Intelligence Has Nothing To Do With It

A couple days ago, I took an online IQ test on a lark. It appears that my IQ is between 133 and 149, "or it may even be higher!" which means it may be over 160, so you might very well, right now, be reading the words of a bona fide genius.

Art: Karntakuringu Jukurrpa

Naturally, I'm joking. No intelligent person puts any stock in the validity of tests that purport to measure intelligence. I sure don't, especially a self-administered online test that only took a few minutes, but there was a part of me that was nevertheless disappointed to learn that I'm pretty much average. We all know about the cultural biases that go into these tests, so of course, being a middle-aged, middle-class, white male, one might expect a person like me to score between 133 and 149. And that's the most reliable thing about most standardized tests: they tend to be very good at predicting the demographics of the test takers, but little else.

"Intelligence" is a cultural construct, something that is dictated by the dominant culture. If history is written by the victors, then intelligence is defined by the victors, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other ways of being smart, they just might not get you into your college of choice. A Google search will tell you that there is not just one type of intelligence, but rather two . . . or three, or seven, or eight, or nine. The dictionary definition is "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills," not identifying what specific knowledge or skills qualify, which suggests that intelligence is not so much about what one knows or does, but rather the capacity for growth.

One of the things that I valued most about my decades as a parent and teacher in cooperative preschools was that the children's parents attended school with them. Every parent absolutely knows that their child is a genius. They've seen it with their own eyes. They've been astounded. They've been inspired as their babies have applied themselves in their sponge-like way to acquisition of knowledge and skills, the connections they've made, the epiphanies, and the apparent ease with which it all happens. And when they get to observe their child in the classroom they get to see that they are right -- their child is a genius! And so is that one, and so is that one, and so is that one . . . Indeed, genius is not the rarity our IQ tests would have it be, but rather the norm, at least during these preschool years.

So what happens? The social construct of intelligence happens. This invention of the dominant culture happens. It sorts the children according to socio-economic status, letting just enough high achieving minorities through to prove the rule of this thing called intelligence. It's as if the concept of intelligence exists primarily as form of social control, as a way for one group to assert its superiority over another in the guise of "objectivity." Or maybe it calls into question, not the concept of intelligence itself as much as the attempt to measure intelligence, because it's only through measurement, through judgement and ranking, that we can sorting winners from losers.

This is the dark heart of academic testing, grading, and assessment. No matter how well-intended, the game is always rigged, at least so long as we presume to measure this non-existent thing called "intelligence." As cooperative preschool parents learn, there are as many types of intelligence as their are children. Education is emphatically not about intelligence, but rather about growth. As educators, we should not be here as referees enforcing the rules that determine who wins and loses, but rather as fellow travelers, supporting each child as they use their unique abilities to become their best selves. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.

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Learning And Loving Go Hand In Hand

When we enrolled our daughter Josephine in cooperative preschool, I explained how it worked to a friend, telling her that there was one professional teacher in the room and a dozen assistant teachers in the form of parents. She freaked out saying, “How can you let amateurs teach your child? I only want professional teachers near my child.” She feared that the parents of other children would somehow damage her child’s educational prospects. So while Josephine spent her 3 years in co-op, my friend's son attended a preschool in which parents were not allowed into the classroom, even to observe.

I could no more have made her decision than she could have, apparently, made mine. Even as a new parent who had no inkling that teaching was in my future, I knew I wanted to be there with Josephine as much as possible, and when I wasn’t I wanted her to be surrounded by the love of a community. I didn’t care about her having a teacher who could teach her how to “read” or identify Norway on map before she was 3, like some kind of circus trick, I wanted her to be in a place where she simply got to play with friends and be guided by loving neighbors.

The more I taught, the better I felt about my decision.

What parents may lack as pedagogues (and, indeed, many of them are masters) they more than make up for by bringing love into a co-op classroom. And as Mister Rogers puts it:

Learning and loving go hand in hand. My grandfather was one of those people who loved to live and loved to teach. Every time I was with him, he’d show me something about the world or something about myself that I hadn’t even thought of yet. He’d help me find something wonderful in the smallest of things, and ever so carefully, he helped me understand the enormous worth of every human being. My grandfather was not a professional teacher, but the way he treated me (the way he loved me) and the things he did with me, served me as well as any teacher I’ve ever known.

My friend also thought that our co-op sounded too much like “play school.” She wanted her child to go to “real school.” Again, as a new parent, my thoughts on the subject were not well-enough formed to answer her with logical argument (not that it would have done any good), but I just knew she was wrong. Today, I know that to undervalue the importance of play for young children is to make a tragic mistake. Frankly, I think that goes for older children and adults as well. The times in life when my mind has been the most shut down are those times when I felt compelled to do “work” prescribed by others. When I've been playing, however, even if dressed up as hard work, I've learned the most about myself and the world.

Again, from Mister Rogers:

Play does seem to open up another part of the mind that is always there, but that, since childhood, may have become closed off and hard to reach. When we treat children’s play as seriously as it deserves, we are helping them feel the joy that’s to be found in the creative spirit. We’re helping ourselves stay in touch with that spirit, too. It’s the things we play with and the people who help us play that make a great difference in our lives. 

It’s love and play that form the foundation of a good education. Without that, the rest is worse than useless, it's meaningless.

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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Our Neighborhood, Our Small Town, Our Extended Family

When we bemoan the loss of childhood freedom, we tend to calculate the price in terms of today's children spending little time outdoors, under constant adult supervision, and with far too many toys and other gadgets that serve as poor substitutes for other children.

I recently read Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury's nostalgic novel of a childhood summer in small town America during the 1920's. It features children roaming their village, barefoot and free, learning about life first hand by following their curiosity, getting into trouble, making mistakes, and engaging in the kinds of philosophical conversations that you can only have when adults aren't always listening. Although I grew up many decades later, the story sparked memories from my own childhood growing up on a quiet suburban cul-de-sac. It struck me that one of the most "dated" aspects of the novel was how many actual adult friends the young Douglas and Tom had. Sure, they spent much of their time with other children, but they might just as often be hanging out with adults of all ages. 

Our fear of adult "strangers" and the loss of the extended family is really a great tragedy for childhood. As I read Dandelion Wine, I found myself recalling the many adult friends I had as a boy, people my parents might not have even known, or certainly not known as well as I did. As John Holt writes in is book Escape from Childhood:

Children need many more adult friends, people with whom they may have more easy relationships that they can easily move out of or away from whenever they need to or feel like it. Perhaps they found many of those in extended families among various grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, and so on. Perhaps they found them living in smaller communities, villages, or towns, or neighborhoods in larger cities. But these communities, in which people have a sense of place and mutual concern, are more rare all the time, disappearing from country as well as city. The extended family has been scattered by the automobile and the airplane. There is no way to bring it together so that children may live close to numbers of older people who will in some degree have an interest in them and care about them . . . What we need is to recreate the extended family.

I was thinking about this last night as our cooperative parent community came together for our fall orientation meeting. The thing that first drew me to cooperative schools when our own daughter was young was that I was going to be in the classroom as an assistant teacher. As I looked around at all of those adults last night, I realized that these people were going to become the extended family for the children of Woodland Park. Children typically form bonds with their teachers, but the cooperative model provides children with dozen of adults who have an interest in them and care about them. It's not uncommon for children in our school to form strong attachments to adults other than their parent, finding in them those sorts of easy relationships that Bradbury remembers and the loss of which Holt bemoans.

This, more than anything else, is what makes our cooperative model special: it’s much more than a school. It is our neighborhood, our small town, and our extended family.

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The World Beyond Her Four Walls

 "Children grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed from within the four walls of their homes. Humankind as a whole does the same." ~Carlo Rossi, The Order of Time

She was on our playground for the first time, a two-year-old there in the world beyond the four walls of her house. I know that in her short life she's already known other walls as home, having recently moved to Seattle from elsewhere, but this was her first time here on our junkyard playground, a place that her mother told me was unlike any she had ever been. But even if she had been on other junkyard playgrounds, this was still the world beyond her four walls.

Her mother stayed with her, which is what parents get to do at cooperative schools, but she had summoned the courage or given in enough to her curiosity to roam away from mommy. She was standing alone there in the big world, not looking worried, but also not looking comfortable. Near her on the ground was an old pepper grinder that has recently turned up. I picked it up and said, "This is a good toy," then I held it toward her.

She paused a moment, looking at me and then the grinder. It might have been my imagination, but I think she nodded, as if to say, I'm going to take your word for it, before wrapping her fingers around it. She then studied it for a moment, feeling it's smooth polished wood surface before cupping her hand over the round top. The set screw is missing (which is likely why the grinder wound up amongst our junk) which meant that she could easily remove the top, separating the machine into two parts. She peered into the hole of the grinder that housed the drive shaft (and pepper corns in it's previous life as a tool rather than a toy), then looked at the round top which she held in her other hand. She then attempted to put it back together. It took a couple tries to get the drive shaft through the small hole in the top.

Then she took it apart and put it back together again.

Then again.

Then again.

I said, "It's a puzzle."

She looked at me blankly for a second as if considering this, then smiled faintly and shook her head. This was not a puzzle. Or, at least, this was not what puzzles look like within the four walls. After several more tries, she discarded the top, then picked up a pebble which she inserted into the drive shaft hole. She then dumped it out. Then she did it again.

Then again.

Then again.

I sang a line from a song by the great Tom Hunter, "Fill it up and dump it out and fill it up again. Dump it out and fill it up and dump it out again."

She liked that. She showed me by smiling before going through the process a couple more times. She then retrieved the top and threaded the drive shaft back through the hole the way she had previously taught herself to do it. While she was down there, a shovel caught her eye, so she picked that up too.

I said, "That's a shovel."

She thought about that while looking at me, then said, "Shovel," holding it up. Then she held up the grinder in her other hand and said, "Puzzle." She was fully outside her four walls now.

I had to go on to other things then, but the next time I saw her she was trying to hand the grinder to another two-year-old, who didn't want anything to do with it. She then took it apart and put it back together again before holding it out to her again saying, "Puzzle." The other girl looked at her blankly for a moment. It might have been my imagination, but I think she nodded, as if to say, I'm going to take your word for it, before wrapping her fingers around this thing that didn't look like the puzzles she had at home.

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The Beauty That Children Always Create

He had taken off his shoe to shake out sand and was struggling to get it back on. He asked me for help, but since my hands were occupied, I answered, "I'm busy right now. You can wait for me or find someone else to help you."

We're a cooperative school, so there are always plenty of adults around and it was these "someones" I was thinking about. Instead, a girl his own age who he had only met the day before, a girl whose name he didn't even know and who didn't know his, offered, "I'll help you." He accepted, so she began to wrangle his foot and ankle in the effort.

The Woodland Park Summer Program is currently in progress, two week summer sessions in which we enroll mixed-age groups who spend all their time on our state-of-the-art junkyard playground. Superficially, it's a lot like our regular school year, but the part that's missing is the sense of community that grows over nine months of coming together day-after-day with the same people. It's like the first couple weeks of the school year over and over, a time when we don't really know one another as individuals, let alone as a community.

Yet still, moments like this one show me that even two days in, the seeds have already begun to sprout, this desire to help, to take part, to form ourselves into something larger than our individual selves. Yesterday, I watched children pushing one another on the swings. Children created simple games together, collecting "gems" (florist marbles), digging channels in the sand in which the water from our hand-pump could flow, forming play "families," and approaching one another with sentences that began, "Let's . . . " the invitations that form the starting point of community.

Not all of them have begun to connect with the other children. Some are barely two-years-old and perhaps not developmentally there, some are temperamentally slower to warm or more inclined toward solo play, but the beginnings of "we" are well underway. The process will include both compassion and conflict, of course, but it's one of the fundamental activities of humans, to form community, perhaps even counting as our purpose. It's the beauty that children always create when left to play together amongst beautiful things, even if that beauty is that of a junkyard.

 I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you! 

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Already A Perfected Form

I'm currently reading Aldous Huxley's novel Island, the utopian follow-up to his dystopian masterpiece A Brave New World. Next up is Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees. I prefer traditional hardbacks, even as more and more friends have urged me to switch to reading books from a screen. I understand that e-readers are a little lighter and the books a little cheaper, but they are also another gadget that needs to be kept charged up, they break if you drop them, they're expensive to replace if you leave them on the bus, and I find reading from a screen far less pleasurable than from the pages of a well-loved book. In other words, for me at least, the latest book-reading technology, despite the hype, doesn't improve my reading experience, and in some ways makes it worse, so I stick with my hardbacks.

Our preschool uses very little screen-based technology. The adults have our phones on us should we need to look something up or take a quick picture, but we don't watch videos or play "learning games" or take tests or anything like that. In fact, our school doesn't have wi-fi or own a computer, not even for the adults to use. This doesn't mean we're Luddites. After all, we live in the land of Microsoft and Amazon, not to mention that Tableau's headquarters and one of Google's major offices are located only a few blocks from the school. A large segment of our families earn their livings from technology and many of us have been early adopters of everything from robot vacuums to battery-powered bikes (really the only way for a cycling-centric parents to haul around multiple children in hilly Seattle), things that improve our lives. 

No, we don't use screen-based technology in the classroom for the same reason I don't read digital books: we've yet to see evidence that using it will improve our educational experience. Indeed, so far it appears that there is not a single thing that children learn better through screen-based technology other than how to use screen-based technology. I try to keep up with the research and while there is no doubt that children do learn from screens, there is nothing to indicate that this type of technology offers an improvement to anyone other than the companies that profit from selling their soon-to-be outdated computers and tablets. 

And in many cases, the use of screen-based technology as an educational tool produces worse results. From a recently released international study:

The more students used technology in schools, the lower the nation ranked in educational achievement.

This isn't the first research to show that not only do these technologies not live up to the hype, they are actually doing damage. The only area in which the study found an advantage was in terms of performing research, which makes sense, and is how we tend to use it at Woodland Park.

Of course, most of the research into screen-based technology in schools has focused on such nonsensical things as test scores and the retention of trivia (a virtually useless skill in this era of smart phones). There has been precious little research performed on how these technologies impact the core of what education should be about: like the crucial citizenship skills of critical thinking, questioning authority, and standing up for oneself; or the acquisition of the traits required to be "successful," like self-motivation, working well with others, and being personable. What research that has been done has clearly shown that these skills and traits are best learned through the self-directed learning that comes from play-based environments like ours.

From where I sit, it looks like hardback books may already be a perfected form. I'll continue to consider the latest "advances," but I expect that we'll be taking old-school books along with us when we begin to colonize Mars. I feel even more strongly that play-based education is a perfected form, one that has evolved over millennia, since the dawn of life itself. Sure, there might be some technology some day that makes children better at taking tests or ciphering, and I'll continue to consider the latest information, but it's hard for me to imagine how one improves upon asking and answering ones own questions in the company of a community fellow citizens who are likewise asking and answering their own questions: learning through direct experience with the real world, negotiating, bickering and agreeing, making mistakes and finding success through perseverance.

Screen-based technology is here to stay, of course, but not, I expect, as an educational tool. It is destined, like every educational fad to, at best, play a peripheral role because the self-directed learning of a play-based education within the context of community is already a perfected form.

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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The Promise Of Democracy

A cooperative is an enterprise that is owned and operated by its customers. It's a model for organizing people toward common ends that's been around for centuries and over that time it has been successfully applied to both non-profit and for-profit ventures alike. I've spent the better part of the past two decades, more than half of my working life, in cooperative preschools, and because of that I often think that I must be, by now, one of the world's leading experts on how a small-scale cooperative works.

Our political candidates are being asked these days if they are "capitalists" or "socialists." They've scrambled to figure out a palatable answer, but when I put myself in their shoes, I think I'd be inclined to answer that I'm "none of the above." If I had to put a label on it (and I'd rather not), I reckon I'd say that I'm a "cooperative-ist." Unlike with capitalism, which requires an impossibly level playing field in order to operate as the sort of meritocratic utopia envisioned by its supporters, and socialism, which requires an impossibly benevolent and uncorrupted bureaucratic apparatus to fairly distribute prosperity, cooperatives have the advantage of actually having been tested successfully in the real world. In other words, the world has never experienced a pure enough capitalistic system, nor a pure enough socialistic system, while purely cooperative systems not only exist, but thrive.

The strength of the model is that individuals have voluntarily come together toward a common end, in our case to educate our own young children. Our school is owned by some eighty families, each of which is a co-equal owner of the school, and each of which is responsible for assuming a role in the day-to-day, week-to-week, year-to-year operations, up to and including serving as assistant teachers in the classroom. Decision-making is necessarily democratic and transparent. Because our cooperative's "customers" are also its managers and employees, tuitions and expenses are kept as low as necessary (as opposed to as low as possible). The natural state of a cooperative is to be economically efficient without the austerity. When extra funds are needed or desired by the community, they tend to show up, one way or the other.

Of course, things are not perfect, which is the case of any human endeavor. Whereas we are unsurpassed in our economic efficiencies, cooperatives like ours can appear quite inefficient when it comes to decision-making. With so many co-equal owners, as you might imagine, we spend a lot of time in meetings, often hashing and re-hashing everything from the behavior of the children to what type of paper towels we will use. It can be frustrating for some of us, but no one ever said that democracy would be fast or easy, and at the end of the day I really can't think of a better use for my time on the planet than getting together with my neighbors and figuring out what kind of world we want to share.

Every now and then I've contemplated life outside of our cooperative, a place where I've grown up in many ways, a place where I've seen time and again the power of people of goodwill coming together without hierarchy in common cause. Every time I consider other pastures, I opt for the beauty of what I know, despite the occasional frustrations. We've overcome challenges and created opportunities together, talking, cooperating, and compromising. In many ways, I think that the cooperative model embodies the true vision of what our nation's founders had in mind when they conceived of a self-governing nation, which is why I think the most important thing we do in our cooperative community is to, on a daily basis, role model for our children the promise of democracy.

If you or someone you know is interested in joining the Woodland Park Cooperative School (Seattle), we are currently enrolling for the 2019-20 school year. Click here for information. There are still spots available for 2-5 year olds.

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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Chatting

I’ve been either a parent or a teacher in a cooperative preschool for more than two decades. As a parent working in the classroom, one of the teacher’s main instructions was to avoid chatting with the other parents during class. This was the children’s time, we were told, and that’s where our focus ought to be. When I later became a teacher in my own right, I carried this ethic forward to Woodland Park and it continues to be a part of my annual Fall Orientation banter to start the school year.

A couple nights ago, at a monthly parent meeting, I was talking with the father of both one of my current students as well as a former student who is now in elementary school. Normally, his wife represents the family as a parent-teacher, but he occasionally fills in for her when she has other obligations. He said, “The first time I was going to work in class, she warned me that whatever I do, don’t chat with the other parents. Teacher Tom will yell at you.” Now this was some six years ago, but I’m still pretty confident that I hadn’t made a habit of yelling at anyone, especially around the school, but it is possible, nay likely, that I was sometimes a bit scold-y, or perhaps even passive-aggressively judge-y when I perceived that classroom parents weren’t, in my view, sufficiently focused on the kids.

Reflecting on this exchange, I realized that I can honestly say that I no longer feel the way my younger self did. Sure, I still habitually give it lip service, but the truth is that when parents chat with one another during class these days, I tend to be rather pleased as long as their conversations don’t take over the class. Indeed, I even join in sometimes, chatting about movies, restaurants, or politics.

Sure, they’re not fully focused on the kids, but I’ve come to fully embrace the promise of the cooperative model: that we are not just a place for children, but rather for entire families. In our school, the parents are every bit as important as the kids: they are there to learn as well, to make friends, to create community, which is exactly why the children are there. It serves all of us, especially the children, when we spend our time amongst good neighbors, good colleagues, and chatting is a big part of how that happens.

The cooperative model is, at it’s core, the model of a village, the kind required to successfully raise a child. It’s how children have been raised and educated throughout most of human existence, not as precious pearls, but as fellow villagers, living, working, learning, and playing alongside their neighbors, both other children and adults. And in all honesty, the last thing children need is a roomful of adults ignoring one another to place themselves in silent service to the kids: I can think of few things more oppressive. No, much better I think is a village in which children and adults strive and thrive together as fellow citizens.

Neighborly chatting is how we get to know and trust one another: it is in many ways the foundation upon which civilization is built.

(If you're interested in learning more about cooperative preschools click here. I've written a five part series of posts with my best thinking on the topic. You'll want to read the posts from the bottom up, the order in which they were published.)

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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!

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How All Those Free And Motivated Minds Will Transform Our World

As our daughter Josephine approached school age we seriously considered homeschooling. Our three years of cooperative preschool had been wonderful, but as we stood at the threshold of kindergarten, I had a choice to make. Either I was going to send her off to school, with me staying behind to teach cooperative preschool or she was going to "stay home" with me and we would continue our educational journey shoulder-to-shoulder. I'd not yet become as radicalized about education as I am today, but even knowing what I know now, I'd have made the same decision.

We were, blessedly, a one-income family, which meant we were in a position to make this sort of choice. We had begun preschool when she was two, not out of a need for childcare, but rather because it was clear that Josephine had a stronger social drive than my own. Whereas I might be happy to spend a day puttering around the house, she insisted that we get out and "do something," even as a toddler, and for her, that meant finding some other kids with which to play. I know now that this was her educational instinct expressing itself.

Education, true education, can really only take place in the context of others, or as author Alfie Kohn writes, "marinated in community." As a fundamentally introverted person, the chore of cobbling together a child-centric social life for our daughter, making arrangements to meet people here or there, signing up for classes, and organizing outings began to weigh on me. The idea of a place to regularly go, where we would find people we recognized, where we could build community together, began to appeal to me because I knew it would appeal to Josephine while relieving me of that weight of social organizing. Not that long ago, during my own childhood even, extended families and more closely-knit neighborhoods largely filled this role, but we live in a world in which it is no longer acceptable (and in some places even illegal) to simply send one's child outside to play, for hours on end, with the children they find there. 

It still makes me sad to know that Josephine never had the experience of walking up and down the street knocking on doors to ask if Pheobe or Johnny could "come out to play," but our cooperative preschool, with its emphasis on play and community was a happy alternative, and she dug right in, every day, working, working, working on her relationships with the children and adults she found there. For our family, the idea of homeschooling or unschooling, would have been a kind of hardship to both Josephine, who to this day is driven to get out there and mix it up with the other people, and me, who would spend my days, if left to my own devices, puttering in my jammies.

In other words, I never felt either of us needed school for the "academic" learning -- I'd long ago witnessed that literacy and numeracy and the absorption of scientific and other facts emerged as she was ready for them -- but rather for the opportunity to engage in community. This is why I've never once, in all her years of "real" school, asked a teacher a question about her grades, test scores, or transcript. I've listened to teachers tell me about these things, but when it came my turn to talk, I've always asked some version of the questions, "How does she treat her friends?" and "How do they treat her?" This is why we sent her to school.

There is so much talk about school "reform," from all points of view, but as author Ken Robinson writes, we would be better served to be talking about "transformation." For many, this transformation involves getting rid of schools altogether, and maybe they're right. But from where I sit we will still need something like schools to replace them: places where children of all ages can come together and practice the skills of building community, to develop the habits of cooperation, to work with others, to be sociable, and to learn to walk the balance between personal freedom and honoring the agreements we make with one another. In other words, to practice the skills and habits of what I think of as deep democracy.

The children at Woodland Park make their own rules, by consensus. Several years ago, my friend Henry was walking around the classroom with his hands over his head, palms forward, wiggling his fingers rapidly. When I asked him what he was doing, he replied, "I'm the police." His hands were the flashing patrol car lights.

I asked, "Oh, so you're giving people tickets and stuff?"

"No," he answered, "I'm reminding them when they're breaking the rules." And sure enough, he was sidling up to his classmates and saying things like, "I want to remind you, we all agreed, no running inside," and "I want to remind you, we all agreed, no hitting." And his friends were thanking him. This is what I mean by deep democracy: not the superficial winner-take-all horse race of modern electoral politics, but the notion that free and equal humans are fully capable of self-governance, of making agreements with one another, then abiding by them. That really is the core of community: our agreements are sacred.

Children naturally understand deep democracy. Most adults have unlearned it even while we honestly believe we are the beacons of fairness. For instance, our playground has only two swings over which there are regular debates. When adults get involved the solution is invariably some version of enforced turn-taking, usually with a timer set to strictly limit each child's turn in the name of "fairness," leaving no one entirely satisfied. When children are left to their own devices, however, as we were as children, when not imposed from on high, our agreements, more often than not, result in mutual satisfaction.

Sometimes the children will decide to share the swing, cramming two, three or four kids onto a single seat. Indeed, at Woodland Park, this solution has evolved into hanging a plank of wood between the two swings, creating a kind of bench swing upon which as many as a dozen kids can swing at once.

Sometimes it turns into a game in which two children will alternate on their own, counting together to 10 or 20, a solution that fundamentally differs from the adult version in that it's a game they play together rather than one child standing sulkily by as a grown-up keeps an eye on her watch.

Sometimes children push one another, taking on different, but equal roles. And often they come up with complex agreements that become games unto themselves, like the time our 4-5 year olds developed a system by which one had to ask for a turn three times in succession, wording the question precisely each time, or, like a magic lock, it didn't work.

And always, over time and with the freedom to practice, the ethic emerges that when you find someone already using the swing you want, you simply call, "Next!" much the way children call "Shotgun!" to determine who gets to sit beside the driver in the car. This is deep democracy. "Next!" is sacred, so sacred that when the child on the swing is finished, he usually seeks out the rightful next in line, even if he has gone on to other things. 

Deep democracy is what happens when we agree to have a "pinecone fight," as we often did in my youth, all of us knowing without adult commands, that tacit in this agreement is the idea that no one wants to get hurt, so heads and faces are off limits, that one throws more gently at close range, that if someone starts to cry the game is on hold until that cry is over. Adults tend to muck this up by simply banning the game altogether, giving no one a chance to learn anything.

Deep democracy is what happens when the 10-year-old pitcher gently tosses the ball to the five-year-old batter instead of trying to strike him out because the unspoken agreement is to have fun, not win or lose. No one has to tell him to do that if he's had the opportunity to practice the skills and habits of community.

Deep democracy happens when children come together each day, girls and boys, friends and foes, with minimal adult interference and maximal freedom to play.

I commend and admire those of you who have managed this sort of deeply democratic educational experience through homeschooling and unschooling, but for most of us, we need schools, or something like schools. True play-based preschools and democratic free schools, to me, are the best models we currently have for what's possible when the transformation comes. And it will come, not only because is it the right thing for education and for children, but because it is ultimately in the direction of morality. As Martin Luther King famously said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice," which is ultimately what deep democracy is all about.

I invite you to imagine for a moment "schools" in which children are free to discover and pursue their passions while marinated in community. Imagine that transformation, then imagine how all those free and motivated minds will transform our world.

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