What The Research Tells Us To Do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Enemy Of Learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Standardization is always the enemy of learning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"Then That's The Right Place"

When our daughter Josephine was three, I began to research kindergartens. Indeed, it became a sort of hobby for me. I must have attended 40 open houses over the course of a couple years. After our experiences in a play-based cooperative preschool, I felt confident I knew what we were looking for. I dismissed those schools with computer labs out of hand. If they boasted of test scores, academics, or what colleges their alumni ultimately attended, I scratched them from my list. If I didn't get a sense that meaningful parent involvement was encouraged, then I was discouraged. Playgrounds were important to me and I was suspicious of places that were too tidy.

It was a winnowing process, one that I took on as a game. I quickly learned that admissions directors gave you little valuable information and that all the teachers seemed great. I liked it best when I could tour while children were there: I knew what a healthy, happy classroom should look and sound like because I'd spent the past three years working in one.

At one point I shared my process with Chris David, our daughter's preschool teacher, and my most important teaching mentor. I expressed my frustration that they all had their good points, but none had everything I thought I wanted for our girl.

Chris listened patiently, then told me that Josephine was destined to get a good education whatever I decided, not because of the school, not because of the curriculum, but because of me. "You're an involved parent. You plan to stay involved. If I were you, I'd talk to the parents of the children who are already going to that school. Don't talk about the school or education, just chat. If you like them, if you can imagine hanging out with them as the kids play, then that's the right place for Josephine."

It took me awhile to process this advice, but of course she was right. I wasn't looking for a school as much as I was looking for a community, which is the foundation for any education worthy of the name.

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A Mere Product Of History And Habit

Children don't like school because to them school is -- dare I say it -- prison. Children don't like school because, like all human beings, they crave freedom, and in school they are not free.  ~Peter Gray

On my first day as the teacher at Woodland Park, a parent warned me about her child, "Paul is an escape artist. He's quick and he's clever. You'll need to keep an eye on him all the time."

My throat was immediately blocked by my leaping heart. I envisioned Paul slithering under the gate or getting lost in the dark, off-limits, back hallways of the building in which we leased our space, a prospectively inauspicious beginning to what I was hoping would be a long teaching career. 

Paul did not try to escape that day, nor in the days ahead. In fact, and I suppose I ought to be knocking on wood as I write this, in my 17 years during which I've been daily coming to this preschool, we've not once had a kid even attempt to make a break for it. Oh sure, there are the occasional two-year-olds who simply want to go where mommy is going, following her to the door or the gate, and perhaps standing there for a time to miss her, but that's not the same thing as trying to escape. Indeed, according to parents of the children I teach, most kids are disappointed to awake on weekends to learn that it's not a school day.

I still think of Paul's non-escape quite often. It had simply not occurred to me that a child would want to escape our school. But isn't that the stereotype? Kids hate school. Around our place that isn't the case. In fact, I've not found it to be true in any of the progressive, play-based cooperatives with which I've been associated. And honestly, I've not found that to be generally true with kids pretty much up through elementary school. In fact, I had several of my former students who are now K-2 come to visit with their younger siblings during the days both before and after the holidays, and they all still "like" school. They like their friends and their teachers, they enjoy showing off the things they're learning. It's going well for them, it's clearly engaging, and over the years I've found this to be true with most of my former students . . . until they hit about middle school.

A few years ago, I was talking to a former student who was just finishing sixth grade. She had recently figured it out and it pissed her off. I can't recall her exact words, but she was quite cynical about the whole thing: tests, and studying, and learning about stuff you don't care about and will never "use" just for grades, and all so you can do it over again the next year. I've heard similar rants from other middle schoolers. My own daughter hit it at about 11-12 years old as well. Me too. It's around this age that children begin to see it for what it is. They've gained the wisdom to understand that they have no choice about if and where they go to school, nor what and when and how they're going to learn. And I have no answer for them when they ask, "What does this have to do with my life anyway?" It's a valid question, one that is not sufficiently answered by saying it builds character.

Some kids thrive, of course, while most make some sort of peace with it, but some want nothing more than to escape, be it under the fence or into the back hallways, if only because they crave freedom, the freedom to learn what and how they learn best. I might suggest that much of what we ascribe to adolescent surliness is largely attributable to this: they've had this epiphany about school and, like my former student, this whole school thing looks like a huge sham. Even the kids who do well in school come to see that it's all a game they're playing, a series of hoops through which they have to jump to satisfy their teacher or the administration or the school board or their parents. When do they get to satisfy themselves?

It's surprising how few of them actually do make a break for it.

It's a pity because children are born passionate about learning. That's what play is, at bottom, the drive to learn. That drive doesn't go away when they hit kindergarten, but we slowly begin to take it away by our insistence that learning is work. This system of education that we've been using for hundreds of years isn't backed by centuries of research, it isn't a product of careful testing and tweaking. It is, rather, a mere product of history and habit, just as is our assumption that many children will hate it. Even the kids who came to visit me over the last month at Woodland Park, those who report they still "like" school, told me they were excited to have "ten whole days off." They didn't feel that way in preschool. 

One of the legacies of Paul's mom sharing her fears about him with me is that I am rigorous about making Woodland Park a place from which they will not want to escape. I want the children to feel free, free to learn what and how they will, to play without coercion or a sense of "duty" imposed from without. No one has ever wanted to escape from freedom.

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Bribing, Lying, And Cheating

The college admission scandal that has been splashed across the headlines for the past couple days is shining a light upon what I consider to be the ugliest aspect of education in America. On the surface, it's a salacious story about wealthy parents getting caught bribing, lying, and cheating in their quest to get their kids into prestigious universities. From where I sit, it's just the tip of the iceberg.

Private universities have always been "flexible" with their admissions policies when it comes to the children of the wealthy, powerful, and famous. Indeed, what the parents in today's headlines have done wouldn't even be illegal except were it not for the fact that they apparently lied in their tax filings, which is what might land them in prison. No, what this story highlights for me is that the stress and anxiety that caused parents to commit crimes on behalf of their children is epidemic throughout our educational system, and not just in private schools.

As a high school senior, I sent away for applications to several prestigious universities as well as one from a nearby state school. Places like Harvard sent me thick packets of material to fill out that including writing essays and whatnot with no guarantee of entry. My state schools application was a single page and because my grade point average was better than 3.0, they had to take me. From where I sat as an 18-year-old, my decision was made for me.

Sure you could call me lazy or unambitious, both of which are fair, but the point was that it was my decision to make. In fact, if mom had had her way, I'd have taken a year or two off to see the world before committing myself. There was no pressure beyond the existential one of stepping off into the unknown. I had walked into my SAT test (a standard college entry test still used by universities) with no preparation other than the actual knowledge I'd acquired during my 12 years of pubic school. No one expressed disappointment in my decision, no one told me I could later transfer to a "better" school. There was a general consensus that I ought to at some point possess a bachelors degree, but when, how, and where I went about that was up to me.

Today, for many families, even the selection of a school for their two-year-old is a matter of stress and anxiety that far exceeds what I went through while applying to colleges. And the situation around kindergarten has become almost unbearable. Parents, in their misguided quest to set junior on the path to an elite university, and thereafter, an elite profession, are scratching, clawing, scheming, and conniving. This has lead to demands that our schools become increasingly academic and competitive, which flies in the face of what evidence tells us about how humans of all ages learn. It is forcing our schools to become more hoops to jump through than places where we learn to be critical thinkers, to pursue knowledge, and learn to work together with other people. It has become all about becoming college and career ready which is not the same thing as educated. And, tragically, it is creating a generation of anxious, stressed out kids who are growing in to anxious, stress out adults, something the world definitely does not need.

I don't know how to end the insanity, but if we value our children, if we value education, it must stop, for both their sake and our own. The proper career aspiration for young children is princess or cowboy, and as far as I know, there is not a university on earth offering a bachelors in either. Successful people (and by that I mean those who are satisfied with their lives, who have careers that stimulate them, and who have good relationships with their families and friends) have never been created through anxiety and stress, let alone bribing, lying, and cheating. Successful people become that way because they are self-motivated, sociable, and able to work well with others, which are traits that come from being free to educate oneself by asking and answering one's own questions, what we in the preschool world call "play."

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Full-Body Learning

On the first day of school he told me, "There's going to be a lot of fighting this year." It was an interesting comment, funny even, coming from this particular boy. I've known him since he was a two-year-old and he had never shown any inclination toward violence, real or imaginary. On the contrary, tough guy bluster, even of the comical variety, had in the past often seemed to intimidate and confuse him; he was regularly reduced to tears by dramatic play that struck him as threatening, often retreating under our classroom loft for "safety."

Jousting with swings standing in for steeds

His mother explained that he had over the summer become fascinated with knights, including their armor, shields, and other weaponry, items he had taught himself to create using paper, scissors, tape, and staples. And that is how his "fighting" first showed up in the classroom, with him not only arming himself, but also others. He has mastered the fierce pose and when he finds another kid inclined toward "fighting," he might threaten something like, "You better watch out, I'm going to fight you." The fighting itself has been quite tame by the standards of Woodland Park play fighting, most often involving "swords," but sometimes featuring "jousting." He is clearly thrilled when someone engages with him, although the moment actual contact is made, even when it's of the light and incidental variety, he usually calls it off, often crying loudly. But once the tears are over, he's back at it, once more trying to lure others into his game of fighting knights.

This knight has been unseated

I hope this description doesn't make him seem like a problem child in any way, because he is not. No one who knows him is worried that he'll grow up to be actually violent. This is clearly an intellectual pursuit, one full of questions to which he is seeking answers. Even now, months into our school year, there is still obvious uncertainty as he approaches others with his knight game, as he tests the others to see how they will respond. He's been delighted by his successes: his face flushes with excitement when it's going as he expected, combatants committed to both ferocity and a kind of chivalry that includes not really hurting one another. He's been overwhelmed when others have surpassed him in intensity or more extreme physicality. He's been often disappointed by those who are neither impressed, nor attracted by this knight who is threaten-asking them to fight with him. He has made his knight studies at home as a self-selected "academic" pursuit and is now attempting to apply what he has learned in real life.

One of his classmates does a similar thing with his own animal studies. Earlier in the year, he could be found prowling the playground as a dinosaur, usually as a T-rex, his favorite, roaring and stalking about with his arms draw up to mimic the short forearms associated with the species. Lately, his interests have turned to invertebrates, like his pet snails, but also slugs, worms, and insects. The other day, he put shoes on his hands so that he could practice moving like an insect, developing a fuller understanding of how they crawl by studying it with his whole body, in the same way that my knight-loving friend seeks to embody a knight in order to more fully understand.

Neither of these boys would be described as particularly physical, at least not in comparison to many of their classmates who spend their days racing around the place. In fact, I'm quite certain that if their parents send them to traditional public kindergartens next year, they will adapt to desk work better than most. They won't show up as "problem children" because they possess the sort of self-control and temperaments that will allow them to adapt more easily than will those "active" kids whose teachers will chase them around the classroom, scolding, punishing, and otherwise correcting them for moving their bodies at the wrong time and in the wrong way, perhaps even going so far as to recommend drugs.

It's a pity because it's clear that all children, even not obviously active ones, learn most naturally when allowed to engage their full selves, including their bodies, not in adult-proscribed ways and at adult-proscribed times, but as their own questioning and exploration dictates. Traditional schools are notoriously bad at allowing this because so much of what happens in them is about crowd control rather than learning. We can't have knights and insects anywhere but in the form of words, read or listened to, then regurgitated in their approved form, with bodies in their proper places, doing their proper things. It's a pity because all children learn best when allowed to explore with their full-selves, teaching themselves. And they must use their full bodies to do it.

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How All Those Free And Motivated Minds Will Transform Our World

As our daughter Josephine approached school age we seriously considered homeschooling. Our three years of cooperative preschool had been wonderful, but as we stood at the threshold of kindergarten, I had a choice to make. Either I was going to send her off to school, with me staying behind to teach cooperative preschool or she was going to "stay home" with me and we would continue our educational journey shoulder-to-shoulder. I'd not yet become as radicalized about education as I am today, but even knowing what I know now, I'd have made the same decision.

We were, blessedly, a one-income family, which meant we were in a position to make this sort of choice. We had begun preschool when she was two, not out of a need for childcare, but rather because it was clear that Josephine had a stronger social drive than my own. Whereas I might be happy to spend a day puttering around the house, she insisted that we get out and "do something," even as a toddler, and for her, that meant finding some other kids with which to play. I know now that this was her educational instinct expressing itself.

Education, true education, can really only take place in the context of others, or as author Alfie Kohn writes, "marinated in community." As a fundamentally introverted person, the chore of cobbling together a child-centric social life for our daughter, making arrangements to meet people here or there, signing up for classes, and organizing outings began to weigh on me. The idea of a place to regularly go, where we would find people we recognized, where we could build community together, began to appeal to me because I knew it would appeal to Josephine while relieving me of that weight of social organizing. Not that long ago, during my own childhood even, extended families and more closely-knit neighborhoods largely filled this role, but we live in a world in which it is no longer acceptable (and in some places even illegal) to simply send one's child outside to play, for hours on end, with the children they find there. 

It still makes me sad to know that Josephine never had the experience of walking up and down the street knocking on doors to ask if Pheobe or Johnny could "come out to play," but our cooperative preschool, with its emphasis on play and community was a happy alternative, and she dug right in, every day, working, working, working on her relationships with the children and adults she found there. For our family, the idea of homeschooling or unschooling, would have been a kind of hardship to both Josephine, who to this day is driven to get out there and mix it up with the other people, and me, who would spend my days, if left to my own devices, puttering in my jammies.

In other words, I never felt either of us needed school for the "academic" learning -- I'd long ago witnessed that literacy and numeracy and the absorption of scientific and other facts emerged as she was ready for them -- but rather for the opportunity to engage in community. This is why I've never once, in all her years of "real" school, asked a teacher a question about her grades, test scores, or transcript. I've listened to teachers tell me about these things, but when it came my turn to talk, I've always asked some version of the questions, "How does she treat her friends?" and "How do they treat her?" This is why we sent her to school.

There is so much talk about school "reform," from all points of view, but as author Ken Robinson writes, we would be better served to be talking about "transformation." For many, this transformation involves getting rid of schools altogether, and maybe they're right. But from where I sit we will still need something like schools to replace them: places where children of all ages can come together and practice the skills of building community, to develop the habits of cooperation, to work with others, to be sociable, and to learn to walk the balance between personal freedom and honoring the agreements we make with one another. In other words, to practice the skills and habits of what I think of as deep democracy.

The children at Woodland Park make their own rules, by consensus. Several years ago, my friend Henry was walking around the classroom with his hands over his head, palms forward, wiggling his fingers rapidly. When I asked him what he was doing, he replied, "I'm the police." His hands were the flashing patrol car lights.

I asked, "Oh, so you're giving people tickets and stuff?"

"No," he answered, "I'm reminding them when they're breaking the rules." And sure enough, he was sidling up to his classmates and saying things like, "I want to remind you, we all agreed, no running inside," and "I want to remind you, we all agreed, no hitting." And his friends were thanking him. This is what I mean by deep democracy: not the superficial winner-take-all horse race of modern electoral politics, but the notion that free and equal humans are fully capable of self-governance, of making agreements with one another, then abiding by them. That really is the core of community: our agreements are sacred.

Children naturally understand deep democracy. Most adults have unlearned it even while we honestly believe we are the beacons of fairness. For instance, our playground has only two swings over which there are regular debates. When adults get involved the solution is invariably some version of enforced turn-taking, usually with a timer set to strictly limit each child's turn in the name of "fairness," leaving no one entirely satisfied. When children are left to their own devices, however, as we were as children, when not imposed from on high, our agreements, more often than not, result in mutual satisfaction.

Sometimes the children will decide to share the swing, cramming two, three or four kids onto a single seat. Indeed, at Woodland Park, this solution has evolved into hanging a plank of wood between the two swings, creating a kind of bench swing upon which as many as a dozen kids can swing at once.

Sometimes it turns into a game in which two children will alternate on their own, counting together to 10 or 20, a solution that fundamentally differs from the adult version in that it's a game they play together rather than one child standing sulkily by as a grown-up keeps an eye on her watch.

Sometimes children push one another, taking on different, but equal roles. And often they come up with complex agreements that become games unto themselves, like the time our 4-5 year olds developed a system by which one had to ask for a turn three times in succession, wording the question precisely each time, or, like a magic lock, it didn't work.

And always, over time and with the freedom to practice, the ethic emerges that when you find someone already using the swing you want, you simply call, "Next!" much the way children call "Shotgun!" to determine who gets to sit beside the driver in the car. This is deep democracy. "Next!" is sacred, so sacred that when the child on the swing is finished, he usually seeks out the rightful next in line, even if he has gone on to other things. 

Deep democracy is what happens when we agree to have a "pinecone fight," as we often did in my youth, all of us knowing without adult commands, that tacit in this agreement is the idea that no one wants to get hurt, so heads and faces are off limits, that one throws more gently at close range, that if someone starts to cry the game is on hold until that cry is over. Adults tend to muck this up by simply banning the game altogether, giving no one a chance to learn anything.

Deep democracy is what happens when the 10-year-old pitcher gently tosses the ball to the five-year-old batter instead of trying to strike him out because the unspoken agreement is to have fun, not win or lose. No one has to tell him to do that if he's had the opportunity to practice the skills and habits of community.

Deep democracy happens when children come together each day, girls and boys, friends and foes, with minimal adult interference and maximal freedom to play.

I commend and admire those of you who have managed this sort of deeply democratic educational experience through homeschooling and unschooling, but for most of us, we need schools, or something like schools. True play-based preschools and democratic free schools, to me, are the best models we currently have for what's possible when the transformation comes. And it will come, not only because is it the right thing for education and for children, but because it is ultimately in the direction of morality. As Martin Luther King famously said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice," which is ultimately what deep democracy is all about.

I invite you to imagine for a moment "schools" in which children are free to discover and pursue their passions while marinated in community. Imagine that transformation, then imagine how all those free and motivated minds will transform our world.

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