The Practical Wisdom of Living Virtuously

I recently ran outside in the middle of the night with a baseball bat to chase away an intruder who was obviously trying to do mischief.

My neighbors are torn over whether I was courageous or foolhardy.

Several have expressed the feeling that I was "lucky." The man might have been armed. He might have overwhelmed me with superior quickness and strength. I might have actually hit him with the bat, then faced legal liability for using "excessive force." 

On the other hand, one older neighbor insisted that if anything like that happened again, I was to call him and he'd join me with a "steel bar." He insisted that he would be "fierce." A woman, inspired, immediately ordered her own baseball bat. Many have thanked me for protecting "our community."

As I grow older, I find myself thinking more and more about the Ancient Greek concept of "virtue," and specifically about Aristotle's idea that all virtues exist on a continuum, one that is different for each individual.

Courage, for instance, lies on a continuum between cowardice and rashness (or foolhardiness). Generosity lies between stinginess and being a spendthrift. Truthfulness between self-deprecation and boastfulness. Friendliness between servility and sycophancy. We live in a psychological age, one in which we tend to view our behaviors, as a default, through the lens of our emotions. But I find a great deal of value in the continued practice of philosophy. Even as I wielded my bat, I was fully aware of my emotion (fear), but I was equally aware that hiding safely behind my locked door waiting for the police to arrive was, for me, the coward's option.

You can call it foolhardy machismo, and people have. I don't expect anyone else to behave the way I did. Indeed, I've talked the woman who ordered the bat into returning it. But there is always a price to pay for safety, or the perception of safety. 

Yesterday, I discussed bell hooks talking about our culture of fear and what it does to us both as individuals and as a culture. She writes, "Learning to face our fears is one way we embrace love. Our fear may not go away, but it will not stand in the way." To love in the face of fear takes courage. Being free takes courage. The courage comes first. As Doris Lessing asks, "What else is there for any of us but courage?" 

I worry that our obsession with safety is crippling us, and particularly this generation of young people. These children in our care are going to live their entire childhoods under adult supervision, forever being told to "be careful" lest they do something foolhardy. But courage, like every virtue, resides in each individual and the only way to learn what it means, for you, is through practice. And yes, this means, sometimes, perhaps often, erring on the side of rashness. Without courage, without knowing what it takes to be courageous in this world, one is left at the mercy of fear. And fear is the great destroyer of life.

Aristotle's assertion is that each of us must find, for ourselves, the mean between extremes. Living virtuously, he says, is an act of what he called "practical wisdom," the kind of thing that can't be taught, only acquired through the day-to-day practice of living. A life under constant adult supervisions, a life behind locked doors waiting for the police to arrive, never allows us to acquire this practical wisdom and to discover ourselves virtuous.

As Lessing goes on to wonder, "And perhaps (courage) is only a world for being prepared to go on living at all."

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Who do you want to be when the children arrive? The countdown for Teacher Tom's Summer Camp has begun. In this course you will learn how even seemingly small changes in how you speak with children can transform even the most challenging behaviors without the need for rewards and punishments. This is especially effective when the whole team is on board. And there's nothing like coming together with like-minded educators to get you ready for when the children arrive. To learn more and to register, click here. I hope to see you around the campfire!

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 Choice to Love

We were all afraid of Mr. Turner. He was the principal at Meadowfield Elementary in Columbia, SC, and, it was rumored, he had a wooden paddle in his office with "holes drilled in it" so he could swing it faster. Even as an eight-year-old, I thought the physics of that sounded off, but I sure didn't want to test it. The most sure-fire way for a teacher to shut down disruptive behavior was to threaten to send the offender to the principal's office.

"Cultures of domination," writes bell hooks, "rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience."

As a boy, I valued my reputation as a "good boy." I valued the good opinion of my teachers and strived to shine in their eyes. I didn't always like or even understand what I was being taught, but I knew that learning was largely immaterial. The important thing was to convince the adults that the lessons were learned, which meant doing well on the quizzes and tests, yes, but more vital was to cheerfully abide by the rules. So that's where I focused my efforts, even as I risked being labeled a "teacher's pet."

I never came close to being sent to the principal's office. Avoiding sticks was easy for me. I was after those carrots. In other words, I fully accepted the notion that those with power could tell me what to do because, after all, they could mete out punishments. I wanted nothing to do with those, so I set my sights on the reward side of the equation. 

As a child, I struggled to understand kids who flirted with the punishment side, even as a part of me admired their courage, but I now know that my choice to be a "good boy" wasn't one that every child was capable of making. 

In all honesty, I doubt that paddle ever existed. I remember Mr. Turner as a large, chuckling, slightly fuddley man in the mold of Mr. Whetherbee from the Archie comic books. There were never any credible sightings of his paddle, let alone, actual evidence of its use. I suspect that the paddle rumor wasn't intentionally planted, but rather was the product of children who were regularly spanked sharing their fears with the rest of us: they knew that even loved ones had the potential to hit them. So even if the paddle was a fiction, the fear was real. I was a "good boy," but that doesn't mean that the threat of Mr. Turner's paddle wasn't a baseline consideration in every choice I made while at school.

Advocates for punishments value them as "motivation." And they are, I suppose, in that children learn to be motivated by fear. And fear is a powerful, yet deadly, motivator.

"In our society," writes hooks, "we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known . . . Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair."

This is the real challenge of our age: isolation, loneliness, and disconnection, the natural consequence of a culture of fear. And that fear is used to "motivate" us. There doesn't even have to be a paddle. The rumors are enough.

Today, most children go to elementary schools where corporal punishment is off the table. You would think that this would contribute to lowered anxiety, but according to the American Psychological Association, rates of anxiety in children have been on the rise since well before Covid. 

Our obsession with safety is a product of our culture of fear. This has led us to greatly limit, in the name of safety, our children's access to independent play, which in turn contributes greatly to increased mental health challenges, and specifically anxiety and depression. According to researcher Peter Gray, rates of mental health issues among children, even very young ones, have been rising dramatically over the past many decades and are now at the highest rates ever recorded. 

"We would like to think of history as progress," Gray writes, "but if progress is measured in the mental health and happiness of young people, then we have been going backward at least since the early 1950's."

"When we choose to love," writes hooks, "we choose to move against fear -- against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect -- to find ourselves in the other."

If being educated is defined as being equipped to deal with the world in which we find ourselves, it seems that this, the choice to love, is the most necessary thing in the world, more important that literacy, more important than math. And love is impossible as long as the paddle remains in the backs of our minds.

I like that hooks refers to love as a choice -- "The choice to love." As an early childhood educator, this is a choice that I strive to make every day. Fear is a powerful motivator, but connection is infinitely more powerful. Only when a child feels connected, can they be truly motivated from within. An obedient child is motivated by fear and sycophancy. A connected child is one who seeks even deeper connection through cooperation, agreement, and kindness. And that, ultimately, is what is most needed if our children, and our world, are to thrive.

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Who do you want to be when the children arrive? The countdown for Teacher Tom's Summer Camp has begun. In this course you will learn how even seemingly small changes in how you speak with children can transform even the most challenging behaviors without the need for rewards and punishments. This is especially effective when the whole team is on board. And there's nothing like coming together with like-minded educators to get you ready for when the children arrive. To learn more and to register, click here. I hope to see you around the campfire!

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!

This is Why We Never Assigned Chores to Our Child

We never gave our daughter chores to do around the house when she still lived with us. 

This runs against the current of most of the parenting counsel out there. Her school officially recommended it for all families. Even our pediatrician suggested, when she was still a baby, that we would want her to do chores. "It's good for them." "It teaches them about responsibility." "It's how they pull their weight in the family."

But I couldn't assign her tasks any more than I can assign tasks to my wife. Our family is not a business, nor a system of government. It is a relationship between fully-formed, autonomous people.

Our culture grants parents the right to command particular children based upon the accident of their birth. We have the right to yoke them to work that they didn't choose and to saddle them with rules in which they had no voice in making. We can, if we are cruel or angry enough, beat them with our hands, imprison them, and rob them of every freedom. Stripped down like this, exposing the raw authoritarian power of it, isn't something we often do, and I've learned that when I do it makes many people quite angry.

Please know that I'm not writing to tell you what to do. I'm sharing what we've done.

In refusing to exercise these parental "rights," I understand that I am, in this, outside the mainstream. People assure me that they can exercise their parental rights with love, and I'm sure they do, but we must have very different ideas about love. Love, for me, cannot exist within structures of hierarchy and control. As groundbreaking psychologist Carl Jung wrote, "Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking." Love, if it is to mean anything, is a relationship between fully-formed, autonomous humans. It is a relationship of choice, one that we must continually reaffirm or it stops being love and becomes something else.

Our child did not ask to be born. That decision was made on her behalf, one that places all the weight of responsibility on me, not her. It's a responsibility I assumed. I do not own my child, but I am responsible for her. She was born not owing me anything, not even gratitude. Indeed, I don't own anyone, nor does anyone owe me anything except when it is an obligation or relationship we've both entered into willingly. 

I don't buy this idea that children can be taught to be responsible through the coercive assignment of tasks, although many, many people seem to believe this. Indeed, for the better part of the first two decades of their lives, we assign children responsibilities "for their own good," at home and throughout their schooling. But that is simply not how responsibility works. Responsibility is always something we assume of our own accord. In the workplace we agree to assume certain responsibilities in exchange for money. In our relationships we make agreements about who is to do what. We might, at times feel as if we have no choice in the matter, but as autonomous humans we always have a choice. And if we truly don't, then we are not autonomous, which means we come to resent it, to rebel against it, to stew and anguish and despair. Is that what we feel we must teach children? To simply do what others tell them to do and call it being responsible?

Our child is an adult now. She is a valued employee. She cooks and shops and tidies up. She pays her bills. If being assigned chores is the path to these little virtues, then she managed to get there by other means. And whenever there was real work to be done, as opposed to the "make work" that comprises most chores we assign to children, she always pitched in because that's what fully-formed, autonomous humans usually do when they see the opportunity to help others.

Utah Philips sang, "I will not obey, but I'm always ready to agree." That is the larger virtue that I choose for myself, even when it comes to the fully-formed, autonomous humans we call children.

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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 ways 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.

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!

Family Dinners and Becoming the Authors of Our Own Lives

Growing up, family dinners weren't exactly sacred, but they were our default mode. Most evenings during my first 18 years of life involved the five of us sitting down around the dining room table and talking.

Much of what we talked about were our collective memories, especially as we got older. And when we get together, that's what we still tend to do. My wife of 40 years has heard our stories countless times by now. She's been a part of the family so long that she's part of many of them, even as she teases me that we hash and re-hash the same stories over and over again, year after year.

If my family is typical, about 40 percent of our conversational time is spent doing this. Some scientists are attempting to make the case that the primary reason our species developed language at all is so that we could communicate our memories with one another.

At one level, why that would be the case is obvious. If our prehistoric ancestors could accurately and efficiently share their memories of, say, where they found food or where they encountered danger, it increases the overall odds of collective survival.

The fascinating thing is that, as Charan Ranganath writes, "Our personal memories do not exist in a vacuum -- they are constantly being influenced and reconfigured as we interact with family, loved ones, friends, and our larger communities. The science of collective memory . . . is still nascent, but we have discovered that the very act of sharing our past experiences can significantly change what we remember and the meaning we derive from it."

I recently wrote a post here about an accident I had while riding my bike. In a nutshell, a man had been flying a kite in a field adjacent to the bike track when a gust of wind knocked his kite to the ground, causing the string to stretch tightly across my path, something I didn't see until it was already cutting deeply and painful into my arms, ultimately sending me to urgent care. 

At the time, I was in the midst of reading Ranganath's book (Why We Remember) and decided that I was going to experiment with taking charge, or at least being as aware as possible, of my memories from this traumatic experience. One of the ways I did this was by telling the story to everyone I knew, focusing on the bizarre and even humorous aspects, showing off my scars, and generally turning it into a kind of heroic yarn. Writing about it here on the blog was, in fact, one of my first attempts to shape the memory. When people asked, I told the truth about the pain, the anger, and the gore, but most of my attention has been on turning it into a story of bouncing back from a strange accident. I know that some will say that I'm consciously practicing "denial" by repressing memories, but it feels more like I'm taking charge of the narrative memory. 

The fascinating thing is that from the moment I arrived home after the accident, my wife began to share the memory with me. Then as I showed the fresh wounds to friends and neighbors, they became part of it. The story of the accident itself is one about which I've maintained awareness and some control, even if I'm fully aware that I tend to leave out certain parts and focus on others. But the memory of how my friends and family got me to finally take the injuries seriously and seek medical attention, is one that has entered the realm of collective memory. In this collective memory I come off as somewhat naive and foolhardy; a man who's putting on a brave face or even indulging in a show of machismo. A man, in fact, who is consciously practicing at least a little bit of denial.

It's now been around six weeks since the accident occurred and my experiment began. When I re-read that post, I'm reminded of details I've already dropped from the memory while there are new aspects that have "emerged" in the meantime. For instance, I'm now convinced that I subconsciously leaned into the string with my biceps out of concern that it would slip up to my neck, causing more grievous injury. Is it true? In my memory it is. I mean it makes sense.

And that's exactly the point of memory. It's not there to accurately record events, but rather to help us orient toward the future. That's why our memories are typically more about what must have happened than what actually happened. And a big part of how we cobble our memories together is in dialog with others which is why I see some of my behaviors, in hindsight, in memory, as something I'd do differently in the future.

That is the great power of family dinners when it comes to our memories.

According to Ranganath, psychologist Robyn Fivush "found that children whose mothers asked open-ended questions . . . and elaborated on their children's answers . . . tend to remember more of their life experiences and put them together in a more coherent narrative than those whose mothers ask their children to recall specific information. These kinds of interactions can significantly impact a child's self-concept. Children who are encouraged to have a voice develop more ownership over their sense of self . . . because they are allowed to be authors of their personal narratives."

When I read that, I realized that this is what I'm attempting to do with my own memory experiments: become the author of my own personal narrative so that I can use it to inform my future behaviors. For instance, in the future, I won't wait 24-hours to go to the doctor.

"Conversely," writes Ranganath, "disallowing certain stories to be told or . . . disputing a child's perspective can undermine their sense of the experience and be detrimental to the development of self." Fivush has found that when families make a habit of discussing shared memories collectively, their children tend to have higher self-esteem and are less likely to be anxious, depressed, or to have behavioral issues. 

Collective memory may be a relatively new area of study, but its practice is at least as old as language itself. When we talk about our shared memories, be it around a modern dinner table or hunter-gatherer campfire, we are in a very real sense preparing ourselves for an unknowable future, coming to a kind of collective agreement, not about what happened, but about what must have happened, connecting the past to the present in a story of which we are the authors.

Advocating for family dinner time, one without screens or other distractions, seems so cliche as to be fuddy-duddy, but these moments of talking about our memories are more important than we realize. When we share our memories with our loved ones, we are allowed to become the authors of the narrative of our own lives.

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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 ways 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.

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!

Living a Meaningful Life is the Only Real Success

More often than not in our culture, when someone is talking about "success" we assume they are referring to either material wealth or the result of someone having achieved some sort of victory or prize. And often they are. Most of us are less superficial in how we define our own successes. Oh, we'll take the cash and the laurels, but our drive to success tends to be motivated by more personally meaningful measures like a sense of satisfaction about a job well-done or having good relationships with family and friends or an overall feeling of contentment. 

As educators, we're widely viewed as agents for the success of the children in our care. A parent of one of my former preschool students wrote to me about how her daughter, now a second grader, had boldly stood up to a child who had been excluding her from a game. "She told her how it made her feel and said, 'I don't like that.' And the other girl apologized and started including her. That's all because of you Teacher Tom." Success! 

Parents want their children to be successful and most want to see us as allies in making their children successful. Taking a step back, we see that our policymakers have similar ideas about our role in society in that most of them cast us in the role of getting children "college and career ready," which is widely viewed as the surest pathway to worldly success. 

The problem is that our obsession with success too often clashes with the far more important goal of education, which is to support children in creating a meaningful life.

In her book The Power of Meaning, Emily Esfahani Smith proposes four pillars of meaning: belonging, purpose, storytelling and transcendence. The more connected we feel to our family, friends, and community (belonging), the more we are motivated by positive long-term goals (purpose), the more adeptly we can make a narrative from the threads of our life (storytelling) and the more we concentrate our energies on something larger than ourselves (transcendent), the more meaningful our lives are.

It all begins with belonging, which is the only curriculum with which I've ever really concerned myself. It's within the context of community that we flourish. Community is an active living thing, something that requires the contributions of everyone. Success is inclusion. When that girl stood up for herself, she was asserting her place in her community. When the other girl listened, apologized, then included her, she was likewise doing the work of belonging. In many ways, this is the only work there is. It's not easy. And it's almost impossible in an educational system that focuses on individual achievement and competition, which is to say, division. The world doesn't need more division.

Living a meaningful life is the only real success. The only way to get there is through belonging. 

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Today is the final day of the Preschool Autism Summit! There are still many more free sessions to make it worth your while . . . Including a live discussion panel with me at 2 p.m. PST. Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I've learned a lot the past two days. Looking forward for more of the same today. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for some outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass right here.

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 Social Arrangements

When the two boys played alone, they tended toward the art table where they would chatter their way through works of art that involved action -- superheroes mostly. Or maybe they would claim a corner of the rug where they built a fort or parking garage together. When they played this way, it was as equals, almost in the spirit of improvisational comedy, building their play one "Yes, and . . ." at a time.

They were also part of a larger group of boys that often played together. You would find four of them forming a team of some sort, usually involving costumes or carrying "blasters" they had made from Legos. These games were full of "C'mon everybody!" and "Let's go over there." Although at times they had to pause things in order to negotiate the exact nature of what they were doing, usually culminating a Eureka! moment of democratic synthesis with someone saying, "I've got an idea!" 

And sometimes they played in even larger groups, with up to a dozen kids, boys and girls, engaged in, say, digging ditches and holes in the sand, then flooding the area from the uphill side with water to see where it would flow. These games could involve a great deal of bickering, sometimes breaking up into factions, but usually coalescing around one or two children who directed while the rest set their own agendas aside, at least temporarily, for the greater good.

You could find these boys engaged in each kind of social arrangement over the course of any given week -- sometimes even over the course of a day. In fact, most of the children ebbed and flowed in this way, sometimes playing alone, sometimes in small groups, sometimes massing together. 

Of course, it was rarely quite this clear-cut. At any given moment, someone was getting frustrated that their ideas aren't being considered. Or there was someone on the outside biding their time for their bestie to break away and join them in something more intimate. There might be someone trying to figure out how they could fit in with the glamorous team that was swooping about the classroom, or someone else who had broken away for solo play that was destined to become the next great fad.

In many ways, this sort of experimentation with social arrangements, the question of what is the "best" way for humans to live together, stands at the heart of what makes our species unlike any other. In their book The Dawn of Everything, the Davids Graeber and Wengrow, an anthropologist and archeologist respectively, point out that a fish or a hedgehog exist in a "state beyond good and evil" and therefore have no need to ask such questions. They organize themselves as their instincts guide them. But humans have evolved the capacity to be moral and social beings, which makes us unique in the animal kingdom. We can choose how we are going to organize ourselves.

Not everyone believes this, of course, there are many who insist that we are evolutionarily hierarchical and that civilizations always progress from the "primitive" to "civilized" in a predictable way. But Graeber and Wengrow beg to differ:

"(A)rcheological evidence is piling up to suggest that . . . our remote ancestors . . . shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of the year then dismantling them -- all, it would seem, on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states . . . our remote forager ancestors were much bolder experimenters in social form, breaking apart and reassembling their societies at different scales, often in radically different forms, with different value systems, from one time of year to the next."

Graeber and Wengrow have re-interpreted the anthropological and archeological record of our species, finding this phenomenon on every continent (with the obvious exception of Antarctica) across millennia. They show that many Indigenous societies deliberately shifted social forms, often on a seasonal basis. A community might be relatively egalitarian during one season and highly hierarchical during another, depending on what they were trying to accomplish. Hierarchy was never an inevitable or permanent state, but rather a tool, adopted for a time, to get certain things done. 

Our habit of considering our ancestors to be "primitive" in comparison to us tends to blind us to the fact that they were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers too. "Likely as not, they grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity just as much as we do; and understood them -- at least the most reflexive among them -- just as much, which also means just as little. They were perhaps more aware of some things and less aware of others . . . equally perceptive, equally confused."

In a similar way, I sometimes think, our habit of considering young children as less cognitively capable, likewise blinds us. When they engage in these kinds of social experiments, these ebbs and flows, they are following in these same footsteps, grappling with the paradoxes of social order, creativity, and what it means to be both free and connected. The Davids argue that our present social order where we see nation-states and hierarchy as inevitable, is unnatural, that we have become "stuck," and that this is the source of many of the world's most pressing challenges. There is no room for the natural ebb, flow, and experiment.

In her Canopus in Argos pentology (five book series), Doris Lessing explores a similar theme, but at the level of consciousness rather than political organization. She creates a mythology based on Sufi philosophy, in which there are six zones, each representing a specific level of consciousness. As moderns, our habit is to rank these zones, ranging from the most earthy to the most Devine, but she shows us that healthy development requires movement and exchange, like the circulation of blood, between the zones, or levels, or ways of being with regard to the other people. 

Otherwise we stagnate. Otherwise the blood clots.

As moderns, we've come to understand freedom as freedom from the control of others, but maybe, as our Indigenous ancestors seemed to understand, freedom is the ability to move between social arrangements, not the obligation to live perpetually under one "ideal" system or another. 

When children are moving like this, between self-created social arrangements, I see a healthy classroom. I see children moving fluidly between moments of complete autonomy, collaborative negotiation, and, hopefully rarely, situations in which an adult must temporarily take charge because the moment calls for it (like when safety is at stake). This may be one of the biggest challenges for us adults: remembering that our moments of authority must be temporary.

The health of any community lies not in its commitment to one governing principle or other, but rather in its flexibility. That is what the children are playing with as they circulate and move, enjoying the fruits of one way of being together, bumping up against the paradoxes, and then trying something else again and again and again. Perhaps it's only when we become stuck that we have a problem.

******

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 ways 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.

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!

"There is No Evidence That Children Learn Through Play"

An early childhood educator recently told me that if "playwork" was a viable career option in the US, she would have pursued that rather than "play-based preschool teacher."

I get it. Over the years, I've had the opportunity to work with and alongside several highly regarded playworkers in the US, Europe, and Australia. I've always felt a strong affinity for their way of working with children, far more so, in fact, than I do with most "preschool teachers."

If you're not familiar -- and if you're in the US, you might not be -- playwork emerged from the adventure playground movement, beginning with Denmark's Emdrup "junk playground" in 1943. It spread to postwar Britain, most notably through the work of Lady Marjory Allen. Playwork is explicitly not about educating children. It is about respecting children enough to create and protect spaces for freely chosen, child-directed play with as little adult intervention as possible. Today, especially in Britain, it has evolved into a distinct profession and philosophy.

Play-based learning has a longer pedigree, with its roots in the work of Friedrick Fröbel, who created kindergarten in the 19th century around the idea that play is central to children's development and learning. This concept was later picked up by such thinkers as John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky who connected children's active exploration and play with intellectual and social development. 

Obviously, there is a great deal of cross-over, but there is one significant difference. As one crotchety play worker once said to me after listening to a talk I gave at a conference: "There is no evidence that children learn through play." Not only are those fightin' words, but it's empirically not true. There is plenty of evidence that children learn through play.

At the same time, I feel like I know what he means, even if I object to the specific thing he said. He was raising a philosophical objection disguised as an empirical one. Playwork Principles say that the play process is paramount and that the role of a playworker is to guard against adult agendas that disrupt the process. I don't think this playworker doubts that children learn through their play, but rather he sees an adult agenda in the word "learning" and, in my experience, he's not wrong about that.

Throughout my decades working with young children, I've experienced, time and again, adult agendas disrupting play. I've seen well-intended adults unilaterally solve "problems," not allow children to struggle, pepper them with questions, and simply take-over the play. The adult agendas of efficiency, conflict resolution, schedules, learning, and adult-direction, are all play disruptors. I felt like my main job as the "teacher" of our cooperative preschool was teaching the adults how to get out of the way and simply be amazed by what they witness.

I suspect that the main thing about play-based learning that rubs playworkers the wrong way is that instead of approaching childhood play as a "pure good," they see us as subordinating play to the adult agenda of "learning."

And that definitely happens in many, maybe even most, play-based environments. There's a lot of talk, for instance, about "making the learning visible," and "scaffolding" the play, and (the phrase that really gets my goat) "guided play." Some of us do it because, frankly, we don't, deep down, trust play, and by extension, we don't trust young children. Some of us do it because we have an agenda (self-imposed or imposed from above) of what the children are supposed to learn and by when. Some of us do it because we see ourselves as "teachers" and that's what teachers do. Others do it because parents are watching and when we "loiter with intent" we worry it looks like we're not doing anything at all.

When children play, really play, learning has nothing to do with it. Not from their perspective. They are learning, of course, but the process of play is the only thing that matters to the people who matter. When adult's enact their agendas they are making it about themselves, their needs, wants, and fears.

I call what I do play-based learning for one reason: marketing. It's strategic language. I find myself "selling" play into a culture that believes, cruelly, that children, even very young ones, must always be producing something that can be measured. "Just let them play" doesn't sell because it sounds too much like nothing is happening. When I say "they're leaning through play" it reassures adults enough to, I hope, leave the children alone. 

The playworker critique applies far more devastatingly to academic-style schooling. We know children are learning something in those schools, but we have no idea what any given child will learn. Ever. We can know what being is taught. We know what they can reproduce on demand (testing). We might even know what they can recall a week later. But learning itself is always largely invisible and wildly idiosyncratic. School children can sit through the same lesson and learn entirely different things. One learns long division. Another learns that they're bad at math. Another learns that adults become irritated by certain questions. Another learns how to cheat without being caught. Another that they must sit still and quiet. Yet the test only asks about long division.

So perhaps the intellectually honest claim isn't "Children learn through play," but rather, "Children are always learning. Play simply gives adults less control over what." And maybe that's what bothers everyone.

Play is what children do when left to their own devices. It's how humans have evolved to spend large swathes of their early years. Adult agendas tend to rob children of their right, their need, to explore, manipulate, and live in the world. All mammals, birds, and even reptiles play when they are young. Some have even found evidence of what could be called play in invertebrates and even, stretching things, plants. The leading theory for play's existence is that it is how young animals practice for the future, which is to say learn in order to survive and thrive.

We are at our best as play-based "educators" when we create beautiful spaces in which children know they have permission to play. The learning, whatever that entails, is none of our business.

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The Preschool Autism Summit is already underway, but it's not too late. Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I can't wait to dig into all 30 of these sessions. I know I'm going to learn a lot . . . And I know I'm going to be a better teacher for it. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for 3 days of outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass right here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

What Preschoolers Know About the Future of Reading

I subscribed to The Atlantic for quite awhile, but recently let it expire when I decided to limit my consumption of "political news." I don't have the time or bandwidth. I'm too busy playing with children and reading books.

That said, they currently have a long article up about the demise of reading books. It's called The End of Reading is Here. All I've read is a longish excerpt because the rest of it is behind their paywall, but if I did want to read it I could find it at my local library. 

I don't, however, expect it to say anything surprising. People have been predicting the end of phonetic alphabet based literacy for some time. Probably the most famous is Marshall McLuhan who, in 1962, the year of my birth, in his mind-blowing book The Gutenberg Galaxy, introduced the idea that electronic media are returning us to a kind of "tribal" or "post-literate" culture. 

As early childhood educators, we know what it's like to exist in this kind of society. We spend our days surrounded by highly intelligent, yet illiterate humans, who create their culture through stories, music, gesture, curiosity, and play.

The adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet by the Ancient Greeks (~800 BCE) happened in a culture that stored and transmitted its knowledge, stories, and history via an oral tradition, not so unlike what we experience on a smaller scale in our classrooms. The creation of the Greek alphabet, however, with its letters representing vowel sounds, introduced a more efficient, but far less nuanced way to store and transmit. As McLuhan points out, 24 letters, even when we consider digraphs, trigraphs, and blended consonants, can't even come close to representing all the sounds we're capable of making with our voices, not to mention non-verbal communication. This means that as powerful as it is, the phonetic alphabet has greatly narrowed what and how we communicate compared to an oral culture. 

The temptation is to become concerned about the decline of literacy, but it was never going to last long as a human "fad." I mean, if The Atlantic is right (or even ahead of game by a few centuries) the kind of literacy we fret over in schools will have only been a "thing" for less than 1 percent of our species' history. At best, it will be considered a kind of bridge between the Ancient Greeks and electronic media.

The decline in novel reading in favor of movies and programs is one of the ways we're moving beyond reading, but I'm really curious about how we'll handle things like laws, contracts, and other bureaucratic things. The future will tell, but not in my lifetime.

Reading books is on the decline, but not in my home. I'm a product of the age of books. My wife reads even more than I do. Our walls are lined in books, most of which we've read, many we've re-read, and there remains an enticing sufficiency of "aspirational" reads. It makes me feel both wealthy and smart. 

I like having read The Gutenberg Galaxy with its dense, convoluted sentences. The kind of things that AI would try to chop up into more easily digested bits. The often ponderous prose of Moby Dick (Herman Melville) presents an ordeal for the modern reader that is every bit as difficult and messy as the lives of the whalers it depicts. I've tackled that white whale of a book twice, including, both times, the famously skip-able chapter on cetology. 

It's become popular to advise modern readers that there is no shame in not finishing a book if it doesn't spark something, but c'mon! Some of the greatest reading experiences of my life have involved real struggle. When I first tackled Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, I got to the halfway point only to realize that I had absolutely no idea what was going on. In frustration I began re-reading it from the beginning each morning, while simultaneously continuing to read in the evening from where I'd realized I'd gotten lost. Amazingly, this process revealed the novel's incredible architecture, its themes, and its story, in a way that I would have missed entirely had I not taken action or worse, stopped reading. I consider having read the book in this way to be one of the crowning achievements of my intellectual life.

The truth is that much of what we call classic literature, both fiction and non-fiction, is written for a different generation of readers, one that pre-dates me. Just has the oral culture of the pre-literacy Greeks produced people with the capacity for feats of what we would today see as prodigious memorization, the culture of literacy produced people capable of appreciating prodigious sentences.

Thomas Paine's Common Sense was published in 1776 and almost instantly became the best selling book up to that point in history. It was praised for its conciseness and clarity. Today, of course, it could never be published as it is. Editors (and AI tools) would demand shorter paragraphs, shorter sentences, fewer nested sentences, an eradication of semicolons and rhetorical flourishes, more frequent headings and white space, more concrete examples, and simpler syntax. 

Modern readers, for the most part, don't often make it beyond the first few pages of Common Sense, unless it's required reading. Of course, we're capable of understanding it, but sustaining engagement with long, layered sentences is a societal muscle that has atrophied in the intervening centuries, especially since the advent of radio and then television. What pre-electronic media cultures once found to be rich and rewarding reading now just feels like unnecessary effort to many of us. I feel that this is why I often struggle with older texts, at least until I get going. I'm lucky that I've discovered the joy of getting over the hump enough to delight in nested sentences, long paragraphs, and semicolons. 

"The medium is the message" is McLuhan's most famous line (sometimes phrased as "The medium is the massage.") His assertion is that new media don't merely change what and how we consume information, but they reshape our minds. This is clearly seen in this brief flash of human existence during which books were king.

Middle and high school teachers as well as university professors are reporting that many of their students simply refuse to read entire books any more. Even as recently as when I was at university in the early 80's, we were regularly assigned reading lists with a dozen books. I once read 20 books for two classes over the span of three months. Students from 200 years ago, I suspect, would have been ecstatic at the prospect of so many books, much in the way that we get excited today when a new season of our favorite network show drops. 

The evidence that this kind of print literacy is on the wane could not be more clear. It's not caused by intellectual laziness, but rather the kind of transformation of our species that attends the introduction of every new technology.

When I'm among preschoolers, I often find myself pitying them. So many are destined to move on to elementary school where they will be hammered with literacy instruction and made to feel badly about themselves when they find it difficult. Others will find reading easier, even enjoyable, but the "work" of reading books, I fear, will get them too. Just as I was born into the first generation for whom Latin was no longer considered a standard part of education, it's quite possible that these children could be among the last for whom reading books is prerequisite for being deemed "educated." It's quite possible that some of them will never read a book.

I also see the future when I'm with them, telling stories and jokes, negotiating, making agreements, then doing it all again the next day. They are citizens of today's world, becoming citizens of tomorrow's. 

In my lifetime, I've seen television become the dominant media, followed by personal computers, the internet, smartphones, and now AI. One could say that my life has been lived almost exactly at the hinge between what might be called the late age of print and the early age of electronic media. I feel lucky to have escaped Latin, one of the oldest rites of passage of print culture, but I'm even more lucky to have grown up with books. People my age are both products of the age of books and children of the beginning of its decline. Today's youth are living during a similar hinge. Maybe everyone always has.

I'm often accused of being too wordy here on the blog, of dragging my sentences out with comma after comma, of taking detours and side roads instead of getting straight to my destination. I try, sometimes, to accommodate the modern reader with more white space and fewer rhetorical flourishes, but sadly, I'm afraid, I've read far too many books for that.

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The Preschool Autism Summit is starts on Sunday! Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I can't wait to dig into all 30 of these sessions. I know I'm going to learn a lot . . . And I know I'm going to be a better teacher for it. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for 3 days of outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass right here.

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!