A Stone Like All the Others

I picked up a small stone and performed some sleight of hand for the children. I then handed the stone to a girl, saying, "I'm giving this to you." Our playground is bestrewn with stones and pebbles. Any one of them would have served my purposes, but I'd selected this one. Now this girl had it. The other children gathered around her, requesting a turn with this "special" stone.

"It's funny how the nature of an object . . . is so changed by the way it has come into your hands, as a gift or a commodity," writes Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. This stone was just a stone until I picked it up, then gave it to someone else. Now it's a treasure.

After trying to make it "disappear" several times, in imitation of me, she passed it along to a playmate, who squealed. The first girl had not squealed when I gave it to her. It had become even more valuable as children jockeyed to be next. 

"The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes," writes Kimmerer.

The stone passed from hand-to-hand over the course of the next half hour or so. Some held it for a few seconds before passing it along. Others took time to cherish it. But they all paid it forward. There was no adult coaxing them or praising them. They knew exactly what to do.

"Many of our ancient teachings counsel that whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again."

Eventually, the last child took his turn with the stone. He had waited a long time. Only he could say if it was worth it, but he seemed as pleased as the others. 

"From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the "gift" is deemed to be "free" because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost. But in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships." And the obligation to give it away again.

I figured the game was now done, but I was wrong. After several minutes the boy began to look around until he spied me. It had started as a stone like all the others, but as it passed from person-to-person as a gift, it had become a talisman, a symbol, and a ceremony. He completed the circle by handing the stone to me. And I returned it to the Earth, who had given it to me.

******

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!

Nasty, Uncontrollable, Hopelessly Feral

"I really can't stand children." 

It's a sentiment I occasionally encounter upon informing a stranger of the work I do. It always rocks me back on my heels a bit, given that I'm most often surrounded by adults who find the company of young children to be preferable to that of their peers.

All adults have theories about children, even those who spend little time with them. After all, we were all once children, so, at a minimum we have those years of experience from which to cobble together our theories about what a child is, does, wants, and needs. And some consider children to be nasty, uncontrollable, hopelessly feral things that will one day, fingers crossed, outgrow it. It's as if they conceive childhood as some sort of larval stage during which these pre-humans feed themselves voraciously of the precious leaves of life before they pupate (perhaps within the chrysalis of university) emerging finally as adults.

As long as they are not cruel to children, I tend to respect these people even as I disagree with them. Their theories cause them to largely avoid children, especially young children, standing aloof in their presence, ignoring them if at all possible. They tend to choose professions and habitations far removed from where children play and when they're compelled to interact with them they do so as if they are little adults, not speaking down to them, employing their full vocabulary, not caring really if these ignorant children comprehend, not even expecting them to respond, at least not in a "rational" manner. Children confound them and, because of their theories, they lack the prying curiosity that attends so many of the interactions children have with other adults.

In most circumstances, children ignore and avoid these adults in return, not out of any sort of animosity, but simply because the indifference is mutual. Sometimes, however, young children love, from afar, these adults, not only because they don't pepper them with the usual questions about what they want to be when they grow up and their favorite subject in school. They appreciate that they aren't talked down to or coddled. Their cheeks are not pinched and their heads are not patted. In other words, they perceive they are not being treated as children, but rather as people. And so long as this adult with the mis-guided theory about children isn't outright mean to them, they often find this treatment refreshing. 

It should also be mentioned that adults who harbor this brand of theory about children, should they be offended or harmed by a child, are unlikely to punish, correct, or scold them, but rather respond by giving them, at most, a few pointed words of disapproval, before turning their backs, the way they would with a wayward adult over whom they have no authority other than their dignity. 

These adults don't "understand" children and so their interactions with them tend to be free of the urge that so many of us have to help or teach or otherwise better them. This is why I respect their opinions.

You see, most children, most of the time, spend their days among adults whose theories about children are constructed on cuteness, naiveté, and ignorance. These adults, with the best of intentions, tend to talk down to children in high-pitched sing-song voices reserved only for children and pets. These adults loooooove children, petting and pampering them, which is all well and good, but it too often comes with these notions of helping, teaching, correcting, and generally behaving as if this theoretical child cannot function without constant intervention from loving adults.

John Holt wrote: "It is condescending when we respond to qualities that enable us to feel superior to the child. It is sentimental when we respond to qualities that do not exist in the child but only in some vision or theory that we have about children." 

In his book Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, anthropologist Christopher Boehm, based on 339 fieldwork studies, concluded that our hunter-gatherer ancestors "are universally -- and all but obsessively -- concerned with being free from the authority of others." Indeed, we have evolved as a species to resist the imposition of hierarchy, even when it comes to interactions between adults and children. Too often, those of us who claim to love children do so, at least in part, because we like the feeling of being superior. We help, teach, and correct these theoretical children "for their own good," not because they have asked us to help, teach or correct them, but because we feel it is our right (which is often mis-framed as a responsibility).

The truth is that children are nasty, uncontrollable, and feral. They are also cute, naive, and ignorant. All of us are. None of these traits proposed by our theories are the exclusive domain of childhood or adulthood. In the end, there is no such thing as a theoretical child and none of our theories are correct. Or rather, none of them are entirely correct which is why I often prefer the approach taken by the "I really can't stand children" crowd. There may be something horribly broken within these adults, but to the degree it allows them to leave the kids alone, to not not impose their unsolicited help, teaching, or correction upon them, and to not assume the posture of superiority, is the degree to which their seemingly stance really is for the children's own good. 

******

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!

The Recurrent Problem of Civilization

 

"The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough . . ." ~Margaret Mead

"Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary." ~Margaret Mead

As a man in a field that is overwhelmingly women, I've often been asked, "Why aren't there more men in early childhood education?"

My knee-jerk answer has typically been that it's about money. 

It's a defensible surmise given that preschool teachers are notoriously low paid ($38,140 a year/$18.34 an hour) and men (in heterosexual couples at least) are still the primary breadwinners. Indeed, the only reason I've been able to work in this profession all these years is because my wife has out earned me. 

That said, the pay gap has closed dramatically in recent decades. Today husbands are the primary income earner in barely over half of all marriages (52%), so that means my answer is shakier than it once was. 

For one thing, there's the chicken-or-egg question of what came first? After all, every profession in which women dominate, tends toward the lower end of the pay scale. And there are few professions with more of a gender imbalance than those that involve working with young children. In other words, do men stay away because the pay is low or because it's "women's work"?

I'm thinking about this because I recently came across Celeste Davis' piece on her Substack: "Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?" It's a short, thought-provoking piece about the startling fact that 60 percent of today's college students are women. When I was a boy, men enrolled in college at double the rate of women. Davis writes, "Scholars, journalists, college presidents and reddit thread philosophers have all come to the table to add their particular offering to the buffet of reasons why fewer boy are going to college," but the thing they all "skirt around" is the one thing that has actually changed: "an increase in girls."

She argues that across the board, when the presence of women reaches 60 percent in any profession the men "make a swift exit and other men stop joining." Among the professions in which this has happened are veterinary medicine, biology, interior design, psychology, social work and, of course, teaching, all of which were not so long ago were predominately "male" professions. 

The medical profession is currently 60 percent men, but 55 percent of all medical students for the past seven years are women. In 2024-25, over half of all new residents were women. Will medicine be the next profession to reach the 60 percent tipping point? And even more interesting will be watching to see if this historically well-paid profession becomes less so as women fill the ranks. 

Clearly there is more at work here than mere economics. It seems that many men and boys (especially heterosexual men and boys, although gay men aren't immune) don't want to be associated with "girly" jobs, often even when it means taking lower pay to work in a "boy" job.

Davis calls it "male flight," comparing the phenomenon to the "white flight" that tends to take place when Black and Brown people move into the neighborhood. As an institution becomes associated with women and femininity, men increasingly avoid it. Her larger argument is that the modern idea of masculinity teaches boys to avoid anything coded feminine. 

In other words, the answer is not the sort of glib, easy answer of "low pay," but rather something more complex and important. I don't think this is as simple as boys being afraid of getting girl "cooties," although I wouldn't dismiss that entirely. The deeper question, I think, is why and how are we socializing young boys to believe that to be masculine, they must reject nurturing, caring for others, and teaching?

In her book How to Raise a Feminist Son, Sonora Jha writes, "In many cultures, we rob boys of the range of human emotions and connection . . . And how are boys often trained in "masculinity"? By distancing themselves from femininity." The irony, she points out, is that what boys most want is to "fit in, and to connect" and they do that by showing that they don't care for connection." "Stoic" and "aloof" isn't what boys are made of but what they are made into."

Poet, essayist, and controversial founder of the so-called "mythopoetic men's movement" echoed Margaret Mead by asserting that the "fundamental problem in the continuation of a decent life everywhere in the world is the question of the socialization of young males." He went on to say, "It is not women's job to socialize young males. That is the job the older men."

In his view, we've entered a vicious cycle in which modern men find themselves "half-adults," who never fully mature, making it impossible to take on those traditionally "masculine" roles, including being a father, which has become a kind of vicious cycle. Essentially, Bly asks, How do we properly socialize boys into masculinity? 

We continue to hear this argument today, but I think that's the wrong question.

In her book, Jha cites the "Man Box" study, an ongoing, multi-country research effort looking at rigid societal expectations of manhood, its effect on young men, and the people around them. This "Man Box" is a collective set of beliefs and pressure society places on men to conform to rigid, traditional standards of masculinity, including such things as self-sufficiency, acting tough, physical attractiveness, adherence to rigid gender roles, heterosexuality, sexual prowess, and aggression used for conflict resolution. I have certainly had to deal with all of these pressures.

But the real question this study raises for me is, Why are we so determined to socialize boys into this definition of masculinity in the first place? It's not a particularly attractive set of traits. I mean, at first blush "self-sufficiency" sounds good, but to a young boy, it often sounds like "Don't ask for help" or "You're on your own" or "It's weakness to need others." Acting tough? That's just another way to drive people away. And ultimately, it's acting. Attractiveness? I mean, who doesn't want to be attractive, but at what cost? And we all know that gender roles, sexual shaming, and sexual conquest all deny ourselves and others their essential and unique humanity. And aggression and violence are simply not valid tools in the modern world. 

The mother of one of my students once told me, "I've never told my father that his granddaughter has a male preschool teacher. He would assume you're a pedophile." This is part of the "Man Box." I know there are many people, both men and women, who make this assumption about any man who would choose to work with young children. Indeed, before accepting my first job, I consulted with a mentor, a man, and asked him point-blank, "What do I do if someone accuses me?" He shook his head, "You would have to move to Bimini." Stepping outside the box can have real, harsh, and unfair consequences.

And as controversial as Bly is, he makes a point. “How can we expect boys to understand nurturing, connection, and non-violence as masculine possibilities if they so rarely encounter men performing those roles in the institutions where they grow up?” I know for a fact, that many parents chose to come to our school because I was a male teacher, just as some stayed away. When I asked why, the answer was typically something like, "I want my child to have a male influence," or "Men just have a different energy than women." It's the same sentiment behind the question, "How can we get more men in early childhood education?"

And we're back to another chicken-and-egg problem: We want more men in nurturing roles but without men in nurturing roles, many men will never imagine it for themselves. And so it goes.

When our daughter was born our circumstances made it logical and possible for me to be a stay-at-home parent. I worried about those "Man Box" pressures. I was concerned that I, along with our daughter, might find ourselves outsiders among all those women. I wondered if I was going to be judged and diminished as a man.

As a young man my father was focused on his career, which involved long hours and lots of travel. He was, however, an involved father. He played with us. He volunteered in his community. He tried new things. He was even our Cub Scout leader. But one day he said to me, "Tom, I think you're the luckiest man alive. I feel like I missed a lot of your growing up. You get to be there with your daughter." He was a conscientious, competent, curious, and caring man. I know that he sometimes felt trapped by the box, but what he taught me was that masculinity was ours to define. (Maybe that's the advantage of being "unnecessary.") And that's the man I still try to be. 

Mead asserts that "the recurrent problem of civilization" is what to do with the men? Maybe the problem is simply that civilization insists on trying to define what that is.

******

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!

The Trouble With Being Right in a Wrong World

In the country of the blind, goes the proverb, the one-eyed man is king.

In his 1904 short story "The Country of the Blind" H.G. Wells writes of a sighted man named Núñez who finds himself in exactly this position. Instead of being crowned king, however, the concerned citizens find his claims about "seeing" to be delusional and propose removing the organs that are clearly the cause of his mental illness. The story ends with Núñez fleeing into the wilderness where he presumedly dies in the effort.

The message is clear: possessing an ability (or knowledge or genius) that nobody recognizes is more likely to cause others to see you as defective rather than superior. 

For instance, there are those, like Thom Hartmann, who assert that their ADHD is his superpower. The big idea behind his "Hunter/Farmer hypothesis" is that traits we label as distractibility, impulsivity, stimulation-seeking, hyper focus, rapid shifting of attention and risk-taking, would have been quite valuable to hunters, while the modern classroom and workplace only tend to reward the steadier "farmer" traits. Hartmann says the genesis of his theory was an attempt to give his ADHD-diagnosed child a less-disempowering story. "It's only a flaw," he concludes, "if you're in a society of farmers."

In a similar vein, several of my autistic adult friends and colleagues have at various times confessed that they often feel themselves superior to us "normies," especially when it comes to understanding things like complex systems or accurately remembering details.

None of this is to suggest that neurodivergence doesn't come with challenges, only that it cannot be viewed only as a deficit.

Thirty-five years after his short story was first published, Wells extended it with a new ending. In the revised version, Núñez escapes into the wilderness, but looks back to "see" that a catastrophic rockslide is about to destroy the country of the blind. He returns to warn them, but they don't believe him precisely because his warning depends on this delusional thing called "sight." Núñez escapes, but the rest are crushed under the rocks.

In the original version, the tragedy is Núñez's alone, while in the retelling the tragedy is everyone's.

There is, of course, an irony in using blindness as a metaphor for deficit in a story about the dangers of deficit thinking. Wells was writing more than a century ago, and his metaphor carries assumptions about disability that I don't share. What's interesting, however, is the deeper question his story raises: Who gets to decide which human capacities count as gifts and which count as defects?

Modern schooling is focused almost exclusively on defining and "fixing" the perceived deficits of children. We shame them. We tell them disempowering stories. We cast their superpower as a delusion, a flaw, and an illness. The one thing we rarely consider is that maybe it's us who must change.

This is one of the great promises of play-based (or self-directed) learning. When children are free to play, we aren't compelled to measure them against any single standard of what a child ought to be. There is a place in our country for the child who can't sit still, the child who becomes obsessed with a single idea, the child who takes risks, the child who notices what the rest of us cannot "see," the child who thinks and communicates and connects in ways we don't immediately understand.

Our job isn't to "cure" children of the things that make it difficult for them to thrive in the world we've made. Maybe our job is to join them in remaking the world in which there are no kings.

******

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!

"May I Dump This Bucket of Water Over Your Head?"

There are three broad categories of things about which we adults know more than the young children in our care: safety, schedules, and courtesy.

The rest is trivia. Yes, I may know more about Elizabethan novels than the typical five-year-old, but they know more about, say, Kpop Demon Hunters, so that's a wash.

Safety is obvious. Indeed, it's our number one job. None of us will last long in this profession if we're regularly sending kids home with major injuries. We say, "My job is to keep everyone safe. That's not safe. I can't let you do that." Then we don't let them do that.

Schedules can be inconvenient. We do what we can to minimize interruptions to the children's play, but the reality is that most of us have some sort of schedule to which we must adhere, even if it's just a matter of getting everyone ready when it's time to go home. We say, "My job is to make sure we're in the lunchroom at 11:30. It's 11:30. Now is lunch time." Then we usher them into the lunchroom.

Courtesy may not at first blush seem to fit with these other two, but this is where I see "consent" living. I don't expect children to align their behavior to the etiquette formulas with which many of us grew up (e.g., Emily Post), but I can't let them, say, dump a bucket of water on someone's head without first checking to make sure it's okay. I mean, it's only basic courtesy.

I once watched a boy sneak up behind a girl and dump a bucket of water over her head. He was shocked when she burst into tears. Later, as we discussed what he might have done differently, he asked, "Why is it funny when it happens on TV?"

The difference is consent. I explained that those people on TV are actors who have agreed to have water dumped on their heads, even if they pretend they didn't like it. Obviously, this kind of thing can be confusing for preschoolers and it's why they need our help to tease out the difference.

I remember when the Miss Manners column began appearing in our local newspaper back in the 1978. What made her advice different from what came before her was her insistence that etiquette wasn't about arbitrary rules, but rather about making social life work while preserving everyone's dignity. Courtesy is the answer to the question: how do we behave toward other human beings so that we respect their autonomy while still making it possible to live together? 

Young children might not grasp that concept exactly, but by the time they're three or four, most children are capable of understanding the concepts of consent and agreement. And this requires dialog, even going so far as to ask the question, "May I dump this bucket of water over your head?" then respecting the answer.

The Golden Rule is often offered as a kind of catch-all guide to living with others, but its weakness is that it allows us to judge the autonomy and dignity of others by our own sense of autonomy and dignity, rather than, you know, actually asking them how they feel about it. It's only basic courtesy.

A boy one time spent an entire morning asking his classmates if he could shoot them with his finger-gun. I admired his sense of fairness even as I found his line of inquiry unsavory. One after another, the children told him they didn't want to be shot. At some point he complained, "No body wants to play with me."

I answered, "Well, no body wants to be shot. I know I don't want to be shot. But maybe they'll play a different game with you."

He didn't like that idea. "But I won't really shoot them," he moaned, "It's just pretend."

"Maybe they don't know that."

He thought about this for a moment, then approached another child, "Do you want to be pretend shot?" Before long, half the kids were joyfully blasting each other with their fingers, everyone's dignity and autonomy intact.

******

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!

We are Plural

Cry contagion, or contagious crying, amongst human infants is a well documented phenomenon, one that anyone who has worked with groups of young people has learned about first hand. One infant's crying triggers nearby infants, especially during their first year of life.

This response tends to be much weaker when babies hear recordings of their own crying or other loud sounds. It seems to be specific to the cries of other human babies. Researchers don't think this response is mere imitation, but rather a display of emotional resonance, a manifestation of the fact that our nervous systems are inherently interconnected at a level beyond any previous relationship or even awareness of the other individuals. As humans mature, this connection transforms into the empathy and compassion that drives us to help one another, which is how our species has always moved forward.

In other words, we are born aware at a basic level that we're part of something greater than what is typically thought of as our individual selves. 

At the same time, it's estimated that only about half the cells in our body actually contain human DNA. The rest "our" body is made up of the bacteria and other microbes that are essential to digestion, immune health, and other functions. As Rebecca Solnit puts it, this means we aren't "singular, each of us, but plural, a cooperative community."

Of course, we have been taught to perceive ourselves as individuals, but in everything we do, there is an entire civilization, both within our "selves" and without, with which we are inextricably intertwined

We are born enmeshed in our world, yet it seems we go out of our way to deny this. Our schools, for instance, tend to be set up as competitive arenas in which children are ranked, divided, and scolded to keep their eyes on their own work. Even "cooperative" activities result in individual grades.

The "genius" of play-based learning is that it's part and parcel of a cooperative community, one in which "success" isn't judged by an authoritative adult, but rather by how well the play sustains itself. In other words, the reward is that the game continues, moving from one thing to another as individuals adjust, adapt, compromise and negotiate. Too often adults show up in the context of play as the killjoys, as the ones who scuttle the ebb and flow of the games, often intervening just when it was "getting good." 

When we allow ourselves to step back, to observe, and to intervene only when necessary, we find ourselves in a natural world in which cooperation and connection, not competition, stands at the center. A place where "we" is greater than "me"; where we are plural. That is, and always has been, the glory of our species.

******

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!

The Real Rigor of Play

The opposite of play is not work, it's rote. ~Dr. Edward Hallowell

Our outdoor classroom is one big slope and within that slope there are many ups and downs, reflecting our city which is built on hills. We're forever experimenting with gravity out there, rolling and flowing things downhill or dragging and pushing things up. There are parts of the space that are so steep one needs a running start to get to the top and there is very little flat upon which to rest one's legs.

We have a pair of wagons, which are regularly used on the hills. One day, one of those wagons became an airplane. 

From my photos, it's easy to see the physics and engineering learning, but those were minor aspects, almost side-effects, of the bigger, more important project, which was figuring out how to get along with the other people.

People sometimes question the "rigor" of a play-based curriculum when, in fact, we're engaged in the most rigorous curriculum known to mankind. There is simply no greater or more important challenge than the one of balancing our own individual desires and needs with those of the other humans with whom we find ourselves. 

A play-based curriculum is rigorous because of it's subject matter, which is the all-important one of getting along with the one another, something children are passionate about. Traditional schools, on the other hand, are rigorous simply because they attempt to teach less interesting things by rote, lecture, and text book, the most difficult way to learn new things because most children find them tedious and frustrating. It's an artificial rigor designed, I guess, to make the adults feel important.

Many people confuse hating school with rigor, saying things like, "It prepares them for life," but those of us who work in a play-based environment spend our days amongst children who love school, who arrive each day eager to tackle the challenges of community, and I would assert that there is no better preparation for life. Make no mistake, it's not pure joy, it's not all laughter. There are tears. There is conflict. There is negotiating and compromise. Children might complain, but they return each day eager to engage, to figure out the things they are most driven to figure out: the most important things of all.

There was so much to learn about flying our airplane together. Would it be safe? Where would everyone sit? How many of us can go at a time? Who gets to steer? Who rides and who "launches?" How do we get it back to the top of the hill? How do we make sure everyone gets a turn?

For the most part, we adults stood back, taking a few pictures, letting the kids work it out. Sure, the first few times they launched themselves down the hill, I jogged just ahead of them, prepared to intervene in the name of safety, but as it turned out on this day, I was unnecessary, even when the airplane crashed and burned.

I'll take the real rigor of play over the artificial rigor of rote any day. And so would the kids.

******

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!

Transforming How We Speak With Children

"No climbing to the top!"

When our daughter was in kindergarten, her school installed an amazing rope-and-steel climbing structure. The kindergartners were forbidden from climbing to the very top, which meant that adults were always hovering around the thing, "reminding" the children when they got too high. 

One day, I asked her if she was loving the new climber. She replied, "It's kind of in the way. No one plays on it." When I asked her why, she just shrugged, "It's just not fun."

Awhile back, I posted some thoughts on The Theory of Loose Parts. Appropriately, it is an idea that has emerged from the field of architecture about how the best learning environments are those in which we have permission to shape and manipulate our surroundings, and the things found within our surroundings, to suit our needs, ideas and curiosity.

It's a theory that's generally thought of in terms of the physical environment, but no matter how loose the parts, no matter how flexible the space, if the environment does not grant permission to engage freely, then the children, as loose parts theorist Simon Nicholson puts it, will still be cheated.

That's what happened at our daughter's school. The adults, in their concern about safety (or perhaps liability), had sucked the joy out of it. They would have been better off not installing the thing at all. Or installing a shorter one. Or, the way we did it at Woodland Park, not have a climbing structure at all, but rather provide the materials -- scraps of wood, shipping pallets, car tires, ropes -- from which the children could build their own "climbers."

And at our preschool, that's what the children did. None so high as the one on our daughter's kindergarten playground, of course, but always just the right height for the children creating it. Not only that, these impromptu structures were never in the way because the moment the kids were done with it, the parts were on the move, being put to other uses. 

But this didn't happen just because we provided the parts. It wasn't even just because they were "loose." This kind of self-motivated play can only happen when children know they have permission to follow their curiosity.

At our daughter's school, the adults specifically forbid a certain type of exploration, but much of the time we let children know they don't have permission in more subtle ways. 

For instance, if you listen to the things adults are saying to children at play -- "Come here!" "Slow down!" "Be careful!" -- we hear mostly commands. Research finds that 80 percent of the sentences adults speak to young children are commands. And an environment full of commands is not an environment of permission.

We also hear a lot of school-ish questions, "What color is that?" "How many marbles do I have in my hand?" "Do you know what letter that is?" Implied in these types of questions is the idea that the adults know better than the children what to think about. But even more open-ended questions like, "What do you think will happen if you put one more block on your tower?" tend to steer children into adult approved "places" in which the parts are no longer loose. When we ask questions, we compel children to divert from their own course and onto the one we've chosen for them.

There are times for commands and questions, but if our goal is to create the kind of loose parts environments that allow children to learn at full-capacity, then we are well served to consider even our words as loose parts. When we strive to replace our commands and questions with informational statements -- "That color is red," "I have marbles in my hand," "This is the letter R" -- we are offering children information, facts, that they, like with any loose part, can use or not use.

Instead of the command "Get in the car," we might state the fact, "It's time to go" and let them do their own thinking. Instead of the command "Be careful!" we might say, "The ground below you is concrete and it will hurt if you fall on it." Instead of school-ish questions to which we already know the answers we might instead simply speculate aloud, "I wonder why the sky is blue," leaving it there for the children to consider . . . or not. 

Of course, we might also choose to just not say anything at all which is when our "third teacher," the environment, often does her best work.

We will be discussing this and much more around the virtual campfire at our upcoming one week summer camp (see below). It will be a deep dive for educators, parents, and other caregivers who want to transform their relationship with young children by transforming how we speak with them . . . Or sometimes by not speaking at all! 

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If you want to learn how to transform your own words into the kind of loose parts that allow children to think for themselves, the this summer camp is the place for you! The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think is a one-week exploration of how the language we use with children creates reality . . . for better or worse! We will explore how the way we speak with children creates an environment in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. Group discounts are available, but hurry because registration closes soon. Click here for more information and to register.

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

"Look What We Did"

As a play-based preschool teacher, I make sure, every day, to have at least two opportunities for making art available to the kids, one indoors and one outdoors. Typically, the outdoor provocation offers the opportunity to get good and messy, although it can get messy indoors as well. Sometimes I go to great effort in preparing things, such as when we do pendulum painting or are melting crayons to pour into play dough molds, but most of the time, I keep it simple.

For instance, I'll roll out a sheet of butcher paper on a table and provide something with which to apply pigment -- crayons, tempera, pastels, water color, makers, pencils, bingo dotters, powdered paint, and so on. And, when appropriate, tools for applying and manipulating the pigment -- brushes of various types and sizes, kitchen tools, stampers, sponges, pipettes, stencils, brayers, cutlery, and so on. 

These are group projects, something to gather around and discuss as you work in creative collaboration. When the paper is full, we take a moment to admire it, then shift it out of the way to make room for another sheet of butcher paper, or cardboard, or a bed sheet, or other communal canvas. These finished products are not signed by any individual. They are not taken home to display on the refrigerator door. No one says, "I made that," but they often say, "Look what we did."

I've recently been revisiting the theories and predictions of philosopher Marshall McLuhan, he of "The medium is the message" fame. In his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan points out that the concept of copyright, the idea that an individual could "own" the work they had produced, emerged alongside the transformative technology of the printing press. Looking at the arc of history from the perspective of 1962, the year of my birth, he felt that our emerging electronic media (radio and television specifically) marked the beginning of the end of the reign of print media. 

Print media had made ours into a predominately visual culture, one that both read, and therefore tended to think, in a linear manner. Electronic media was to return us to a kind of "global village" in which oral storytelling came to dominate once more, freeing us of the linearity and shaping us into a people with more in common with pre-printing press cultures and their oral traditions.

And with the death of print culture would come the death of the concept of copyright, which is to say individual ownership of a creative work. 

Up through medieval times, great works of "literature" were certainly created. The Odyssey is showing in theaters right now. Someone named Homer is credited with it, but it's far more likely that "Homer" is a name given to a collective effort over generations. Perhaps it originated with an individual bard who was particularly gifted in retelling these evergreen tales, but the stories themselves are the product of an oral tradition going back over centuries, making it a collective work. 

"Look what we did."

Our concept of copyright, or individual ownership of stories, has extended well into our electronic age. Until the internet arrived, this concept continued to be tenable, but now in the era of AI, it's becoming increasingly clear that the age of copyright, along with the age of print, is coming to an end. It won't happen all at once, there will be plenty of death throes, but pride of authorship is already dissolving. Much of the music we listen to is cobbled together from samples of other people's music. Social media is fueled by re-mixes of memes and clips and reimaginings. And our movies and programs are increasingly erasing the lines between what it proprietary and what is available for common usage. 

I have no doubt that we'll create a leaky dyke of laws to protect copyright for a time, but the writing is on the wall, pun intended. Anonymous graffiti, I believe, has more of a future -- in the long run -- than, say, the collected works of Marshall McLuhan.

And what will we be left with? Something like these children crowding around a table, shoulder-to-shoulder, creating collective works of culture, rather than proprietary works of individual genius.

As Albert Einstein, one of the most iconic individual geniuses of modern times, once complained, "(T)he cult of individual personalities is always, in my view, unjustified . . . It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few individuals for boundless admiration and to attribute superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate."

As historian Darrin McMahon wonders in his book on the history of genius, The Divine Fury, in a world in which Supermen are not needed, in which genius is becoming a group activity, "are we returning to the era in which we are closer to god?"

As I watch these young children crowd around, shoulder-to-shoulder, creating together, I see a through-line hearkening back to pre-printing press times when community meant creating together and remembering together; when a rambling troubadour might come through to sing songs and spin yarns, leaving them behind, not as works of proprietary genius, but as commonly held material to be used by the people, just as the children use crayons and paper to make their own stories.

"Look what we did." Our culture may be generations away from McLuhan's predicted transformation, but preschool classrooms, as pre-literate cultures, are already there. Just look at that crowd around the art table practicing the literacy of the future.

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Who do you want to be when the children arrive? The countdown for Teacher Tom's Summer Camp has begun. In this course you will learn how even seemingly small changes in how you speak with children can transform even the most challenging behaviors without the need for rewards and punishments. This is especially effective when the whole team is on board. And there's nothing like coming together with like-minded educators to get you ready for when the children arrive. To learn more and to register, click here. I hope to see you around the campfire!

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!