The Concept Of "Learning Loss" Is BS

Just scanning the first page of my search engine's results for "learning loss" without clicking a single link I see that children have "suffered" learning loss during the pandemic, that the learning loss is "grim," that it is "unprecedented," and that schools are "racing" and "struggling" to correct it. It will, apparently, "take years to overcome" the damage that's been done to our poor children who we are counting on to fill the jobs of tomorrow.

Oh boy, we're on high seas alright. Just when we think we're seeing a light at the end of the pandemic storm, we see there are still choppy waters and dark clouds ahead, and this time it's all going to come crashing down on our children. The poor children. Think of the children!

But breathe easy. Fortunately, there are heroes here to save the day: for-profit corporations who just happen to sell exactly the lifesavers we need in the form of curricula, text books, tutoring, and, most importantly, standardized tests. Of course, it will apparently mean tossing a few less important things overboard. Recess must, of course, be reduced. School hours can be extended. Summer break can be shortened or perhaps eliminated entirely. And perhaps we can put those extras like music, physical education, and art on hold for a few years. If these measures seem harsh, please consider the poor, wee, suffering children whose brains are being, as we speak, drained of learning; who have been traumatized by what is clearly a brain damaging event. But if we act fast, with the kind of tough love only institutions can administer, and with, most importantly, rolls of freshly minted bills (that are definitely not needed to make up for the financial losses these self-proclaimed "education" corporations experienced during this dark time when children were not being rigorously drilled-and-killed), these benevolent heroes can save our children from being hopelessly lost at sea for the rest of their lives . . .

This is what they are selling and it should sicken all of us. The concept of "learning loss" is complete BS. It's been with us forever, of course, this noxious idea that if we don't keep children's noses to the grindstone year-round they fall into some sort of swoon of blithering ignorance, but now it's being weaponized and aimed directly at our children. "Learning loss" is not a real thing. It's an invention of the standardized testing crowd. If it's so fragile that a year or so, will cause it to somehow disappear, it was never learned in the first place. It was, at best, a bit of trivia that a child managed to store away in their short term memory long enough to fill in the right dot on a test. I have no doubt that kids have sloughed off tons of this sort of trivia during the pandemic months, but that isn't evidence of learning loss: it's evidence that what we've been doing to children at the behest of these testing companies isn't learning at all. Or rather it's learning in the only thing that matters to their bottomline, which is proficiency in taking tests, of cramming, of scoring points. It is a useful, self-perpetuating set of skills just so long as testing remains the center of their educational experience. It is not useful for anything they will ever face in the world beyond the classroom.

Clearly, the actual content doesn't matter, and that's usually the way children feel about it as well. Once they've used it for it's only conceivable purpose, filling in a bubble with a number two pencil, they are free to dump it to make space for the next set of test answers they must retain long enough to fill in the correct bubbles. This is not learning in the sense that professional educators think of it, which is why it's no loss at all.

Professional educators know that real learning cannot be lost except in the case of some sort of brain damage. Professional educators know that real learning continues unabated, even during a pandemic. Professional educators know that the children who have returned to their classrooms have been transformed by their experiences, profoundly, and not all for the bad. Professional educators know that "falling behind" is a concept invented by testing companies whose only measure for "behind" is the very tests they create, a convenient, cynical self-perpetuating cycle that has nothing at all to do with learning or education or life itself. Professional educators know that one must apply knowledge before it is learned and our children have spent the pandemic applying their knowledge to living through a pandemic. That's where the learning has happened.

The real heroes are the children who stayed home, who sat in front of computer screens, who continue to wear masks and keep their distance even when every fiber of their being is telling them to hug and wrestle and hold hands. The real heroes are the educators who ditched the curricula and tests, and joined the children on their learning journey, supporting them as they learned lessons that can never be lost. What they lost was the chance to play with their friends and that's what we owe them.

It's now beyond sickening to watch our elected representatives (of both parties) fall all over themselves to beat the "learning loss" drum, eager to once more sic the profit-mongers on our children. 

Have some of our children, maybe even most of our children, suffered during the pandemic? Of course, but not because of this "learning loss" BS. Have things been grim? Indeed, but not because the kids had a break from the test score coal mines. Has there been suffering and struggling? My lord, yes, but not the kind that is manufactured in institutions that are designed to run the kids through the kind of assembly line that characterizes most of what these cruel profiteers pass off as curriculum.

It's tempting to wrap up this rant with some heartfelt verbiage about how the children need us to listen, to support, and to help them process the real world events that have changed everything, at least for a time. All of this is true, and we will do it, but right now, as I contemplate the abject meanness of the "learning loss" crowd, I don't want to simply become like them by thinking we can or should prescribe anything to these kids. Let's just admit that none of us know what's next. Let's just admit that the children, overall, may well be weathering this better than most adults, and that they have learned things that we have not. We find ourselves, after a terrible storm, in sight of land, all of us together. We don't know what we will find there. All we know is that we will disembark together and from there we can begin to build something new from what we have actually been learning about ourselves and our world. But first we have to throw the "learning loss" crowd overboard.

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book 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!

I Was A Stranger

"I was a stranger, and you welcomed me." ~Matthew 25:35

We had only just met, this four-year-girl and I, but we were already sitting around chatting like old friends. Markers, scissors, and plain white paper were scattered across the table top before us.

She was drawing a spiral shape, so I said, "You're drawing a spiral."

She stopped and considered it, then said with a shrug, "I call it a nautilus, but you can call it a spiral if you want."

Once she had drawn the outline of her nautilus in purple, she capped the marker, before choosing a green one. I said, "You capped the marker."

She nodded, "Yes, if you don't, they dry out."

She colored a patch of green, capped that marker and selected another color. Then she switched to orange, then red, until I got the idea that she was making a rainbow nautilus. I said, "You're making a rainbow nautilus."

As she went back to purple, she replied, "I call it stripes, but you can call it rainbow."

I was struck by the compassion this girl was showing me, a newcomer, a stranger in their midst, making space for my difference.

We sat in silence for awhile as she finished coloring in her nautilus. When she was done, she pushed it toward me along with a pair of scissors. "I went outside the lines a little bit, but that's okay because you can just cut right around the edges." She pointed to the outline of the nautilus, showing me where she apparently meant for me to cut.

As I started, I asked, not wanting to ruin her masterpiece, "Like this?"

"Yes. Just stay right outside of that line and cut off all the poking out parts."

She encouraged me as I carefully made my way around her drawing with the scissors. I felt a little stress at having been made responsible for her artwork, especially as she gave me several tips and cautions as I went. I asked her if she wanted to cut it herself, but she held her hands up to me as if allowing me a great pleasure.

When I finished, I said, "All done," and pushed the striped nautilus back across the table to her. She pushed it back, saying, "It's for you."

Before I could take possession of it, however, she snatched it back, carefully rolled it into a tube, then flattening it. She handed to me, saying, "This will make it easier to carry in your pocket."

I told her, "Thank you."

And she answered, "You're welcome."

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book 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!

The Artist Is Present

Marina Abramović is best known for her performance piece, The Artist is Present, which took place in 2010 at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

Museum goers waited in long lines for their turn to sit with the artist, in silence, face-to-face, a few feet apart. Sometimes there was a table between the artist and the participant. In some ways, it reminds me of the staring contests we used to engage in as children, gazing into one another's eyes until someone "broke," usually in laughter. Participants in The Artists is Present did sometimes laugh, but more often, sometimes after having laughed earlier, they cried. Many more just cried.

I don't know if there was a time-limit set for each sitting, but from what I've seen Abramović gave each person an open-ended expanse of time during which she merely sat, her face placid, her gaze rarely breaking, simply and profoundly being present with them. Participants described the experience as "transformative," some coming back to the museum again and again.

As an artist, what Abramović did was as simple and as difficult as to sit, silently, looking into the eyes of strangers for over 700 hours, being with them as they had their experience. Critics descibed the artist as courageous. Abramović herself says the experience changed her life completely.

When I think of this performance, when I think of all those people coming simply to be with her, I think of what we do as early childhood educators. So much of the most important work we do with children is, through laughter and tears, to be present, to be a blank canvas upon which they are free to express themselves, being transformed, while we ourselves are transformed, completely, as well.

(Note: I did not take part in the actual exhibition, although I wish I had, but rather watched others participate in the HBO documentary Marina Abromović: The Artist Is Present.) 

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book 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!

"We Can't Make Children Learn, But We Can Let Them Learn"

Public schools, since their inception, have been conceived as education factories. Having emerged alongside, if not as a product of, the Industrial Revolution, they adopted many of the processes being innovated during this move from largely agrarian and handcraft economies to industry and machine manufacturing.

It was during this time that we began to conflate education with schooling, or as as philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich wrote in his groundbreaking book Deschooling Society:

"They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with eduction, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question."

Whenever I read this, I'm reminded of a sister and brother who attended our school. As is often the case in a cooperative school where families come together to take part in the educational and social life of their children (in ways, incidentally, much more closely aligned with pre-Industrial Revolution practices), I became friends with the entire family, and so had the privilege of being part of their lives long after the preschool years. These were bright, creative, self-motivated kids, perhaps not the "best students," but certainly capable. As they moved into middle school, however, cracks began to show. One day, the older sister went into a mini-tirade about school as her brother chimed in his agreement.

"All they do is try to make learn all this useless stuff," she said, "We'll never need to know any of it." She went on to critique the whole of her school experience as a process of jumping through hoops devoid of meaning. She didn't use the word "irrelevant," but that was the gist of it. She went on to have a brilliant academic career, but she never lost her cynicism about what she was doing. She let us all know that she was just subversively "playing the game" so that she could get into the college of her choice: she earned her grades, she demonstrated she was well-rounded by filling her resume with interesting and varied extra-curricular activities, and she made sure to concentrate on her standardized test scores.

As she ranted, I recalled having a similar epiphany when I was about her age. Our own daughter had similarly learned to approach schooling as a cynic. Indeed, it can be seen as the most rational approach to such an alienating process, which is, in my mind tragic. A cynic is someone who has come to believe in an essentially selfish world, one in which the only thing that matters is self-interest. This is the horrible and inevitable result of trying to manufacture education (or health care for that matter): the best and the brightest come to understand success as grades, scores, and diplomas, while the rest, those not willing or able to play the game, are left to believe that they are incapable of "learning."

There's a well-known story about a businessman, a manufacturer of ice cream, who was invited to "inspire" a group of teachers. He gave his lecture, urging these educators to adopt the practices of excellence that could be discovered in businesses like his. He was feeling pretty good about himself until he reached the question and answer part of the program. A veteran teacher asked, "Do you make blueberry ice cream?" 

"Yes, we do," he replied, "the best in the world." 

"What do you do with the blueberries that aren't up to standards?"

"We throw them out of course."

"That's the difference between what we do and what you do," she replied, "We can't throw any of them out."

I like this story because it points out the ludicrousness of applying manufacturing processes to learning. When manufacturing ice cream, or anything for that matter, the goals is to mass produce a standardized product in the most efficient and profitable manner possible. That can't be the story of education. Humans cannot and should not be standardized. Indeed, it is impossible to standardize humans so our schools have done the next "best" thing, which is to standardize the process in the name of efficiency and to treat those who will not be standardized like those rejected blueberries. Oh sure, we try interventions and special programs designed to help them, but the goal isn't to help them become educated, but rather to make them more suitable to be used to flavor the ice cream.

Illich's critique of schooling is a critique of society and our penchant for trying to apply the principles of business and manufacturing in places where they do not belong. If the goal is a best-selling blueberry ice cream, then all is good, but education, like so many of the most important things, cannot be manufactured no matter how much we teach, test, grade, and certify. When we do this we create a society of cynics and rejects.

If our goal is learning, we must figure out a way to jump off the assembly line and re-imagine how we can best focus on the substance of education rather than the mere process. The only way I see to do this is to reject the manufacturing model altogether and perhaps instead learn something from the gardener, as envisioned by Alison Gopnik in her book The Gardener and the Carpenter. Our job is not to manufacture our children, but rather to provide them with water, sun, and soil so that they can grow:

"So our job . . . is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children's minds; it's to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it's to give them the toys and pick the toys up again after the kids are done. We can't make children learn, but we can let them learn."

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book 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!

The Cult Of Right And Wrong Answers

Dale Chihuly

When I was a boy, a fire ravaged our neighborhood, destroying dozens houses. Our own was saved by neighbors who protected it with garden hoses, but that fire completely ravaged our yard, including our second car and our bicycles. Our family had been away for the weekend and I'll never forget returning to the devastation. We sat there in stunned silence, all of us, not speaking, not able to make sense of it. It's a feeling that has returned to me at times throughout my life: witnessing the horrors of 9/11 being replayed on the television being one example. The insurrection at our nation's Capitol was another.

I've since, of course, moved beyond the stunned silence. Our neighbors told us the story of the fire. I've since learned the story of 9/11 and we are, as a nation, now learning the story of the insurrection. Whereas, I was at first confounded by these and other things, I now "understand" them because I've been able to place them into the context of the story of my life. 

Invariably, in science fiction stories that involve time travel into the past, the protagonists are warned that they must not change a thing or else the present could be irrevocably altered. The more I learn about how the minds of humans work, however, the more it seems possible that even if time travelers were constantly tweaking the past, we in the present would never notice, except, perhaps in those moments of stunned, uncomprehending silence that come before we do the work of making this new information part of our story.

As one of the world's leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience Mike Gazzaniga puts it, "This is what our brain does all day long. It takes input from various areas of our brain and from the environment and synthesizes it into a story that makes sense." For all we know, those time travelers from the future are constantly messing around with the past, and our brains, as they do, are seamlessly weaving it into the story we are telling ourselves.

We are born into chaos. As Daphne and Charles Maurer write in their book The World of the Newborn: "His world is a melee of pungent aromas -- and pungent sounds, and bitter-smelling sounds, and sweet-smelling sights, and sour-smelling pressures against the skin. If we could visit the newborn's world, we would think ourselves inside a hallucinogenic perfumery." And from that moment, probably even before, our instinct is to begin making it all into a story, one that brings all of these sensations into some sort of order. 

This story-making instinct forms the foundation of learning. We take in new information, sensations, and ideas, then seek to fit them into our stories. Most of the time, this is relatively effortless. After all, from the moment of birth, we have been masterfully assimilating all manner of confounding and inexplicable things into our stories. We've already had our timelines disrupted countless times and we've become adept at making order from chaos.

Education as we perceive it in schools, is an attempt to one-up Mother Nature. We believe, stupidly, that we can, somehow, do a better job of ordering the world than the children themselves. We try to artificially confound them with facts, questions, and equations, then, just as artificially, usurp the role of their own story-telling brains, by equally artificially telling them our pre-approved story: the "correct" and only story. This is what I call the cult of right and wrong answers, this anti-human idea that answers are the end result of learning. 

Psychologist and educator Eleanor Duckworth explains that learning is indistinguishable from thinking. "Intelligence is a matter of having wonderful ideas. In other words, it is a creative affair. When children are afforded occasions to be intellectually creative then not only do they learn about the world, but as a happy side effect their general intellectual ability is stimulated as well." In the cult of right and wrong answers, we do exactly what we must not do: rob children of the opportunity to be intellectually creative, which is to say we attempt to replace their creative stories with our rote answers.

When we allow children to play, to ask and answer their own questions, we free them to be intellectually creative, to synthesize and re-synthesize their own stories, to discover their own genius. We can keep them safe and healthy, we can pick them up when they fall, we can sooth them when they are hurt or afraid, but beyond that, the best possible use for our time with children is to be intellectually creative ourselves: to allow ourselves to be confounded and inspired by them, and to step back and allow young people the creative freedom to tell, tell, and re-tell stories that help them make sense of the world.

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book 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!

I Did Something Stupid

Awhile back, I did something stupid, but with it behind me, upon reflection, I feel proud of myself.

I often joke that after my family and job, my bike is the most important thing in my life. I bought it with a generous holiday bonus from the families at our school. It was an inexpensive fixed gear bike, orange and gun metal gray, which I've been slowly upgrading one part at a time ever since. I normally take long rides on the weekends, but it was so hot that I decided to just ride down to King Street Station in Pioneer Square for a weekend exhibit of local contemporary artists, some of whose work illustrate this post. While there, I ran into my friend and brilliant fiber artist Cameron Mason who invited me to a wine and cheese open house later in the day at the Foster White Gallery, where she had a couple of new pieces for sale.

It was really a perfect Seattle afternoon of light cycling and art.

I'd locked my bike to a rack just outside the gallery doors. As I started to leave the gallery, I saw a guy just starting to ride off on my bike. I shouted, "Hey!" and started to run. As I burst out onto the sidewalk, I shouted again, "Hey!" I emerged to find my bike lying on the sidewalk and a man running off up the hill.

A bystander said to me, "I wondered why he was cutting the lock." (Most of the quotes in this post are reconstructed from an imperfect memory, but this is a direct quote.)

I said, "He fell down didn't he?"

"Yes."

My bike is a fixed gear style bike, single speed with clip-in pedals. Everybody falls down the first time they try to ride my bike. When I first got it, I let a couple of friends try it out, and they both fell, which is why I don't let other people ride it anymore. Now that a third person has fallen, I can even more confidently say that everybody falls.

As I watched the failed bike thief run up the steep hill in the heat, I took note of his clothing and general appearance. I spotted his cable cutters on the ground where he had dropped them and picked them up. I then noticed that in his efforts to cut the lock, he had also managed to cut my rear wheel brake cable. I grumbled, "He cut my brake cables" to the small crowd that my shouts had drawn around me.

This "carpet" is made entirely from baking flour.

That's when I did the stupid thing -- I started following the failed bike thief.

I had no plan. I had no rationale. I only knew that after running up that hill in the heat he would be exhausted and therefore easy to catch up to. I also knew that he was headed for City Hall Park at the top of the hill, a place known locally for being the year-round loitering place for Seattle's sketchiest street people. I figured he would try to blend in there.

Walking my bike and carrying his cutting tool, I achieved the top of the hill, where I spied him right away on the far side of the park walking quickly with his head down. I tracked him from across the park, paralleling his course. Then suddenly, he turned, backtracking the way he'd come. I had him.

I angled across the lawn. When I got within a dozen feet, I shouted, "Hey!" then I used a swear word, which I regret. I had expected him to run, but instead he stopped and faced me, droop-shouldered. I shouted, "You tried to steal my bike!"

He started to tell me a stammering story about how some guy had put a gun to his head. Really. I interrupted him, saying, "I don't believe you. You tried to steal my bike. Here's your tool," and I held it up for him to see.

That's when I noticed his forehead was bleeding and there was another fresh abrasion on his left cheek. I said, "You fell, didn't you? You couldn't ride my bike." He was about my size and I judged him to be 15-20 years my junior. This was a very stupid thing I was doing, but it didn't feel stupid as I was doing it. He looked sad. I thought maybe he was going to start crying. I felt a bit like a mad dad scolding a kid, and he seemed to take it that way. He asked, "Are you going to call the cops?"

Without hesitating, I answered angrily, "No, I'm going to give you your tool back." I held it out to him, but he wouldn't take it, so I dropped it on the ground. It looked brand new. Comically, a guy in a yellow vest on litter patrol came over, picked it up with his long grabber tool, and dropped it in the trash, almost as if he didn't notice the conflict taking place right in front of him. I said, "Now you don't even have your tool."

I showed him my bike. I said, "And you cut my brake cable. Now I have to walk my bike all the way home. I'm mad at you." With that I started walking away, calling back over my shoulder, inexplicably, "You tried to steal my bike. Come on, man, get with the times!" Yes, that's what I said.

As I passed a group of about a dozen people sitting on the benches, I saw they were nodding. A couple were smiling. A woman called out to me, "You wanna come to my house?" I laughed, "No thank you, but that's a nice offer!" It was probably just a run-of-the-mill solicitation, but I choose to think I'd impressed her. It was a lighthearted end to a strange incident.

As I rode home (he had thankfully only cut one of the two brake cables), I felt a sense of power and pride, even while my heart fluttered at my stupidity. I mean, had I left it alone, I would have had my bike and a nice new pair of cable cutters in exchange for a brake cable and bike lock. I had taken a stupid risk, but had been rewarded with this powerful feeling that came from standing up for myself. And I'm proud that, except for that swear word, I had told him how he made me feel. I had even tried to return his belonging even as he had tried to take mine.

It doesn't take a cynic to doubt that mine is the last bike he'll try to steal, and I recognize that being a middle aged white male gives me a lot of advantages, but this experience was quite life affirming. I mean, I practiced what I preach and it worked! This is what we try to teach the children to do when they have a conflict with another person: tell them what they did and how it made you feel. Most of the time, that's enough. In my case, there was really no restitution possible, so listening to me, I guess, was his "natural consequence." It worked because I walked away feeling lightheartedly good about myself, when I could have felt weak and victimized.

I'll work on the swear words for next time, but otherwise, I'm quite happy with the result.

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book 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!

I Once Met A Man Who Believes The Earth Is Flat

The Edge of the World 

by Shel Silverstein

Columbus said the world is round?

Don't you believe a word of that.

For I've been down to the edge of the world,

Sat on the edge where the wild wind whirled,

Peeked over the edge where the blue smoke curls,

And I can tell you, boys and girls,

The world is FLAT!

I once met a man who believes the earth is flat.

There are many more people who believe the earth is a sphere.

I believe that trees are capable of retaining memory, learning lessons, telling time, and having the ability to communicate with one another. 

Others believe that trees are like fruit, if you don't pick them they rot.

I know people who believe that it's morally wrong to eat animals or any of their byproducts.

There are those who believe that there are only two genders. 

Others believe that gender is a social construct.

Some believe that guns keep them safe. 

There are those like me who believe that the danger of death or injury goes up whenever a gun is present, so I leave the room when one is present.

I've spent my career around people who believe in fairies and Santa.

A boy once told me that Star Wars is real because "I've seen it!"

I once believed that there were actual small people living inside our family's television set, but then a repairman let me see the inside of it.

I once believed that the moon was a hole in the sky revealing the light behind it, but then I looked at it through a telescope.

I once believed that people lived on the top side of clouds, but then I flew in a jet.

Scientific consensus is a marker of general agreement among scientists; it changes as agreements change.

Simon and Garfunkel sang, "A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."

Voltaire wrote, "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

Charles Darwin believed, "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."

Our schools are based upon ignorance and absurdity because they are conceived largely as places of right and wrong answers. 

I was recently speaking with a professor of neuroscience who told me that the field is changing so rapidly that by the time peer reviewed papers are published, they are already out of date. But this isn't just true of neuroscience; it is true of all human knowledge. 

If our schools are to ever be places of wisdom, judgement and certainty must be replaced with questions of curiosity rather than testing. Children would then be free to believe that small people live inside their screens and they would likewise be free to open up the back and look inside to meet those small people, or not. 

Socrates asserted, "If I am the wisest man it is because I alone know that I know nothing." His "method" is a process of asking questions, which beget more questions, which in turn beget more questions.

The man I met who believes the earth is a disk is no danger to anyone, but even he was, I will never convince him with argument. Believe me, I tried. The only thing that has ever convinced anyone to change their beliefs are questions, real questions, which is to say those that are asked out of genuine curiosity. 

In our world, we seem to believe that we can come closer to the truth by shouting at one another across divides, playing gotcha, attempting to install our certainty over the certainty of others, even as we know that all certainty is folly. 

Mónica Guzmán, the author of I Never Thought of it That Way, believes that "radical curiosity" is the better path. As part of preparing for the upcoming Teacher Tom's Play Summit, I asked her questions because I was curious. I believe that she is right. If you think I'm wrong, about anything, get curious and ask me some questions. And I'll do the same for you.

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book 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!