What We Lose When We Can't Get Lost

There are a couple of inventions that have made my lived experience less pleasant, and I'm not talking about smartphones or AI.

The first is the telephone answering machine. Prior to the answering machine, if you wanted to talk to me, you had to keep calling until I answered. The moment I got my first answering machine, people started asking, "Why didn't you return my call?" Suddenly, the onus of making contact could be placed on me by anyone at anytime, even by people I had no desire to speak with. The answering machine is long gone, but its legacy -- email, text messages, direct messages -- just put the whole thing on steroids. Now, I even receive email from advertisers that scold, "I've written to you several times about this"

I don't want to be rude, but the modern world has become one big answering machine of flashing lights telling me that someone, everyone, is attempting to place the obligation of communication on me. Well, I left you a message . . .

The second invention is GPS. I know, it's an amazing thing to not get lost in the world. As long as we have service, it's almost impossible to get lost, even in strange or foreign places. 

People my age know what it's like to be lost, to have to rely on your wits and the kindness of strangers to get back on track. Some of my favorite travel memories involve times when I didn't know where I was. I was once lost in Paris, having gone out on a ramble, only to find that I'd taken too many turns to recall the way back to my hotel. I stopped at a street cafe to collect myself over a cup of coffee. I looked up to find a most magnificent cathedral across the way. It turned out it was Notre Dame. I felt almost as if I'd discovered this famed tourist attraction because I'd not sought it, I'd not planned for it, but rather came across it in my travels.

Another time, while lost, I found myself in light industrial area. I stepped into an open garage door to find it was an artist's studio. Specifically, he was blowing glass, a process I'd never seen so close-up. He sent me on my way with a bespoke piece of glass that he blew for me on the spot.

In her book Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit writes, "Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind."

And implied in the act of exploration, at least for me, is this idea of not really knowing where you are or where you are going. Exploring the world or the mind suggests that we are fully alert, using all of our senses, taking in the strangeness and foreignness as an outsider, an innocent, curious, wondering.

Solnit refers to "the mind at three miles per hour," a pace of body and thought that allows for exploration rather than mere sightseeing.

I share Solnit's fondness for long walks. When I travel as Teacher Tom, I'm generally hired for a specific purpose, but there are always hours during which I'm free to roam. I rarely consult the "What's Happening" or "Must See" listings, and instead simply wander. In this way, I got to watch dog sled races through the streets of Fairbanks, Alaska. I once found myself in Sydney's magnificent botanical gardens. I've re-discovered one of my childhood homes in the suburbs of Athens, Greece. 

I've also found myself walking along motorways without sidewalks, trapped in a maze of dead ends, and chased by aggressive (seeming) off-leash dogs. That's the other side of exploring, of course. It's not all Notre Dame.

Just as the answering machine became its own kind of slippery slope, the advent of GPS has virtually eliminated the necessity of surrendering to being lost, and reduced the opportunity to experience the unexpected. We get from point A to point B as efficiently as possible. We plan our itineraries, take our photos, then get back on track. I recently spoke with a 17-year-old who told me of his panic over finding himself in a rural part of Oregon where there was "no connectivity." That was my entire life until relatively recently, but today connectivity is part of our baseline reality. Being lost today isn't a normal aspect of freedom, but rather an emergency.

And I miss it.

I still go out on those long walks. And yes, I do carry my phone. I turn it off because I crave being "out of touch" for a few hours, but it's impossible to forget that should I "get lost" I can be immediately found, complete with step by step directions to food, water, and transportation. No need to stick my head into an artist's studio. No way to find myself amidst huskies pulling sleds. No exploration of either the world or my mind.

The mind at three miles per hour, however, seems like the perfect thing. It seems like how we are meant to think, while moving, outdoors, communing with unfamiliarity, exploring, learning about the world and ourselves.

Today's children may well go their entire lives without the experience of being lost. They may never know what it means to temporarily disappear from the known world. And that, I think, is a loss.

******

Books, like Sand Talk, 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!

Childhood is the Time for Falling in Love

I'm currently planning an exciting DIY project. 

The wicker armrests and backs of our patio furniture are coming apart. It's nice, well-made furniture, and the sides are still looking nice, so I've had the idea to add teak planks to cover the broken wicker. In my mind, it looks good. In my mind, I can envision exactly how I'm going to do it. I even think I already have all the tools I'm going to need, other than perhaps a little sandpaper. I calculate that it will cost around $200 to do the job, which is a lot less expensive than new furniture.

I actually think it will make the furniture look even better than it did when it was new; more solid, more substantial, and I like the way teak tends to weather into a soft grey. My friends have different opinions. My wife Jennifer, despite knowing that I have a history of successful home improvement projects (one of the main reasons, I joke, that we've remained married for 40 years), is doubtful so I've just ordered the minimal amount of material to finish one chair as a proof of concept.

I don't fault anyone for doubting me. After all, I'm an amateur. 

An amateur, by definition, is someone who does something for pleasure or as a hobby instead of for money, but the word also often connotes someone who simply isn't very good at something. We often dismiss things as "amateurish." But then there are, say, amateur athletes or amateur artists who we admire, in part, because they are amateurs. They are doing something for the love of doing it. Indeed the word amateur comes from the Latin amator, "lover," from amare, "to love."

In his iconic book The Medium is the Massage, philosopher Marshall McLuhan writes: "Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment . . . the “expert” is the man who stays put."

Part of becoming a professional is that we must learn to function successfully within an existing "professional" environment. The professional must master its assumptions, conventions, categories, standards, vocabulary, and measures of success. When McLuhan uses the word "environmental" he's talking about the "ground rules" that become so habitual that they cease to even be noticed.

A professional is a person who has become adapted. They have learned what it means to be, say, a "good" lawyer, a "good" teacher, or a "good" carpenter. The professional knows what is "legitimate," "acceptable," and, perhaps most importantly, what success is meant to look like.

In contrast, the amateur hasn't internalized those rules. Indeed, the amateur may not even know they exist and therefore has the freedom to ask questions the professional would not even think to ask, such as "Why must it be done in this way?"

"There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics," wrote J. Robert Oppenheimer, "because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago." That loss is one of the risks of becoming a professional.

I'm not saying that professionalism is necessarily a bad thing, but rather to suggest that perhaps it's best not to rush ourselves towards professionalism, especially since it can tend to turn something one loves into a mere "job."

I'm an amateur bread baker -- sour dough baguettes are my speciality. When I deliver fresh bread to my neighbors, they often say something like, "You should sell these at the farmer's market" or "You should start a bakery!" It's a nice compliment, but I know that the moment I start doing it for anything other than pleasure, it will become, well, less pleasurable and that's something I don't want to lose.

The professional has something at stake: reputation, status, livelihood, credentials, measurable outcomes. The professional therefore has reasons to stay inside the established rules.

The amateur—at least McLuhan's ideal amateur—can screw around.

They can try something that probably won't work. They can abandon it halfway through. They can pursue something merely because it's interesting. They can combine things that aren't “supposed” to go together. They can ask questions whose answers have no practical value. They can fail without having failed at being an amateur.

In other words, amateurs can play.

A four-year-old building a block tower isn't a junior architect. She's an amateur builder in the deepest sense. She doesn't need the tower to stand. She doesn't need to optimize materials. She doesn't have a client or deadline. She doesn't need to demonstrate mastery against a rubric. She can build it badly, knock it over, turn the blocks into sandwiches, discover something about balance, forget about balance entirely, and wander off to dig a hole.

And importantly, the freedom to lose, or to fail, is what makes discovery possible.

Play-based education protects amateurism. Standard schooling prematurely professionalizes childhood.

Consider how much of conventional schooling resembles professionalization: specialized subjects, schedules, externally defined objectives, standards, performance measurement, comparison with peers, deadlines, evaluation by experts, and increasingly narrow definitions of competence.

We say, in effect: Here are the ground rules. Learn to succeed within them.

Whereas play, amateurism, permits children to discover the ground rules themselves and, crucially, to discover that the ground rules can be changed. And that's why children playing in the street may have an advantage over a professional.

This rush to professionalize childhood is a misguided effort to dismiss a necessary and beautiful mode of learning: amateurism. We want children to get good at things, to master the ground rules, to produce measurable outcomes, often before they've had enough time to screw around with the world.

The amateur, remember, is the lover. Children at play are amateurs in this oldest and best sense of the word. They pursue things because they are interesting. They do things badly. They fail without being failures. They change the rules. They abandon one thing for another. They follow questions that lead nowhere, then suddenly somewhere.

There will be plenty of time for professionalism. Childhood is the time for falling in love.

******

Books, like Sand Talk, 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!

Extending Themselves Into the World

Karntakuringu Jakurrpa

I've been driving cars for 45 years. It's been decades since I spent time and energy thinking about driving. I just do it. When I was first behind the wheel, when I was learning about driving, I had to think about every aspect of what I was doing, but today it is second nature.

As Tyson Yunkaporta explains it in his book Sand Talk: "At the simplest level, when we hold a tool, our brain recognizes it as an extension of our arm. It isn't really part of our body, but it becomes an embodied extension of our neural processes."

This ability to make and use tools, like hammers or cars, is one of the things that makes Homo sapiens the species we are. Of course, other species, like apes, otters, and crows, use tools, but none to the extent that we do.

I recently observed a toddler stop to consider a stick on the ground. On wobbly legs, she stood over that stick for a moment, before carefully, awkwardly, bending at the waist and knees to get closer to it. Again, she paused to catch her balance before reaching out her hand, fingers splayed. It took her a couple attempts to grasp hold of it. She fell on her bottom in the effort to stand upright again, but then, without dropping the stick, she pushed herself back onto her feet. She then began testing the world with that stick, tapping it on the ground, poking tree trunks, sticking it into holes. It had become "an embodied extension of (her) neural processes."

We've all observed young humans doing these kinds of things. This urge to extend our bodies and minds out into our environment is, in many ways, what learning is all about. Reggio Emilia educators consider "the environment" to be a teacher, equal in significance to human teachers. Indigenous wisdom, no matter where we find it in the world, has more often than not acknowledged the interconnectedness between us humans and the rest of creation.

"At more complex levels," Yunkaporta writes, "the meaning we make with places, people, and objects and the way we organize interactions between these things become an extension of our thinking. Through meaning-making, we effectively store information outside our brains, in objects, places, and relationships with others." (Italics are mine)

A while back, I went golfing for the first time in 30 years. I was concerned I would make a fool of myself, and I did, but not nearly to the degree I'd feared. Indeed, the moment I picked up a club, I was reconnected to the golf clubs of my youth. I thought of my father's persimmon wood drivers, then my father, then of taking those clubs to our local municipal course and the pride of having the pro there enthuse over their rarity and beauty. I thought I'd forgotten everything about golf, but the moment I took my first swing, my body and mind embodied much of the knowledge I had stored away in those clubs from long ago. As I went around the course, I was in the past as much as the present, as the course itself -- the grass, the sand traps, the greens, the balls, the tees -- taught and re-taught knowledge, even wisdom, that I'd left stored there long ago.

Many of us will gather with our extended families over the upcoming holidays where we will reconnect with knowledge that we keep stored in our relationships with others. Perhaps we will spend time in our childhood homes or engaging in rituals and traditions that reconnect us to things we thought we'd forgotten. If the lessons we learned were of kindness and love, those will surround us. If they were harsh or sad, we will resist or avoid the people, places, or things that store our pain, which is probably why so many of us find the holidays challenging.

Young children are just beginning this process of extending themselves into the world, of connecting their neural processes with their environment. They are just beginning to store their knowledge and wisdom outside of their brains. They will learn things in school, although most of it will remain in school, stored there in the classrooms, teachers, and classmates. Their important connections will be made with the people, places, and things from life itself.

"If you use a familiar object to help you encode new knowledge that you are learning," write Yunkaporta, "then when you pick up that object or even just visualize it, you instantly remember what you learned. It has become a tangible metaphor, an overlap between the two worlds." This goes for people and places as well as things. Writes Yunkaporta, "This is how spirit works."

******

Books, like Sand Talk, 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!

Our North Star

The profit motive is good, I suppose, for some things, like televisions. If the demand for TVs goes up, then the big manufacturers can make more by doing business things like expanding capacity or becoming more productive through creating efficiencies. If demand falls, they can protect their profits by cutting back or lowering prices. The bottom line is that at the end of the day no one really needs a TV and there is still enough competition in the consumer electronics market that the promise of capitalism's supply-and-demand dynamics actually serves consumers who are always, at least theoretically, looking for the "best quality" at the "lowest price."

Some of you may have heard about the collapse of the Guidepost Montessori chain of preschools. The founder had raised $335 million from venture capitalists and private equity firms with the promise of doing "what ride-sharing apps or Airbnb have achieved." At its peak, Guidepost had opened 150 preschools serving tens of thousands of families, only to have the whole thing come tumbling down after accumulating $440 million in losses. But only after degrading their "product" (i.e., caring for young children) to the point that they were, from the sound of it, essentially warehousing kids under the care of unqualified teachers working for, you guessed it, low wages. It's been called a "Ponzi scheme" by some former employees.

Some things, and early childhood education is one of them, cannot practically or ethically, be provided as the kind of fast-growth, high-profit "product" that most investors are looking for. I know something about this because I've watched, from the inside, as smart, well-funded people tried to thread that needle.

Several years ago, I got involved with an effort to do something similar to what Guidepost Montessori was trying to do. We even compared ourselves to Uber. I was recruited, the CEO told me, to protect the company's "North Star," which was to provide affordable, high-quality preschool in every neighborhood in the US, and, we dared to dream, ultimately the world. We had seed money from a well-regarded venture capital firm and I was well-compensated, but it didn't take long for me to realize that they really didn't want my input. I was there to provide credibility. The company had other problems, but it quickly became clear to me that the kind of business approach favored by Silicon Valley would never work for our sector. The Guidepost collapse just further confirms my decision to run like the wind.

On the surface our model sounded ingenious. Instead of building expensive centers, we would unlock the underused capacity of educators' homes, the way Uber does with their drivers' own cars, to create a network of in-home care. Instead of employing all teachers at a central location, we would create a platform to connect families directly with educators in their neighborhoods. We would create efficiency by centralizing marketing and admin, while letting individual educators provide the actual service. 

But there's a fundamental difference: Uber can scale without producing more drivers. It recruits people who already possess cars and driving skills, and each additional driver expands capacity. A preschool platform, however, has to somehow produce and sustain high-quality educators, and that quality resides overwhelmingly in those human beings and their relationships with children. That's a much bigger challenge than simply providing a relatively clean vehicle with a full gas tank.

I would say it's an impossible challenge.

I'm not saying that business is bad for childcare. Indeed, our profession is full of scrappy, creative entrepreneurs, people who are providing outstanding education and care that is both affordable and at least modestly profitable. These people aren't likely to get rich. They might open a second, third, or even fourth location, but at some point they stop themselves because they know that anything more would mean losing sight of their North Star: the high-quality that made them successful in the first place.

No, the conflict isn't between business and education, but rather between the economics of high-quality care and an investment model that requires rapid, scalable growth and attractive financial returns. You can't have both.

From the perspective of economics, our profession is a mess, which is why so many business people are trying to fix it. Families are stretching themselves thin to afford child care and preschool. Early childhood education is among the lowest paid professions with many of us leaving because of it. Yet, as we discovered during the pandemic, the service we provide is an essential aspect of the overall economy. In the world that capitalism envisions, this should mean that we all get a substantial pay raise, but that ain't in the offing. The economics of what we do is broken.

At the same time, I've long said that I would love to see us make more money, but not so much more that we start attracting people only for the money. Money is important, but it's an inadequate organizing principle when it comes to caring for children.

Money is what motivates a television manufacturer to respond to growing demand through productivity improvements: automation, cheaper components, improved manufacturing, larger factories, global supply chains. Each worker can, as a result, effectively produce vastly more TVs to satisfy demand.

An early childhood educator can't become vastly more "productive" in that sense without degrading the "product" itself. If one excellent teacher caring for eight children becomes one excellent teacher caring for 16, we haven't discovered an efficiency -- we've simply changed (degraded) what we're "selling." 

This is an aspect of what economists call Baumol's Cost Disease. Labor-intensive activities like education, childcare, and live performance can't achieve the same productivity gains as manufacturing, but their workers still exist in an economy where wages and costs are influenced by sectors that can. That's one reason these services become increasingly expensive relative to manufactured goods.

Capitalism knows what to do when we want more televisions. Why doesn't it know what to do when we want more preschool teachers? Maybe it's because the "productivity" of an early childhood educator isn't measured in the number of children she can process. The relationship is the product. And that's why so many of us know that we are rich even when our paychecks are modest.

******

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!

Without Emotion Reasonable Decisions are Impossible

There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. ~Friedrich Nietzsche  

The stereotypical argument used to exclude women from business, science, politics, the military, or indeed just about any category of public life is that they are "too emotional." Emotions, the theory goes, renders them incapable of making rational decisions. Most of us, of course, instinctively recognize this as a baseless patriarchal assertion, one that is disproven every day as we find women succeeding in every area of society.

Chihuly glass

As a preschool teacher, I've learned that emotions have no gender. Every child cries. Every child has tantrums. Every child experiences fear, frustration, envy, joy, disappointment, and melancholy, and gender has nothing to do with how and how often. As children grow older, however, society tends to be somewhat more accepting of girls' expressions of a fuller range of emotions, but there is still a lot of pressure to hide "bad" feelings, especially anger, behind a smile. 

Boys, in turn, quickly learn to hide their "negative" feelings behind stoicism and anger, the only public emotion "allowed" to them. A boy who cries or is afraid is often mocked. A boy who smiles too much is often considered flighty or unserious. 

We are all emotional, but that begs the question: is it possible to be too emotional? I suppose the answer is yes, to the degree that our emotions become incapacitating or destructive. We all have those moments when we flip our lids, curl up in a ball of anxiety, or trudge through days as if under a dark cloud. When it becomes chronic we call it mental illness. So yes, I suppose it is possible to be too emotional, but it is equally possible, and perhaps even common, to not be emotional enough. It's only through our emotions, not our intellects, that we fully connect with one another, understand, empathize, and communicate. Without emotion, we are but automatons, doomed to stand outside of humanity either as outcast or villain. We all have our times when we become emotionally exhausted, when we detach for a time. When our emotional detachment becomes chronic we call it sociopathy.

It's tempting to conclude that it's all about finding a balance, but there's no fulcrum here upon which to rest an easy center. Our emotions are too important for that. They are to be felt fully and honestly, not balanced out with cool rationalism. Indeed, rationality cannot exist without emotion.

For much of the 20th century scientists were convinced that emotions played no role, and were perhaps even an impediment to rational thought, which provided much of the "scientific" underpinning for denying women (and children for that matter) rights and opportunities. But more recent research has found that emotions play a critical role in our ability to make decisions. 

Rather than clouding our judgement, the neural systems that underlie emotions are essential to high-level cognition, which is to say decision-making. 

One of the pioneers in this research is prominent neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. Much of his work has been done on patients whose brains have been injured and who, as a result, are missing the connection between their sensory input and emotions. The rapid beating of their heart at the prospect of crossing a narrow bridge, for instance, doesn't provoke fear. Based on traditional views, one would conclude that this fearless person would be more clear-headed and, therefore, be more inclined to making rational decisions. But Damasio has found the opposite to be true: his emotionless patients proved incapable of making reasonable decisions. This is a conclusion that has now been replicated numerous times by other scientists.

We need our emotions in order to make sound judgements and our greater doubt should be saved for those who do not credit their emotions because they are more likely, according to science, to be the irrational ones. But like much of what scientists are "learning" about humans, this is actually ancient knowledge, long understood by artists and mystics alike. As Lao Tzu wrote in the 6th century BC, "Let your feelings flourish and get on with you life of doing." That is, and always will be, the path of wisdom.

******

It's hard sometimes to stay-the-course these days, but every child thrives in a self-directed environment because every child deserves the right to pursue their own special genius in the company of others who likewise are pursuing their special genius. It's not just a foundation for life, but a way of life. If you want to provide this kind of playful childhood for the children in your life, then join us for a 2-week pop-up version of Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning starting September 24. It's designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents, and grandparents who know that there is so much more than mere academics. This is a great way to make sure the whole team is on the same page to begin to coming school year. To learn more and to register, click here. But hurry, we start today!

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 Story of Your Life

In his novella The Story of Your Life, Ted Chiang imagines a woman who learns to comprehend the language of an alien species that perceives the universe through a teleological lens, meaning that instead of seeing cause-and-effect as we do, they live their entire lives always knowing the past, present, and future. Physicists like Stephen Hawking have pointed out that the fundamental laws of physics don't distinguish past from future in the way our experience does. The fact that we perceive time's passage, that there is a past and future, these scientists tell us, may largely be a function of our perspective.

Of course, knowing something is true does not mean it's necessarily useful. We would be fools to attempt to live as if time does not pass.

But it's something to wonder about.

The book's protagonist learns the alien language, and as she does, her own mind is rewired to see things as the aliens do. She comes to know the fullness of her life: that she will marry, have a daughter, suffer through a painful divorce, and lose her child to an early death. Yet, despite all this inevitable heartbreak, she chooses to embrace the journey of her life.

And isn't that what we all do anyway? As the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote:

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;

Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;

Thy fate is the common fate of all,

Into each life some rain must fall,

Some days must be dark and dreary. 

We know the rain and dark are coming even if we don't know the specific nature of them. We always try, and always fail, to shelter our children from this knowledge -- or at least try to soften it. We also know, in our good moments, that the sun is still shining.

As a mental experiment, it's fascinating to consider how one would live without either the fear of or hope for what is to come. Since the future is fully known in all its details, there is no place for either anxiety or its flip-side, anticipation. Would we still lie awake at night? Would our hearts still flutter? Would we better appreciate the emerging moment in which we find ourselves?

Or, perhaps, what we learn is that we aren't so different from those aliens and their alien language.

In his notes for the novella, Chiang writes, "Stephen Hawking . . . found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future. But remembering the future is child's play for me now. I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead now." He then quotes Kurt Vonnegut, "Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and likes you no matter what you are."

When I think of that first moment alone with our newborn daughter, just the two of us face-to-face as the midwives tended to my wife, the story of our life together unfolded before me. There was joy, pain, learning. 

I saw it all and embraced it.

******

It's hard sometimes to stay-the-course these days, but every child thrives in a self-directed environment because every child deserves the right to pursue their own special genius in the company of others who likewise are pursuing their special genius. It's not just a foundation for life, but a way of life. If you want to provide this kind of playful childhood for the children in your life, then join us for a 2-week pop-up version of Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning starting September 24. It's designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents, and grandparents who know that there is so much more than mere academics. This is a great way to make sure the whole team is on the same page to begin to coming school year. To learn more and to register, click here. But hurry, we start tomorrow!

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!

Use It Or Lose It

I've come to realize that many people I know can barely tell one plant from another. Yes, they may know a tree from a weed, or maybe a shrub from a cactus. 

According to science journalist Zöe Schlanger, "'plant blindness' is the tendency to view plant life as an indistinguishable mass, a green smudge, rather than as thousands of genetically separate and fragile individuals, as distinct from one another as a lion is from a trout."

To one degree or another, most of us suffer from plant blindness, at least compared to our ancestors. For much of human history, knowing the subtle differences between plants was much more a matter of life and death than it is today. When we lived closer to nature, it was important to know, say, which red berries were delicious and which might kill you; which leaves could alleviate your headache and which could cause seizures; which you could wear and which could cause a rash. 

But today, we tend to come across "plants" as products in the form of berry baskets, medicines, and clothing. The necessity to know the properties of this plant or that plant isn't as vital as it once was, so our ability to do so has atrophied. In our fantasies, we often imagine that if a caveman was transported through time to our modern world, they would be in awe. And I'm sure they would be, although much of that awe would be over how stupid and oblivious we've become. 

As the saying goes, "use it or lose it." We've outsourced plant knowledge to farmers, chemists, and the entire supply chain that manufactures and brings things to market, specialists who supposedly free us up to specialize in our own right. 

Today's children spend significantly less time outdoors than previous generations, part of a decades-long shift of childhood from outdoor environments to indoor ones. Indeed, Americans of all ages now spend about 90 percent of their lives indoors. So, of course, this ability is atrophying.

The modern world is built on specialization, on individuals picking what they will use and what they will lose. Unfortunately, that also means we lose our connection to things that may well be important to us. I mean, the smartphone or AI may represent grand, perhaps misguided, definitely uncontrolled "experiments" that may wind up killing us all, but this experiment in disconnecting from nature is, from where I sit, a far more dangerous experiment.

This is part of the reason I feel so strongly that every preschool playground should include plants. A garden is a good place to start, but also trees, grasses, vines, shrubbery, and whatever else will grow in and around the place. Even better, of course, is an adjacent forest or pond or beach or bush or vacant lot where the weeds run wild. Sadly, most playgrounds are soft fall zones and out-of-the-box equipment, with, perhaps a patch of well-mown grass. We think that represents "safety" when, in fact, it represents the adult's ignorance of nature, the full needs of children, and the only real safety that has ever existed: the experience to keep oneself safe. Use it or lose it.

We'll never be as plant savvy as our hunter-forager ancestors, nor do we need to be, but what else do we miss in our near complete inability to recognize these living things that were here for millennia before us and will likely be here for millennia after we Homo sapiens have either died off or evolved into whatever is next? 

What else are we blind to? The evidence is that we, as individuals, are blind to most of reality, even if we, as a species, have specialists who know a lot about a lot.

I often see our youngest children as the last of the generalists, which is why I want them to play. If nothing else, when we let them choose what to explore, what to think about, what to experiment with, we allow them to discover connections with the world to which the rest of us have become ignorant through disuse. We often talk about the early years as a time for building foundations, but maybe a better metaphor is to think of it as discovering how to connect with the world in all its wonder.

In our species' "progress," we've lost at least as much as we've gained as we've leaned into our capacity for specialization. But of all the things we've lost, I wonder if the one indispensable thing is the capacity to connect directly to the rest of the world, freely, without the perpetual guiding hand of for-their-own-good specialists. And that capacity is built through play.

Use it or lose it.

******

It's hard sometimes to stay-the-course these days, but every child thrives in a self-directed environment because every child deserves the right to pursue their own special genius in the company of others who likewise are pursuing their special genius. It's not just a foundation for life, but a way of life. If you want to provide this kind of playful childhood for the children in your life, then join us for a 2-week pop-up version of Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning starting September 24. It's designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents, and grandparents who know that there is so much more than mere academics. This is a great way to make sure the whole team is on the same page to begin to coming school year. To learn more and to register, click here. But hurry, we start on Thursday!

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!

How Much Evidence Do They Need?

Swedish cognitive neuroscientist and researcher John Axelsson says that our brain seeks to become expert in the environment in which it finds itself. 

The brain is, in effect, a "simulation machine," according to Axelsson, designed to learn about the world, then automate the relevant survival behaviors. 

The example he gives is learning to drive. At first we must be conscious of every aspect of operating our vehicle (i.e., learning), but with practice the relevant behaviors become more and more automatic until we can free our brains up to do more "important" things, like simulating what we are going to say to our boss about being late yet again.

The brain learns and automates: learning takes a lot of energy, automation less. This means that we are in a continual process of converting behaviors that take more energy into behaviors that take less energy. This can also be called the process of becoming expert which is, to close the circle, what our brains are designed to do. 

We see this process in action, quite clearly, when we observe children at play. Each is drawn toward becoming expert in their environment, starting with what is most "important," which is to say that thing about which they have the most curiosity. I recently watched an 18 month old with a stick. His learning took the form of poking various things in his environment with it, trying the dirt, then the pavement, then a manhole cover, then a wall, then a tree trunk. I can certainly speculate about what he was learning, although I can never know for sure. What I do know is that he was seeking to become expert in the environment  in which he found himself because that's what humans do. Not far away, another child, in more or less the same environment, was sitting with her family at a lunch table repeatedly scraping a fork across a plate, then putting it into her mouth. She was also in the process of becoming expert in her environment.

Standard schools are based upon hubris and habit, rather than the science of how learning happens. When committees of adults pre-determine what is important in a child's environment, when they likewise predetermine how and on what schedule they are going to learn it, we cheat the children. Instead of creating environments of autonomy, we create ones of reliance upon others (i.e., adults). What children learn in these environments is that they must strive to ignore their curiosity and become expert instead at compliance, placing their learning in the hands of "teachers" who will then attempt to measure it. This is an artificially stressful environment and, as Axelsson told us, stress is one of the conditions under which learning slows down, or even ceases altogether in extreme cases.

In contrast, we learn best in relatively stress free environments. Axelsson points out that children escaping extremely stressful environments like war zones will stop playing until they find themselves in environments that are relatively stress free, like refugee camps. Indeed, they need to play in order to start becoming expert in the new environment in which they find themselves. Our schools are not, of course, war zones, but by seeking to control the bodies and minds of children, we are asking them to replace their curiosity with obedience. And that is unnecessarily stressful.

Some children learn those lessons in compliance quite well. We call them good students. Many more learn to hide or squelch their curiosity, doing their real learning by pursuing passions outside of school. Those we call "indifferent students" even if some of them learn to pass all the tests. Still others are driven to rebel, which is how their brains seek to become expert in an environment that tries to control them, a perfectly valid, even commendable response. These children know that, for them, escape is the only relevant behavior.

If we were to rely on science instead of habit and hubris, our school environments would look much different than they do right now. Instead of being places of top down curricula and compliance, they would be environments full of stuff and ideas. They would be environments in which children were free to pursue their curiosity, to become expert in the aspects of the environment that they deem most important, to do it in the manner they choose, and according to the timetable they set for themselves. Schools would be environments in which the adults themselves are part of the stuff and ideas, there not to instruct or control, but rather to answer questions, provide materials, and support each individual child to the degree and in the way the child determines. 

Those who support standard schools are never asked to defend their methods, whereas those of us who advocate for play-based or self-directed learning are forever being challenged to defend our approach. Again and again, the science, the evidence, tells us that if a generation of critical, creative thinkers is our goal, an environment of play is how our brains work best. Yet again and again we are called on to provide more evidence. How much evidence do they need?

It seems the only conclusion is that those who support standard school methods have different ideas of education than I do. And, of course, if compliance is the goal, carry on. You'll just be doing it without me.

******

It's hard sometimes to stay-the-course these days, but every child thrives in a self-directed environment because every child deserves the right to pursue their own special genius in the company of others who likewise are pursuing their special genius. It's not just a foundation for life, but a way of life. If you want to provide this kind of playful childhood for the children in your life, then join us for a 2-week pop-up version of Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning starting September 24. It's designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents, and grandparents who know that there is so much more than mere academics. This is a great way to make sure the whole team is on the same page to begin to coming school year. To learn more and to register, click here. But hurry, we start on Thursday!

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!