In Endless Dialog With An Interconnected World

Yoan Capote (detail from Isla, oil, nails, fish hooks, artist's blood)

I often talk about my blogging habit as the core of my reflective practice as an educator. I generally don't sit down and write because I have answers, but rather because something has happened that intrigues me, or challenges me, and I want to understand it better.

Maybe it's a child doing something. Maybe it's something I've read. Maybe it's something someone has said. Maybe it's the state of the world. It starts with an anecdote or quote or phenomenon and this part, the writing, is my best effort at making sense of it. I like writing for publication because knowing that someone might read it, gives me an imagined thinking partner or interlocutor. I write a sentence and wonder how someone might respond. Will they, with reason, scoff, will they doubt, will they be confused, will they be angry or depressed or inspired. They say we shouldn't worry what the other people think, and sometimes that's probably good advice, but I find that if I'm not considering how others will respond, then it's often difficult to think of anything at all.

One of the things I think I've learned from working with young children is that they seem to think best while engaged in play. As developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky put it, "In play a child is always above their average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than themself."

In this way, my blogging, I think, is a form of play, a way to sustain a thread of thought, not with a specific goal in mind, but rather because I've learned if I'm not rushing toward a conclusion, I'm much more likely to discover connections I could not have otherwise anticipated.

In their book, The Dawn of Everything, David Greaber and David Wengrow, write:

“When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window of consciousness’, during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds . . . the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on tend. This is of course why so often, even if we’re trying to figure something out by ourselves, we imagine arguing with or explaining it to someone else. Human thought is inherently dialogic. Ancient philosophers tended to be keenly aware of all this: that’s why, whether they were in China, India or Greece, they tended to write their books in the form of dialogues. Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem.”

Play is likewise a kind of sustaining dialog, a thread that keeps children engaged without forcing a predetermined destination. This is why it stands in such sharp contrast to normal schooling, which is all about predetermined destinations in the form of "correct answers." Play, like dialogue, is inherently about taking the time to explore questions without the pressure of being judged right or wrong.

In his book Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that Neanderthals, our species' chief hominoid rivals, were individually much more intelligent than individual Homo sapiens. If Neandrathals were like mainframe computers, we are much more like PCs, individually less powerful, but far better connected. This is what our species has evolved to do: to think through, with, and alongside people, places, and things. Our minds are not confined to our brains, but rather come into being through the connections we make.

In other words, thinking is at least as much a social activity as it is a cognitive process. Together we're a genius.

We've evolved in conversation, in argument, storytelling, joking, teaching, debating, writing, and playing. And it seems to me that play is the seed from which it all grows. Play is how we evolved to sustain inquiry. It's how we come to stand a head taller than ourselves. Children do it with blocks, mud, and pretending. Adults do it with ideas, stories, and conversations. In both cases, the activity provides enough structure to keep the thread from dissolving, to keep our minds from distraction, while remaining open enough to be surprised and delighted by what we find; not because it's the right answer, but rather, as Eleanor Duckworth puts it, because it's a "wonderful idea."

When we are free to play, this is what we're doing, moving from one wonderful idea to the next, in endless dialog with an interconnected world.

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Who do you want to be when the children arrive? If you want to learn more about how the language we use with children impacts not just our relationships with them, but also their entire learning environment, join us for summer camp. This is my popular 6-week course, The Technology of Speaking With Children So The Can Think, condensed into a single week. Join colleges from around the world as we examine how the language we use with children creates reality. We will explore how the way we speak with children becomes an environment in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. This is great summer PD for the whole team. There is nothing like getting everyone on the same page to start the new school year! Clink here for more information and to register.

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

Playing With Social Arrangements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Otherwise we stagnate. Otherwise the blood clots.

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

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

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

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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

Knowing How to Play This Game

"Wait a minute! I know how to play this game."

The children were standing around a table upon which were the tokens, dice and other parts and pieces from the board games Monopoly and The Game of Life. The night before, I had discovered, in my building's garbage room, that one of my neighbors had thrown out these brand new board games. I assume that it was the young couple from down the hall who had been talking for some time about hosting a game night for their friends. 

And as a preschool teacher, I'm not above a little dumpster diving.

If you're familiar with these particular classic games, you know they aren't designed for preschoolers, but I thought the kids would nevertheless get a kick out of the little houses and cars, the roulette wheel spinner, the stacks of phony money and whatnot. I had set the actual game boards aside, replacing them with a piece of white mat board that a previous group of children had used for an art project involving table and crayons.

"I know how to play this," the boy insisted, as if convincing himself. He was taking in the scene, his eyes and hands darting from piece-to-piece, "I know how to play this." 

Of course, he could not possibly know how to play this game because there was nothing to know; there was no game there. It wasn't a game at all, but rather a collection of game pieces. What he was reacting to was the idea of a board game, something he derived from previous experiences with these same, or similar, game pieces. He was making connections between his memories and the present. He was seeing patterns, interpreting them through the filter of experience, and, right there in front of everyone, constructing knowledge. "I know," he said.

Humans are born knowing no visual stories so the world they see is just a bunch of blobs. Likewise, smells and tastes begin as meaningless sensations. Newborns have, however, had the experience of listening to their world in utero, muffled by the womb, and so they are born knowing to attend, for instance, to their mother's voice: they turn their heads toward the familiar sound because a story about that voice has already started to form. 

The human brain is a pattern-recognizing machine, one that cannot abide a story vacuum. So, just as the boy constructed the story of a game from those mixed up pieces, a baby begins, from the moment of birth, even before, constructing the story of mommy, connection, and love.

As adult humans, it's obvious to us that the raven in the tree over our heads is not actually smaller than the raven in the grass near our feet. Indeed, we treat perspective as a scientific and artistic truth, but the ability to perceive that is a story we constructed for ourselves. It's a story we've learned. 

Not all the stories we tell ourselves throughout our lives turn out to be true. The patterns we think we've identified, the connections we've made between things, might turn out to be wrong, or at least not the same as the way other people do it, resulting in a different story. Our conflicts are always disagreements over stories.

By the same token, our greatest achievements emerge from working together to fill the vacuum with a common story. As the boy began to share with the other children about this game he "knew," they began to join in, asking questions, making their own assertions, and even negotiating exactly what this game was all about. The story of the game that emerged was not the one that we adults with our more detailed experience with board games in general, and these board games in particular, would have told. This was a fresh, new story.

So much of what passes for education is adults trying to tell their same, old, tired stories to the children. Stories that may or may not be true. A play-based curriculum is one in which the children are free to do what our brains are designed to do, which is to construct their own learning. This is how our species progresses.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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!

"Well, He Won't Do That Again"

"Well, he won't do that again."

We've all said, or at least thought it. And more often than not (but not always) we're right. Like when a child goofs around on the edge of a fountain on a cold day and falls in. We expect that unpleasant experience to "teach" them a lesson. At least, we hope, it's less likely that they're going to need us to caution them about it the next time. Either they're going to avoid it or they're going to use the information they gathered the next time to exercise a bit more caution

This doesn't mean that we don't care about their tears. Of course, we comfort the child. Dry them off. Get them new clothes. But we don't need to add to the unpleasantness by attempting in our heavy-handed adultness to "drive the point home" with a lot of "So what did we learn today?" style scolding. That just shifts the focus from the actual lessons learned to whether or not the adult is pleased with them, which is a different thing. 

In his book Why We Remember, neuroscientist Charan Rangnath, writes, "We are wired to learn from our mistakes and challenges -- a phenomenon called error-driven learning." It's learning that derives from actively doing (playing on the edge of a fountain) rather than passively memorizing (listening to a safety lecture). If a child really wants to play by the fountain, no amount of our cautioning will teach them as effectively as that error.

Memory is a strange thing. Most of what you will do today will never become part of your memory. The boy who fell in the fountain will likely never fully recall the events leading up to his fall. He will, if necessary, be able to construct a "memory" involving walking to the bus stop with his classmates and riding to the Wooden Boat Center, but that will mostly be his brain determining what "must have" happened rather than what "actually happened." 

Our brains have not evolved for literal recall, which is why we struggle with things like remembering the name of that movie with that actor from that other movie. Or as cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness."

No, what this boy will remember of the events leading up to his fall will be largely cobbled together from what is called his semantic memory, which is "our ability to recall facts of knowledge about the world, regardless of when and where that information was learned" and applied "across a range of contexts." In other words, other field trips and bus rides will play at least as large a role in what he remembers.

When he recalls the fall itself, however, and perhaps the immediate aftermath (the shivering, the discomfort, the consequences), that will be called up by his episodic memory, which is "the kind of remembering that allows us to call back, and even reexperience, events from the past." It's still a construction, but one that requires us to "mentally return to a specific place and time." Episodic memory is what we generally refer to when we talk about "our memories." (Although, this too is a construction, or an "imaginative reconstruction.")

Much of what passes for education in our schools involves training children to do something that isn't natural to the human mind, which is precise recall, usually assessed by testing. The problem, as Rangnath puts it is that "tests are optimized for last-minute learning that enhances short-term performance at the expense of retention." And as we know, most of what we store in our short-term memory is gone within days, if not hours.

"Lasting benefits come from error-driven learning, during which we are not always going to be successful," writes Rangnath. "We learn and retain more from the struggle of pushing ourselves to the edges . . . than we do by memorizing and regurgitating on command." This is a big part of why play-based learning, which could really just be another name for error-driven learning, is so powerful.

"Perhaps," concludes Rangnath, "instead of rewarding success, we should normalize mistakes and failures and incentivize constant improvement. Rather than emphasizing mastery, we need to celebrate the struggle -- working to learn, rather than to prove you have learned something."

In this case, he's writing about his university students. Fascinatingly, he is not opposed to testing, but rather believes that we do testing in the wrong way. In his work, he uses tests not as a foundation for grades, but rather as learning tools in which his students are free to be wrong. He's found that "when we look under the hood of the hippocampus . . . we see that the benefits of testing do not come from making mistakes per se, but rather from challenging yourself to pull up what you have learned." The more often we do that, the more likely it is that we will be able to recall it.

"Well, he won't do that again."

The boy tested his world. He fell into cold water on a cold day. The consequences tell him it was a mistake. But this is different than a university test with its precise answers. As adults we might think there is a "correct answer," that the boy has learned to never again goof around on the edge of a fountain. We may even try to drive that point home, but that may not be how he sees it. His urge to goof around on the edge of the fountain may remain, but what he has done, through error-driven learning, is gain information that will make it less likely that he fall in the future.

He may still hop up on that fountain if, say, it's a warm, sunny day when the consequences of a fall won't be so uncomfortable

He may still hop up on that fountain if, say, he feels he has developed a better sense of balance.

He may still hop on that fountain if, say, the adults turn their backs, because, at the end of the day, he was curious about testing a different kind of limit.

Perhaps the worst thing we do in education is make children afraid of being wrong. They worry about bad grades, adult disapproval, or even punishment, instead of being free to struggle toward their own learning. Error-driven learning is play-based learning. It's not the successes that matter, but the pursuit of success that gets us out of bed in the morning. And that's where the learning is.

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

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

Making Our Preschools Worthy of Autistic Children

Play-based preschool should be the default. Research consistently tells us that young children -- all young children -- need play and lots of it for both intellectual and healthy social-emotional development. 

Unfortunately, ignorance and fear continue to drive too many parents to seek out factory model schooling for their children in the misguided hope that they'll get a leg up on the competition for getting into Harvard or Stanford. These settings, in contrast to play-based settings, do not serve all young children, which means that kids who need to move their bodies, who need to learn with their hands and hearts, who need to be outdoors, who need to learn with all their senses, who need to followed their curiosity, and whose neurotype doesn't match up with command-and-control models, wind up being a "problem." 

The superpower of play-based learning is that it adapts to the child rather than forcing children to adapt to the school. This is why so many of these "misfits" thrive with us. I can't tell you how many children wound up at Woodland Park after having been essentially expelled from other programs. And many of those children over the years were autistic.

When I first started teaching, I didn't really understand autism, even though, looking back, I can see that I worked with dozens of children who were likely autistic, but since play-based theory requires that we adapt our environments to support children in their self-directed learning, these kids never showed up as "problems." Indeed, these children were some of my most important teachers.

Back then, about 1 in 150 children were identified as autistic. In the intervening two decades, autism research and awareness has had its day. Today, about 1 in 30 children will be identified as autistic. This is because we've come to increasingly understand autism as a spectrum of traits, with each autistic person possessing a unique pattern of strengths, challenges, and support needs. And that can't be standardized for the "generic autistic child," because such a human doesn't exist. In other words, the infinite flexibility of play-based learning makes it the right approach for all children.

There continues to be a great deal of research and debate in the autism community, which is normal when the science is moving so rapidly. It can be confusing for classroom educators to keep up, especially given the amount of misinformation that's out there.

This is why I was so eager to take part in the upcoming Preschool Autism Summit, July 12-15.  This free online gathering features presentations from 30 experts, bringing together the latest research and approaches to working with autistic preschoolers and their families. My session is called Making Our Play-Based Preschools Worthy of Autistic Children and I will also be taking part in a live panel discussion. 

Please join us!

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

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

Our Minds Extend Into One Another

It takes humans years before they fully comprehend their separateness from their caretakers. At least that's the widely accepted psychological theory. A newborn doesn't know that they are not their mother and vice versa. This is understandable, of course. After all, it wasn't long ago that they were growing inside of this other person where they were literally one, mind, body, and perhaps even soul. One of their first acts, upon emerging into this bright, noisy world, is to seek the intimate reconnection of nursing and other kinds of physical touch.

Even as we grow into toddlers, we continue to struggle to understand that we are independent people. It's part of why separation anxiety is so common. As we get older, we must learn that we are not our parents: we have our own bodies and minds.

We learn about our separateness. It is not a concept with which we are born. 

There is a growing body of research around the tantalizing idea that maybe human infants are on to something and that what we are teaching them about separateness is all wrong. Certainly, our bodies are separate from the other bodies, but it's beginning to look like this thing we call "the mind," our essential self, extends beyond us and into our environment, including, perhaps especially, the other people.

In an influential 1998 paper, cognitive psychologists and philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers posed the question "Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?", concluding that there is no identifiable line. This concept of the "The Extended Mind," as they labeled it, was at first laughed at, but has over the last quarter century come to be regarded as one of the most important recent insights into how the human mind functions.

It was the work of Russian psychologist and early learning pioneer Lev Vygotsky that initially set Clark's course. Famously, Vygotsky noted that young children learn with the help of what he called "scaffolding" from the outside world, such as the help of an adult or an object. Clark realized that even as adults we rely on the outside world to scaffold our own thinking, including things like writing which is impossible without an interplay between pen and paper or fingers and screen, objects that scaffold our minds.

What Clark and Chalmers realized is what babies are born knowing.

Our minds cannot be confined to our heads. Oh sure, the conscious part might feel like it's self-contained, but much of what we know, think, and recall is actually stored in the outside world. A prosaic example is when I write down my "to do" list. Other people might hold their list in their conscious mind, but functionally there is no difference between us -- we both have our "to do" lists. This is the same phenomenon that is taking place between us and our smartphones, tablets, and computers: our minds extend into them, making them an essential part of our thinking process. A more complex example of how our minds extend into the world, and indeed, other people, is while in conversation. That process of give and take becomes a melding of the minds an interplay that isn't contained within any one person, but rather takes place beyond the confines of our bodies. 

When we moved my wife's mother from her long time home to an assisted living facility because it wasn't safe for her to live alone, it became clear to us that a part of her mind was left behind in that house. Indeed, in hindsight, it's clear that the death of her husband was a trigger for her rapid decline into dementia, which is to say, the process of losing her mind. When we removed her from her environment, we unwittingly removed much of the scaffolding that supported her extended mind.

Some time ago, I wrote about what Eleanor Duckworth called "the collective creation of knowledge," that process by which young children learn together, thinking, discovering, and exploring, as if they have a kind of "hive mind." In the language of Clark and Chalmers, their minds extend into one another, scaffolding one another, erasing the distinction between your mind and my mind, blurring the lines that separate you from me.

Our schools are based upon outmoded models of how human minds think and learn. Specifically, we have bought into the idea of brains as organs that must be muscled up on academics, drilling, testing, and the artificial rigor that characterizes so much of what happens in school. We treat children like self-contained silos into which we must stuff teaching. However, when we understand, as newborns do, that learning is scaffolded by our environment and that our minds work most naturally when they are extended outward in all directions, including into that space that connects us with other people, we see that learning is, necessarily, a collective, collaborative process: not an academic one, but an experiential one.

The more I learn about learning, the more I find myself returning to the Reggio Emilia notion of the environment as a teacher on par with adults and other children. Indeed, in this theory of the extended mind, we see that adults and other children can actually be included in our notions of environment, which means that environment is the only teacher. And as every baby knows, we learn when we extend our minds outward, driven by curiosity and the irrepressible urge to merge our minds with the things and people we find there.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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!

Jumping Up and Down and Throwing Ourselves to the Ground

Jumping up and down on the bus downtown

We are brash -- we all fall down

We take out our brains

And shake 'em all around

              ~Jim White, Crash Into the Sun

The way the game worked, as far as I could tell, is that an ever-changing cast of children jumped up and down, while some of them periodically threw themselves onto the ground, which was hilarious. As an adult who makes a study of children's play, I saw that it was a connecting game, one that allowed children of various ages and developmental stages who didn't know one another particularly well to get to know one another a little better.

Growing up, I often played impromptu games like this. Dad would, say, bring the family along to a company picnic and while the adults made tedious small talk, the kids would introduce themselves to one another with purposeless games. Maybe it would be rolling down a hill together or playing chase or jumping up and down and throwing ourselves to the ground. This would then, given enough time, typically transform into more sophisticated play that involved sorting ourselves out by age, gender, and temperament in which agreements were made through a process of invitation ("Let's pretend . . .") and bickering ("No, I get to go first!"). As long as we didn't interfere with the grown-up fun, as long as we avoided getting too badly hurt (physically or emotionally), our games would be allowed to evolve in this way until it was time to go home. 

Without fail, I would have learned something new, even if it wasn't particularly useful. But sometimes, that new thing we discovered together -- that game, that cultural reference, that way of being in the world -- would be transformative. 

In his book The Kingdom of Play, David Toomey writes:

Natural selection possess a number of specific and well-defined characteristics. It is, for instance, purposeless. It has no intention, and no objective, and as Darwin averred, it “includes no necessary and universal law of advancement or development.” It is provisional. The evolution of any organism is a response to whatever conditions are present at a given place and moment. It is open-ended. The evolution of any organism has no moment of arrival and no end point . . .

This is only one of the ways in which play and natural selection are similar. As Toomey puts it, "(I)f you could distill the process of natural selection into a single behavior, that behavior would be play. Alternatively, if you were to choose an evolutionary theory or view of nature for which play might seem to be a model, it would be natural selection."

"We're here on this Earth to fart around," wrote Kurt Vonnegut. And farting around, which is to say playing, is our natural response to the conditions in which we find ourselves. Humans, however, are forever attempting to squelch play, to forbid or at least suppress farting around. We tell our children they must get ready for the future by putting their noses to grindstones. Meanwhile the rest of the universe plays, making "the future" a place we cannot even imagine, even as we will help create it. We've collectively determined that having a clearly defined purpose is morally superior to not having a purpose. We praise those hard-chargers who unswervingly chase their goals, while dismissing the rest as muddling deadbeats. But that, in the scope of time and space, is an anomaly. It's a mean denial of the very essence of life itself, which "in the most fundamental sense, is playful."

We tend to forget that nothing is a finished product. Everything continues to purposelessly evolve at every level -- from the microscopic to the universal -- forever transforming itself; endlessly becoming something new. And it seems that the mechanism for doing that is play.

We cannot steer it. We can only take part, jumping up and down and throwing ourselves to the ground alongside those with whom we find ourselves. And, if we're doing it right, it's hilarious.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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All Work and No Play

I spent an evening at a Memorial Day weekend barbecue in the company of several people I had never met before. We asked one another "What do you do?" which is our culture's short form for "What to you do for work?" Boiled down, it's the question, "How do you go about acquiring food, clothing, and shelter?"

This dawned on me when one of my new acquaintances answered, "I don't do anything. I'm retired, just living off the fat of the land."

Of course, this man spends his days doing something. As we chatted, he mentioned grandchildren, golf, and gardening, he talked of travel and hiking. All of these things meet my definition of "doing," yet in his mind, in our collective mind, he's an idle man. In this, he is very much like most of the children I've known.

Indeed, this may well be the most decisive dividing line between children and adults. Kids just don't take work all that seriously, whereas for most of us grown-ups it's the center of our lives. Even if we love our jobs, we envy the kids their freedom, meanwhile we grind our teeth and wring our hands when they show any sign of being lazy, which is to say being unproductive. We gripe that today's youth feel "entitled," that they don't seem to understand that they must work for their food, clothing, and shelter. We worry that our children are directionless, that they lack grit, or that they are more interested in their friends than their school work. These are all concerns, I would assert, related to answering the question "What do you do?"

Of course, in most cases it's illegal for children to contract to do proper work so we assign them chores -- some parents even pay their kids for completing them -- or we re-define school as a work place with grades as the paycheck. It's not the same, and the kids know it, because at the end of the day, they can't exchange their grades for their basic necessities. They see our re-framing for what it is: a flat-out lie. The consequence for not getting your chores or school work done is, at worst, punishment, whereas actual productive work, the kind of thing we say when someone asks us adults what we do, is life or death stuff.

Years ago, I went through a phase where I consciously avoided mentioning my profession when someone asked, "What do you do? I would say, "I read books" or "I like to cook," and my fellow adults would almost always follow up by asking, "Are you retired?"

It seems so natural to define ourselves by our work that we forget that for most humans throughout most of our history, work, the process through which we acquire the necessities of life, held a relatively insignificant place in the scheme of things. Marshall Sahlins' highly influential 1968 essay "The Original Affluent Society" made the point that despite claims to the contrary, technological advancement does not liberate us from work. Indeed, the story of modern man is one of spending more and more of our waking hours working. What we today call hunter-gatherers spent, typically, no more than two to four hours a day acquiring material necessities. Even Medieval serfs worked fewer hours in a day than we do and had far more holidays. One could argue that nearly every technological, political, or social development over the course of the past several centuries has resulted in us consuming more of our life in order to acquire food, clothing, and shelter.

I'm a big fan of food, clothing, and shelter, but if that's what it's all about, if that's all I "do," then what's the point? This is why we envy children. Life, as we've created it, is increasingly all work and no play. This is also why we worry that our youth won't have the grit or maturity required of our all-work-all-the-time society. What if they are so entitled that they think they get to continue playing?

This is all, however, just a story we tell ourselves. As David Graeber and David Wengrow write in their book The Dawn of Everything: "By framing the stages of human development largely around the ways people went about acquiring food, men like Adam Smith . . . inevitably put work -- previously considered a somewhat plebeian concern -- centre stage. There was a simple reason for this. It allowed them to claim that their own societies were self-evidently superior, a claim that -- at the time -- would have been much harder to defend had they used any criterion other than productive labor."

This is the story of colonization. Everywhere Europeans went, they found people who placed art, community, relationships, and play at the center of their lives rather than work. Instead of learning from them, we labeled them as backwards and lazy and sought to correct these flaws. In many ways, this is exactly what we do today with childhood, colonizing it with our grim story about work. We tell them, meanly, that school is their job, that learning is a matter of toil, that they can only play when they have done their work. But as we all know, the work is never done. For most children, when we open the door to school, we close the window of play, allowing it to only re-open again decades later, at life's sunset, the only time when it is acceptable to do "nothing" with our lives.

"What do you do?" We tend to relegate the question to holiday barbecues, but really, isn't it the question for every day. Isn't this the question we should be asking ourselves as we awake each morning? What will I do with my life today? There are valid answers other than work. We see it every day at preschool.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 16 years. I've recently gone back through the nearly 5000 blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!