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 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, situation 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.

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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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