How We Will Start To Heal Our Children

According the Center for Disease Control and Prevention as many as one in five American children ages 3-17 suffer from some form of mental illness. That's a 500-800 percent increase since the 1950's. 

For those keeping track, this isn't new news even as it continues to be a crisis, one that is largely being addressed through prescription drugs, with precious little being done to identify and address the causes of this generational spike in mental illness. Lest you be tempted to dismiss this as simply a change in our definitions or ability to diagnose mental illness, this holds true even when these things are held constant.

According to psychologist and researcher Peter Gray:

The increase psychopathology seems to have nothing to do with realistic dangers and uncertainties in the larger world. The changes do not correlate with economic cycles, wars, or any of the other kinds of world events that people often talk about as affecting children's mental states. Rates of anxiety and depression among children and adolescents were far lower during the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the turbulent 1960s and early '70s than they are today. The changes seem to have much more to do with the way young people view the world than the way the world actually is.

However, as psychologist Steven Pinkler notes in his book Better Angles of our Nature, our chances of being victims of homicide, rape and sexual assault, violence against children, death in war and a whole host of other risks have never been lower:

Violence has been on the decline for thousands of years, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in the existence of our species.

Yet our children are experiencing historically high rates of anxiety and depression, the mental health results of feeling out of control and in danger. This is because our children feel out of control and in danger and we, as a society, are doing it to them.

In her book The Gardener and the Carpenter, psychologist Alison Gopnik, notes that the word "parenting" didn't really exist until the early 1960s. "Parenting" is the verb form of a fundamental relationship that has no parallel in our other important relationships. We don't do "wifing" or "childing" or "friending." We are, rather, wives, children, or friends. We are likewise parents, but it often seems that the whole notion of "parenting" is a failed experiment, one that has directly resulted in this rise in anxiety, fear, and depression, both among parents and children, over the past 70 or so years, without producing much in the way of positive results.

Instead of simply being a parent, we now feel that children must be endlessly shaped, molded, and built, that they must always be "learning," and that if they do not "turn out" according to some pre-determined blueprint of a "successful" adult, we have failed as parents. In the name of parenting, we have shaped our children's lives in such a way that they have very little free time, with every minute of their days scheduled with structured activities, not just during school, but after school and on weekends as well. In the name of parenting we have demanded that our schools increasingly focus on "academic" learning, on homework, on testing, on measuring, on manufacturing. And it comes at the expense of our children being allowed to be children, which is to play, which to choose what they are going to do, which is to be outdoors, unsupervised, with other children, and with the time to just fart around. The result is that our children never get a chance to learn how to be in control of their own lives. No wonder they feel anxious and depressed. And no wonder parents are feeling anxious and depressed as well.

To be a parent is simply to have a loving relationship with your child. As Gopnik writes:

So our job as parents 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.

We must learn to stop "parenting" and return once more to simply being parents. When we do that, we will start to heal our children.

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Teaching Mindfulness

I was recently asked in a public forum if I've ever taught mindfulness to children. The question threw me. Yes, no, maybe, I don't know, can you repeat the question? 

Mindfulness is a radical Buddhist practice in which one focuses one's full attention on the present moment. This is something toward which I strive, even as I find it exceedingly difficult to achieve for any more than a few minutes at a time. Yesterday, ironically, I was reading a novel in which one of the characters said something about mindfulness that sparked a train of thought that took my brain so far away from the present moment that I had to re-read several paragraphs. I find it a slippery thing to accomplish, requiring discipline, concentration, and practice. A quiet mind is a healthy thing, something valued by medical and spiritual practices from east to west.

Mindfulness as a concept has broken through into our popular culture, really taking off as a popular phenomenon in recent years. There are more than 100,000 books being sold on Amazon with some version of the word in the title, not to mention the proliferation of mindfulness workshops and seminars and gurus. My social media feeds are full of mindfulness memes.

As I reflected on being stumped by the mindfulness question, I had to admit that I've never attempted to teach children the practice of mindfulness. Yet I've spent my professional career surrounded by it. I see it being practiced wherever there are young children engaged in self-selected activities. A child bent over a puzzle in the midst of a noisy classroom is not just working a puzzle, she is the puzzle. Children negotiating their way through their games of princesses and super heroes are fully there in the moment, intellectually, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. And the younger the children are, the more mindful they tend to be: a baby staring off into the middle distance is, in that moment, the entire universe.

Every day, if I can manage to be mindful enough to see it, I am inspired by the children's ability to be mindful. How can I pretend to teach mindfulness to the experts? We are born mindful. The challenge, is to not lose it as we grow up and it seems that the best place to start is to not unlearn it in the first place. As important adults in children's lives, we too often allow our agendas, our drive to move from here to there, our unquiet minds, to override the mindfulness of children. We insert ourselves, uninvited, into their play with our ideas and concerns and scaffolding and witticisms, drawing their attention away from the present moment, often in a jarring manner. We can't teach mindfulness to the experts, but we can leave them to it. And maybe if we can manage to allow them the time and space for it, they won't grow to forget this wisdom with which they were born.

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

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Collaboration Is Everything

Over the years, I taught a number of children who were later identified as "gifted," that blessing-curse label that is generally applied to children who demonstrate an extraordinary interest in and aptitude for traditional academic type pursuits. One boy, for instance, arrived as a young two-year-old, already teaching himself to read. He would walk through the door asking for "the ABCs" and if he couldn't find them somewhere in the room, he would cry until I presented him with an alphabet puzzle or book or cookie cutters. From there he developed an intense interest in the solar system, a subject upon which he would lecture for the benefit of adults. Then he moved on to the Periodic Table, not just memorizing the elements and their atomic numbers, but also developing an understanding of what would happen if you mixed, say, hydrogen with carbon (nothing), a game he enjoyed playing with the adults in his life.

It wasn't until he was well into his four-year-old year that he turned his attention to the other kids. Unlike the other subjects he had tackled up to this point, this did not come naturally to him. Indeed, it was frustrating, often heartbreaking work figuring out how to get along. Young children, he found, were not as predictable as the ABCs or the solar system or the chemical elements, or, for that matter, the adults who had up to then been his primary playmates. There were days when it seemed as if he had finally figured it out, when he was at the center of the game, playing with the children he had identified as his friends, only to find himself on the following day looking in from outside. The friendship formula he had applied so successfully in one instance did not work in the next.

It's a pattern I've seen with most of the gifted children I've known. Too often, I think, these children with their undeniably wonderful aptitudes are hustled off into academic pursuits, sequestered from the hoi polloi, so that they can focus on their genius. I worry that when we do this, we interrupt their even more important studies. As psychologist and author of Einstein Never Used Flashcards Kathy Hirsh-Pasek writes:

Collaboration is everything, from getting along with others to controlling your impulses so you can get along and not kick someone else off the swing. It's building a community and experiencing diversity and culture. Everything we do, in the classroom or at home, has to be built on that foundation.

The world is full of frustrated geniuses, people who were marked for "success," but who never learned the fine art of getting along well with other people, especially those who do not share their own particular genius. We need people, we need the cooperation of others in order to succeed at most things in life. There is very little we can do alone. Successful people, and by that I mean those who are satisfied with their lives, who have good relationships with others, and who are doing fulfilling, meaningful work in the world, are always those who have mastered the fine art of working well with others, even if they were toddlers who were busy drooling on the table while their gifted classmates were expounding on the solar system.

I'm happy to say that this particular gifted boy figured it out, at least so far as anyone ever figures it out. He's now approaching middle school, still precocious, but also surrounded by friends. His parents understood that being gifted, while wonderful, was not a ticket that was already punched for fame and fortune. So they left him play with the other children, coaching and loving him as one would any child, allowing him the space and time to learn the most important skills. And it's because of that, he is already successful.

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"You Want Your Children To Be Independent, Then It Terrifies You When They Are"

My mother once told me, "You want your children to be independent, then it terrifies you when they are." I was a teenager at the time, and while I don't recall the exact circumstances, I'm sure I'd just done something that had terrified her. At the time, I took it in as information, something that was perhaps true, although not particularly useful, but now, having been a parent and having been around thousands of parents, I know she was expressing something that comes pretty close to being universal.

If there is anything we wish for our children it is that they grow up to be their own people, free, capable, autonomous, and independent. In the counterbalance, however, there are the other things we value on their behalf, traits like empathy (with the ability to draw boundaries), courtesy (albeit not servility), thriftiness (stopping short of stinginess), caution (without timidity), outgoingness (but with a well-adjusted social filter), industriousness (with an understanding of balance), and kindness (without being a pushover). The list is long and complicated and all of us at one time or another have found ourselves attempting to instill these kinds of traits in our children, even if we ourselves are still finding our own way.

The truth is that independence is a pure good even if it doesn't necessarily lead to pure good. But without it, without the freedom to make mistakes, to learn the often hard lessons that lead to the internalization of traits like courtesy and caution and thrift, children are left to learn them later in life, as teenagers or young adults, when the consequences of their inevitable mistakes are likely to be far more dire than they would have been had the mistakes been made, had the learning happened, when they were children.

We've all heard people express the sentiment that kids can't be trusted with freedom and autonomy, that without our adult vigilance and control, they will use any freedom and autonomy they have to do "stupid things." And, indeed, these critics can point to any number of examples from the real world, usually of teenagers making bad choices. But that is a faulty conclusion.

I would counter with the assertion that those bad choices are, in fact, a direct result of having had limited experience with freedom and autonomy up to that point. Too many teens and young adults have spent their childhoods being controlled by our institutions and our parenting, being told where to go and what to do. In those rare moments when allowed a bit of freedom, they of course make mistakes. Mistakes that are necessary to learning how to live with freedom. All too often, we see these mistakes, these bad choices, as confirmation that they simply cannot be trusted with freedom, but the truth is that they are merely a sign of inexperience.

Better, I think, if we really want our children to grow up to be their own people, free, capable, autonomous, and independent, we must allow them to experience freedom from an early age, to be allowed to make the mistakes necessary for learning what freedom is really all about. We must let them fall down and to be there to pick them back up, because that is the single most important lesson we can learn through freedom: independence means nothing unless it's balanced with interdependence.

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If That Is The Present, Then The Future Will Take Care Of Itself

"Parenting" is the verb form of a fundamental relationship that has no parallel in our other important relationships. We don't do "wifing" or "childing" or "friending." We are, rather, wives, children or friends. We are parents, but it often seems to me that the whole notion of "parenting" is a failed experiment, one that has resulted in a rise in anxiety, fear, and depression, both among parents and children, over the past 70 or so years, without producing much in the way of positive results. 

The concept of parenting as a job is a modern idea, one that began to gain prominence during the 1950's as extended families found themselves scattered and grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins began to play a diminished role in the care of children. From this emerged the idea of parenting as a mostly solo job that fell primarily to mothers, who, without traditional support systems, were forced to turn to "experts" to help them manufacture the child: one who was well-behaved, intelligent, charming, creative, motivated, and who otherwise met the specifications. To be a parent was no longer a relationship based on love, or at least not solely on love, but also on work, and the quality of that work was determined by how the child turned out, like one would judge the work of a shoemaker by the quality of their shoes. Of course, unlike shoes, one can't judge parenting success for two or even three decades, which is a long game that makes things all the more stressful, not to mention the fact that we are talking about human beings here, not widgets.

Parenting as a job versus being a parent as a relationship are two very different things: one is about achieving some sort of goal, to actively shape a young human into something pre-determined, while the other is to simply love, to give children what they need to thrive, right now, so that they can shape themselves. On top of that, there is scant evidence that parenting, meaning the variations on how we attempt to shape our children, have much impact at all on how children "turn out." If there was evidence, we would be on the way to having figured the whole thing out. There would be no need for "flavor of the month" parenting books or podcasts or blogs, each of them offering the latest set of parenting blueprints. But instead, the selection of recipes for baking up the perfect child pie proliferate, agreeing on some points, and conflicting on others, and generally proving that we are no closer to knowing how parenting as a job works than we were 70 years ago. 

In 1946, Dr. Spock, the original parenting guru told new parents "you know more than you think you do." I think this is still true today when it comes to parents. I'm not so sure when it comes to parenting.

Alison Gopnik, one of the world's most prominent childhood development researchers writes:

So our job as parents 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.

Being a parent is hard work, but it is not a job: it is a relationship. The idea of "parenting" is an unfortunate imposition that places the stress and anxiety of vocational performance on what is arguably the most important relationship in anyone's life. Providing a protected space of love, safety, and stability is enough and you already know more than you think you do. If that is the present, then the future will take care of itself.

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

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What We Are Doing To Young Children In The Name Of "Instructional Time"

At the beginning of the 2015 school year Seattle's Public School teachers were on strike. They had a list of demands, most of which were ultimately met, including the requirement that all elementary school children receive a minimum of 30 minutes a day on the playground. As pathetic as that victory might sound to those of us who live and work in the world of play-based education, some schools were limiting their charges to 15 minutes of recess over a school day. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in America and indeed many other parts of the world.

As heartlessly cruel as this sounds, it's the result of administrators and teachers who have bought into the entirely unsupported myth that more "instructional time" will result in "better results," and that every moment of free play, especially outdoors, is a waste of time. Meanwhile, 17 million children worldwide have been prescribed addictive stimulants (like Ritalin), antidepressants and other mind-altering drugs for "educational" and behavioral problems, over half of them in the US. Already one in ten American students are on these drugs and the fastest growing segment are children five and under.

This from the UK: 

Tests to assess . . . children's physical development at the start of the first school year found that almost a third to be "of concern" for lack of motor skills and reflexes. Almost 90 per cent of children demonstrated some degree of movement difficulty for their age . . . The tests suggest up to 30 per cent of children are starting school with symptoms typically associated with dyslexia, dyspraxia, and ADHD -- conditions which can be improved with correct levels of physical activity, experts say.

What's to blame? Lack of physical play is a big part of it, but there's more. According researcher Dr. Rebecca Duncombe:

"Young children have access to iPads and are much more likely to be sat in car seats or chairs . . . But the problem can also be attributed to competitive parenting -- parents who want they children to walk as soon as possible risk letting them miss out on key mobility developments which help a child to find their strength and balance."

And why do we have competitive parenting: because our schools, indeed our entire educational environment, is built around the idea of competition; around the cruel caution that "You don't want your child to fall behind." Bill Gates and his ilk have succeeded in "unleashing powerful market forces" on our children and this is the result. Because we have to get them ready for the "competitive job market of tomorrow," we've herded them indoors, where they spend their days locked in being force-fed "knowledge" like it's some sort of factory farm. It's so bad that we have to drug them. It's so bad that 90 percent of our four-year-olds aren't even getting the opportunity to learn how to move their bodies properly. The only other human institutions of which I'm aware that regularly drug and confine people are prisons and mental wards.

Instead of understanding the truth about young children -- that they need to move their bodies, a lot, and preferably outdoors -- we have created a very, very narrow range of "normal" into which we are forcing our children. This is outrageous. It's malpractice. And it's on all of us for letting it happen.

I usually try to end these posts on a positive or hopeful note, but the best I can do right now is to say that at least Seattle's Public School kids are getting their 30 minutes a day outdoors . . . Unless, of course, they are being punished, because taking away recess is one of the more common "consequences" for children who can't sit still and focus. And if they fail too often, we drug them.

Parents: the more time your children spend outdoors, playing, the smarter they will be. Create it at home and demand if from our schools. Teachers: the more time your students spend outdoors, playing, the smarter they will be. Create it at school and demand more of it from your administrators. This is the science. This is what we know about children. What's happening now is nothing short of institutionalized child abuse and we're all a part of permitting it to happen.

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

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Curiosity And Exploration

She said, "I'm going to climb this tree," referring to the multitude of "trunks" of a lilac bush that stands as tall as a tree. I was nearby, but it wasn't obvious she was talking to me, but when I didn't reply, she asked, "Do you think I can climb it?"

I took hold of the thickest branch and gave it a shake, then did the same to another branch beside it. I said, "It seem strong enough to hold your weight." Then answered her question with a question, "Do you think you can climb it?"

She studied the lilac for a moment. She also tested some branches. In fact, she tested all the ones she could reach. "I think I can," she said before beginning her ascent.

Curiosity and exploration are the foundations of how young children learn, as any preschool teacher, or research scientist, knows. But it is only within the context of feeling safe, or at least safe enough, that they can truly thrive intellectually, physically, and emotionally, and parents, teachers, and other important adults play an important role in that. From the very beginning of life, physical touch reassures an infant that it is safe; it seems to give the body the go-ahead to develop normally. Without that touch, without that reassurance of safety, tragically, human babies fail to thrive and even, in extreme cases, to die, even when provided with all the other necessities for life. The need to feel safe does not disappear as children grow older.

There is a balance adults must learn to walk in their relationship to children, one that isn't always easy to find. We've all heard of the dangers of what are labelled "helicopter parents," those well-intended adults to hover and smother. Likewise, we're appalled by neglectful parents, those who fail to provide their charges with the attention they need to feel safe and therefore to thrive. The title of cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik's book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, provides an apt metaphor that I find useful when trying to find that balance for myself. The carpenter is her way of referring the overprotective parent, one who see's their role as constructing their child through constant intervention and instruction, while the gardener refers to the parent who sees their role as planting a seed, to water it, to protect it from true dangers, but to otherwise simply let it grow.

The carpenter-parent tends to create an environment of pressure and expectations, prioritizing structure and metrics over exploration and play. In contrast, it is in the presence of the gardener-parent approach that children are assured that they are safe enough to be curious and to explore, to play their way toward a fuller understanding of themselves and their world the way humans are designed to do it.

As poet and author Diane Ackerman wrote, "(R)oaming is one of the things humans love to do best -- but only if they can count on getting home safely." We are, from our first days, driven by our curiosity to explore, but we can only do that when we are first assured that we are safe, which requires the presence, the love, the nurturing nearness of adults who will be gardeners. No one can tell you how to find that balance: it can only come from adults themselves being curious enough to explore.

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Imagine The World We Could Create

Human babies are born with their full capacity to see, but they are unable to focus or move their eyes in a coordinated way. Their visual world is therefore blurry and gray. Babies must learn to see, much in the way they will later learn to walk and talk.

The way sight works is that particles of light, photons, alter the receptors in our retinas. Our bodies then convert that into electricity, which becomes information. We must then assemble this information into what we've come to understand as the visual world. In other words, our minds must learn to create what we see, which means, in a very real sense, that babies are born seeing the world as it actually is without the intervention of the human mind and must then, over the course of the next several years, learn how to not just passively see like a camera might, but to actively make the world.

It's amazing to think about and even more so when we consider that this is the process involved with all our senses: our minds must learn to convert abstract sensations into what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch, and this is a process that is carried out during most of our preschool years. We are literally learning to create the world. Is it any wonder that scientists working for NASA found that a full 98 percent of four and five years olds they tested fell into the category of "creative genius," while only two percent of adults do. 

As adults, reality is a kind of settled science in the sense that we long ago learned how to assemble the information provided by the particles and waves of the universe into what we perceive to be real. Young children are still in the process of learning to create, their brains making form from formlessness, sense from senselessness, and concreteness from abstraction. It is a mind-boggling process, work that can only be done by a creative genius.

This is what we interrupt when we insist upon inflicting our agendas on young children, foisting mere memorization and ciphering upon them, insisting that they "learn" whatever it is we've decided they must learn, succumbing to a reality that is not of their own creation. This is the reason that the first five years must remain sacred, a time when we allow these creative geniuses the time, space, and freedom to do what they are designed to do, which is learn to create reality. And if we could succeed at this, if we could, say, allow one single generation this sacred time in which to genuinely play as they are designed to do, perhaps more than two in 100 of us would emerge with their capacity for creative genius intact. Imagine the world we could create.

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

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Creating The Stories They Need To Create

Among the earliest human recreations was sitting around the campfire telling stories. I imagine the first stories were of the informational variety, the sort that bees dance to one another about where they've found nectar or pollen. But then someone got the idea to lie, not maliciously of course, but simply because they could, by way of making the story more engaging, or to make themselves appear braver, or to illicit laughter. Maybe the first lie was an accident: they misspoke, were believed, then later remembered they had got it wrong.

Whatever the case, it must have been a real mind-blower, this idea that by simply saying things that are not true, a whole new reality is created. After all, how were these other people to know? They weren't there, they hadn't seen it, they have no choice but to take my word for it. I imagine it's much the same when young children first discover the concept at around the age of two.

We all lie, at least sometimes. The average person lies once or twice a day according to research, although since the methodology necessarily relies on self-reporting, at least some of the study subjects likely lied about their lying. And then, there is the whole matter of definition. There are certainly degrees of lying. Many of us don't consider it a lie-lie if it's spoken, for instance, for the purpose of allowing someone to avoid embarrassment, or to make them feel better about themselves, or some other "white lie." And, of course, there are the lies we tell ourselves, lies of omission, lies we permit in service of a greater truth. I've known some absolutists who consider lying of any kind to be wrong, but for most of us, most of the time, the moral line is more of a situational gray smudge.

And then there the lies of storytellers, those fabrications, exaggerations, and outright balderdash that comprise a really good story. We excuse these untruths because, most of the time, we know from the start that the storyteller, the novelist, or the movie maker is creating something, that it didn't really happen. We're in on it, and in a very real sense, we are co-creators in that we suspend our disbelief and become part of the story. The fascinating thing about stories is that they are made up of "lies," yet very often they convey a greater truth far more directly and clearly than we can ever hope to convey it through truth alone.

Lies told to deceive, harm, or manipulate are clearly immoral, but there is a whole world of untruth that appears to be necessary for humans to make sense of the world. Indeed, in many ways what we consider to be our "self" is really just the story we tell about our experiences, both individually and collectively. As Virginia Woolf wrote, "We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself."

When young children lie it's generally quite easy to catch them out, and we should, gently, call them on it when their intent is to deceive, harm, or manipulate. But when their lies are of the "because I can" variety, such as about a stuffed teddy that talks or, as one girl insisted for the better part of a year, that she is, in fact, really a fairy, our better approach is to "believe" them as they practice creating the stories that they need to create in order to make sense of themselves and their world.

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 Enemy Of Learning

I went to kindergarten in the 1960's. We played outdoors, built with blocks, pretended, and made some art. I don't think there was any particular curriculum or ideology behind the program offered by Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Ruiz. We mostly played, much like the kids do at Woodland Park, although I remember one classroom project in which we sat around tables, each responsible for coloring in a part of a train -- box cars, coal cars, passenger cars. I got the engine. Mrs. Jennings gave very specific instructions about how to color our pictures. We were to strive to color side-to-side, using only horizontal motions, and to stay within the lines.

It was the kind of project I always enjoyed. To this day I love the challenge of creating artwork that requires fine motor deftness and precision. I chose to make my engine mostly red and was quite impressed with how wonderful the finished product looked. I'd already learned to take aesthetic pleasure in staying within the lines, but the whole horizontal coloring concept was an epiphany to me, a concept I employed in coloring projects throughout the rest of my youth.

The following day we arrived at school to find that Mrs. Jennings had taped our individual pictures to the wall to create a train, my red engine at the front. I was proud of that engine, but man was I appalled at my classmates' work. Most of them had failed to stay within the lines, and from what I could tell only I had adhered to the horizontal coloring method. Yet there was Mrs. Jennings, not scolding anyone, not correcting anyone, not making anyone do it over, but rather enthusing about the beautiful train we had made together.

Of course, today I can see that the problem was not with the other kids, but rather with my own expectations. You see, I was apparently a coloring within the lines prodigy, much in the way some four-year-olds prodigiously teach themselves to read in preschool, while most of their classmates are still years away from being developmentally ready for it. Mrs. Jennings instructions had hit the five-year-old me right where I lived, while it went right over the heads of most of my classmates: she knew this, which is why she didn't scold or correct. It's why she saw beauty.

The development of human beings, especially in the early years, is notoriously spiky. My own daughter began to speak at three months, but didn't crawl until her first birthday, and wasn't walking until she was closer to two. Some kids are capable of reading at an early age, some are genius climbers, others have advanced social or artistic or musical skills. Every parent knows their own child is a genius: every preschool teacher knows that every child is a genius. And we all know that every child is also "behind" in some areas. This is all normal and it's not something that needs to be "fixed."

Indeed, the range of "normal" is enormous. This is one of the most powerful aspects of a cooperative preschool. As parents work with me in the classroom as my assistant teachers, they come to appreciate this, and even, as Mrs. Jennings did, find it beautiful. And this is why a play-based curriculum is ideal for young children, it allows each child to focus like a laser her own personalized educational objectives in a way that meshes perfectly with her developmental stage.

Sadly, kindergarten, at least he public school variety, no longer accommodates this wide range of "normal." Over the past decade or so, kindergarten has transformed dramatically, and not for the better:

A new University of Virginia study found that kindergarten changed in disturbing ways . . . There was a marked decline in exposure to social studies, science, music, art and physical education and an increased emphasis on reading instruction. Teachers reported spending as much time on reading as all other subjects combined . . . The time spent in child-selected activity dropped by more than one-third. Direct instruction and testing increased. Moreover, more teachers reported holding all children to the same standard.

The whole idea of standardization runs counter to what we know about how young children learn and develop, yet that has been the focus of the corporate education "reform" movement, which spawned this era of the federally mandated Common Core State Standards and high stakes standardized testing. The cabal that created this pedagogically indefensible mess, lead by Bill Gates through his foundation, have ignored what professionals know about how children actually learn:

To make matters worse, the drafters of the Common Core ignored the research on child development. In 2010, 500 child development experts warned the drafters that the standards called for exactly the kind of damaging practices that inhibit learning: direct instruction, inappropriate content and testing . . . These warnings went unheeded . . . Consequently, the Common Core exacerbates the developmentally inappropriate practices on the rise since NCLB (No Child Left Behind).

No, the goal of these "reformers" was never to meet the children where they were developmentally, nor to shape a curriculum around the way children learn, but rather, as Bill Gates famously said in an interview with the Washington Post: "(T)o unleash powerful market forces on education." You see, standardization makes it easier for businesspeople to develop products to sell to schools. The dehumanizing metaphor Gates used was to compare it to standardizing electrical outlets.

Mrs. Jennings understood, as all professional early childhood educators do, that children cannot be standardized like computers or washing machines or electrical outlets. Some of us can stay within the lines, but most of us can't, and that's what makes us beautiful.

Standardization is always the enemy of learning.

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