What The Research Tells Us To Do

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Economic Forum, and Unicef (and according to the dubious measurement of standardized test scores) Finland has the best schools in the world. They have achieved this status by building their educational system on evidence. The US languishes around the middle of the pack, often falling into the bottom half according to some measures. We have achieved this lack of success by relying upon the busy-body guesswork of policy makers, billionaire dilettantes, and administrators who listen to them.

It shouldn't be surprising that the system based on evidence, on research, on reality, would outperform the one based on the fantasies and feelings of people who are not professional educators. In Finland, they do not try to teach kindergarteners to read because the evidence tells us that formal literacy instruction should not start until at least the age of seven and that children who are compelled into it too early often suffer emotionally and academically in the long run. In the US we are forcing kindergartners, and even preschoolers, to learn to read. There is no, as in zero, research that finds longterm gains from teaching to read in kindergarten. In fact, the research that has been done tends to find early instruction reduces literacy in later years.

The evidence tells us that early childhood education should focus on equity, happiness, well-being and joy in learning. This is what Finland has done by basing their educational model on childhood play, which is, again according to the overwhelming preponderance of research, the gold standard. The US has based its early childhood education on standardized testing, increased "instructional time," bottoms-in-your-seats carrot-and-stick standardization, and an ever-narrowing focus on literacy and math despite the evidence that it causes longterm harm to children, because people in power who know nothing about education think that sounds good to them.

We are through the looking glass here. We are doing harm to our children. We are subjecting them to decades of "education" that is, again according to the evidence, doing them far more harm than good, while children in other countries are being provided the best education available because the adults are adult enough to look at reality and act accordingly.

This is not my feeling. This not my opinion. This is not my philosophy. These are the facts as far as we can currently determine them. It is cruel, even abusive, to base our educational system on other people's feelings and fantasies, even if they are rich and powerful. For the sake of our children, we must demand play-based education because, damn it, that's what the evidence tells us.

(Please click the links in this post. Most of them take you to articles, research, and papers that provide even further links into the evidence.)

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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.

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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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That Is How Brains Grow

“We now know enough about the brain to realize that it’s mystery will always remain. Like a work of art, we exceed our materials.” ~Johan Lehrer

When our daughter was a preschooler, authority figures informed parents that the human brain was fully formed by around five-years-old. After that, there would be no new brain cells, which was why, they told us, the early years were so important. These were the scientific facts. Just a few days ago, a parent of a preschooler told me that the director of her child’s school told the assembled parents that the human brain was “90 percent developed” by five, information which she conveyed to me in a kind of jittery breathiness that betrayed both awe and panic. I recall feeling similarly about these scientific facts. 

The problem with these facts is that they were not facts 20 years ago and they are not facts today. They are the product of a debunked theory about human brain development. Sadly, these non-facts were, and still are, being used to support the toxic academic pressures being applied to our youngest citizens.

It seems that the earlier “facts” were based largely upon studies done on monkey brains in a laboratory. When skeptical scientists more recently tested the theory on monkeys living in their natural habitat they found that not only do their brains continue to produce new brain cells throughout their lives, but they produce a lot of them. It was being held in captivity that caused their brains to stop producing new cells. This has now been confirmed in birds, rats, and other animals, including humans: when animals are free, their brains grow, when they are not free they don’t.

Play is the “natural habitat” of young humans. Traditional schools are, at their core, a form of captivity. Longer school days, more academic instruction, developmentally inappropriate expectations, less time outdoors, standardization, and high stakes testing are causing children’s brains to stop growing. The cure, according to science, is to set our children free, to let them play: that is how brains grow.

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I Chose To Educate For Freedom

Imagine a person who has lived her entire life in a cave. She has never been in a house; indeed she has never even seen one. One day, some do-gooders discover her living in this "primitive" manner and decide that, "for her own good," they are going to teach her to build a house. She doesn't know whether or not she wants a house, but they nevertheless compel her, again, for her own good.

These do-gooders begin by bringing her a hammer, nails, and some wood, then proceed to drill her on the use of those basic house building tools. Of course, having never used a hammer before, she's not very good at it. She smashes her thumb, for instance, which hurts. She bends a few nails, which she's told are mistakes, even if she found it satisfying to bend them over. But eventually, after a few weeks, she gets the hang of it and is able to drive a nail as well as any professional. Now, they introduce the saw in the same manner, followed by drills, levels, and measuring tapes. Then they bring in miter saws, nail guns, and concrete mixers, and whatever else she might need to build a house, drilling her on their use one at a time until she is proficient.

The woman still has never seen a house, even as the do-gooders continue to insist that it's something she really, really needs. The work, while perhaps interesting at first, becomes mind numbing, repetitive, and ultimately meaningless. She would rather be doing other things, but each time she tries to, say, use her newly acquired hammering skills on a rock or a tree or their noggins, she's scolded into focusing on the task at hand. When her mind wanders, when she drops her tools to chase butterflies or pick flowers, she's told she needs more grit, that she's falling behind, that she requires more homework.

Then one day, after years of this type of "education" she's told that she is finished. She now has all the skills required to build a house for herself. The do-gooders pat themselves on the back and hike off to find more primitives to educate, leaving the woman alone at the mouth of her cave, two decades older, yet still unable to build a house because she's never even seen one. She's not even sure she wants one. And not only that, she's been so busy learning her skills that she's now also ignorant about butterflies and flowers.

As ludicrous as this sounds, it isn't too far off how the US is attempting to educate its children. Our schools, controlled by "education reform" do-gooders and dilettantish policy makers have come to focus overwhelmingly on skill acquisition over knowledge. To a certain extent our schools have always done this, but with the advent of the federal mandates of No Child Left Behind (2001), followed by Race to the Top, and the Common Core, schools have been forced to focus almost exclusively on the "tools" of reading and math at the expense of knowledge like social studies, art, physical education, history, and science.

No matter how many skills one acquires, they are meaningless without knowledge, which is why knowledge must alway precede skills. Just as a person, no matter how skilled, will struggle to build a house without prior knowledge of a house, children will struggle to comprehend what they are reading or calculating without prior knowledge of the subject matter. This is why the skills based approach to public school education has been such a disaster, with American children failing to become better readers or mathematicians, while the achievement gap between wealthy and poor children continues to expand despite the do-gooders' insistence that closing that gap was their main goal in the first place.

Human beings are driven to make sense of the world, to understand, to acquire knowledge, to chase butterflies and pick flowers. It is through this process that we come to comprehend. It is our desire to then do something with our knowledge that motivates us to learn skills, like hammering, sawing, and reading. Without his motivation, without a meaningful, self-selected "project," without comprehension, the acquisition of skills will always become dull and meaningless. This is why the sort of self-directed learning at the core of play-based education is superior to the top-down, authority-directed approach favored by traditional schools. We actually put the horse before the cart, which even a cavewoman knows is the way to get anywhere.

But there is more at work here. As writer Joao Coutinho wrote, "There is no neutral education. Education is either for domestication or for freedom." I chose to educate for freedom.

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The Cruel Assertion That Your Five-Year-Old Is "Falling Behind"

What would you think if you saw a mother hovering over her two month old infant drilling her on vowel sounds? Or how about a father coaching his five month old on the finer points to walking? I expect you would think they were at best wasting their time: two month olds can't talk and five month olds can't walk, let alone be taught. Talking and walking are things children just learn. Now imagine that when these babies failed to acquire these capabilities that are clearly beyond their developmental grasp, these parents began to fret that their child was "falling behind." You would think they were crazy. If a doctor told these parents their child was "falling behind" we would think he was either incompetent or cruel.

Sadly, there are actually people out there doing things like this. I've written before about hucksters who assert that babies can be taught to read and there are devices on the market that purport to help babies learn to walk. The good news is that while there are some naive parents who fall for such gimmickry in the misguided attempt to somehow one-up nature's long, successful history of "teaching" talking and walking according to well-established developmental timelines, most of us know better than to worry about these things that virtually every child stressless-ly learns without any special interventions.

My own daughter spoke her first word at 3 months old, consistently saying "Papa" when I played and cared for her: she was putting together full sentences before 6 months. This same "advanced" child didn't crawl until her first birthday and wasn't walking until close to 20 months, a full lifetime "behind" some of her peers. Today, as you might expect, she talks and walks like the rest of the young adults: if she was ever behind she caught up, and if she was ever ahead, the others caught up with her.

This unsavory practice of taking advantage of new parent insecurities in the name of profit is one that deserves to be called out wherever it rears its nasty head, and it's borderline criminal when they play the "falling behind" card, which is why I'm writing today.

I've had the opportunity these past few years to travel around the world to talk to teachers and parents. Every place I go I find myself discussing this bizarre notion of "school readiness." Often translated in the US as "kindergarten readiness," it is essentially code for reading. It seems that the powers that be in our respective nations have decided to sell parents on the snake oil that if your child isn't starting to read by five-years-old she is "falling behind." They are doing this despite the fact that every single legitimate study ever done on the subject recommends that formal literacy education (if we ever even need it) not begin until a child is seven or eight years old. They are telling parents and teachers that children are "falling behind" despite the fact that every single legitimate study ever done finds that there are no long term advantages to being an early reader, just as there are no long term advantages to being early talkers or walkers. In fact, many studies have found that when formal literacy instruction begins too early, like at 5, children grow up to be less motivated readers and less capable of comprehending what they've read. That's right, if anything, this "school readiness" fear-mongering may well turn out to be outright malpractice.

But the worst thing, the unforgivable thing, is the cruelty of the assertion that five-year-olds are "falling behind." It's one thing when commercial interests attempt to move their crappy merchandise by playing on fears, but when schools are doing it, when teachers are doing it, that's unconscionable. Listen, I'm a staunch supporter of my fellow teachers here on these pages, but I am calling my colleagues out on this one. Teachers should know better than to help these guys sell this stuff: it's bad for kids, it's bad for families, and it's bad for society. We are the professionals. Teachers need to put our collective foot down, point to the research, rely on our own experience, and if we can't refuse to subject young children to developmentally inappropriate, potentially harmful "readiness" garbage for fear of losing our jobs, the least we can do is refuse to take part in the crass abusiveness of "falling behind." If we can't do that maybe we don't deserve to call ourselves professionals.

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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.

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Comforting The Afflicted And Afflicting The Comfortable

Around the turn of the last century, while discussing the proper role of the press, author Finley Dunne wrote, "(I)t is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." In 1997, Harvard professor Cesar A. Cruz applied the notion to art, saying that it should "comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." That is to say that the purpose of journalism and art, indeed all forms of truth-telling, is to challenge the status quo. The same, I assert, goes for education.

Much of what passes for journalism or art these days has fallen under the control of the "comfortable," the large media corporations that dictate much of what we see and hear, and because truth disturbs them, they tend to turn it all into entertainment, stuff that might shock, titillate, or excite, but rarely disturbs or afflicts them in their role as gatekeepers.

The same thing is happening with public education, as large corporations and Wall Street backed charter schools have descended upon our classrooms, places that should be cauldrons of democracy. Our schools have never been perfect, of course, and the powerful have always inserted themselves in anti-democratic ways, but the drive to narrow the focus of education by reducing it to test-taking focused almost exclusively on literacy and mathematics, things that are easily measured, while pushing aside the more uncomfortable disciplines like art, philosophy, and the humanities has accelerated over the past couple decades. The comfortable are disturbed by the sorts of critical thinkers that emerge from a real education. They are afflicted by those of us who ask a lot of questions, challenge their authority, and stand up for our beliefs. And so the schools they seek to create are ones that focus on questions of how rather than why; schools that seek conformity through standardization; schools that are activity centers more than places of real learning.

Education is upsetting, it digs into the gray areas and asks difficult questions. An educated person always has doubts. An educated person is never fully satisfied. An educated person afflicts the comfortable.

The American author Ray Bradbury was a largely self-educated man, opting for libraries rather than university. In his 1951 masterpiece Fahrenheit 451, he conceived of a dystopian future in which books have been banned in the name of keeping the peace. His protagonist, Montag, is a fireman, although instead of putting out fires, his job is to burn the books. He meets a young woman named Clarissa, a kind of free-spirited throw-back to the olden days, who sparks doubts. As he begins to grow increasingly disillusioned, his chief attempts to explain why their work of book burning is so important and why people like Clarissa are so dangerous:

"You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say . . . Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs. The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. 

"Heredity and environment are funny things. You can't rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot of what you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle . . . The family had been feeding her (Clarissa's) subconscious, I'm sure from what I saw of her school record. She didn't want to know how a thing was done, but why. That can be embarrassing. You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead . . . Luckily, queer ones like her don't happen often. We know how to nip most of them in the bud, early. You can't build a house without nails and wood. If you don't want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none . . .  

Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I've tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the Theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment."

Bradbury was writing nearly 70 years ago, writing about the future, the place we now occupy. When I read this passage I see that he was, of course, wrong in some details, but right about too many for comfort. And I worry that the essence of his predictions are closer now than they have ever been. In an earlier passage in the book the chief explains that it wasn't the government that originally banned books, but rather the people themselves, who simply quit reading them. The more I reflect upon this, the more I think Bradbury is right: reading books, a lot of them, and especially those that make us uncomfortable, and then acting upon our discomfort, is the only way we can ensure that his dystopia remains fiction. And as educators we can never forget that much of our job is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

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Preparing Themselves For Their Real Future

When our daughter Josephine was a four and five-year-old, she and her friends played chase; usually boys chasing girls, but sometimes switched up. The girls she ran with were often in conflict with one another, experimenting with one another's feelings, sometimes even intentionally hurting one another, but they were always allied when they played chase, a collective power with which to be reckoned.

Sometimes the girls would decide they didn't want to be chased and turned on the boys, shoulder-to-shoulder, telling them to "Stop!" And the boys would stop, although sometimes they would show their regret for the end of the game by not stopping right away, so the girls learned they must insist that no means no. It's not hard to see how games like this prepare children for our world; not some kind of ideal world, but the real world in which we live where males still tend to pursue the females. The children were preparing themselves for the world as they perceived it, not some utopian future of radical, genderless individualism.

Peter Gray, in his book Free to Learn, explains that children, when left to their own devices, invariably prepare themselves for the real world. He writes of Jewish children in concentration camps playing games of despair and survival, because, indeed, this is the real future for which they knew they must prepare themselves:

Even in the extermination camps, the children who were still healthy enough to move around played. In one camp they played a game called "tickling the corpse." At Auschwitz-Birkenau they dared one another to touch the electric fence. They played "gas chamber," a game in which they threw rocks into a pit and screamed the sounds of people dying. One game of their own devising was modeled after the camp's daily roll call and was called klepsi-klepsi, a common term for stealing. One playmate was blindfolded; then one of the others would step forward and hit him hard on the face; and then, with the blindfold removed, the one who had been hit had to guess, from facial expressions or other evidence, who hat hit him. To survive at Auschwitz, one had to be an expert at bluffing . . . Klepsi-klepsi may have been practice for that skill.

Thankfully, our children don't have such grim prospects, but politicians and corporate data miners will tell you that we must take control of childhood in order to prepare our children for their mythological "jobs of tomorrow," as if they can somehow know the future better than the children themselves who, when given the opportunity, are always brutally honest about what that means. When our daughter and her classmates playacted heterosexual gender relations as a crude metaphor, they were so much more clear sighted about their world, and what awaited them, than any of us adult social engineering do-gooders, including myself, who dressed Josephine into overalls and ball caps before she, as a two-year-old, informed me, "Papa, you don't know what girls do," before popping a sparkly crown on her head.

When we watch children play, we see the future. Those girls playing "princess" beauty games are preparing for the future they know is before them. They perceive, like all women in our culture, that they must somehow come to terms with the notion of "beauty." You may accept it, reject it, or make it your own, but our preschool girls know without a doubt that they must deal with it and it's so important they must start practicing right now. When boys play at "hero," they are playing with our culture's messages about masculinity. Just think how it must feel to know that you must grow up be an unsmiling tough guy, expected to rescue others -- you sure as hell better get to work on that. When children play games of cooperation and conflict, debate and agreement, exclusion and inclusion, they are preparing themselves for their real future, the real jobs of tomorrow.

From time to time, well-meaning folks will initiate some program or other designed to "break down" gender or race or cultural stereotypes by somehow changing the children. Among those nobel experiments were forced busing in the name of desegregation or the Swedish effort to replace gender specific pronouns with a gender neutral one. I'll leave you to decide if busing lead to a more racially egalitarian society and I doubt the language experiment will impact gender inequality one way or another. Among those ignoble experiments are a school district's decision to ban the playground game of "tag" in the name of ensuring the "physical and emotional safety of all students." (Thankfully, the backlash to this initiative was such that the district quickly reversed itself.) And while I favor the goals of these initiatives, they've got it backwards: if we want to change the games children play, we must first change the society in which they live.

When we over-regulate and micro-manage childhood, robbing our kids of their play, we prevent them from preparing themselves for the real world in favor of our fantasy world. When we get out of the way, they prepare for the future that they, themselves, will create. We have very little chance of improving civilization if we keep stubbornly seeking to train our children for those mythical "jobs of tomorrow." The only hope we have is to turn the kids free to practice for the real future that they see much more clearly than we do. And the only way for us to get there is to follow them.

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