The Vital Power of "Followership"

Earlier this week during a community discussion in Teacher Tom's Club, a colleague mentioned how much she loved observing the way different children emerge as play leaders depending on the situation. A child who follows in one circumstance leads in another.

Both are vital skills. Most of us, if pressed, hope our own child learns how to lead. The ability to lead with confidence and compassion is a relatively rare and vital talent. And, I think, most of us would prefer that our child not be a "follower." The word connotes mindless devotion or giving into peer pressure. We want our children to be strong, to know their own minds, to say "No!" when it doesn't feel right. Yet it's also true that most of us spend much more of our lives as followers rather than leaders.

Indeed, there is great power in following, more than is generally credited. The ability to unselfishly look at what someone else is doing and, with an open mind, say to yourself, That looks great. I want to do it too! is really the foundation upon which all meaningful human activity is built. "Followership," the capacity to be inspired by what others are doing, is every bit as important as leadership.

Below is a video created by entrepreneur and author Derek Sivers. I've watched it many times over the past decade. It always strikes me that as much as we claim to value leadership, we spend most of our time with young children helping them learn to contribute as followers in an empowering and meaningful way. In our leadership roles as teachers we are at our best when we understand that the children following us are our equals. And if we really observe what's going on in our classrooms,  we find that the children are, more often than not, following not us, but the other children.

When we fail as teachers, and we all do, I think it's often because what we're doing simply isn't great enough or instructional enough to attract that first follower. But when we succeed, once we've inspired that first follower, watch out!

But just watch the video, it says it much better than I can:

"The first follower transformed the lone nut into a leader. The best way to make a movement is to be the first follower and show others how to follow." As the tipping point is passed in this video and all of those people who were once uncomfortably, perhaps mockingly, watching a lone hippie dancer begin to leap to their feet and rush to be part of his movement, it moves me almost to tears. What a powerful thing we become when we are able to move beyond our self-consciousness, our sense of shame, and leap into something new, even if, this time, it's only because we feel hidden in the larger group. Maybe next time, we'll be the first follower.

Indeed, as teachers we do spend most of our time helping our charges learn followership skills. And that's as it should be because they, like all of us, will spend most of their lives not leading, but making judgments about who and what to follow, then following them, not just because others are following, but because they see a lone nut doing something great and have the courage to stand up and join in.

That's why we must, as much as possible, give kids a choice about whether or not, and when, to follow. Compelling children only teaches obedience to leaders, a dangerous thing. But choice and variety in the classroom gives children the opportunity to really practice how to follow. It's a process that requires thinking for themselves, not following blindly, and knowing when to jump in and expand upon the great thing the lone nut is doing.

And when its our turn to be the the lone nut, we'll know how to treat our followers.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Risk, Cooperation, and the Culture of Childhood (When We Get Out of Their Way)

"I'm gonna try this."

"You're gonna get hurt."

"I can't get on. Everybody hold it."

"Was that funny?"

"My turn."

"I want a turn."

"You can go after me."

"I'm next."

"Okay, so guys, after me it's you, then it's you."

"Then I'm after you."

"We each get four turns."

"I'm gonna try the wagon."

"Somebody, help me. I'm stuck."

"I'll push you."

"Settle down."

"After my turn, it's your turn."

"I never had a turn."

"Get in a line. We're in a line."

"Let's go together!"

"Don't push."

"Wait! I'm going to get something. Everybody wait."

"While you're gone, we're gonna go."

"Are you okay?"

"Will you help me?"

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Playing With Evil

The best part of my time at university were the dorm room debates.

There was one heated exchange in particular that has stuck with me. It was between a newly-minted atheist and a self-described "follower of Christ." The atheist had provoked the devotee by saying, "I don't believe in God, but I do believe in Satan." His joke was that he could take the credit to himself when good things happened, but he liked having a scapegoat to blame for the bad.

Tempers flared. There were good and stupid points made on both sides. Us onlookers enjoyed it immensely, even as a few of us kept our heads down, you know, because of the potential for lightening bolts. The thing that stuck with me, however, was the question,"If you don't believe in the Bible, then what's to stop you from murdering people?"

It unsettled me. I had never had the urge to kill another person. I mean, aside from sibling rivalry wrestling matches, I'd never intentionally physically harmed another person. For the first time, I found myself asking Why? 

It wasn't the fear of God that stopped me if only because murder, in a real sense, had simply never crossed my mind. There was nothing to stop. Perhaps I'd just never found myself in a situation in which I was desperate enough or angry enough to have to be stopped. Whatever prevented me from killing to that point in my life came from a place that preceded conscious thought, let alone action. 

I had, of course, previous explored killing through my play. My toy soldiers killed one another in droves, usually ending in a single survivor left alone in his block fort, a nice metaphor for the ultimate futility of violence. Around the neighborhood we often played games that involved shooting one another, using our fingers as pistols or sticks as rifles. In these games we killed and were killed, deaths that lasted for the count of 10. In these games, dying was an art form, one we had learned from cowboy movies, many of us drawing it out comically, like Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

But this was different. Were there really people, people I knew, people who lived with me as dorm neighbors, who were only prevented from murder, rape, and pillage because some words in a book -- even holy words in a sacred book -- commanded them not to? I found the whole idea alarming. 

I remember considering the kid who had asked the question with a question of my own. Am I really just a crisis of faith away from being murdered by this guy?

It was an idea that to this day causes me to be wary of anyone who seems overly adamant about their faith. I worry that they're really just trying to convince themselves. And if their faith is all that keeps them from murder and mayhem, then I definitely don't want to do or say anything to monkey with that, which is why I never argue religion with anyone. I don't want to risk being too persuasive.

The atheist responded, "I don't murder people because I don't want to spend the rest of my life in prison."

Well that was even worse. And this is why I'm equally cautious around people who are too adamant about law and order. Again, I worry they're just trying to convinced themselves.

The truth be told, I wasn't genuinely in fear for my life during this dorm room debate. I knew these guys. I felt safe with them. They weren't on the verge of murder. I understood that we were just playing with ideas in the same way that we had played with the ideas of death and killing as kids. 

But what about the people I didn't know? I mean, I'd recently read Crime and Punishment with its nihilistically murderous protagonist Rodion Raskolnakov. But he was a fictional character, the creation of Dostoyevsky's playful mind, a thought experiment to explore an idea. It hadn't occurred to me that there were real people like him out there contemplating and committing murder in cold blood simply because they found themselves beyond the laws of God or man.

The history of humanity is full of killing. As I wrote yesterday, our nation has been at war for most of my life. There are something like 50 murders in the US every day. But the place with the most murders is my own living room. It seems like half the shows offered by streaming services are some version of a murder mystery or police detective show, most of which start with a dead body. Again, these are fictional murderers, but still . . .

The long term historical trend is that murders have declined dramatically over time. Today's murder rate is something like 1 for every 100,000 people, while some estimates place the murder rate in Europe during medieval times between 10 and 110(!) per 100,000. 

Of course, we rightly fret over murderous violence today, even if it's low by historic standards. We worry that our faith isn't strong enough or that our laws aren't tough enough. We worry that our media is feeding our murderous urges, especially among young men. But what if we have it backwards.

What if those murder mysteries and detective shows are actually giving us an opportunity to explore this darkness, to play with it like we did as children or college students?

When we play, we are free to explore things and ideas from all sides, to consider, bloodlessly, what it's like to both kill and be killed. I often think of play as being the process of considering yet one more perspective. It's unsavory, of course, when we see children "blasting" one another. It's upsetting to think about young men debating murder outside the strictures of the laws of God or man. And it can be disturbing to see all that blood pooling up around the bodies of murder victims on our screens. But ultimately, I wonder if this is a big part of why, when you step far enough back to really look at the historic trends, we aren't killing one another nearly as often as we once did: we have more opportunities to play with it.

When children play, what we see often strikes us as anything but peaceful, but is it possible that it's play, not laws, that leads to peace?

Loris Malaguzzi, Maria Montessori, Rudolph Steiner, Paulo Freire, Lev Vygotsky, John Dewey, and most of the other foundational advocates for versions of play-based learning were all overtly focused on educating for peace. They understood that play is freedom and freedom leads us to explore all things, fully and courageously. When the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, "man is condemned to be free," he meant that we are ultimately "left alone, without excuse", without laws, and that if we are to have morals and values, if we are to know the difference between good and evil, it will come from what we make of ourselves.

As Natalia Ginzburg writes, "(I)n general I think we should be very cautious about promoting and providing rewards and punishments. Because life rarely has its rewards and punshments; usually sacrifices have no reward, and often evil deeds go unpunished, at times they are even richly rewarded with success and money. Therefore it is best that our children should know from infancy that good is not rewarded and the evil goes unpunished; yet they must love good and hate evil, and that it is not possible to give any logical explanation for this."

But play gives us an explanation, even if it can't be framed as logical. Laws are attempts to assert what is good and evil. But perhaps the way we come to know and live the difference is through play which is how we discover the fullest picture possible, one in which killing is out of the question and peace is the only reasonable way forward.

Play-based learning is educating for peace.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Today is Veteran's Day

(I've been post a version of this piece on Veteran's Day for several years now. Some of the statistics may be a bit dusty, but regrettably, I'm certain that the gist of them remains the same.)

My daughter grew up in a country at war. 

I grew up in a country at war. 

My parents grew up in a country at war. 

My grandparents grew up in a country at war.

Whatever we feel about ourselves, it's not difficult to understand why there are people around the world who view the US as a warlike nation. It's one of the things we do, sending our army to Europe or Asia or Africa or South America to fight against our "enemies" or support our "friends." War has become the wallpaper of our lives, something that most of us only think about when there is particularly ghastly or encouraging news, or on special days set aside to think about war, like today, Veteran's Day.

Some of us, of course, think about war every day: those whose children or loved ones are in harm's way. How could they not? Even now, when for the first time in a long time, there are no hot wars to fret over, it's impossible, I'm sure, not to worry about the stray bullet. The stress on those families must be incredible and what anxious joy they must feel knowing that the two longest wars in our nation's history have finally wound down. I'm sure they think all kinds of things about the wisdom of any war or the ways in which they have been conducted, but I'm equally sure they are united in their desire to actually touch and see and hear their sons and daughters; their mothers and fathers.

Whatever you think of war in general, or the specific wars in which our nation has engaged, whether you believe that those who enlisted are brave patriots, misguided souls, or victims of the economy, there are few among us who don't appreciate the risk and sacrifice of these young men and women, nor do we want to shirk the responsibilities we have to them as they seek to re-join the civilian world, a place where they can hopefully sometimes forget about war.

This is a place where 1 in 3 male veterans between 20-24 are jobless. It's a place where nearly a million veterans are unemployed, where the unemployment rate for veterans is over 12 percent, 3 points higher than for the rest of us. And unless we turn things around fast, it's only going to get worse as an estimated 1 million more veterans return from foreign wars to rejoin the civilian workforce over the next 5 years.

This is a place in which 1 in 5 suicide victims are veterans. It's an epidemic of despair and mental illness that claims an average of 18 lives per day. Suicide prevention hotlines set up to serve veterans receive 100,000 calls per year. 

This is a place where people will boo you and try to strip you of your rights as a veteran and a citizen if they learn you are somehow not the "right kind of American."

This is a place where big banks, like Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase will brazenly defraud you because you are a veteran and they think you're a soft target, often taking your home and sending you into bankruptcy.

This is a place where 83 percent of veterans receive no pension at all and where even that pathetic number is under threat of the budget axe, along with veteran healthcare benefits, because we don't have the political will to raise taxes on the the super wealthy, such as those very bankers who are defrauding veterans. 

This is the world we've created for our veterans. This is not what they fought for.

I don't feel at all good about the legacy of war we are leaving to our children, just as our parents left to us. Violence always represents failure, and this is a torch of shame we pass along. But this is a failure of politics, a failure of self-governance, and has nothing to to with our veterans who have placed themselves in service to our nation. These are our children, our mothers, and our fathers. For better or worse, we've sent them to risk their lives for us and caused their families to sacrifice for us. We must do better by them.

We don't honor veterans by glorifying war. These Americans, of all Americans, know the truth that war is horrific. No, we honor them by creating a society in which diplomacy is the highest political good. We honor them with a functioning economy and a world-class health care system. We honor them when we have social and economic justice. We honor them when we work to end war. We the people need to do these things every day, and that, more than parades and ceremonies, is how to honor veterans.

But most of all we honor veterans when we stop what we're doing to really see the wallpaper that's been hanging on our walls for generations, contemplate it, and wonder if it's time for a change.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

To Get Close to Things

"This is my home," she told me, settling into a curl of blanket populated by stuffed animals. "This is my bedroom over here. That's my living room. Over there is the play room . . . " 

She had called me over to tell me this. She had been playing by herself all morning in this corner of the classroom under the loft. She'd not had help, nor had she asked for it. Even now she was not asking for help. Indeed, she was barely looking at me as she detailed the home she had created for herself.

Her self-satisfied manner made it clear she was not seeking validation or advice. The information she conveyed was not urgent or even essential, for either of us. 

"(I)n the end," writes physicist and philosopher Carol Rovelli, "it seems to me, the real purpose of language is not to communicate. It is to get close to things, to be in relation with them . . . when we speak with friends, with the people we love, do we really speak in order to tell them something? Don't we really use the excuse of wanting to tell them something in order to be able to speak with them?"

Obviously, there are times when we seek to convey information or to persuade one another, but most of what we say is relational. When a baby sees a dog, points, and says, "Woof woof," I suppose they may well be attempting to edify us, but it seems more likely  that this urge to call out and point is really about the delight in connecting both with us and with the world. This is how we come to create a shared understanding of the world, by weaving a shared web of connections between people, places, things, and experiences. 

The school-ish notions of teaching cause us to center everything we do with young children under the lens of learning. What is being learned? What can I say to scaffold the learning? What are they asking me to teach them? But the instinct, which manifests through play, is really about this process of being in relation with the world. The weaving of connections may result in understanding, but that isn't the goal. The goal is to "get close to things."

When we understand this, I think, it helps us know what to do as important adults in the lives of young children. Ours is not to intentionally shape or steer them, but rather to join them in their delight. To point along with them and connect our "woof woof" with theirs. To listen to them as they tell us about their homes of blankets and stuffies that connect to other homes and other stuffies they know. 

In Rovelli's world of physics, energy and mass are known to be "two facets of the same entity, just as the electric and magnetic fields are two faces of the same field, and as space and time are two facets of one thing, spacetime." Electrons don't even exist except in the moment they are interacting with something else: these fundamental particles only exist within the context of relationship.

This is likewise true of us. When the baby points or when a girl shows us their game they aren't really attempting to communicate about dogs or homes. That's their excuse to speak with us, to connect, to weave themselves into the magnificent web of relationships that from the oneness of reality. We've spent centuries considering the world's separate parts only to learn that everything may well be simply facets of the same thing.

The girl surveyed her home in silence, her need to speak now sated, but her hands, her eyes, her full self continued to weave herself into her world.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Seeing the Cage that is Created by Norms and Standards

Karntakuringu Jakurrpa

I've written before about how, when our daughter was a toddler, we lived within walking distance of the Seattle Art Museum, where we regularly popped in to visit our favorite paintings and sculptures. In the back of my mind, I suppose, I took her there out of a sense that doing so would be a mark of "good parenting." I don't specifically recall any expert recommending art museums, probably because two-year-olds aren't normally possessed of the executive function to make such a thing a pleasant experience. In fact, in all the dozens of times we prowled the galleries together, we never once came across another toddler. But that wasn't unusual for us: we didn't typically spend time with any other toddlers. During those first couple years our family of three formed a kind of happy pod into which the relatives and friends we allowed either had adult children or none at all.

The real reason we went to the art museum so regularly actually had nothing to do with parenting, good or bad. We went to the art museum because that's something that I've always done. A couple evenings ago, I had dinner with a woman who had been, for years, the director of our local art museum. When I mentioned that I'm there at least once a month, she replied, "Good for you -- thank you," as if my motivation was charity or civic duty, which is similar to the response I get when I mention that I read classic novels or attend Shakespearean performances.

I understand that many, if not most, of those reading this are suppressing yawns right now. I also know that at least a few of you think that by mentioning these hobbies of mine, I'm showing off. Add classical music to the list and I've hit the quadfecta (real word!) of cultural snobbery. But that genuinely isn't my motivation. For me, the arts are where I turn as a way to explore human nature, to understand myself and others, to shift my perspective. I come away from my engagements with art feeling more human, more connected to present, past, and future, and often even with a deeper sense of my own morals and values. I walk away full of reflections about the vastness of what it can mean to be human beyond the walls of the day-to-day humdrum of normalcy.

In contrast to its reputation for black tie fundraisers in celebration of dead white men, the arts, and especially the ones that have stood the test of time, are the work of radicals, people who lived, or at least thought and created, outside the strictures of normal.

Too much of life is governed by norms and standards: academic, social, medical, psychological. Those parenting books that I didn't read until our daughter was grown are a classic example. I have no doubt that millions of parents have found them helpful or comforting or even eye-opening. But like with much of what has been labelled the "therapeutic state" -- social workers, psychologists, dietitians, marriage counsellors, sex therapists, and the aforementioned child-development experts -- they work with the tools of what Antonia Case, philosopher and author of the book Flourish, refers to as "technique and normalization, offering step-by-step instructions on just about everything -- how to relate to our partner; how to quell disputes in the home; what not to eat during pregnancy; how to raise children; how to be a good mother; how to be tidier, neater, calmer, smarter." This leads, she argues, to a shrinkage of our imaginative and emotional horizon. "We no longer turn to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina . . . as a guide to human nature, or visit art galleries for some much-needed respite; the literary and artistic are brushed aside for the Beginner's Guide to Cognitive Behavior Therapy and a remedial massage. It is little wonder that modern life seems too highly organized, too self-conscious, too predictable."

"How can we serve others, nature or the planet," she asks, "when everything we eat, drink or think has to be put to some grueling standardized pseudo-scientific test?" And let's be honest, most of what the experts have to offer are based on what Stephen Colbert might call "truthiness." Not long ago, I was talking with the head of the neuroscience department at a major European university. When I tried to share some of my own thoughts on the subject, he shook his head, saying, "By the time any of our work makes it into the mainstream, it's already twenty years behind what we're doing in the lab. Even we have trouble keeping up." This is why science inevitably becomes pseudoscience in the hands of dilettantes. We've been taught by the ethics of the therapeutic state that science is made up of hard facts when, in fact, it is nothing more or less than a process by which theories are offered up as possible truth, then rigorously tested, and almost always found flawed.

In my life as a parent "science" once told me that the human brain is more or less fully formed by around five-years-old, while today we think we know that it remains remarkably plastic (renewable) throughout life. In the 1980's were were convinced that the ultimate healthy diet was one that limited fats and emphasized carbohydrates. Much of Freud is now considered bunk. This is the nature of science and any effort to define normal or to apply techniques or standards to our lives based upon it will inevitably be hit or miss.

The opening sentence of Tolstoy's novel Anna Karinina is one of the most famous lines in all of literature: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

This is the kind of truth that the therapeutic state simply cannot abide, yet it is one that has been true throughout the existence of humans. It's a truth that cannot be addressed by norms or standards or a step-by-step approach, because each case is a new one under the sun. It is a truth, however, that is found in the art that hangs on the walls of every art museum, on the pages of every great novel, and on the stages that bring us the comedies, histories, and tragedies of Shakespeare. And art is only one of the countless ways that humans may come to understand the world and their place in it.

I'm not saying to stop reading those parenting books or listening to education experts (myself included), but only to see them for what they are. Of course, you will find insights and ideas, but the moment they offer norms and standards, they are speaking the language pseudoscience, and the result is to drain much of the joy out of our work and play, limiting rather than expanding what it means to be human.

I've learned more about life from paintings, novels, and plays, than from any expert, not because they told me what to think, but because they spurred me to think for myself, and to ultimately see the cage that is created by the fallacy of norms and standards. What art teaches me is that none of us will find joy or peace by in a step-by-step approach, but rather that I must find my own path. I may not be any less unhappy than the rest of you, but at least I'll be unhappy in my own way.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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 Way Democracy is Supposed to Work

Like many preschools, we were always a little short on storage space. We had a separate storage room and a couple of outdoor sheds, but our classroom walls were still lined with a hodgepodge of shelves and cabinets. A few of these pieces of furniture had doors, but most were open shelves which were covered with curtains of butter yellow fabric.

One of the first things children learned about our space was that when the curtain was in place, the items on those shelves were "closed," while when the curtain was removed, that meant "open." Even the youngest children got the system within a couple weeks. Of course, that didn't mean they didn't peek, but after the first couple weeks of school it was exceedingly rare for a child, even a two-year-old, to take the next step of actually playing with what they found there.

I'm always impressed by this level of self-control. After all, they were only curtains, attached with velcro. The shelves were full of attractive items stored at eye-level. No one ever threatened or scolded them about these shelves. During the first few weeks of school, as they are figuring out the boundaries, they are told, "That's closed" or "That's opened," statements of fact about our storage-challenged classroom, said in the way one might say, "That's a window" or "This is a chair." We helped them re-hang any curtains that had been removed in the process. We might then discuss when we should "open" the shelf in question (we usually agreed on tomorrow). And after a couple weeks of experimentation, we all seemed to more or less agree on the system.

There was one curtain, however, that needed new velcro. Indeed, it had needed new velcro for several years. Pretty much anytime someone brushed against it, it fell. It was located on a shelf adjacent to our checkerboard rug, an active place where we regularly engaged in both circle time and a lot of large motor, dramatic, and constructive play. Needless to say, it fell open several times a day. A child could easily be excused for assuming that meant that those blocks were "open," yet they never did.

Almost every time the curtain was knocked down, a child would take it upon themself to re-attach the velcro. No one asked them to do it. No one even suggested it. Yet the moment the curtain fell, someone was on it. Often more than one, and usually without saying a word. Over the years, parents volunteered to repair it with new velcro, but I declined the offer. It was beautiful to me to watch how the children took responsibility for it year after year, often struggling with it, often needing help, but nevertheless making the effort; "closing" the inadvertently "open" shelf, not because it's a rule or because they had been told to do it by an authority figure, but simply because that's the way we do things at Woodland Park. 

Every time I saw it happen it occurs to me that this is the way democracy is supposed to work.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!