The Anti-Social Century?

Salvador Dalí (Luna Luna)

My biggest "vice," one I thankfully share with my wife, is that we like to go out to dinner. If I die broke, that's where the money went.

It's not necessarily the food. I'm not bad in the kitchen and, after 40 years of cooking for my wife, I'm confident I can please our pallets better than most restaurants. No, the reason we go "out" is to be out, to be among people, noise, action, laughter, and to bop along to music, even crappy background music, with others. At least once a week we invite friends into our home for dinner for the same reason. Likewise for going out dancing: we could dance in our living room, but the point is socializing. We currently live in a place in which we know most of our neighbors. I often sit on my front porch with a book and always wind up chatting with passers by. We walk the dog twice a day, and not only for the physical exercise, but because our neighbors are also out walking their dogs. On a typical day, it can take an hour chat our way through a mile.

We have consciously chosen this lifestyle because we've seen too many people in America age into isolation and loneliness. But, it can feel like swimming up stream. The world seems to want us isolated. I could easily while away an hour scrolling through vaguely interesting things on my smartphone. It takes extra effort to go outside and engage, but I'm always happy I did. I feel more alive in contrast to the aftermath of scrolling when I feel, without exaggerating, a little more dead.

When we were young, this is how everyone we know lived: face-to-face. Today, many of the restaurants we frequent are half empty, but have bags of take out orders piled up around the cash register. I'm happy they're able to stay in business, but the steady stream of blank-faced customers who come through the door and grab their food to eat in front of Netflix is depressing. They hardly even say "hello" or "thank you." Grocery stores are full of professional shoppers, loading up carts for delivery. The movie theaters are virtually empty, even for blockbuster movies as people stay home, streaming their entertainment. And, of course, working remotely is no longer a trend, but rather a way of life. I recently saw a survey in which 80 percent of the respondents who had been with their partner for five or fewer years met through an online app. Even togetherness is accessed through solitude. There is a current Google ad being run for its new AI product that portrays young people having social-style conversations with a damned robot instead of, you know, a person.

Isolation is no longer just a problem of the elderly.

According to The Atlantic's latest cover story -- The Anti-Social Century (sorry, the story might be behind a paywall):

Eroding companionship can be seen in numerous odd and depressing facts of American life today. Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species. Since the early 2000s, the amount of time that Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside their nuclear family has declined by more than a third.

My wife and I recently returned from a trip to Hanoi, Vietnam, where we participated the International Conference for Happiness and Well-being in Education hosted by TH School. The conference was wonderful, I came home with a lot to think about, but for the past couple months, the stories we've been telling are about our impressions of the social lives of the Vietnamese people. 

Hanoi is a city of 8.5 million, roughly the size of New York City. And like New York, which we visited over the holidays, you feel the massive population every time you go outside. The difference is that in NY most people are simply rushing from place-to-place, eyes forward (or down), earbuds installed, phone screens lit. It feels like you're perpetually in someone's way and they are perpetually in yours. In Hanoi, however, the crowds tend to be gathered together, in cafes, coffee houses and garden patches. I can't tell you how many times we rounded a corner to find dozens of people boisterously eating pho together, enjoying one another's company, not a smartphone in sight. 

The people of Hanoi seem to spend their days out on the sidewalk, pruning plants, washing dishes, preparing dinner, exercising, and, you know, living. The sounds of traffic are similar to everywhere else, but above it all, under it all, is the steady human sound, the talking and laughter of togetherness. Even in the biggest crowds, I was never once made to feel I was in someone else's way.

It's tempting to blame the pandemic, but the Vietnamese went through it as well. According to The Atlantic, this American trend toward isolation, toward an anti-social lifestyle, has been ongoing for decades, although it was obviously accelerated by Covid. It's tempting to joke that this is a boon to introverts, but as an introvert myself, there is a difference between choosing to  stay home with a good book and doing it day-after-day, year-after-year. Even introverts need a social life.

As an early childhood educator, I'm worried about how this is impacting our children. We know that a socially stunted childhood leads to a socially stunted adulthood. Anxiety and depression are currently spiking, not just among teenagers, but right down to our three-year-olds. Psychologists know that this is, at least in part, a direct result of a lack of a social life. Our play-based preschools provide the right kind of social environment for young humans, but more and more of our youngest citizens spend their days in increasingly academic settings in which socializing is intentionally kept to a minimum. 

This isn't about deep and abiding friendships, although that too is important, rather this is about simple daily social interactions.

Yesterday, the young man in front of me at the supermarket was attempting to purchase a canned beverage. His debit card wasn't working. The effort to talk with the cashier (a man about my age) was clearly a struggle for him as he tried to explain what was going on. After a couple minutes during which I could see his face reddening, I offered to buy his drink for him. He seemed stunned that I'd spoken to him, blank. The cashier clarified, "This man is kindly offering to buy your drink for you." Finally, suspiciously, the young man relented and let me pay. Only then, almost as an afterthought, he smiled at me. I took it as an unvoiced thank you. I could tell his anxiety was overwhelming him. As the kid walked away, I joked to the cashier, waving toward the racks of snacks, "I paid out of self-defense. If I'd had to wait one more minute, I'd have grabbed one of these impulse items." We then bantered back and forth about whether or not I should have a candy bar as he rung up my purchases. It was exactly the kind of stupid, social banter for which young people mock older people, but I walked out of there slightly more alive than I'd gone in.

The emergence of this phenomenon is insidious. It has snuck up on us slowly, and then suddenly, which is a blessing because we might have otherwise missed it until it's too late. The Atlantic article asserts that this is a uniquely American problem, and our experience in Hanoi suggests that this might be true, but if history is a guide, it won't be long before we've exported it, like we do most things, for better or worse . . . In this case, worse.

I love convenience as much as the next guy, but we need to come to grips with the high price we're paying for this world in which everyone can live as a "secular monk." I know that it's unhealthy for young children, not just socially, but emotionally and intellectually as well. Day-to-day socializing is an aspect of play that we don't often consider, but in many ways it stands at the center of why play is so important for human development. And this goes for all of us, not just the kids. 

So you know, in spirit of play, how about going outside today and say "Hi" to someone? You have nothing to lose but your isolation. It will make you feel a little more alive.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!

Humans Thinking at Full Capacity

As you step onto a preschool playground or a play-based classroom, the first thing visitors are struck by is the never-ending swirl of bodies in motion. Adult visitors to Woodland Park have always stopped at the gate or doorway seemingly afraid to get in the way as children move from one thing to the next, leap, skip, swing, crawl, jump, jiggle, bend, and reach. Even when children stop to greet the newcomers, they are in motion: kicking a leg for no apparent reason, clapping their hands, bouncing up and down. Sure, some of the children might remain relatively still for a few minutes at a time, but even the ones curled up with a book are bouncing a foot. Even the ones pretending to be a baby under a blanket are wiggling.

"Sit as little as possible," wrote the influential philosopher and notorious nature trail hiker Friedrich Nietzsche, "do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement."

A mountain of studies back up Nietzsche's assertion. When we move our bodies our visual sense is sharpened, our ability to concentrate is enhanced, comprehension is boosted, information retention is increased, and self-regulation improves. Cognitive scientist Sain Beilock even asserts that "(m)oving the body can alter the mind by unconsciously putting ideas in our heads before we are able to consciously contemplate them on our own time." (Italics are mine.) In other words, our bodies can know stuff through movement for which our brains aren't yet ready. And it doesn't necessarily have to be robust movement either: one study found that when people doodle while listening to a lecture, they retain nearly 30 percent more of the information. By now, most of us know that our brains alone don't do our thinking, but rather our whole bodies, other people, and even things are involved, not just intellectually, but emotionally as well. 

Another great 20th century philosopher and psychologist, William James once observed that one of the best ways to overcome mild depression or ennui is to stand up straight, pull our shoulders back, hold our head high, and move confidently. More contemporarily, Katherine Isbister, a professor and researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz, talks of what she calls embodied self-regulation. "Changing what the body does," she writes, "can change our feelings, perceptions, and thoughts. 

(If you are interested in digging deeper into any of this, I highly recommend Annie Murphy Paul's book The Extended Mind.)

One of the foundational myths of schooling is that we must somehow get the kids to stop moving around in order to focus, but the exact opposite is true. Some schools have even gone so far as to cut back on recess in elementary school in favor of more "seat time." The evidence, however, tells us that the more children move, the more clearly they think. This evidence is so clear and so compelling (and by now, so widely known) that the fact that our schools persist in forcing even preschoolers to spend large chunks of their days sitting quietly is outright malpractice.

What visitors see as they stand in the doorway of standard classrooms are humans whose minds are torn between obeying the adults by sitting still and their natural urge to actually think and learn through movement. 

What visitors to a play-based classroom are witnessing are humans in motion, thinking and learning at full capacity. 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!

Clearing the Deck for that Next First Step

A baby's first step is a moment that thrills us. We seen them, their entire body focused on this previously impossible task. That it's something they will spend their rest of their life doing without thought or special effort, isn't relevant. This is the moment we video tape if we can, but the truth is that young children spend their days routinely engaged in similar firsts: grasping an object, drinking from a cup, clapping. These are all things that we, as adults, do on automatic pilot, so to speak, but for a young child, they are things they are in the process of learning so it takes a coordinated and concentrated effort by both mind and body to make them happen.

As adults, most of our movements and actions throughout the day are accomplished with minimal conscious thought. When we were learning to drive, for instance, we at first had to think about every single thing we did. Our brain sends a signal to our foot to press the brake pedal, then the tiniest fraction of a second later our foot makes that idea come true, simultaneously sending the signal that it has done so back to the brain, which in turn confirms that yes, this is what I was hoping for. Turning the key, releasing the emergency brake, putting the car in gear, depressing the accelerator, gently at first, then with a little more oomph, all of it was once something that required our full attention. Now it's all handled in the background by our brain and body, freeing our conscious mind to do other things, like worrying about that upcoming meeting or re-litigating the argument we just had with our spouse.

Soon that baby will be running on autopilot while clapping as their conscious mind can concentrate on their part in the game at hand. This is what we have evolved to do: relegate as much habitual movement as possible to the background in order to free our attention for more pressing matters. Meditation and mindfulness practices seek to temporarily override this phenomenon, to refocus us on our routine movements, but it can't last for long because we've evolved for automating what we can and focusing on what we can't.

Our brains are often referred to as "prediction machines," and it makes sense. After all, there is a tiny lag time (something like 100 milliseconds) between the moment we see, say, a tiger about to pounce and our brain receiving that information. This means that we are always living ever so slightly in the past. Some believe that our conscious minds have evolved, at least in part, for the purpose of trying to correct for this by forever predicting the future, giving us a better chance of escaping that tiger.

Of course, most of the time, we aren't faced with tigers, but rather less pressing things like taking our first step. As neuroscientist Karl Friston puts it, "Actions are making your predictions come true . . . The way that we move -- the intention to move, the willed actions that we enjoy -- are actually prior fantasies that I am going to do this. The body -- the reflexes, the muscles -- realizes those fantasies" As science journalist George Musser puts it in his new brain-bending book Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: "According to Friston's way of thinking, which he calls active inference, the brain is not the body's helmsman or puppeteer, but its dreamer. Brain and body are bound up in a mutual project to predict the world successfully."

No wonder our brain-bodies are so eager to automate as much as possible. Indeed, we are even more marvelous than that. If our brains make predictions that prove correct, our sensory inputs  typically don't rise to the level of conscious awareness. Even when the prediction proves wrong, if it's an easy error to correct, our conscious mind doesn't get involved. Only when our predictions are way off and challenging to fix does our conscious mind get fully involved. In other words, as Musser puts it, "In short, we are only aware of thwarted expectations. And there is a lot thwarting. Nothing in the real world is ideal, nothing ever goes according to plan, so the brain is always erring and calibrating. If not for these continual imperfections, we'd have no need to be conscious."

And this isn't even the most brain-bending concept in Musser's book.

This has direct application for those of us who work with young children. For one thing, it means that we are, at best, wasting our time when we try to "teach" children anything if they haven't already shifted the prerequisite movements into autopilot. If a child is still using their conscious mind to manipulate a pencil, for instance, there is no way they can be taught to write letters. If a child must still make a conscious effort to sit still or be quiet, there's no way we can expect them to learn much of anything else while sitting still and being quiet. 

But more to the point, we are designed to learn by attempting to make our dreams reality through embodiment. This is why we must be free to move. Research indicates that all of us think more clearly and creatively while in motion. Our brains need the give-and-take with our bodies, and specifically our senses, in order to do much of anything.

This, at least in part, helps explain why play is a better teacher than any kind of adult-directed instruction. Direct instruction requires educators to attempt to somehow wrangle children's attention toward pre-determined "learning objectives." That so many teachers attempt to do this while simultaneously insisting on stillness and silence, is irrational given what we know about learning. It's like trying to push water up a hill, which is why punishments and rewards are so often the real focus of much of what we call schooling. When you essentially disable self-motivation, that's what you're left with.

Play, or self-directed learning, frees our conscious mind to choose what it is ready, right now, to focus on, what it needs to focus on, what it is self-motivated to focus on. It frees children to do what they are best at, dream and move, be thwarted and try again until that combination of thought and movement has been mastered, clearing the deck for that next first step.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!

Learning to Resolve Conflict Among Peers

"Teacher Tom, Arthur is calling us 'finger binger'."

"Are you finger binger?"

"No!"

"Then I guess he's wrong."

Most of the time, the children don't need us to get involved in their every day conflicts.

"Teacher Tom, those guys won't let us in their factory."

"How does that make you feel?"

"Bad."

"Did you tell them it makes you feel bad."

"No."

"If I were you I'd tell them it makes me feel bad when they don't let me in their factory."

Sometimes, of course, they do need us, especially when emotions are running high, but most kids, most of the time, are fully competent. They just might need a different perspective.

"Teacher Tom, she took the hula hoops and we were using them."

"Oh no, what did you say to her?"

"Nothing."

"Maybe she doesn't know you were using them."

I don't want to call it tattling, because that word is full of judgement. I like to think of it as kids taking a moment to talk through their options with me. Children who are new to our school often arrive with the expectation that the adult will simply "fix" the problem through the blunt instrument of force that is ours simply by virtue of being an adult in a space for children. But resolving conflicts is a life skill that can't be learned through other people exercising police power.

"Teacher Tom, Erin hit me!"

"Oh no, we all agreed to not hit each other. What did you do?"

"I came over here to tell you."

"Now I know. What are you going to say to Erin?"

"I'm going to tell her to stop hitting me and that I don't like it!"

"That sounds like a good idea."

Sometimes they want me to come with them, to stand nearby. If I sense they're asking for moral support, then I go with them. If I think they just want to use me as muscle or an implied threat, then I ask them to report back.

"Teacher Tom, none of the kids will give me a turn on the swings."

"And you want a turn."

"Yes."

"Did you tell them you want a turn?"

"Yes, and they still keep swinging."

"Maybe they didn't hear you."

"They heard me. I said it really loud."

"What did you say?"

"I said I'm going to tell you that they were being mean."

"And what did they say about that?"

"They said they weren't being mean."

"Maybe they weren't being mean. Maybe they just aren't finished with their turn. Maybe they think you're being mean."

"I'm not mean!"

"I know, but maybe they think you are."

"I know! I'll say please!"

Most often it's the last I hear of the conflict. Other times they get stuck and need me to mediate, which doesn't mean "solve." Usually, I just listen, occasionally repeating or reframing key points.

"Don't call us finger binger!"

If he doesn't respond, I might say, "They don't want you to call them finger binger."

"I didn't call them finger binger."

If they don't respond, I might say, "He says he didn't call you finger binger."

"He did too."

"They say you did."

"I called them finger inger!"

"He says he called you finger inger, not finger binger."

"Well, we don't like that either."

. . . This can take a long time without anyone having more inherent power than anyone else. Learning to resolve conflicts among peers is, necessarily, an inefficient process. And it goes on throughout life. 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!

Skipping Over Complexity to Get to the Answer . . . Which is 42

I've never written about the day I became a father. I think about that day and often tell parts of the story, but so far I've not found all of the words to do so, if words are even adequate. What I need to say is too complex to express in my normal way. Maybe it requires a novel. Maybe it requires poetry, sculpture, or painting, or it's possible that the way to say what I need to say hasn't been discovered yet.

Those of us who have spent our lives around young children, are familiar with their creative struggle to express themselves. It's part of the process of learning the language, of course, so the conversational short cuts and "good enough" putty with which we spackle our day-to-day adult conversation is yet to be learned. Children regularly find themselves thinking thoughts or having feelings for the first time and they need to communicate about them. Without being able to make use of the cliches upon which we adults rely, they must invent a way of saying it.

An excited five-year-old once replied to an adult who had off-handedly asked, "How are you?" by replying, "This day has a powerful, huge, even big magic in it!"

A three-year-old described an accidental lever she had made on the playground in the form of a chant: "Push down, go up, push down, go up, push down . . ."

Another preschooler, playing with a wine cork in a tub of water, explained, "It went on the water and didn't go down in the water, but I could push it down. And it went back on the water!"

In each example, you can hear the child grasping for complexity, for depth, for knowledge about themselves and their world, then striving to express the fullness of it, grasping at words, building with them the way they build with blocks. Soon they are going to learn to simply say, "I feel good" or to reduce the complexity into words like "lever" and "float," but right now it's the complexity that matters, because it's not just the angels and devils that live in details. Understanding complexity is all about the details, the fullness of a thing, the process or experience. Later will be the time for more concisely summing up the complexity.

Too often, educators try to skip over the complexity and go straight to the summing up, immediately offering children the simple concise answer. Stripped of complexity, the responses are rendered mostly meaningless even if absolutely correct. In Douglas Adams' novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, they build a computer programed to answer the question, "What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?" After seven million years the computer calculates the answer, which is "Forty-two." It's the right answer, but without the rest of the story, it's useless for anything beyond passing a test.

When children play, we sometimes see it as frivolous and purposeless, and perhaps to that child, in that moment, it is, but we should never make the mistake of thinking it's meaningless. This is why we don't step in to correct the child by telling them that there is "no such thing as magic," or "help them" by showing them what else a lever can do, or which other objects can float on water. When we do, we risk rendering the moment meaningless, or as the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget wrote, "Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself." The complexity is where the action is because that's what interests us about a new thing, the details. When we leave children to decide for themselves which of those details are relevant, where to build their own scaffolding, and whether and when to move on to something else entirely, we free them to learn beyond the surface of right answers into where complexity lives. When humans engage like this, even frivolously and purposelessly, we're inventing for ourselves.

And as we invent, we find we must communicate about it. We're a language-using animal, of course, and schools tend to concentrate on using language to bring our inventions into existence, although sadly, most of what they encourage focuses on using language to "prove" what we know on tests or to practice what we know on worksheets. Even our essays must be graded. It's doubly sad because much of children's learning is literally being constructed by themselves as they strive to express it, be it through words, art, or science. That someone else has listened carefully, understood, and acknowledged that they've understood is a vital part of that process. It's this process that is important, not the outcome.

As we get older, we tend to experience fewer things for the first time, which leads many of us to fill our language with words and phrases that rush us past the complexity. We've got places to be and things to do, after all. We don't have the time to just play, to let ourselves fall into the details and wander around, being frivolous and purposeless. I suppose when you've seen it all before, it's hard to summon the enthusiasm for inventing things, unless, that is, you have young children in your life. If you listen to them, listening not just with your ears, but with your heart, it's impossible to not be inspired. 

When a child answers, "How are you?" with, "This day has a powerful, huge, even big magic in it," you find yourself nodding along, at once understanding something more complex, and therefore more true, than the old shoe of, "I'm fine, and you?" We can't do this ourselves without play. Without play, we lose sight of complexity and stop inventing our world, becoming increasingly efficient, but going nowhere. 

This is something I started to discover on the day I became a father: children are here to remind us to keep inventing life for ourselves.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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 Process of Putting Reality Through Its Paces

Any of us who have spent much time with very young children have had the privilege of observing one of them discover themselves in a mirror. It's confounding to them at first. That other child surprises them by being so close, so suddenly. When they realize it's themselves at whom they are looking, that there is no other child inside the mirror, they are delighted: it's like magic. They are delighted because it's a novelty in their world, and humans have evolved to notice novelty. I suppose there are some children who are at first afraid of their own reflection, but the ones I've observed, are delighted when they realize what is happening. And in their delight, they experiment: making faces, jumping in and out of range, showing it to other people, and generally putting it through its paces (which is why unbreakable mirrors are a good idea in preschool spaces). 

It's a clear example of learning through play. The child, by putting their own hands on it and their own face in it, is engaged in discovery. Their efforts will not likely result in an understanding of why a mirror works, but they will, if allowed their experiments, all learn the basics of how it works. Most of the time, for most of us, that's all we ever need to know about mirrors: they reflect a portion of visual reality. Young children usually don't yet have the vocabulary to describe the phenomenon, but they will nevertheless learn that the "picture" in the mirror changes as their body changes in relation to it. 

This seems so commonplace to us adults that it's hardly worth mentioning, yet it stands at the center of much of the current thinking around the nature of reality: perspective matters.

"To those of us who believe in physics," wrote the great physicist Albert Einstein in 1955, "this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, if a stubborn one." He wrote this in a letter to a family of a friend who had just died. One presumes that the great scientist was offering comfort. After all, if time does not flow in a particular direction, then our loved ones are always still with us, just not always at/on the same tract of time that we currently occupy. I don't imagine it offered much solace to those who had lost their loved one, even if Einstein had proven it true by mathematics.

Math, for most of us, offers, at best, cold comfort. It tells us that our loved ones are simply elsewhere in time in the way that they might be elsewhere in space. True, but not useful information. For most of human history, when a loved one travelled hundreds of miles from where we stood, and stayed there, it was the equivalent of losing them into time, to death, except it was into space. In the meantime, we've invented postal systems, telephones, and the internet, all of which allow us to keep in touch even as they occupy a different corner of space than we do. We've invented trains and cars and airplanes that can take us to where they are or bring them back to us with relative ease. We haven't invented a technology for communicating or traveling through time, so, as "children of time," as physicist Carol Rovelli puts it, we are stuck with the finality of death no matter what the math tells us.

Rovelli writes, "The time of our thinking is directional because our thinking is itself an irreversible phenomenon. Because we ourselves are irreversible phenomena." Being children of time is a perspective on the universe, an angle on the mirror, that we can't change by moving around in space. To do that, we would need to be able to move around in time, and, like a child discovering how a mirror works, put it through its paces. Sadly, so far, and probably forever, math will be our only way to comprehend this.

"We are always convinced that our natural intuitions are self-evidently right," writes Rovelli in his book White Holes, "and it is this that prevents us from learning more." What we see when we commit ourselves to observing young children, as opposed to "teaching" them, is that they are far less attached to their own self-evident rightness. Perhaps we adults have concluded that learning is "hard" because we ourselves struggle to overcome our natural intuitions. As we age, we tend to calcify, to take comfort from what we think we know and even to fear things that seems like magic (like our current cultural nervousness about so-called "artificial intelligence"). After all, we've been taught magic doesn't exist, so when we see our face in whatever mirror we are considering, we dig in our heels, reluctant or afraid of upsetting the status quo. That can't be true. It's a trick. I'm being gaslit. In the good old days, you would get roughed up for saying such things. The Earth is obviously flat. 

What children understand better than we do is that when confronted by something new, something novel, something magical, if we are to understand it, we must play with it. Play is how we discover new perspectives, and it's only through collecting as many perspectives as possible that we can ever approach comprehension about this mirror, or anything else for that matter.

There is a mountain that I can see from my living room window. I spend time every day looking at it. In the morning, I see familiar rocky faces caused by shadows and patches of vegetation. As the sun rises throughout the morning, the first faces are replaced by new faces. If I happen to see the mountain from a perspective other than my living room window, even if I look at it as the sun rises, it shows me different faces. I know, of course, that those faces are creations of my own mind in partnership with my perspective: the mountain does not have faces, yet there they are whenever I look. I once tried to show some of the more obvious faces to my wife. She saw faces, but they were different ones than the ones I was seeing. The awe-inspiring thing is the recognition that all those faces -- hers, mine, everone's -- exist all the time, even if I can't see them.

The great flaw in Western science is that it presumes that there is, ultimately, for everything, everywhere, a "god's perspective," one that sees all of reality objectively. Scientists like Rovelli are investigating the controversial idea that there is no such perspective, that everything is a function of relationships between things, like the relationship that the toddler creates and their mirror. Reality, he writes, "is perhaps nothing other than perspectives."

This is why play, the process of putting reality through its paces, is the most up-to-date and direct way to learn about the world from our unique, if limited and impermanent, perspective.

From the perspective of science, reality is just a bunch of particles and waves that our senses take in and our minds construct into shapes, sounds, scents, textures, and tastes that allows us, as children of time, to better survive.

From the perspective of life itself, however, we have no choice in any given moment but to trust the world our minds have created from the stuff of reality. Education is the process of adding to our perspectives by playing with reality, especially the parts that are novel or look like magic, not through the question of why (which is the domain of science and manufacturing), but rather how. How is the question of life itself. Why leads us to take things apart, to separate them, to try to seek the ever-just-out-of-grasp god's perspective, whereas how leads us to the relationship this object or idea has with ourselves and the rest of the world as we know it. How is the question that allows us to figure out where new perspectives fit with old ones. How makes us bigger.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!

Following a Treasure Map

One of the children, probably inspired by a movie, used a stick to draw a "treasure map" in the sand pit. Other children gathered around as he told the story of what "treasure" is, what a "map" is, and the adventure upon which they were going to embark.

The treasure, he explained, was a chest full of gold and jewels. Some of the kids wanted to know what a chest was. Others wondered, knowing it was all pretend, why the treasure couldn't be ice cream or Pretty Ponies. The concept of the map was difficult. It wasn't even clear to me that the boy drawing the map really understood what he was trying to describe. Although he assured the crew that treasure was buried (at least one child needed that word defined as well) somewhere on the playground, the map included a coconut tree and giant boulders, features that I expect were drawn from the movie landscape. 

"Let's pick some coconuts when we get there," enthused one pirate. "Pirate," in this case, had been defined as "guys who go around and find treasure."

These kinds of scenarios are the gold standard of play-based learning. I'm sure there are many preschool educators who would have felt compelled, in the name of learning, to step in with corrections and clarifications, or worse. In similar play scenarios, I've watched well-meaning adults engage in what they think of as "scaffolding," by offering impromptu lessons about, say, maps or pirate lore or ship rigging, in the hopes of "deepening" or "extending" the learning. The problem is that even if the kids are willingly diverted, even if the educator is engaging, we've now had the children's play taken over by an adult. In a moment, we seen the children turn away from one another, away from their own questions, explorations, speculations, and ad hoc conclusions based on dialog and agreement. They are now relying on the adult for questions and answers, rather than continuing to engage in the highest pursuit of human intellectual endeavor.

There are those who would argue that this game is, at best, a waste of time, that these children playing their fantastical games of imagination, getting the facts wrong, playing with wrong ideas, and even spreading them amongst themselves, may be learning, but that it's false knowledge that will somehow have to be undone. But that, I think, is a misunderstanding of what play is all about, and, for that matter, what learning is all about.

"When we talk about the big bang or the fabric of space time, what we are doing is not a continuation of the free and fantastic stories that humans have told nightly around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years," writes physicist Carlo Rovelli in his book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. "It is the continuation of something else: of the gaze of those same men in the first light of day looking at tracks left by antelope in the dust of the savannah — scrutinizing and deducting from the details of reality in order to pursue something that we can’t see directly but can follow the traces of. In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. This is the nature of science."

The birth of the universe and the nature of space and time are every bit as much mysteries to physicists as treasure maps and pirates are to these preschoolers. What drives scientists is the same thing that drives playing children: they are motivated by the mystery, by their own questions, and by the freedom to seek answers. Too often, educators, in our commitment to facts and truth and teaching, take over the learning by providing shortcuts to answers, stripping away the mystery that has driven humans since the beginning of time. We forget that getting it wrong is every bit as important to this process as being right.

The job in life is not to know stuff, but rather to figure stuff out so that we will then know. And we get there through play.

The pirates decided that one of the playground cedars was, for their purposes, a coconut tree. A stack of shipping pallets were the boulders. And off they went on their treasure hunt, following mysterious tracks like their ancestors did.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!

If Only We Could Remember That Living is Enough

We take memory for granted. 

Not our specific memories, of course. Most of us have memories we cherish as well as those we try to forget. Many of us spent these most recent holidays trying to re-create fond memories. Memoirs are a popular literary genre. And we think we know that memory is the foundation upon which learning is built. 

What we take for granted is that we have memories in the first place.

Even babies are born with memories of the womb, of the muffled sound of our mothers' voice, of the warmth, of the connection to another living being. And it could be that it is those memories that cause babies to seek similar connection in the bright, chaotic "outside world." The memory of mommy's voice causes us to turn toward it. The memory of warmth causes us to snuggle in. The memory of connection drives us to suckle. No one knows, of course, but it makes a certain kind of sense from an evolutionary point of view.

I've met a few people who claim they have vestigial in utero memories, but most of us retain very little from before we're four or five-years-old. Last week, I recalled an event from our adult daughter's preschool years while on our holiday visit to New York. She replied, "I don't know if I remember that or if you've just told the story so many times that I think I remember it." Cognitive psychologists tell us that this is the case for most of our "memories" from those years: they've been kept alive by others, by photographs, by videos. 

I find it impossible to conceive of life without memories. How would I know how to brush my teeth if not for the memories of having done it before? I once experienced an unsettling bout of partial amnesia. It lasted a couple hours during which I couldn't recall anyone in my life other than my immediate family. It was frightening, but I could still brush my teeth, still prepare food, still operate my electronic devices (although, one of the freakiest parts was realizing that I didn't recognize any of the my so-called "friends" on Facebook). Most of my memory was still there and I was easily able to cobble together a functioning life from the memory that remained. 

My mother-in-law recently died after a decade of ever-worsening dementia. By the end, not only had she forgotten people, but even, at times, how to do such basic things as eating. She would sit down at the table, then ask, "What do I do now?" We sometimes even had to remind her to chew and swallow. Losing one's memories, I'm convinced, is life's cruelest disease.

Of course, forgetting is every bit as common as remembering, probably more so. On that same  holiday visit, our daughter casually recalled an event from her childhood involving me that I simply don't remember at all. I don't recall most of what happened yesterday, to be honest. 

And then there is the well-documented fact that the more often we recall a memory, the more we tend to change it, meaning that many of our fondest memories are mostly fiction, even as we insist they are true. This bothered me when I first learned about it, but now I see it as a blessing that we are capable of changing the past to suit the present. People say you can't change the past, but I beg to differ: we do it all time.

We take memory for granted because, like breathing, we can't imagine life any other way.

There are many, often conflicting, theories about why, what, and how we remember. Obviously, the urge toward survival causes us to retain memories of where to find food and water. Traumatic memories remind us, or teach us, to avoid things like tigers and geysers and poisonous plants. As Oscar Wilde wrote, "Experience is simply the name we give to mistakes." That also applies to our successes. Memory, with all its vagaries, stands at the center of what we call learning: we use information stored about the past to make decisions for the future

Of course, other animals possess memories and likewise use memory to learn, although, in our arrogance we tend to think of their's as shorter and less complex than ours. I mean, our dogs might return for a decade to the same shrub under which they once found a pizza crust, but what kind of memory does, say, a spider have? Increasingly, however, the evidence is showing us that the rest of our fellow travelers, animals and even plants, have amazingly complex cognition. 

For instance, in her book The Light-Eaters, journalist Zöe Schlanger writes about the evidence that plants also possess the ability to learn through memory:

"What garlic needs in order to sprout, is the memory of winter. That the spring eventually comes is not enough to make life emerge — a good long cold is crucial. This memory of winter is called “vernalization.” Apples and peach trees won’t flower or fruit without it . . . The remarkable thing about vernalization is that it means plants remember. The term undisputedly applies; plants use information stored about the past to make decisions for the future. This isn’t a singular example. Plants take note of the length of a day and the position of the sun. Cornish mallow . . . will turn its leaves hours before sunrise to face the horizon in exactly the direction it expects the sun to rise. The movement itself originates in the tissue at the base of its stalks, where the mallow will adjust the pressure of the water flowing through it to bend in the desired direction. Throughout the day, the amount and direction of sunlight the mallow experiences is encoded in the photoreceptors laid out across its leaves. It stores the information overnight, during which time it will use it to predict where and when the sun will rise the next day . . . Researchers have messed with the mallow by simulating a more “chaotic “sun,” switching the direction of its light source. The mallow learns the new location . . . Memory clearly has deep roots in biology. This makes sense; if the trajectory of all evolution is toward survival, then the ability to remember has a natural evolutionary advantage. It’s incredibly useful for staying alive."

As an educator, I see that nature, all of nature, learns what it needs to learn simply by living. There are those who argue that we need schooling because humans have made life far more complex than has nature, but c'mon! At best, we're on par with ants and bees as far as societal complexity goes. And when we consider plants and the 200 million year head start they have on humans, when we consider the planet they have in fact created, including animal life, including our lives, it's hard to not at least be open to the notion that what we see as species superiority is a failure of memory. We've retold the story of our existence as a work of fiction with ourselves as the main character, forgetting that we live in a universe that is far too complex for us ever to really understand it: even our own brains, the part of our body in which we imagine our memories are stored, is beyond our ability to comprehend. We might get closer and closer to the mechanics of how it works, but we simply don't have the perceptual ability to know how those mechanics result in our human experience. It's often referred to as "the hard problem of consciousness," made so by the paradox of having to use our minds to think about our minds.

The hubris of schooling, the notion that we adults can somehow one-up Mother Nature, has lead us to believe that our children, who are born, like plants, knowing exactly how to learn from life itself, must be tricked and tracked and trained in systems and schemas. Today, few of us don't remember childhood without schooling, although we recall very, very little of what we were actually meant to learn. Indeed, the main lessons that most of us learn from school is that life requires toeing the line, doing what we're told, and staying focused on what authority figures tell us to focus on. 

Life itself sends us butterflies, but school tells us not to chase them. Life sends us answers, but school tells us the only answers worth anything are the ones attached to the questions asked by adults. Life sends us billions of years of memories, of experience, of wisdom, but school attempts to replace that with a meager, dull, narrow range of trivia.

The great educator John Dewey wrote, "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself." If only we could remember that living is enough.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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!