Inventing Us

The opposite of play isn't work, it's rote.  ~Edward Hallowell

This might sound like an odd thing for a teacher to write, but I sometimes get the idea that knowing stuff is the enemy of education. There is little gratification in it for me when I've envisioned how children will do something, then they proceed to do it in just the way I've imagined. Certainly, I could claim it as some evidence of experience on my side, but it also makes me worry that it's also evidence of rote on the children's side. 

I'll leave it to future teachers to worry about teaching the kids to follow instructions if that's what they feel they need them to do. Much better things are happening in our school, it seems, when instructions are minimal and I'm constantly proven wrong in my expectations. Fortunately, when working with young children in a play-based environment, that's more the norm than the exception. 

Our classroom, every day, should be one big experiment, a place where things are not known by either the kids or the teachers, a place where we fiddle and argue and poke and prod our way toward knowledge, and where everything we come to understand is only a part of all the other things we're striving to know.  It should be a place with lots of room for failure, frustration, and conflict. It should be a place with lots of room for wonder, epiphany, and friendship.

When a colleague complained to Thomas Edison about his lack of results in one of his experiments, he replied, "I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won't work." Except we're not even trying to invent anything here, but simply discover, in the spirit of pure science, conducted for the purpose of getting closer to our own truth and nothing more.

Or maybe we are trying to invent something, after all, and if we are, it's not the sort of thing that can be put into words, but rather felt or intuited. I suppose it has something to do with inventing ourselves both as individuals and as a community. It's something that can only be invented by conducting thousands and thousands of experiments; by taking thousands and thousands of steps.

And even though billions of humans have come before us, if we are playing together, we are discovering and inventing a thing that has never been discovered or invented before: us.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ 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!

Humans Are Ultra Social Learning Machines

Most of us take it for granted that human beings are smarter than other animals. After all, we have exceptionally large brains for our body size, comprising, on average, about two percent of our body weight. But when scientists in Germany used a series of thirty-eight tests designed to compare our innate intelligence with animals we assume are pretty smart, such as orangutans and chimpanzees, on things like spatial awareness, calculation, and causality, we performed about the same. This doesn't surprise me, actually. Having lived with a series of dogs over the course of the past three decades, I'm convinced there are times that they've pitied me as a sweet little puddin' head, lovable, but not that bright, especially when it comes to things like being aware of a rabbit hiding in the shrubbery or understanding what they want or need when they could not be communicating more clearly. 

The only area of intelligence in which the researchers found that humans surpass our ape cousins is when it comes to social learning: the ability to learn from others. As Rutger Bregman writes in his book Humankind:

Human beings, it turns out, are ultra social learning machines. We're born to learn, to bond and to play. Maybe it's not so strange, then, that blushing is the only human expression that's uniquely human. blushing, after all, is quintessentially social -- it's people showing they care what others think, which fosters trust and enables cooperation. 

That we need one another in order to take advantage of our great big brains shouldn't surprise any early childhood educators. 

Other research, and most significantly, the Perry School Project, the longest running study of the impact of high quality preschool on the lives of children, finds that far more important than anything that can be measured by standardized testing, the traits most linked to children going on to live "successful" lives are the development of traits like "self-motivation, the ability to work well with others, and sociability." And the key thing that makes a preschool "high quality" is programs that foster trust and enable cooperation.

Too much of what passes for education today is about the individual, about shoehorning various kinds of trivia into their brains, then patting ourselves on the back when they can regurgitate it on a test. During the pandemic, when schools were closed and children were forced to learn remotely, we got a glimpse of what happens when we strip education of its social dimension. There were those who insisted that this was an opportunity to really figure out what kinds of shoehorning worked "best" without the data being "tainted" by the distractions of social interactions.

But without one another, without being able to see other people blush, without the ability to look into one another's eyes, without the information embedded in our subtle smiles, flared nostrils, or tensed muscles, we learn no better than apes. Screens are very limited in what they can convey. They make trust and cooperation far more difficult. The same for physical distancing. No wonder we were all so tired. We were working overtime to gather the social information we need in order to learn at full capacity.

Whether we know it or not, this is why "school" isn't working very well right now. We tend to think of our schools as places for shoehorning the old reading, writing, and 'rithmatic into their little heads, but its real value (beyond the economic value of child care) has always been the opportunity for children simply be together, to learn from one another, to practice being sociable, to cooperate, to develop the habits of working with others, to play, and to grow the trust necessary for their brains to develop to their highest potential. This is where or focus ought to be..

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Countering Alienation With Connection: Play Can Save Humanity

Yesterday, I listened to Pink Floyd's masterpiece The Wall. The album came out in 1979. I was a high school senior and on my way to university the following year. For those unfamiliar with it, the album was conceived as a rock opera and is the story of an alienated young man who responds to the slings and arrows of his life by building a metaphorical wall around himself ("All in all it's just another brick in the wall"). 

At the time, I appreciated it as a work of art that showed me a person struggling with mental health, who had suffered at the hands of society, and who was undergoing a kind of ongoing existential crisis. Although I didn't necessarily identify with it, I knew that there were many kids around me who did, who had not had the kind of privilege that I had lucked into. I was a relatively well-adjusted youth with decent grades, plenty of friends and lots to look forward to in life. That doesn't mean I wasn't inspired to "try on" the affectations of youthful alienation and angst, but it was never really me, even as I found myself romanticizing the moodiness.

The record came back into my life when our daughter Josephine was 12. The entire sixth grade was given the assignment to create some sort of artistic response to The Wall. It was a project that took weeks, so once more the album regularly played in our home. By now, I was an educator and the story seemed more tragic than it had when I was younger. I didn't think that I was one of the adults who contributed bricks to the wall. I certainly didn't want to be that adult. I wanted to be a person who tore walls down, both for my child as well as the children I taught.

Perhaps the best known song from the album is the anthemic "Another Brick in the Wall," with its unforgettable lines:

We don't need no education

We don't need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Teacher! leave them kids alone

Hey, teacher! Leave them kids alone.

At one point, a chorus of children take over singing it. Yesterday, as those young voices shouted, "Hey, teacher! Leave us kids alone," I choked up.

I've been involved with education for a long time now. I've always strived to do it the right way by placing children at the center, by not commanding or controlling or shaming them. I've tried, to the best of my ability at any given moment, to allow children to be free to do and be what they want to do and be. I've made plenty of mistakes. I've even made some children cry. But, all in all, I've tried my best not to be a brick in anyone's wall.

That said, there are still too many children for whom school does not work, who do not have the advantages that I had. Over the years, I've come to understand that for many kids, school is and was a kind of hell. We don't do anyone a favor when we ignore this fact. And we are especially irresponsible when we try to blame the kids themselves, or their parents, who are, in most cases, products of this very same school system that manufactures at least as much alienation as it does education.

Part of what made me cry yesterday was when those children shouted, "Teachers!" I imagined them pointing their little fingers, their faces stony with anger. I'm aware that there are some awful human beings in our profession, as in any profession, but all in all most of the teachers I've known are likewise not to blame for the alienation. Indeed, teachers are the heroes of our schools because we are the ones who inject humanity into what would otherwise be a hollow behavioristic system of carrots and sticks. From where I sit, any successes our school system can point to are the direct results of teachers who find it in their hearts to mitigate the harm.

Teacher-activist and author Jesse Hagopian once told me that school taught him that he wasn't smart. He had been labeled by standardized tests as being "below" some arbitrary standard and it wasn't until "years later" that he came to understand his own intelligence. Likewise, Kisha Reid, one of the world's leading experts on play-based learning (and emerging painter), told me, "Play taught me I was smart . . . It wasn't until I went to school that I started to doubt myself."

We tell ourselves that education is our society's great equalizer, that education will allow us to rise above and grow beyond, but for far too many of us, that is a myth. The world is full of people like Jesse and Kisha who have risen above the harmful tendencies of our system of mandatory schooling, with its relentless focus on deficits, but for every Jesse or Kisha, there are countless others who experience "education" as a wall to overcome or escape or, tragically, behind which to remain forever entrapped.

I cried yesterday, because I've been trying for decades, like Jesse and Kisha, to do my part to be the change I want to see in the world, but the central facts behind those lyrics remain. It wasn't that long ago that my friend and colleague John Yiannoudis blared that song into the streets of Athens, Greece to attract a crowd of hundreds to listen to me and others as we discussed our dreams for what education could be. More than 45 years later, those lyrics, those angry children, remain relevant.

But I remain unalienated, as does Jesse, as does Kisha, both of whom have countered alienation with connection. Jesse has built an inspiring career from "struggle" against the injustices of school and society, sprinkling his stories with the words "joyous" and "beautiful." Kisha has created a "circle of love" in which robust, authentic play teaches generations of children and their parents that not only are they smart, but that they can do and achieve anything their hearts desire. "Play," she says, "can save humanity."

The last thing our world needs is more schooling, more curriculum, more testing, and more homework. What we need are more educators like Jesse and Kisha, who stand up boldly and who, as Kisha puts it, "Step into our positions as professionals." It means educators who know what is right for children, who love children, and who are committed to tearing down the walls.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Brains Do Not Grow in Captivity

We now know enough about the brain to realize that its 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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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!

I Fought the Temptation to "Correct" Them

When my grandmother-in-law died, she left us with a set of The Great Books, a 54 volume set of renowned works by European men, from Homer to Freud. Published in 1954 by Encyclopaedia Britannica, this was meant as a comprehensive study guide for adults interested in learning about intellectual underpinnings of the Western world. The idea was that students would encounter the original works, rather than textbook summaries, and, more importantly, the curriculum was built around conversation, debate, and inquiry rather than to simply deliver direct instruction.

The Great Books approach to higher education had been underway decades before this set was published, versions of it having been adopted by several respected universities, including Columbia, University of Chicago, Notre Dame, and St. John's College, which to this day organizes its entire undergraduate program around it.

Over the years, I've cherry picked volumes to browse, reading, say a bit of Plato here or a passage from Goethe there, but largely they've lived with us ornamentally, or, as I often say about books on the shelf, aspirationally. 

My attention was drawn to these books recently when I read that schools in South Korea have begun adopting the Great Books seminar approach by partnering with St. John's. Hwacheon High School began offering the program as a two-credit course in 2025. Five other schools in Chuncheon offer seminars using readings from Plato and Thomas More, and the Incheon National University has adapted it for Korean students and is currently extending it into local schools.

At first, this confounded me. Why would Korean schools be embracing a deep dive into this curriculum of "dead white guys." I mean, certainly Korea has its own rich intellectual and literary tradition to draw from, and apparently they have included Asian thinkers, but the point isn't the specific content. The stated goal, according to educators, is for Korean students to discover a new way to learn. They want their students to learn by speaking as equals, questioning one another, and exploring ideas without being expected to reach a single correct answer. This, of course, is a reaction against school cultures that have traditionally been more hierarchical and lecture-based.

Equally important, I think, is that they are consciously seeking to move away from vocational training and toward supporting students to become facile, confident critical thinkers.

This is happening in Korea as US universities and high schools are moving away from reading entire books altogether. 

Of course, as a preschool teacher, I've always worked in schools in which the students don't read any books at all. Or rather, books are read to the children. And then, invariably, they are discussed, not as lessons to be learned, but very much with the goal of becoming facile, confident critical thinkers. 

One of the greatest reading episodes of my life involved a reading of The Little Red Hen. This classic morality story involves a hen who finds some grains of wheat and decides to do the work of planting, tending, harvesting, grinding, and ultimately baking it into a loaf of bread. At every step of the way, she asks the others, "Who will help me?" to which they reply, "Not I." As an adult, I know the intended moral of the story, but when we got to the end where the hen, justifiably, refuses to share the bread, the children were confused and outraged.

"Why didn't she share?"

"They're hungry and she's eating all the bread!"

"That's not fair!"

I fought the temptation to "correct" them, but rather allowed the discussion to unfold as the children, together, determined that the little red hen was a jerk.

Another time we were collecting books for a fundraiser. The intent had been picture books, but one of our families donated a bunch of paperback novels, among them William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. People my age know that this book is difficult and dense, made particularly confusing by the fact that the narrator of the first quarter of the book is a grown man, Benjy, with a severe intellectual disability. A five-year-old brought it to me. I told him, "That's a grown-up book. You'll probably have to read it when you're in high school."

"Let's read it now."

It was a sunny day, so we took the book outside and I began reading it to a small assembly of preschoolers. I figured they would wander off before I'd reached the bottom of the first page, but I was wrong. For the next week, we read and discussed this book on the playground, as a group. Not only that, but the children, together, were able to discern exactly what was going on ("They're playing baseball." "No, they're playing golf." "He's hiding from them." "He's trying to get their golf balls."), something I'd struggled with as a teenager. They made me stop to define words, and they were particularly interested when I skipped over the N-word. "What's so bad about it?"

Our policymakers are forever talking about the "jobs of tomorrow" and how our schools must "prepare" our children for them. What BS. No one can possibly predict what jobs our preschoolers will be applying for 20 years from now. They're just blowing smoke. They're, at best, talking about the jobs of today, but more often than not, they're talking about the jobs of yesterday. It will be today's preschoolers who will be inventing those jobs of tomorrow.

What we do know, however, is that whatever the future holds, we will need those critical thinkers. 

That's what educators in South Korea are thinking about. Maybe we should too.

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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!

Your Children Already Know How to Be Successful

I think most of us, if asked to define "success," would think deeply enough to consider more than the capacity to acquire great wealth. Certainly, we would cite things like having "enough" money and a holding personally satisfying job, but we would also include things like mental and physical health, good personal relationships with friends and family, and a general sense of well-being about how life is going.

There has never been a study that links early literacy or early numeracy to any of these aspects of "success," even the superficial one of wealth. None. Never. 

The research that's been done on successful people tends to find, rather, that their success comes from being self-motivated, sociable, and having the ability to work well with others. These are the skills and attributes children work on when they have ample opportunity to play, especially outdoors, with other children, with few toys and lots of time, and with a minimum of adult intervention. Our job as adults to prepare an environment in which free play is possible, to keep an eye out for hazards (as opposed to risks children choose to take on their own), and where children have the opportunity to do things for themselves, even if it means failing, and failing often.

As a teacher in a cooperative and a parent myself, I understand the pressures parents are under. On the one hand there are those who insist we must drill and grill our youngest citizens lest they "fall behind," while on the other, there are those who are in the business of selling us on the idea that children are constantly at risk of abduction or injury or other dangers. These twin manufactured fears, and they are largely manufactured, have caused a generation of parents to behave as what is popularly called "helicopter parents," always hovering nearby, always ready to step in, always urging and cajoling and warning, teaching helplessness instead of independence. All this leaves precious little time for the children to actually play in the way that will allow them to grow into successful adults.

I reckon by writing this, I'm now, at one level, joining the fear-mongers, providing parents who are already pulled this way and that by fear, one more thing about which to worry: is my child getting enough free play? For that I'm sorry, but the answer is, if you're a typical American parent, probably not.

I've spent my career at a cooperative preschool, which means that I worked more closely with parents than most teachers. I write here often about teaching children, but one of the most important things I did was to also teach their parents, which was done formally through our parent educators, and informally by our larger community of families who were, collectively, striving to offer children the opportunity to acquire the skills and attributes of success through play. It's a learning process I've witnessed time and again, one that I experienced myself as a parent. I know that for some it is a painful one of "letting go," of coming to trust the world enough to know that those inevitable bumps and bruises our children experience, both physical and emotional, those "failures," are the true building blocks of success. It's hard because we live in a culture that tells us our job as parents is to fix things for our kids, to make things easy, to soften the blows. We have to consciously push back against the culture of fear that has come to surround parenting if we are to raise truly successful adults.

Most of our three-year-olds were out of diapers. When they told me they need to go to the potty, I pointed to the bathroom and said, "The toilet is in there." If you asked their parents, many would insist their child still needed their presence, if not assistance, in the bathroom, but it was really no longer true. Sure, children may want mommy with them, after all it can be an intimate, private moment, but when mommy isn't at school, they've shown they are more than capable. Yes, some struggle to get their pants back up, others miss the toilet, and I'm sure few do as thorough a job of wiping as mom, but they all come out of there, mission accomplished, then hop up on the stool near the sink to wash their hands.

It's likewise difficult for parents to step back and allow their children to engage in, say, conflict or risk, but it must be done if our goal is successful children. Yes, they will fail, and those failures form the foundation of success. Indeed, when looked at from the wider perspective they aren't failures at all, but rather steps along a pathway. As Thomas Edison famously said about the invention of the light bulb when asked by a journalist how it felt to have failed a thousand times: "I did not fail a thousand times. Inventing the light bulb was a process of one thousand steps."

A pastor friend of mine once said that our main purpose in life is to assure the other people, "Don't be afraid," and that is what I'm saying to parents. Your children already know how to be successful, and that may require a lot of failure. What they need from you is to love them, to trust them, and to keep them safe. Otherwise, relax and get out of their way. It's through freedom that their own unique success will be found.

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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!

Childhood is the Time for Falling in Love

I'm currently planning an exciting DIY project. 

The wicker armrests and backs of our patio furniture are coming apart. It's nice, well-made furniture, and the sides are still looking nice, so I've had the idea to add teak planks to cover the broken wicker. In my mind, it looks good. In my mind, I can envision exactly how I'm going to do it. I even think I already have all the tools I'm going to need, other than perhaps a little sandpaper. I calculate that it will cost around $200 to do the job, which is a lot less expensive than new furniture.

I actually think it will make the furniture look even better than it did when it was new; more solid, more substantial, and I like the way teak tends to weather into a soft grey. My friends have different opinions. My wife Jennifer, despite knowing that I have a history of successful home improvement projects (one of the main reasons, I joke, that we've remained married for 40 years), is doubtful so I've just ordered the minimal amount of material to finish one chair as a proof of concept.

I don't fault anyone for doubting me. After all, I'm an amateur. 

An amateur, by definition, is someone who does something for pleasure or as a hobby instead of for money, but the word also often connotes someone who simply isn't very good at something. We often dismiss things as "amateurish." But then there are, say, amateur athletes or amateur artists who we admire, in part, because they are amateurs. They are doing something for the love of doing it. Indeed the word amateur comes from the Latin amator, "lover," from amare, "to love."

In his iconic book The Medium is the Massage, philosopher Marshall McLuhan writes: "Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment . . . the “expert” is the man who stays put."

Part of becoming a professional is that we must learn to function successfully within an existing "professional" environment. The professional must master its assumptions, conventions, categories, standards, vocabulary, and measures of success. When McLuhan uses the word "environmental" he's talking about the "ground rules" that become so habitual that they cease to even be noticed.

A professional is a person who has become adapted. They have learned what it means to be, say, a "good" lawyer, a "good" teacher, or a "good" carpenter. The professional knows what is "legitimate," "acceptable," and, perhaps most importantly, what success is meant to look like.

In contrast, the amateur hasn't internalized those rules. Indeed, the amateur may not even know they exist and therefore has the freedom to ask questions the professional would not even think to ask, such as "Why must it be done in this way?"

"There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics," wrote J. Robert Oppenheimer, "because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago." That loss is one of the risks of becoming a professional.

I'm not saying that professionalism is necessarily a bad thing, but rather to suggest that perhaps it's best not to rush ourselves towards professionalism, especially since it can tend to turn something one loves into a mere "job."

I'm an amateur bread baker -- sour dough baguettes are my speciality. When I deliver fresh bread to my neighbors, they often say something like, "You should sell these at the farmer's market" or "You should start a bakery!" It's a nice compliment, but I know that the moment I start doing it for anything other than pleasure, it will become, well, less pleasurable and that's something I don't want to lose.

The professional has something at stake: reputation, status, livelihood, credentials, measurable outcomes. The professional therefore has reasons to stay inside the established rules.

The amateur—at least McLuhan's ideal amateur—can screw around.

They can try something that probably won't work. They can abandon it halfway through. They can pursue something merely because it's interesting. They can combine things that aren't “supposed” to go together. They can ask questions whose answers have no practical value. They can fail without having failed at being an amateur.

In other words, amateurs can play.

A four-year-old building a block tower isn't a junior architect. She's an amateur builder in the deepest sense. She doesn't need the tower to stand. She doesn't need to optimize materials. She doesn't have a client or deadline. She doesn't need to demonstrate mastery against a rubric. She can build it badly, knock it over, turn the blocks into sandwiches, discover something about balance, forget about balance entirely, and wander off to dig a hole.

And importantly, the freedom to lose, or to fail, is what makes discovery possible.

Play-based education protects amateurism. Standard schooling prematurely professionalizes childhood.

Consider how much of conventional schooling resembles professionalization: specialized subjects, schedules, externally defined objectives, standards, performance measurement, comparison with peers, deadlines, evaluation by experts, and increasingly narrow definitions of competence.

We say, in effect: Here are the ground rules. Learn to succeed within them.

Whereas play, amateurism, permits children to discover the ground rules themselves and, crucially, to discover that the ground rules can be changed. And that's why children playing in the street may have an advantage over a professional.

This rush to professionalize childhood is a misguided effort to dismiss a necessary and beautiful mode of learning: amateurism. We want children to get good at things, to master the ground rules, to produce measurable outcomes, often before they've had enough time to screw around with the world.

The amateur, remember, is the lover. Children at play are amateurs in this oldest and best sense of the word. They pursue things because they are interesting. They do things badly. They fail without being failures. They change the rules. They abandon one thing for another. They follow questions that lead nowhere, then suddenly somewhere.

There will be plenty of time for professionalism. Childhood is the time for falling in love.

******

Books, like Sand Talk, 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!

Use It Or Lose It

I've come to realize that many people I know can barely tell one plant from another. Yes, they may know a tree from a weed, or maybe a shrub from a cactus. 

According to science journalist Zöe Schlanger, "'plant blindness' is the tendency to view plant life as an indistinguishable mass, a green smudge, rather than as thousands of genetically separate and fragile individuals, as distinct from one another as a lion is from a trout."

To one degree or another, most of us suffer from plant blindness, at least compared to our ancestors. For much of human history, knowing the subtle differences between plants was much more a matter of life and death than it is today. When we lived closer to nature, it was important to know, say, which red berries were delicious and which might kill you; which leaves could alleviate your headache and which could cause seizures; which you could wear and which could cause a rash. 

But today, we tend to come across "plants" as products in the form of berry baskets, medicines, and clothing. The necessity to know the properties of this plant or that plant isn't as vital as it once was, so our ability to do so has atrophied. In our fantasies, we often imagine that if a caveman was transported through time to our modern world, they would be in awe. And I'm sure they would be, although much of that awe would be over how stupid and oblivious we've become. 

As the saying goes, "use it or lose it." We've outsourced plant knowledge to farmers, chemists, and the entire supply chain that manufactures and brings things to market, specialists who supposedly free us up to specialize in our own right. 

Today's children spend significantly less time outdoors than previous generations, part of a decades-long shift of childhood from outdoor environments to indoor ones. Indeed, Americans of all ages now spend about 90 percent of their lives indoors. So, of course, this ability is atrophying.

The modern world is built on specialization, on individuals picking what they will use and what they will lose. Unfortunately, that also means we lose our connection to things that may well be important to us. I mean, the smartphone or AI may represent grand, perhaps misguided, definitely uncontrolled "experiments" that may wind up killing us all, but this experiment in disconnecting from nature is, from where I sit, a far more dangerous experiment.

This is part of the reason I feel so strongly that every preschool playground should include plants. A garden is a good place to start, but also trees, grasses, vines, shrubbery, and whatever else will grow in and around the place. Even better, of course, is an adjacent forest or pond or beach or bush or vacant lot where the weeds run wild. Sadly, most playgrounds are soft fall zones and out-of-the-box equipment, with, perhaps a patch of well-mown grass. We think that represents "safety" when, in fact, it represents the adult's ignorance of nature, the full needs of children, and the only real safety that has ever existed: the experience to keep oneself safe. Use it or lose it.

We'll never be as plant savvy as our hunter-forager ancestors, nor do we need to be, but what else do we miss in our near complete inability to recognize these living things that were here for millennia before us and will likely be here for millennia after we Homo sapiens have either died off or evolved into whatever is next? 

What else are we blind to? The evidence is that we, as individuals, are blind to most of reality, even if we, as a species, have specialists who know a lot about a lot.

I often see our youngest children as the last of the generalists, which is why I want them to play. If nothing else, when we let them choose what to explore, what to think about, what to experiment with, we allow them to discover connections with the world to which the rest of us have become ignorant through disuse. We often talk about the early years as a time for building foundations, but maybe a better metaphor is to think of it as discovering how to connect with the world in all its wonder.

In our species' "progress," we've lost at least as much as we've gained as we've leaned into our capacity for specialization. But of all the things we've lost, I wonder if the one indispensable thing is the capacity to connect directly to the rest of the world, freely, without the perpetual guiding hand of for-their-own-good specialists. And that capacity is built through play.

Use it or lose it.

******

It's hard sometimes to stay-the-course these days, but every child thrives in a self-directed environment because every child deserves the right to pursue their own special genius in the company of others who likewise are pursuing their special genius. It's not just a foundation for life, but a way of life. If you want to provide this kind of playful childhood for the children in your life, then join us for a 2-week pop-up version of Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning starting September 24. It's designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents, and grandparents who know that there is so much more than mere academics. This is a great way to make sure the whole team is on the same page to begin to coming school year. To learn more and to register, click here. But hurry, we start on Thursday!

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!

How Much Evidence Do They Need?

Swedish cognitive neuroscientist and researcher John Axelsson says that our brain seeks to become expert in the environment in which it finds itself. 

The brain is, in effect, a "simulation machine," according to Axelsson, designed to learn about the world, then automate the relevant survival behaviors. 

The example he gives is learning to drive. At first we must be conscious of every aspect of operating our vehicle (i.e., learning), but with practice the relevant behaviors become more and more automatic until we can free our brains up to do more "important" things, like simulating what we are going to say to our boss about being late yet again.

The brain learns and automates: learning takes a lot of energy, automation less. This means that we are in a continual process of converting behaviors that take more energy into behaviors that take less energy. This can also be called the process of becoming expert which is, to close the circle, what our brains are designed to do. 

We see this process in action, quite clearly, when we observe children at play. Each is drawn toward becoming expert in their environment, starting with what is most "important," which is to say that thing about which they have the most curiosity. I recently watched an 18 month old with a stick. His learning took the form of poking various things in his environment with it, trying the dirt, then the pavement, then a manhole cover, then a wall, then a tree trunk. I can certainly speculate about what he was learning, although I can never know for sure. What I do know is that he was seeking to become expert in the environment  in which he found himself because that's what humans do. Not far away, another child, in more or less the same environment, was sitting with her family at a lunch table repeatedly scraping a fork across a plate, then putting it into her mouth. She was also in the process of becoming expert in her environment.

Standard schools are based upon hubris and habit, rather than the science of how learning happens. When committees of adults pre-determine what is important in a child's environment, when they likewise predetermine how and on what schedule they are going to learn it, we cheat the children. Instead of creating environments of autonomy, we create ones of reliance upon others (i.e., adults). What children learn in these environments is that they must strive to ignore their curiosity and become expert instead at compliance, placing their learning in the hands of "teachers" who will then attempt to measure it. This is an artificially stressful environment and, as Axelsson told us, stress is one of the conditions under which learning slows down, or even ceases altogether in extreme cases.

In contrast, we learn best in relatively stress free environments. Axelsson points out that children escaping extremely stressful environments like war zones will stop playing until they find themselves in environments that are relatively stress free, like refugee camps. Indeed, they need to play in order to start becoming expert in the new environment in which they find themselves. Our schools are not, of course, war zones, but by seeking to control the bodies and minds of children, we are asking them to replace their curiosity with obedience. And that is unnecessarily stressful.

Some children learn those lessons in compliance quite well. We call them good students. Many more learn to hide or squelch their curiosity, doing their real learning by pursuing passions outside of school. Those we call "indifferent students" even if some of them learn to pass all the tests. Still others are driven to rebel, which is how their brains seek to become expert in an environment that tries to control them, a perfectly valid, even commendable response. These children know that, for them, escape is the only relevant behavior.

If we were to rely on science instead of habit and hubris, our school environments would look much different than they do right now. Instead of being places of top down curricula and compliance, they would be environments full of stuff and ideas. They would be environments in which children were free to pursue their curiosity, to become expert in the aspects of the environment that they deem most important, to do it in the manner they choose, and according to the timetable they set for themselves. Schools would be environments in which the adults themselves are part of the stuff and ideas, there not to instruct or control, but rather to answer questions, provide materials, and support each individual child to the degree and in the way the child determines. 

Those who support standard schools are never asked to defend their methods, whereas those of us who advocate for play-based or self-directed learning are forever being challenged to defend our approach. Again and again, the science, the evidence, tells us that if a generation of critical, creative thinkers is our goal, an environment of play is how our brains work best. Yet again and again we are called on to provide more evidence. How much evidence do they need?

It seems the only conclusion is that those who support standard school methods have different ideas of education than I do. And, of course, if compliance is the goal, carry on. You'll just be doing it without me.

******

It's hard sometimes to stay-the-course these days, but every child thrives in a self-directed environment because every child deserves the right to pursue their own special genius in the company of others who likewise are pursuing their special genius. It's not just a foundation for life, but a way of life. If you want to provide this kind of playful childhood for the children in your life, then join us for a 2-week pop-up version of Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning starting September 24. It's designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents, and grandparents who know that there is so much more than mere academics. This is a great way to make sure the whole team is on the same page to begin to coming school year. To learn more and to register, click here. But hurry, we start on Thursday!

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!