"Activities Rather Than Objects"

Like a younger sibling, our school has always run on hand-me-downs. 

I've long believed that one of the functions of preschools in our society is to be a pitstop for things -- almost anything -- along its journey to the landfill or recycling center. Much of what populates the playground at any given moment, for instance, is other people's junk that we treated like treasure: the insides of a washing machine, old tires, motorcycle rearview mirrors, carpet samples, manufacturing patterns, the articulated hose from a defunct vacuum cleaner . . . 

The children always know what to do with these things, these real things that often come from their own attics or cellars. The only toys are broken ones -- dolls without arms, cars missing their wheels, handlebars without their tricycle. Yet, all of it is reimagined as a toy, or part of a toy, for a day or a season, before being freed to become something else. A parent once donated a box of her old swimming trophies that turned up, in whole and in part, as part of children's play for years, although never as achievement "awards." 

In 1955, a TV commercial for The Thunder Burp Machine gun debuted on the first episode of The Micky Mouse Club. It was the first time a toy had been advertised on television outside of the Christmas season. According to Howard Chudacoff, a cultural historian at Brown University, this was an historic moment for toys. Almost overnight, children's play became focused, as never before, on things. "It's interesting to me that when we talk about play today, the first thing that comes to mind are toys," says Chudacoff. "Whereas when I think of play in the 19th century, I would think of activities rather than objects."

For most of human history, toys were something that were made of commandeered and cast-off materials from day-to-day life. Modern toys tend to come with scripts written for them, whereas junk requires children to write their own scripts, which is why children might beg for the latest plastic-fantastic plaything, but will invariably wind up playing longer and more creatively with the box it came in.

A retiring high school teacher once dropped off a large box of several dozen standard issue clipboards. Our community put many of them to use right away, as convenient holders for attendance sheets, cleaning checklists, safety guidelines, and other practical purposes. I used several of them for things like holding stacks of recycle box paper, the backs of which I used to take dictation when children told me stories. The clipboards weren't transformative or anything, but they came in handy all over the classroom. There were so many that I put the box in a convenient location where parents could grab them as needed, but this also made them easily accessible to the kids who began incorporating them into their play.

One group in particular took to them. Some days our classroom looked like a training school for meter readers as the kids roamed the place in groups, scribbling "notes" on their clipboards. When we decided to take a neighborhood walking tour, the kids wanted to bring the clipboards with them to hold "maps" or, alternatively and more excitingly, "treasure maps." I thought I'd contribute by printing out a copy of our neighborhood map for each of them and see if there was any interest in using them to orient ourselves. With our high visibility safety vests on, we definitely looked like a team of junior surveyors or census takers.

The concept of the map, as I expected, was over most of their heads. After all, full grown humans traveled and traded over great distances for millennia before someone, a pioneering pre-Socratic scientist named Anaximander, had the earthshaking idea of considering what the world might look like from the perspective of an eagle, and thus the geographical map was born. Of course, several of the kids quickly found that their clipboard was in the way, abandoning them to my backpack, but many combined the concepts of clipboards, maps, and rambling into their own version of mapping. Some of them attempted to draw pictures of things they saw. Others used their clipboards to keep track of, say, how many construction vehicles we passed. Yet others used the wide clip to hold the dandelions they plucked along the way. And all of them, even if they had abandoned their clipboard altogether, still mapped their world through their memories and the stories they later told about where we had gone and what we had done.

It was never about those clipboards. It was about the real activity of mapping our world. Without scripts, without instructions, without adults providing them with the correct answers, the children went out a did what humans have done since long before Anaximander: made sense of the world, knowing all along that tomorrow, with different tools, with a different perspective, their maps would take them, perhaps not always to treasure, but always to heart of the real world where the box is always better than the toy.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Answers are Far Less Compelling than Questions

I recently ate a tomato salad that transported me back to my childhood, several years of which were spent in living with my family in a suburb of Athens, Greece. I was once again in the dappled shade of the dining area of a taverna set in a park. Children were racing around on the lawn in front of the graveled dining patio where my family had been served our first course. The tomato salad hadn't been my choice, but rather ordered for the table by my parents. I really only wanted souvlaki, but Mom insisted I try a bite of the classic tomato, cucumber, onion, basil, and feta combination that was to become the portal through which I travelled a half century back in time.

Food can be a portal to the past. For the novelist Marcel Proust the taste of a Madeleine that triggered his seven volume novel In Search of Lost Time (La Recherche). Art, music, scent, light, topics of conversation, photographs -- just about anything, in fact -- can, under the right circumstances, can take us back in time. Science fiction is full of stories of time travel, as if it's something yet to be invented, but the truth is that we do it all the time. 

"You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives," wrote English philosopher John Locke, one of most influential Enlightenment figures. He believed that life without memory would be "no life at all."

As a man of 62, I possess a much larger basket of memories than, say, a preschooler. It's what we call experience. The assumption is that we are wiser because we are older, which is to say, because we have a deeper well of memories from which to draw lessons that apply to (or make plans based on, or to raise cautions about) the present. It's assumed that we must always take the lead with young children because of this experience. But increasingly, I find myself uncomfortable the arrogance of this assumption. After all, I may have more memories than a five-year-old, but their memories are going to be much fresher, much more closely connected to what's happening right now. They don't have as far to travel as I do.

Besides, we've learned much more about how memory functions since John Locke's time. It's common knowledge that you can't change the past, but the truth is that we do it all the time. We now know that recalling memories, traveling into the past, changes those memories. The evidence even seems to indicate that the more often we recall a memory, the more inaccurate that memory becomes. Those science fiction time travelers are always cautioned to not do anything that changes the past while they are there because of how even the smallest alteration could cause dramatic changes to the present, but that's exactly what all of us do, change the past, whenever we find ourselves transported there.

We all have a literal blind spot at a point located between our eyes, but we perceive of the world in front of us as continuous because our brains create a bridge between what our left and right eyes see, based not on what is actually there, but rather what our brain expects to be there. We have a much larger blind spot behind our heads, but we know the world exists back there because of the story our brains tell about what ought to be there. When it comes to our memories, it's all a product of our brain's irrepressible drive to tell stories, not necessarily reflecting things as they were, but rather as they must have been. It's not the reliability or accuracy of those stories (our memories) that matters as much as how well they help us understand the world and our place in it in the present.

If we have any more wisdom than young children, therefore, is not necessarily contained in our memories themselves, but rather in our experience as creative storytellers about those memories. We are not scientists or reporters as much as we are mythologizers, explainers, tellers of tales that make sense to us, that give us comfort, that tell us the story of our identities and the ways of the world. We hope that our lessons, our example, will likewise offer sense and comfort to the children in our care, but we can never lose sight of the fact that we and our stories are the product of our unique perspective. That bit of the world between our eyes is different for everyone, just as our myths are a product of our individual uniqueness. 

My wife and I have been together since 1984, forty years, and have obviously many shared memories. We recently fought over one of those memories, each of us recalling things differently: what I think happened, she assures me, absolutely did not, yet I remember it so clearly. We will never know what really happened, nor does it matter. What matters is that the story I tell myself of this memory has already become something else, one that includes perspectives I never considered. Something that I thought old and settled has suddenly come alive once more.

I know that some are uncomfortable with thinking about the world in this way. They want certainty, they crave "objective" truth, they can only be satisfied with answers. Perhaps the most important thing I've learned through working with young children, however, is that answers are far less compelling than questions. When I watch children at play, when I stay out of their way with my "wisdom" and "experience" and "memories," I see humans in their natural state: pursuing their questions. Answers are ultimately dull things. They are questions that have been stripped of wonder. Questions without answers, in contrast, present life as it truly is: an experience of awe, where even the past is not even the past and where ideas and the stories we tell are everything.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Flow Activities

We call our's the Age of Information, but it would more accurately be called the Age of Attention because when information becomes abundant, attention becomes the scarce resource. But the truth is that human's have long felt that they lived in a time of information overload. The French philosopher René Descartes complained in the 17th century, "Even if all knowledge could be found in books, where it is mixed in with so many useless things and confusingly heaped in such large volumes, it would take longer to read those books than we have to live in this life." I imagine that even our most distant ancestors, while star gazing, would sometimes feel overwhelmed by all those celestial bodies up there vying for their attention.

Whatever the case, our attention, being limited and rare, is a valuable thing, yet most of us squander mountains of it over the course of any given day. Social media is a major attention thief for many of us today, but before that it was TV or radio or, as Descarte points out, books.

What we focus on grows; where our attention goes, there goes our life. People who are able to focus well report feeling less fear, frustration, and sadness. They are better able to plan and regulate their impulses. This makes it more likely that they will achieve their goals, which in turn feeds the cycle of feeling less fear, frustration, and sadness.

Researcher Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi has found that the more time we spend in what he calls "flow activities," the higher our sense of wellbeing and the better we get at focusing our attentions.

Most of us, I hope, know what it feels like to be "in flow." For me it generally shows up when I've undertaken a challenging self-selected project that has personal meaning to me. When I'm in flow, I'm thinking by doing, overcoming obstacles, and stretching myself, at least a little, beyond my comfort zone. Time on a clock may say one thing, but time, while I'm in flow, stands still, I don't find myself checking the clock (a major distraction in the rest of my life), but then, when I look back on what I've done, the time seems to have passed in a flash. That's the nature of flow.

As a play-based educator, I try to make focus my focus, which is to say, I strive to create environments in which I've curated potential distractions. At the end of the day, when someone asks, "How was your day?" I want to be able to honestly reply, "It just flowed."

When I say I curate the distractions, one of the first things I do, is limit, if not eliminate screen-based technology. This is not because I'm a technophobe, but because I know that the children in my life have plenty of access to these technologies, and their distractions, during the rest of their lives. Indeed, two in five American children live in homes where the television is kept on all or most of the time, a fact that has been linked to attention challenges. In other words, I'm not worried that they will miss out or fall behind when it comes to technology. Yes, they are part of life itself, but they are distractions with an agenda of their own: they seek to command our attention to satisfy their own ends, while flow demands self-motivation.

I likewise seek to minimize the impact of scripted toys, especially those linked to movies or programs, but really anything that "tells" a child how to play with it. A ball or a doll is one thing, but a Paw Patrol play set is quite another. I also hope to reduce the impact of timekeeping distractions by limiting transitions. I even strive to remove myself as a potential distraction to the degree that's possible, by stepping back and avoiding direct instruction or too many questions or just generally inserting myself into the play.

At the end of the day, I want the other children, nature, and unscripted (or open-ended) loose parts to be the primary "distractions" in the environment because, when we put our attention there, I've found that a state of flow is much more likely to emerge, both for individual children and groups. Screens, scripts, and schedules demand our attention, whereas people, plants, and parts spark our curiosity, our education instinct made manifest. Self-motivation emerges which is the impetus for flow.

Our attention is perhaps our most precious possession. When we learn to apply it deliberately, with intent, research tells us that not only are we more satisfied with our lives, we are more creative, more conscientious, more empathetic, and less aggressive. There will always be distractions, there always have been. The key, I think is to pay attention to our attention, value it, choose deliberately, and let it flow.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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 the Source of Everything that Makes Us Human

Even before they can walk, many, if not most, babies dance, bouncing their bodies to a rhythm. It's not the tango, but it's where the tango got its start. 

Even before they can read or write, many, if not most, children create poetry. I still remember a poem my brother "wrote" when he was no more than three:

I like cheese.

Cheese likes me,

Mice like cheese

Just like me.

It's not Homer, but it's where Homer began.

Even before they comprehend the meaning beyond their nursery walls, many, if not most, children develop unique and quirky rituals that help them make sense of the chaos of the world. It's not as if they've founded a religion, but it's where all of our spiritual and cultural rituals began.

Critics of play-based learning often wonder about the purpose of play. "What is it for?" "What are they learning?" "Isn't there something more productive they could be doing?"

In his classic book Homo Ludens cultural historian Johan Huizinga wrote: "Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play."

The critics are missing the point when they ask for play's purpose. Play has no purpose. It is far older and foundational than anything else in human culture. Play is not the purpose, but rather the source of everything that makes us human. In human development, play has always come first.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Our Awesome Responsibility

The countries of France, New Zealand, Switzerland, Slovakia, Austria, Egypt, and the municipalities of Brussels and Quebec have defined animals as "sentient beings." This means that in those places animals are not property, but rather "legal persons." This designation allows humans to litigate on behalf of the legal rights of animals.

As a person who has known, intimately, several dogs and a couple cats, I can attest to their sentience and I have no problem with extending that recognition to the entire animal kingdom. That said, I "own" a dog, my wife and I have owned several, and it makes me wonder if in those places would my ownership, my property, be recognized.

Under US legal precedent there can be "no property in the body as such." As far as I know, this legal principle has only been applied to human bodies, but does the legal personhood of animals open the door to, say, making the farming of animals illegal? It's a classic slippery slope, but the truth is that human laws are always slippery slopes.

Property rights are widely considered to be "transferable rights to exclude all others from one or more use of a certain thing." In other words, if our bodies were considered property under law, if human bodies could be legally owned, then, by extension, slavery would be legal. Indeed, it was the recognition of Black people as "legal persons" (e.g., "sentient beings") that ended the cruel practice of slavery in the US. The fact that bodies are not property also means that our bodily rights are not transferable, which allows for the widespread illegality of prostitution. It likewise means that there are uses for which we can be legally forbidden to put our bodies, such as imbibing illegal drugs, committing suicide, or increasingly, having an abortion.

I'm going to assume that most people reading this are morally opposed to the notion of humans as property, but I wonder about my own body. Certainly, I own it, right? Legally, none of us own even our own bodies, although most of us believe we should have the "rights" of ownership over our own bodies. And indeed, many of us have signed legal documents that transfer our bodily rights to others under certain circumstances. My wife had power of attorney over her mother's property, including her body, during the final years of her life.

But that's different, right? Caring for others, be they elderly or children, isn't the same as ownership. But isn't it? So long as we stop short of abuse and neglect, those bodies legally "belong" to us. In this regard, those of us who care for others bear an awesome responsibility and we must remind ourselves, every day, that these bodies in our care, these legal persons, are not property.

From an Indigenous perspective, the original sin of colonizers was the concepts of property and ownership. Prior to their arrival, Native Americans considered themselves to be stewards or caretakers of land, animals, and plants rather than owners. The sin was in taking these living things, these legal persons, these sentient beings (and yes, there is a growing body of evidence that plants are sentient), and turning them into objects.

"You can't thingify anything without depersonalizing that something," wrote Martin Luther King, Jr. "If you use something as a means to an end, at that moment you make it a thing and you depersonalize it."

Philosopher Simone Weil defines "force" as anything that "turns anybody who is subjected into a thing."

We don't own our children, but we are responsible for them. We are their stewards and caretakers even as our world increasingly views them as things. Few admit it, but every for-profit education company thingifies children as a means to an end. Standardized testing likewise thingifies them, exploiting them as unpaid labor in test score coal mines. Indeed, much of what passes for "classroom management" or "punishment," to the degree that force or the threat of force is the fulcrum over which our levers work, objectifies children, turning them into something to be treated like property. Even when we turn them away from what they want to learn to focus instead upon what we want them to learn, we are, at one level, thingifying them. And if children object to any of this, if they assert their rights as legal persons or sentient beings, they are turned into things through force.

Our responsibility as stewards of children is an awesome one, made even more so as we consider these cultural forces toward objectification and commodification.

If I had my way, this passage from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet would be posted on every classroom or nursery wall:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

When we love them and let them play, we live up to our awesome responsibility.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

They Will Lose Their Ignorance and Innocence: It's Called Education

Awhile back I read the disgusting story of a police officer and his wife who were arrested for handcuffing and jailing his own three-year-old overnight, for two nights in a row, for the "crime" of soiling himself. Their defense is that it was their parental right.

Thankfully, Florida state law recognizes this as an actual crime. I suspect the parents, unless there is evidence of other abusive or neglectful behavior, will get off with a warning, perhaps a required parenting course, and maybe some sort of probationary period during which the appropriate state agency will keep tabs on them for a time. That's probably what's best for the whole family. Not only was that poor boy traumatized by his parents' actions, he likely feels responsible for getting his parents in trouble, the whole episode will remain with all of them for the rest of their lives, and, thinking rationally, it's probably best to allow them to deal with the natural consequences and move forward.

Of course, it's tempting, in anger, to want those parents punished more severely. How could anyone treat a young child like that? On the other hand, I'm confident there are others who feel that these officers were within their rights as parents and are outraged that the state would presume to step in to a "family matter." Indeed, these parents obviously felt that way. After all, as the father is quoted as saying, "it worked."

"Parent rights" stands at the center of much of the current controversy swirling around our public schools. The argument being used to ban books and speech is that parents have the right to protect their children's innocence about certain topics, especially with regard to gender, sexuality, and race. There are even some who don't want their child taught anything that smacks of social-emotional learning, sternly scolding that schools should stick to all-academics-all-the-time. And there are some who believe they have the right to jail their three-year-old.

My child is an adult now, but when she was young I also felt that, ultimately, my rights, as her parent, were paramount. I wasn't anti-vaccination, for instance, but I did ask our pediatrician lots of questions which resulted in delaying some and staggering others. I once had words with one of her teachers (firm but without involving his superiors) over what I saw as an inappropriate use of collective punishment. And in that same spirit I tried to respect the rights of other parents. When we invited another girl along on a family vacation, her father gave me long list of dos and don'ts as a condition of letting her join us, a list that contained many things I found ridiculous, but to which I nevertheless adhered. Although had one of those conditions been, say, to spank (or jail) her, I would have let him know that I wasn't going to do those things and let him be the one who told his daughter why she couldn't join us.

There is always a line. Jailing a three-year-old clearly crosses that line. When the line is crossed, the rest of us get to override the parents. The challenge is knowing where the line is drawn and we're not always going to agree on where that is, but let there be no doubt: there is a line beyond which parents lose their rights, even if they cross it in the privacy of their own home. We, as a society, through our institutions, get to decide when a parent has engaged in abuse or neglect. When that happens, the parents lose their rights.

The "parent rights" argument, as currently be used against our public schools, however, is an entirely different thing, although it's not new. Parents who exert their rights to "protect" their children from discussions of gender, sexuality, and race, are in a head-on collision with the rights of parents who see it as essential that their children be educated about those very things. On one side, parents say they are concerned that their white children, for instance, will be made to feel shame and guilt over discussions of our nation's history of slavery. They say that discussions of gender or sexuality will plant ideas in their children's heads, confuse them, and are an attack on their "innocence." On the other, parents are concerned that if these topics are excluded from classroom discussions, their child will grow up thinking there is something wrong with them unless they are white, straight, and identify with the gender assigned to them at birth. Our public schools are currently in the process of figuring out how to navigate this, just as the public at large is doing the same thing.

I was recently talking with my mother about her decision to put me on the bus when the courts ordered the desegregation of public schools in 1970. Most of my neighborhood friends, all white, were pulled from public schools and sent to segregated private schools, many of them citing their rights as parents. I recall a neighbor worrying that if her white child went to school with black children, he might grow up to marry one. Mom told me that she wanted her children to attend pubic schools because "you would be spending the rest of your life in public." She wanted us to learn how to live, work, and play in the real world. She was, and still is, a woman of morals and values, and she definitely wanted us to share them, she told us so, but she also knew that once we walked out the front door, we were in public where we would be not just be exposed to a diversity of people and ideas, but have to learn to share public life with them. When I heard things while in public, either from teachers, books, or other children, that unsettled my worldview, I would discuss them with my parents. They would tell me their views. I can't tell you how often Mom would start a sentence with, "Some people believe . . ." or "Some people don't think . . ." I'll never forget telling her about the Theory of Evolution, a scientific framework that continues to be vilified by many people. She said, "Well, I guess if that's the way God created the world, then who are we to say it's wrong?"

I'm old enough to remember when prayer was banned in school. Our teachers, from one day to the next, were no longer allowed to lead Christian prayers. This was, in part, a parent rights issue. Parents of non-Christian children didn't want their kids forced to pray Christian prayers. When this happened, my Christian mother told us that we could just say our own private prayers, shrugging, "Prayer isn't for showing off anyway. It's for talking with God."

My point is that when you send your child to public school, you don't lose your rights. No parents do. But at the same time, it's in the nature of "the public" to be diverse. Ideally, it's a place where individuals come together as a community that doesn't just make room for everyone, but is created by everyone. Within our own homes, within the confines of our chosen communities, we have the right to exclude people and ideas, but the very definition of "the public" in a democratic society means that our ability to exclude others is very limited. And as for lost "innocence," isn't that just another way of saying lost "ignorance?" 

I understand that in a diverse world, we all draw our lines in different places. In private, we have an almost unrestricted right to decide where those lines go, but the moment we step into the public, we are just one point of view in a world of points of view and it always means a loss of innocence. I'm often critical of public schools on this blog, and I remain so, but it was my experience in public schools combined with my relationship with my parents that taught me how to be myself in this diverse world, while at the same time allowing others to be themselves. My academic education may have been inferior, but my public education was unsurpassed.

Believe me, I understand parent rights. I value them. I strive to honor them. But unless you're prepared to be the jailor of your own child, they will lose their ignorance and innocence. It's called education.

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If we are going to provide our children with the kind of education they deserve while still respecting their rights, we must focus on creating a true give-and-take partnership with them, one that builds, rather than divides, community. If you're interested in learning more about creating a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For 20 years, I worked in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? Click this link to register and to learn more. This is a course that becomes even more powerful if the whole team does it together. Discounts are available for groups. Registration closes today at midnight, so now's your moment!

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!

"What are Your Goals for Your Child?"

I've asked thousands of parents the question, "What are your goals for your child?" It's something a lot of us ask at the beginning of a school years or when we are first getting to know a family. Far and away, the top answers are some version of, "I just want my child to be happy," or "I just want my child to love learning." These are the answers I expect, especially from first time parents. 

The good news is that their children already love learning, they were born that way, so no problem there. Our only job, and it's made far simpler by a play-based curriculum, is to do no harm.

Happiness is, of course, another matter. It's the only emotion that tends to disappear the moment you become aware of it. It's a tricky, personal, and ephemeral thing, something we spot in others, but when we ourselves are happy we daren't look directly at it. It's like those phantom movements in our peripheral vision that Icelanders say are the "hidden people," elves and fairies and whatnot, who flee when you turn their way. Because of this phenomenon, Aristotle asserted that the only way humans can ever know if they've lived a happy life is in hindsight, from the perspective of our death beds, looking back over it all. This, of course, doesn't mean that we ought not pursue happiness, only that we have to accept that the pursuit is the most important part of that project, which is, at bottom, what self-directed learning is all about: the pursuit of happiness.

So I have no problem assuring parents that their preschool goals will be met. Their children will continue to love learning because they will be free to pursue happiness within the context of a community. The problem is that we too often fail to understand that the love of learning and the pursuit of happiness must be ends unto themselves, not means to an end. It's when we attempt to wrangle these highest of goods into the service of some more prosaic result, like a grade or a score or a certificate or a job, that we begin to undermine the joy of learning, replacing it with the avoidance of corrective sticks. It's when we begin to make the pursuit of happiness into a hopeless chase after carrots that are always dangled just out of reach.

No wonder so many children wind up finding school to be a disappointment: it is the place where they are taught that learning is a chore and something like happiness must be found in the praise of adults.

"I just want my child to be happy." "I just want my child to love learning." Laudable goals, indeed, the highest. My goal for these parents is that they come to see that the only way to get there is to set their children free and to trust them to know what to do with their freedom.

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If you're interested in learning more about creating a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For 20 years, I worked in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? Click this link to register and to learn more. This is a course that becomes even more powerful if the whole team does it together. Discounts are available for groups.

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!

An Alternative to Assembly Line Education

The teacher . . . is not a machine which follows a certain syllabus, which has certain lessons to recite to the child, and too make him recite them back. She is a sensitive human being who works with her intellect, and loves her work. She is not helpless. She has faith in human nature and the child. She is calm and sure of herself, but not timid. She is not frightened or nervous or in doubt. She is armed with love and understanding.

Educator Maria Montessori wrote this over a century ago. She was part of a vanguard of philosophers, scientists, and innovators that included fellow pioneers such as John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Rudolph Steiner who were working during that era to understand what it means to treat children as fully formed, capable human beings, rather than as incomplete products to be manufactured along an education assembly line.

Tragically, this idea is still considered "alternative" despite over a century of science and experience supporting and expanding their work. Today our schools are more factory-like than ever, with children being subjected to standardized syllabuses handed down from on high and from which teachers mustn't deviate. Of course, the best of us do deviate, because we know, even as the curriculum writers do not, that children are fully-formed human beings. We deviate because we are sensitive humans who work with our intellect and love our work. We have faith in human nature and the child. This is what has made school at least tolerable for many, if not most, children.

Increasingly, however, policy-makers, largely ignorant of anything about children beyond the factory-model of schooling, seek to punish educators who do not mindlessly adhere to their manufacturing methods, methods that are explicitly inhuman, having been proven in commerce, but never in classrooms. In some places, educators are not even free to choose their own books, discuss scientific theory, or suggest that history is made of both greatness and horror. Some places we are even expected to set our intelligence aside and stick to scripts while being monitored and micro-managed. It would be one thing if these measures were based on scientific principles about how young humans learn, but instead, in many cases, they are being foisted upon school systems in the name of what "the parents" want.

Of course, this all makes it increasingly impossible for educators to love their work. We see this in action as more and more of us are opting out of this profession that we once loved. And for those who remain, it is becoming progressively more difficult to summon up the calm confidence that Montessori and others recognize as a central tenant of teaching.

I have never met a parent who did not want their child treated with love and understanding. I've never met a parent who wanted their child to be taught by a machine. But that is exactly what these education factory bosses are attempting to do to the lives of our children who have no choice about whether or not they will spend their days on these test score assembly lines. In fact, for many children, it is only their teacher's love and understanding that makes school tolerable. 

I've never met a parent who wants their child to suffer from anxiety and depression, yet that is exactly what is happening as even our youngest are expected to put their little noses to the grindstone.

I have been working with early childhood educators and with schools, both directly and indirectly, for over 20 years. We talk about children as fully-formed, capable human beings. We talk about their need to explore, discover, and think for themselves. We talk about the centrality of play to how we learn, especially in the early years. We talk about our faith in human nature. We talk about the importance of relying upon our own intellect and experience and meeting children where they are, rather than where some curriculum says they should be. And we always talk about love and understanding. We question and debate and think. Most of us are parents ourselves: this is what we want for our own children.

Sadly, despite the fact that educators and parents genuinely want the same thing for children, the politics around education has, in many cases, resulted in an almost adversarial relationship between early childhood educators and the parents of the children we teach. This is not good for us, the parents, or society, but it is particularly bad for the fully-formed, capable human beings we call children.

The longer I've done this, the more convinced I've become that if we are going to continue to do our jobs as sensitive human beings, with love and understanding, we are going to have to work to heal this unhealthy divide. Indeed, parents and early childhood educators are natural allies and if we can find a way to link arms, there is no power on earth that can stand in our way. And it starts, as it does with the children we teach, with our relationships.

This is why I developed my 6-week course entitled Partnering With Parents. I won't pretend that it is a panacea for all that ails us, but it is a way forward. Imagine what our world would be like if we could get educators and parents on the same page. Imagine a world in which both educators and parents knew that the best thing for children is love, understanding, and play. It can start with us.

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If you're interested in learning more about creating a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For 20 years, I worked in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? Click this link to register and to learn more. This is a course that becomes even more powerful if the whole team does it together. Discounts are available for groups.

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!

Communities of Mutual Concern

"We still had a blacksmith in our town in those days, if you can believe it." 

I was talking to the great grandfather of one of my students. Most of the time, the grandparents aren't much older than me, but here was a man 30 years my senior. I make a habit of talking to older people about their childhoods. I like seeing how they tend to light up. I learn about recent history through intimate stories, and I'm especially drawn to childhood memories. 

"My friends and I used to walk into town to watch him work. He opened his doors up wide to get some ventilation. They were like barn doors. There was a counter, then behind it was the fire and the anvil. We boys would stand in the doorway to watch. Sometimes he'd come out and talk to us. His arms were like this." He showed me with his hands, then chuckled, "At least one of them was. And he was always covered in soot and sweat. For a long time, I wanted to be a blacksmith when I grew up."

Another grandparent told me about how she used to go around to the back of a neighborhood ice cream parlor where the woman who worked there would secretly give her free samples and where they would often talk "about this and that. All kinds of things. She was like having a grown up sister."

John Holt wrote in his book Escape from Childhood: 

"Children need many more adult friends, people with whom they may have more easy relationships that they can easily move out of or away from whenever they need to or feel like it. Perhaps they found many of those in extended families, among various grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, and so on. Perhaps they found them living in smaller communities, villages, or towns, or neighborhoods in larger cities. But these communities, in which people have a sense of place and mutual concern, are more rare all the time, disappearing from country as well as city. The extended family has been scattered by the automobile an the airplane. There is not a way to bring it together so that children may live close to numbers of older people who will in some degree have an interest in them and care about them."

The scattering of our villages, through automobiles and airplanes, yes, but also through an economic system that demands more and more from adults during what are the typical child-rearing years, is something that concerns me a great deal. If caring for children is among the most important projects of any human civilization, and it is, then how can it be that we're tending to increasingly push children away from the center of life, cordoning them off in "schools?" If the pandemic has showed us anything, it's that the primary reason schools exist anymore is to get the kids out of their parents' hair so they can get to work. 

We know we all need the kinds of connectivity, the kinds of relationships of trust and kinship that can only be found in a community, village, town, or neighborhood, yet most of us start our days by sending the parents into one corner (work) and their children into another (school), one serving economic necessity while the other is left in a hothouse of like-aged children. On top of that, our automobiles and airplanes continue to scatter our small nuclear families far and wide, leaving the rest of our villages -- grandparents, aunts, uncles, and the like -- far away, only accessible by appointment. There are no longer opportunities to stand in the blacksmith's doorway or learn about life from an ice cream scooper. 

This was always my vision for the Woodland Park Cooperative School, a place where families could convene, where both children and adults could forge friendships with one another. Over the years, when I've written here about our preschool, I've focused mostly on the children, avoiding using photographs that show too many adults, but I'm showing a distorted picture of how our community really works. Visitors who see us up close and in person have always remarked on the number of adults around the place. At any given moment children might be playing with one another, but there are others "playing" with adults: cheek to cheek in the garden, tasting the cilantro blossoms from a plant that's gone to seed; working together to get a snack on the table; wondering together about where that jet in the sky is headed. These are often real friendships by anyone's definition of the word, easy relationships formed for a day, a week, or a year. There are always some children who feel so connected to "Paul's mommy" that they ask for her when they arrive. There is disappointment when "Sarah's daddy" isn't there that day and joy at being reunited when "Kisha's grandma" is there.

We know there is something broken in society. We want to blame the press, social media, video games, politics, or declining morals. We all know we are divided, that we are lacking connection and community, even as it continues its long, slow disappearance over decades. We too often believe, I think, that this break up of villages is the effect of some greater cause, but I find myself wondering if it's the other way around. Maybe it was our choice, as a culture, to scatter ourselves that came first. But whatever the case, I think it's clear that a return to the village, in whatever contemporary form, is the balm and cure we need.

I have seen that our preschools can, at least in part, serve the role of community based on mutual concern. That, at least, is much of the thinking behind my course, The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents (see below). We can't all be cooperative schools, but we do stand in a unique position to bring children, parents, and even grandparents together by placing our children at the center of our lives. As John Holt points out, children need this, but it doesn't take much reflection to realize we all do. Children, families, and educators: I can think of no better foundation upon which to build our future villages.

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If you're interested in learning more about creating a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For 20 years, I worked in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? Click this link to register and to learn more. This is a course that becomes even more powerful if the whole team does it together. Discounts are available for groups.

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!