It's Remarkable That We've Gotten it So Wrong

Young children do math for fun. Most of us, however, have been taught to misunderstand mathematics. We think it has to do with numbers and equations, but that's like mistaking a map for the actual terrain. A friend with a PhD in mathematics once told me that most of what he does is discover increasingly beautiful ways to pattern, organize, sequence, and group things.

In other words, when we see a child arrange blocks in a red-blue-red-blue pattern we see a child engaged in math. When children sort objects by color or shape or some other characteristic, they are doing math. When children discover a clapping pattern or identify an animal as belonging to a smaller category called "bugs," they are engaged in math. Math is one of the fundamental ways that humans make sense of a complex world. The numbers and equations are academic abstractions that help us communicate, explore, and solve specific problems, but when we center this aspect of math in the early years we rob it of its essential connection to the human experience. 

In other words, we tend to render it boring and meaningless, an academic exercise done for the purpose of grades or a teacher's approval.

Shakespeare is an other example of something profoundly beautiful that schools tend to render dull by treating it as an academic pursuit. I wasn't introduced to his work until high school where I was expected to read the script of Romeo and Juliet. I struggled through it, listened carefully to my teacher explain it, then managed to pass my test, but it was dull, dull, dull. When we complained, our teacher recommended we try reading it aloud, which helped to enliven it a bit. Finally, as a senior, a group of us were rewarded with a field trip to the Ashland Shakespearean Festival, where we were in the audience for several plays. I still struggled with it, but it was far from dull.

My daughter's experience with Shakespeare was quite different. At 8-years-old, she declared that she was going to grow up to be a Shakespearean actor, a pursuit that carried her through college. Her introduction to The Bard was through a summer camp in which the kids spent two weeks acting out scenes with an emphasis on fight choreography. She went on to spend the next several years performing in a series of Shakespearean plays through a youth program offered by the Seattle Shakespeare Company. She was never bored. Indeed, she became obsessed with the works of one of the greatest artists to ever live. I'll never forget arguing with her about something or other when she was 10. She settled matters by quoting Macbeth, a play in which she hadn't even yet performed. Shakespeare wasn't something for school or study, it had become intertwined with her life.

The works of Shakespeare, perhaps the most influential and enduring art in history, are meant for the stage. When we read them, they bore us. When we see them acted, they come alive. When we act them ourselves, we embody them. Schools, however, tend to do it backwards, just as they do with math: they start with the disembodied abstractions, then, some day, once most of the kids have long given up on Shakespeare, it's offered as an extracurricular activity that only "nerds" care about. It's as if we tried to teach art by making preschoolers start with years of tedium like horizontal line theory, only allowing them to paint a full canvas painting once they've worked their way through years of shape, color, and shading drills. Taught this way, everyone would hate painting.

But this is what normal schools do with everything. Academic instruction dehumanizes things that are essentially human. Academics instruction strips away the the natural motivations of beauty and relevance, replacing it with dry external rewards (like grades) and threats ("If you don't learn this, you'll never get into college."). It's a system that makes learning itself, perhaps the most inspiring thing any of us will ever do, into drudgery. 

As a boy, I played and watched a lot of baseball, a game that features a whole lot of statistics involving averages and relatively complex calculations. Long before I got to the academic version of averages and other statistics, I understood it because I'd been motivated to make sense of all those columns of numbers of the backs of baseball cards. In the same way my daughter was fully conversant with Shakespeare long before it was presented to her as an academic pursuit. This is the direction in which learning is meant to flow. We must first experience the terrain before we can comprehend the map. 

This is exactly the way play-based, or self-directed, learning works. We start with the beauty. We start with the relevance. We start with self-motivation; with life itself. We start with the full canvas painting, the patterns, the terrain, the comedy and tragedy. When learning starts with our natural curiosity about life itself, the educator's role becomes one of keeping up rather than cracking the whip. 

Learning is the easiest, most natural, and joyful thing in the world. It's remarkable that we've gotten it so wrong.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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