm or to avoid shame: those kinds of lies are, well, human. And while these kinds of lies can certainly cause harm, the harm is not the point. It's the sociopathic lies, the lies told for power, fame, or fortune, that make me afraid.

Not surprisingly, when surveyed, we tend to believe that this kind of lying makes up far more of human nature than it actually does. We tend to be more misanthropic, pessimistic, and cynical about human nature than the actual evidence warrants. Professor of communications and media theorist George Gerbner used the term "mean world syndrome" to describe this phenomenon. He found that the more news one consumes the more likely we are to agree with the statement "Most people care only about themselves." The more we watch or read the news the more helpless we feel. It is a major contributor to stress and depression. What we forget is that "news" is, by definition, something rare, something that diverges from the norm. We want our news to be objective, but, in fact, it tells a bigger lie about human nature because it tends to focus on the exceptions rather than the rules.

"Where's the good new?" we ask. It's hard to find it in the news or on our social media feeds. The internet's algorithms inevitably elevate the lies about who we are as a species because they only care about eyeballs and humans are always attracted to novelty, like car crashes. It's not news that most of the cars are not in crashes. So where is the good news? It's outside our front doors: in our parks and schools and churches. It is out there in the world amongst the other emotionally leaky people, the people who can't help but tell us the truth even if their words and memories and stories don't always adhere strictly to it.

It's out there in the real world, the place with real people, that we learn to tell the difference between the common, normal, everyday deceptions that are part and parcel with being human. It's out there that we find that most of our lies are told with good or at least understandably human intentions. It's out there, away from our screens and "news" that we see that the mean world syndrome is itself a lie. And it's out there in the real world that we learn how to pick out and steer well clear of those relatively rare, albeit dangerous, liars who seek to do harm.

It's out there in the real world that we can rediscover our superpower which is to understand, connect, and collaborate with our fellow humans.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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!

How Spirit Works

Karntakuringu Jakurrpa

I've been driving cars for 45 years. It's been decades since I spent time and energy thinking about driving. I just do it. When I was first behind the wheel, when I was learning about driving, I had to think about every aspect of what I was doing, but today it is second nature.

As Tyson Yunkaporta explains it in his book Sand Talk: "At the simplest level, when we hold a tool, our brain recognizes it as an extension of our arm. It isn't really part of our body, but it becomes an embodied extension of our neural processes."

This ability to make and use tools, like hammers or cars, is one of the things that makes Homo sapiens the species we are. Of course, other species, like apes, otters, and crows, use tools, but none to the extent that we do.

I recently observed a toddler stop to consider a stick on the ground. On wobbly legs, she stood over that stick for a moment, before carefully, awkwardly, bending at the waist and knees to get closer to it. Again, she paused to catch her balance before reaching out her hand, fingers splayed. It took her a couple attempts to grasp hold of it. She fell on her bottom in the effort to stand upright again, but then, without dropping the stick, she pushed herself back onto her feet. She then began testing the world with that stick, tapping it on the ground, poking tree trunks, sticking it into holes. It had become "an embodied extension of (her) neural processes."

We've all observed young humans doing these kinds of things. This urge to extend our bodies and minds out into our environment is, in many ways, what learning is all about. Reggio Emilia educators consider "the environment" be a teacher, equal in significance to human teachers. Indigenous wisdom, no matter where we find it in the world, has always acknowledged the interconnectedness between we humans and the rest of creation.

"At more complex levels," writes Yunkaporta, "the meaning we make with places, people, and objects and the way we organize interactions between these things become an extension of our thinking. Through meaning-making, we effectively store information outside our brains, in objects, places, and relationships with others." (Italics are mine)

Recently, I went golfing for the first time in 30 years. I was concerned I would make a fool of myself, and I did, but not nearly to the degree I'd feared. Indeed, the moment I picked up a club, I was reconnected to the golf clubs of my youth. I thought of my father's persimmon wood drivers, then my father, then of taking those clubs to our local municipal course and the pride of having the pro there enthuse over their rarity and beauty. I thought I'd forgotten everything about golf, but the moment I took my first swing, my body and mind embodied much of the knowledge I had stored away in those clubs from long ago. As I went around the course, I was in the past as much as the present, as the course itself -- the grass, the sand traps, the greens, the balls, the tees -- taught and re-taught knowledge, even wisdom, that I'd left stored there long ago.

When we gather with our families over holidays, for instance, we reconnect with knowledge that we keep stored in our relationships with others. When will spend time in our childhood homes or engaging in rituals and traditions we are reconnected to things and ways of being that we thought we'd forgotten. If the lessons we learned were of kindness and love, those will surround us. If they were harsh or sad, we will resist or avoid the people, places, or things that store our pain, which is probably why so many of us find the holidays challenging.

Our children are just beginning this process of extending themselves into the world, of connecting their neural processes with their environment. They are just beginning to store their knowledge and wisdom outside of their brains. They will learn things in school, although most of it will remain in school, stored there in the classrooms, teachers, and classmates. Their important connections will be made with the people, places, and things from life itself.

"If you use a familiar object to help you encode new knowledge that you are learning," write Yunkaporta, "then when you pick up that object or even just visualize it, you instantly remember what you learned. It has become a tangible metaphor, an overlap between the two worlds." This goes for people and places as well as things. Writes Yunkaporta, "This is how spirit works."

******

Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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!