Learning is a Process of Upsetting the Status Quo

On a cellular level, learning something new requires growing new nerve cells along with the connectivity between them. In other words, learning always means replacing the status quo with something else.

As a little boy, it was self-evident that tiny people somehow got inside our television set or that there was another child inside the mirror who delighted in imitating me. As a species it was once self-evident that the sun revolved around the earth, that life could arise spontaneously from non-living matter, and that lightening was caused by angry gods.

What learning does, for the individual as well as for society as a whole, is change the order of things. And change can be frightening. It can be unsettling, even terrifying, to recognize that what we know is not definitive. It can also, sometimes even simultaneously, delight and awe us as we find ourselves privileged to see the old world in a new way.

We typically think of education as a process of moving from ignorance to knowledge, that we build learning from the foundations up, like a constructing a house. But it is really more like an unveiling, a lifting up of the curtain of ignorance to see behind it, first from this angle, then from that. Each peek shows us a new perspective on truth, one that doesn't negate what we once thought we knew, but rather adds to it, just as our brain adds neurons and connections as it learns.

Every now and then, we see things from a perspective that causes a revolution in our thinking, like when a child realizes, That's me in the mirror, or when Einstein recognized the theory of relativity by imagining himself on a beam of light. We call it epiphany and from that moment on, everything has changed. The status quo is no more. Long live the status quo.

As adults, those moments tend to be rare unless we go out of our way to seek them out, to become curious about things that may at first seem to have no apparent connection our status quo life. This is why we tend to become hideabound and jaded, sometimes to the point that we simply cannot, or refuse to, even consider new perspectives because we know it all. For young children, however, these moments of epiphany come fast and furious as they encounter so much for the first time. It's their openness, their curiosity, their willingness to have their status quo upset, that makes us declare that their minds are "sponges." Indeed, for young children, each day can bring a new ephipany.

Too often, we adults, seeing their capacity for learning, decide we must take advantage of these young brains growing all those new neurons and connections by striving to somehow cram as much in there as possible. I'm thinking here, of course, of the increasing academic-ization of preschool and kindergarten. When we do this, we show our own ignorance of how humans have evolved to learn, stripping the process of curiosity and replacing it with the far weaker external motivators of rewards and punishment. The result is that children become as hidebound and jaded as adults because it's just status quo all the time.

When we allow curiosity to lead, as we do in play-based settings, we lay the groundwork for epiphany. "We consciously take in . . . new experiential data," writes cognitive psychologist and author Christine Caldwell, "and if we feel sufficiently drawn to it (i.e., curious about it) or emotionally invested in it, we will commit this new experience to memory, which is another way of saying that we just learned something. This also explains why we have difficulty learning things we don't care about."

Caldwell goes on to say, "If learning is an act of upsetting the status quo, then, it stands to reason, that conflict is essential to learning. Collaboration is a conflict of ideas."

And this is the vital second piece of what makes play-based learning, or self-directed learning, the gold standard. The ultimate way we access new perspectives is through other people. Playing with others teaches us how to live in a world of conflicting perspectives, to collaborate, and that is why I often say that "together we're a genius."

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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!

The Old Bangeroo

I always used a hand drum as the signal for transitions. At some point, I started referring to it as "the old bangeroo."

For instance, when it was time to tidy up, I'd say, "I guess it's time for the old bangeroo." Several kids would usually object, joyfully, "It's a drum, Teacher Tom!"

"Well, I call it a bangeroo because I'm going to bang it for clean up time."

Sometimes I would say I'm going to bang it so loud that their brains are going to come shooting out of their ears. Sometimes I would say I'm going to bang it so loud that their heads are going to pop off of their shoulders, bounce off the ceiling and come down on someone else's body. Sometimes I would drop the bangeroo bit and instead pretend it's the "clean up time banjo" or "trumpet" or some other instrument as the children corrected me, "It's a drum, Teacher Tom!" Whatever the case, I typically made something of a show of it, one that could go on for several minutes before finally signaling that it was time for our transition.

I started doing this as just another goofy thing to do, something to make our day a little more fun, but over the years I've come to see that it actually provided a function. Young children are notoriously reluctant about transitions, and I don't blame them, I feel it every Monday morning, but this process, one in which I simply goof around for a few minutes, tends to draw the children together and allows them an opportunity to "prepare" themselves for the impending transition. In fact, as I go on, it's quite common for the children to start demanding that I bang the drum as I go through my schtick, especially as I stretch it out. And for those not drawn in by my show, those who need to finish playing, it lets them know they need to start wrapping things up in a way far more concrete than, say, the classic "five minute warning," which is meaningless to very young kids.

Often, by the time I actually bang the drum, kids are standing over their playthings, poised to go into action, anticipating the starting pistol, so to speak. And they usually make short work of it.

One day, we were playing with our wooden trains. We have a big box of tracks and a big box of trains. I try to discourage the kids from just dumping the boxes because all those small items quickly get scattered across the entire space, leaving it unusable as a building area, which results in kids mostly just walking on and kicking through the mess. That said, someone almost always has the idea of dumping the boxes. When it happened on this day, I waited until the dumper had found what he wanted, then uprighted the box and began refilling it, just by way of keeping things tidy.

A girl looked at me with wrinkled eyebrows, "I didn't hear you bang the old bangeroo."

"I didn't."

"Then why are you putting things away?"

"Oh, I'm just getting some of these tracks back in the box so kids don't walk on them. When kids walk on them, they sometimes get broken or people trip and get hurt."

"Oh."

Seconds later, another child, "Teacher Tom, did you bang the old bangeroo?"

"No."

"But you're cleaning up." I repeated my explanation.

Moments later, another, "When did you bang the old bangeroo?"

"I didn't."

Then, without a word, the kids started packing things away, sorting the trains into the train box and the tracks into the track box. I said, "Hey guys, I haven't banged the old bangeroo. It's not clean-up time yet."

And a boy paused long enough to say to me, "Yes it is. You just forgot to bang the old bangeroo."

So I banged it, catching up with them for I am supposed to be their leader.

******

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!

Motor Plans

The two-year-old was attracted to our cast-iron water pump. Maybe he was drawn to the water play. Maybe he was fascinated by the mechanics of it. Maybe it was simply that this is where the older kids tended to congregate and he was drawn to their energy.

Whatever the case, he made a beeline for the pump whenever he was on the playground. At first, he simply observed, but soon, he began taking advantage of gaps in the action to try out the pump handle with his own two hands. His first attempts produced there merest trickle of water, but day-after-day he worked on it until he was pumping with vigor and technique. 

The other children played in the water that flowed downhill from the pump, digging channels and holes in the sand, filling buckets, adding lengths of gutter, building dams and bridges, all of which were dependent upon that flow of water. Before long, the boy was orchestrating his actions to match the needs of the other children, reading the situation, while also responding to calls for "More water!" by pumping with a joy that appeared to fill his entire body.

In a matter of weeks, of his own volition and efforts, he had made himself into the unofficial "pump master."

"One of the best ways to get good at a complex action (such as playing a musical instrument or pitching a baseball game) is to practice it until it becomes a motor plan," writes movement expert and psychologist Christine Caldwell. "Throwing a ball or playing musical scales over and over starts to feel almost automatic, able to be done quickly, almost effortlessly. With the motor plan in place, we can concentrate on the small but tricky adjustments that turn a fastball into a curveball or successive notes into a melody. This is where most of our movement habits come from."

This is clearly what this two-year-old was doing with our water pump. Without prompting or prodding, without instruction or even guidance, through his sacred urge to play, he had developed his "motor plan" to the point that he was able to tweak his movement to suit a variety of situations. He later moved on to joining the older kids in their engineering project, but it began with this process of habit creation through practice and adjustment based on feedback from the environment. 

The development of motor plans through practiced movement and adjustment is obviously intertwined with cognitive functions like attention, perception, and decision-making. The psychological parallel to motor plans is often referred to as "motor cognition." In other words, just as we develop automatic movement habits that allow us to drive a car or knit a scarf, we likewise develop psychological habits including problem-solving and decision-making. Indeed, both motor planning and this kind of cognitive processing seem to share the same brain regions. This suggests that movement and thinking are fully entangled with one another.

This is why young children must move as they learn. Our schools struggle to grasp this concept, even as some are starting to recognize that recess or "movement breaks" help children focus on many of mind-numbing tasks that are assigned them in school. But when we remove the school-ish practice of forcing young children to sit still and silent during "instructional time," and let the children move as they learn the way we do in play-based programs, we free them up to fully engage what cognitive philosopher Andy Clark calls their "minds on the hoof."

He asserts that Homo sapiens have evolved to hunt and forage. For most of our existence as a species, we have been constantly on the move. Our minds have therefore evolved for an active engagement with the world around us, hence "minds on the hoof." The process of developing motor plans and motor cognition are essentially one and the same. We simply aren't able to think as clearly when our bodies aren't involved.

In other words, we have evolved to not just learn, but to become masterful, through our motor plans, like the one this two-year-old developed, driven by curiosity. And motor plans demand the freedom to move our bodies, which is to say, to play.

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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!

"I'll Bet You Won't Try That Again"

One of the best parts of growing up as I did, when I did, was that much of our childhood play took place beyond the reach and view of the adults. It's not that the adults weren't at hand, it's just that when the kids were playing outside, they did their adult things while we played in the neighborhood. This meant that there was very little prior restraint placed on our choices.

If we, say, wanted to try jumping off a shed roof or ride our brakeless red wagon willy-nilly down a hill, there was nothing but our own judgement to stop us. If we survived without significant injury, we got to try it again and again. If, however, things went poorly, our adults would tend to us, then be confident in saying, "I'll bet you won't try that again." And by-and-large we didn't.

What if we had been seriously injured, or even, heaven forbid killed? I don't know. It never happened. In fact, I don't recall any of the neighborhood kids suffering from anything worse than a broken bone or a few stitches. Maybe more terrible things happened to a kid two neighborhoods over, but we didn't have access to those grapevines. I imagine if we did, if say, our parents had heard about a local child becoming permanently paralyzed by a fall from a pine tree, we may have experienced prior restraint, "No climbing pine trees," but we were all "blissful" in our ignorance.

We don't live in that world any more, of course. Nearly everything in our children's lives is subject to prior restraint. There is always adult supervision and there are always rules about how fast, high, or far the kids can go. The grapevines have since invaded every nook of childhood, the fruit of which is the kind of catastrophic thinking that would have abhorred our parents as irresponsible and negligent.

But let's be honest, I'm quite certain that if our parents had known we were planning to jump from a shed roof (something I never, in fact, tried), they would have wisely put the kibosh on it. Likewise with careening downhill in wagons (something I did, in fact, do repeatedly). At a minimum they would have made us wear helmets . . . Had they existed.

And, indeed, the world has changed materially since then. I don't mean that there are more predators or that the laws of gravity have somehow shifted into a more dangerous phase -- the risks associated with those things, I expect, have stayed pretty constant over the decades. What has change are all those grapevines and their fearful fruit. We hear about every catastrophe, not just the local ones, and that has made us more anxious. But perhaps the most impactful things that have changed since the 1960's are that there is now a lot more traffic and that our neighbors are too often strangers who cannot be trusted in the impromptu project of responsible community supervision.

One of our few prior restraints was to avoid Macon Street. It was a "busy" street, the through street that connected all of our cul-de-sacs. By today's standards, it was a shady neighborhood promenade, but compared to the streets on which we played, everyone, even us kids, agreed it wasn't a safe place for us. And maybe because of this, we didn't know any of the families who lived on Macon, while we did know everyone on our own Wembley Street as well as Christopher which was the next cul-de-sac over, accessible to us kids by cutting through unfenced yards, thus avoiding Macon altogether.

In 1965, the leading causes of childhood death in the US were accidents like drowning or burns, followed by death by illnesses like influenza and pneumonia. Today, according to the CDC, the leading causes of childhood death are motor vehicles, followed by firearms. 

So yes, the world has changed, but not necessarily in the ways we often think.

Whatever the case, the result is that for today's children, every waking moment tends to involve prior restraint, enforced by ever-present adults.

As an educator, I can't change the world and its attitudes, but I can make a difference for the children in my care. 

I once taught a boy named Joseph who had a cannon for an arm. By that I mean, that he, as a three-year-old, was capable of throwing any object that could fit in his hand, on a line from one side of the playground to the other. And he loved to throw things: balls, rocks, blocks . . . You name it. He wasn't the first kid who enjoyed throwing, but he was the only preschooler I'd ever met who could throw with such velocity.

Naturally, Joseph's "genius" couldn't be tolerated in a crowded preschool setting. At the same time I felt incredibly guilty putting that prior restraint on something that he enjoyed and at which he excelled. Fortunately, we had access to a large, high-ceilinged room that we barely used for anything other than adult meetings and a bit of storage. One day, when Joseph was struggling with his urge to chuck stuff, I had the idea of designating this room as a kind of throwing range. I then provided him with a few tennis balls and turned it over to him.

He was in heaven.

There was some negotiating when other, less capable, kids wanted to try out the "throwing room," but Joseph himself devised a system whereby he waited until all the throwers were together, shoulder-to-shoulder, then, "One-two-three," they would throw together, all in the same direction, meaning no one was ever in harm's way. Like I said, genius.

It was a much better solution than the blanket prior restraint that children like Joseph so often face: "No throwing things." And it reminded me of the kind of agreements we kids made with one another when playing together unsupervised.

Similarly, when spontaneous wrestling disrupted things, instead of an adult-imposed, "No wrestling," we found a way to make it work without prior restraint, with the children themselves in charge of making it safe enough.

As anyone familiar with my work knows, we always began our school years with no prior restraints on the children because if we were going to have rules, I wanted the children, in the spirit of democracy, to make their own. So there were always restraints, but only those agreed upon by the children themselves, which is, again, in the spirit of how us neighborhood kids managed our own play off the radar of our adults.

I've been accused of wrapping my childhood memories in he sepia tones of nostalgia, making our freedom sound more perfect and complete than it actually was, and there is certainly some truth in that. It's what old men do. At the same time, that underlying freedom and autonomy is something I've always tried to make real for the children in my care and one of the ways to do that is to avoid, to the degree possible, prior restraint. 

And when things go wrong, as they sometimes do, to say with confidence, "I'll bet you won't try that again."

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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!

It's Working

In the introduction to his book Humankind: a Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman writes: 

"If we believe most people can’t be trusted, that’s how we’ll treat each other, to everyone’s detriment. Few ideas have as much power to shape the world as our view of other people. Because ultimately, you get what you expect to get. If we want to tackle the greatest challenges of our times - from the climate crisis to our growing distrust of one another — then I think the place we need to start is our view of human nature."

If this sounds like magical thinking to you, that suggests to me that maybe you've not spent enough time with young children. I mean, sure, like all people, they can be unreasonable, impulsive, and frustrating, they make mistakes and harm other people, sometimes even intentionally, but they can be trusted.

Of course, they can't be trusted with secrets: they're far too honest for that.

They can't be trusted to brush their teeth or always recognize when they need to pee: they're far too grounded in the present moment to fret about the prospect of future cavities or to interrupt their play to go to the bathroom.

They can't be trusted to know or even care about their A-B-C's, 1-2-3's, or P's and Q's: they're far too curious about the actual world and the people they find there to attend too much to our adult-ish abstractions.

They can be trusted, however, to try too hard, to care too deeply, and to be unashamedly awkward. They can be trusted to be open about their enthusiasms, joys, sorrows, and fears with equal vigor. They may be selfish at times, but they can be trusted to not be intentionally mean. And when equipped with both the facts and the freedom to act on those facts, they can be trusted to opt for fairness and compassion.

That last assertion might strike some as more of that magical thinking, but having spent most of my adult life among children who I've sought to set free, I've seen it time after time.

When told they must give up their seat on the swings to another child, they can be trusted to grip the chains more tightly as they refuse to budge. But when informed that someone else is waiting for a turn, I've learned that they can always be trusted to give up their swing within minutes, if not seconds.

I've found that the less I command and the more I inform, the more I can trust young children with their own freedom.

The clinical symptoms of what professor and theorist George Gerber called "mean world syndrome" are cynicism, misanthropy and pessimism. This syndrome causes people to believe that they live in a world that is more violent a dangerous than it actually is and tends to afflict the people who consume the most media. It's what causes people to label trust in fellow humans as "magical thinking." As Gerber put it in his 1981 Congressional testimony, "Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simply, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures . . . They may accept and even welcome repression if it promotes to relieve their insecurities."

As we learn in preschool, when people feel less free, they are less inclined to be fair and compassionate. In other words, it becomes a vicious cycle: distrust leads to repression which leads to more distrust. You get what you expect to get.

Making us distrust one another is, of course, good for business, and clearly makes for successful politics, but as Bregman points out, it also makes it nearly impossible to solve any problem that demands collective action.

Spending more time watching television (or doom scrolling or partisan podcast listening or whatever) teaches us that people can't be trusted. Spending more time with actual people, like we do in preschool, teaches us just the opposite. Over the past year, I've made a conscious effort to stay away from the news and to limit my viewing, listening, and reading habits to things that celebrate fairness and compassion. But the biggest shift I've made is to spend as much time as possible with other adult people.

I got accused the other day of being "too trusting" and of "thinking the best of everyone."

It's working.

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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!

The Stupidity of Thinking We Can One-Up Mother Nature

We often think of ourselves as being x years old, but that is only the age of the unique mind-body we call our "self." When considering the full miracle of existence, the fact that we are entities capable of the self-awareness to even consider such a calculation, it's more accurate, as neuroscientist Patrick House suggests, to consider that we are really our "age plus three billion years." 

Mother Nature has been growing her garden for a very long time and everything, including us, is the product of eons. 

George Bernard Shaw wrote, "Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does." And that's because it doesn't seek to "manage" it's affairs, but rather to simply live, to pull sustenance from the soil and air, to photosynthesize, to grow and propagate, to change according to the seasons, to "listen," and to respond as well as possible to environmental changes both large and small. In other words, the tree isn't managing at all, but rather engaging in life itself.

Modern humans, as Shaw suggests, have a real problem with thinking we can somehow one-up Mother Nature. The most grotesque example is idea that we can somehow, through managed "breeding" (eugenics), create a race of super humans. At the most extreme are those who seek to create a "master race." Decent people are appalled at both their idea and their efforts to make it happen, of course, and cast them from our midst, but that doesn't stop the rest of us from thinking we are capable of improving upon nature through our "management."

Schooling is a case in point. For those billions of years (4.5 billion, in fact; I don't know where House got his 3 billion), humans have, like trees, educated ourselves through the process of life itself. And that's been more than enough, yet, in our hubris, we've created institutions that pretend to be an improvement upon the system by which the entire rest of the universe educates itself. Our species has evolved in a way that means our young are born too soon to fend for themselves without the support and protection of adults, that's true, but this responsibility is too often interpreted by us as a superiority that allows us to dictate to them. Most of our young now spend the first couple decades of their lives forcibly separated from life itself and are instead compelled to attend to our best guesses about what they will need to know in order function once we finally set them loose to finally engage with life itself. 

The argument most often put forward for why we must do this is that modern human society is too complicated and complex to leave them to their own devices. But that is to suggest, once more, that we've outdone Mother Nature. What arrogance. There is more complexity in a single leaf on a single tree than in all of our civilizations put together: that's what happens with a 4.5 billion year head start.

I'm sixty-three years old and, yes, those years of experience can prove useful to those with marginally less experience, but the moment I step outside of my responsibility to support and protect, I risk adding a dose of stupidity to nature's time-tested educational model.

Education isn't the only place where we try and fail to one-up Mother Nature. The treadmill is a poor replacement for Mother's Nature's fitness plan of life itself which challenges our bodies with terrain, weather, risk, and purpose, to move our bodies in novel, creative ways, with the full engagement of all of our senses. Our methods of manufacturing and distributing food is leaving us weak, hypertensive, and diabetic, when Mother Nature's nutritional plan for every other living things is the fruit-of-the-vine and fat-of-the-land. Social media is a poor, poor replacement for actual community. Recorded music is a far cry from making music ourselves. The farther we get from life itself, the more sickly, bored, and unhappy we become.

“Plants answer questions by the way they live, by their responses to change," writes Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, "you just need to learn how to ask. I smile when I hear colleagues say 'I discovered X.' That’s kind of like Columbus claiming to have discovered America. It was here all along, it’s just that he didn’t know it. Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating knowledge.”

This is how the rest of Mother Nature learns. We aren't meant to waste our childhoods isolated within walls, attending to task-masters. Nature's curriculum wants us out there in the midst of life itself, actively engaged, and listening -- with our ears, eyes, bodies, hearts, and minds -- to those things that demand our attention and spark our curiosity, those very things that standard schooling labels as "distractions." Our school walls are there both literally and metaphorically to shut our children away from life itself, only accessible through pre-packaged lessons made from the dried husks of real things, sterilized and disconnected.

Yesterday, I read an article by an educator who was offended by someone who had called out standard schooling for its reliance on direct instruction, rote, and memorization (the treadmills of education: what schools use as a stand-in for actual thinking). He huffily defended this approach, insisting that brains first need a "stock of knowledge" from which to draw in order to ever think clearly. He's not wrong as far as that goes: experience is important to cognitive development, but the hubris is that he believes that his "stock of knowledge" and his coercive, tedious method of delivery is superior to that of life itself.

When we see our role as supporting and protecting children as they play, we are educating our children alongside, rather than in opposition to, Mother Nature. As the great John Dewey wrote, "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."

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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!

In Today's World, That is Radical

"I like you just the way you are."

If you read that and immediately thought of Mister Rogers, you're probably a child of the 70's. It's a simple, radical message, especially when it comes to adult relationships with young children. And it's more radical now than it was back then.

It's radical to like anyone just the way they are, but to like our children just the way they is almost unheard of. I'm sure that many parents would insist that they like their kids, but you wouldn't have to dig very deep to find the "but . . ." 

"I like my child . . . but she never listens to me."

"I like my child . . . but I wish he were more motivated."

"I like my child . . . but all they care about is (fill in the blank) . . ."

I'm sure that many teachers, when asked, would say they like the kids they teach, but the entire job of "teacher" in the standard sense is to shape the child in front of us into someone else.

Indeed, if a parent or educator likes a child just as they are, much of the rest of society would accuse them of failing at their "job." Parents are supposed to "raise" children. Teachers are supposed to mould children. 

In her book The Gardener and the Carpenter, author and psychologist Alison Gopnik argues that our view of parenting has changed dramatically since the mid-century. We have moved from a time when to be a parent (a noun) referred to a relationship of love between two people to the idea of "parenting" (a verb) in which "your qualities as a parent can be, and even should be, judged by the child you create."

"To be a wife is not to engage in "wifing," to be a friend is not to engage in "friending" . . . and we don't "child" our mothers and fathers. Yet these relationships are central to who we are. Any human being living a fully satisfying life is immersed in such social connections. And this is not only a philosophical truth about human beings, but one that is deeply rooted in our very biology . . . I would not evaluate the success of my marriage by measuring whether my husband's character had improved in the years since we wed. I would not evaluate the quality of an old friendship by whether my friend was happier or more successful than when we first met -- indeed, we all know that friendships show their quality most in the darkest days. Nevertheless, this is the implicit picture of parenting . . ."

"Parenting" as a verb, she argues, is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that turns us from "gardeners" who understand that it is the child's job to grow into "carpenters" who are charged with manufacturing our children. In this scenario, to simply like our children just the way they are is to fail at our "job." Maybe educators have always been a type of carpenter, but this attitude has clearly seeped into our relationship with children as well, leading our schools to the extremes of test and assess and drill and kill.

"Love doesn't have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose. The purpose is not to change the person we love, but to give them what they need to thrive. Love's purpose is not to shape our beloved's destiny, but to help them shape their own. It isn't to show them the way, but to help them find a path for themselves, even if the path they take isn't one . . . we would choose for them."

"I like you just the way you are." "I love you just the way you are." That is the soil in which our children can grow toward their purpose in life, their unique gift, their genius. "The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world," writes bontantist and philosopher Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. "Individuality is cherished and nurtured, because, in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others."

"Don't ask what the world needs," Howard Thurman advised his friend Martin Luther King, Jr. "Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." This is the stance of a gardener. 

Gopnik concludes: "So our job as parents (and I would add, as teachers) is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children's minds; it's to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it's to give them the toys and pick the toys up again after the kids are done. We can't make children learn, but we can let them learn."

And to like them just the way they are. In today's world, that is radical.

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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!

Ugly Plastic Things

I want to save the human race as much as the next person. 

Despite appearances, I do have an aesthetic sense.

And I think it's pretty well established that I want what's best for children. 

All of that said, we always had a lot of plastic things around the school, much of which was brightly colored.

There's been a movement in the preschool world over the past decades to do away with the plastic junk that has come to dominate early years environments, with an emphasis upon replacing it with more "natural" materials like wood, fabric, and metal. I support this effort on environmental, aesthetic and pedagogical grounds, yet the plastic remained even as we had greatly increased our use of said natural things over the course of my 20 years there.

One of my personal ethics is that we don't throw things away as long as there is still use in them. We had a plastic shopping cart and a wagon, for instance, that pre-dated my time at Woodland Park, playground workhorses that managed to survive generations of children. They were garish plastic things, but how could we pitch them into a landfill where they will remain forever when they were still going strong? 

Indeed, even broken things, like trucks with no wheels or dolls with no arms, continue to have play value, with children using them in creative and unexpected ways far beyond the time that they "should" have been trashed. And even then, even when something plastic is so far gone that even the children aren't picking it up and using it for something new, it can still live on as part of a piece of art. Our "glue gun box" was always full plastic items that found new life as parts of sculptures or space ships or doll houses that then went home with the children to be displayed on shelves, played with, and otherwise treasured for at least a little longer before winding up as garbage long after they would have otherwise.

Generally speaking, I don't find plastic things to be beautiful and if I could snap my fingers and turn all the plastics in our school into alternative materials, I would. Of course, I'd rather spend my days surrounded by the warmth and beauty of wood and stone, and I don't dismiss experts who caution us about surrounding children with the gaudy colors that plastic toy makers seem to favor. 

As we purchase new things, I strive for the sort of look and feel of natural things. The set of sturdy tables and chairs we purchased for outdoor use, made from plastic salvaged from recycled plastic milk jugs, are a chocolate brown. The playhouse is made from untreated wood. The outdoor environment is dominated by wood, plants, concrete, and brick, but because another of our ethics is that we favor donations over purchasing new stuff (again, I believe, an environmentally, as well as economically, sound choice) we stand as the sort of "beggars" who can't always be choosers. 

When someone offers their old car tires or the guts of an defunct washing machine or a collection of Disney figurines, we enthusiastically take them. From where I stand, one of the functions of preschools in our society is not to use things, but to finish using things. And while these things may not be "beautiful" to the adult eye (hence our playground's moniker, the Junkyard Playground), they are delights to the children as evidenced by how enthusiastically they incorporate vacuum cleaner hoses, the caps from dried out marker pens, and discarded office machinery into their play, creating the sort of beauty that can always be found in the eye of the beholder.

So while I am in favor of reducing the use of plastic in our environment, and I congratulate those who have achieved it, I will also never be fanatical about it. There is still use and even a kind of beauty in those plastic items, not to mention that they are, for us, free, which is good for everyone except the folks who continue to manufacture ugly plastic things for kids.

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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!

You Can't Get There on a Treadmill

Not long ago I spent time with a man who does not have children, doesn't want children, and, in fact, told me, "I don't even like being in places that allow children."

For people like us, it's an outrageous thing to say. I wanted to ask, "Who broke you?" but instead I just asked, "Why?"

He answered, "Because they're always moving."

Well, he's right about that, at least compared to adults: young children do move far more than most adults. Not only that, they run when they could walk. They jump, they climb, they wiggle, clap, dance, balance, and swing even when there is no obvious reason. Studies find that young children engage in moderate to vigorous physical activity, on average, for three hours a day. By the time they're teens, it's down to less than one hour. 

This discrepancy is typically dismissed as developmental. Childhood is the time for play and play usually involves movement and lots of it. But humans aren't the only animal that plays. Indeed, play seems to be universal, at least among higher order animals, but no other species of which I'm aware has such a movement gap between juveniles and adults. This probably has to do with the fact that wild adult animals must spend a large percentage of their waking hours hunting and foraging, whereas modern human's tend to earn their living in increasingly sedentary ways.

Sadly, this doesn't just hold true for adults. Children today spend far less time in physical activity than we did as kids, but the gap between adult movement and child movement hasn't narrowed. In other words, as a species, we simply aren't moving as much as we once did.

The impact on physical fitness is obvious, but it goes beyond that. As neuroscientist Patrick House writes, "This must be the ultimate purpose of consciousness: to control a body." Cognitive philosopher Andy Clark says we have inherited "a mind on the hoof," brains built to hunt and forage, to think and react while moving about an environment. 

Today's world increasingly demands the opposite. As play-based early childhood educators, we are among the rare professionals who actually spend our days "on the hoof," but the rest of the world is fighting their bodies into chairs, training themselves for long hours on screens or in cars. 

We try to correct for this with the modern invention of "exercise," an idea that emerged from the idle rich of previous centuries, movement strictly for the sake of fitness. Back then they took "constitutionals." Today's idle middle class jumps on a treadmill.

Rebecca Solnit writes in her book about walking, Wanderlust: "The treadmill is a corollary to the suburb and the autotropolis: a device with which to go nowhere in places where there is now nowhere to go. Or no desire to go: the treadmill also accommodates the auto mobilized and suburbanized mind more comfortable in climate-controlled indoor space than outdoors, more comfortable with quantifiable and clearly defined activity than with the seamless engagement of mind, body, and terrain to be found walking out-of-doors."

Treadmills are now regular features in our public schools.

Those of us who come from the world of play, of self-directed learning, tend to criticize the increasingly academic nature of schooling as "developmentally inappropriate," usually meaning "cognitively inappropriate." But it's equally inappropriate in that the way this type of curriculum is delivered requires young children to fight their bodies into chairs, and rein in their mind on the hoof. We are literally dumbing our children down in order to "prepare" them for their sedentary future.

We cannot separate our minds and bodies. We have inherited a mind on the hoof and when we are not allowed to move, our body-minds rebel by becoming flabby, stiff, distracted, anxious, hypertensive, diabetic, and depressed. There are few modern ailments, physical or psychological, that aren't connected to lack of meaningful movement.

"For my part," writes Robert Lewis Stevenson, "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."

This is our heritage as a species, a mind on the hoof. Movement is not only our native language, but it is the universal language. Attention during action is our natural state. To move is the great affair. Movement literally defines life. And here we are, as a culture, attempting to become a strange kind of creature on this planet, one that is so sedentary that we even find the movement of others annoying.

Reacting to Stevenson, poet Diane Ackerman writes, "The great affair, the love affair in life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between."

And you can't get there on a treadmill.

******

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!