"To Daily Converse About Virtue"

"Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good," said Socrates, according to his student Plato, "I am better off than he is -- for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know."

This is one of his most famous assertions. Whether it's true or not, can be debated. Self-evidently, he knew more than nothing. My mother used to say, whenever I thought I'd caught her in an inconsistency, "All wise people change their minds." It was a frustrating parry in the same way I imagine Socrates' claim was frustrating to those who sought to debate the famed orator.

And he was quite famous in his lifetime, at least in Athens where he spent most of his life. When he was still a relatively young man, Aristophanes' play The Clouds was first performed, portraying Socrates as a ridiculous intellectual clown teaching young people to undermine traditional beliefs. He was sufficiently famous even then that audiences were expected to recognize him. 

It's hard not to compare him to, say, The Beatles, who were initially laughed at, then criticized as corruptors of youth. Or maybe he was more like a modern influencer, who many of us old people view as lightweights, at least until one of them pops through our bubble and we find ourselves outraged at the things they are saying. I'm not saying that any of them are Socrates, but then again, the Beatles were a bunch of silly mop tops before they became icons.

The Beatles, of course, didn't have the internet, but they did have radio and television, which allowed them to "converse" directly with their young audience. Today, most of us know about Socrates through Plato's writing, but Socrates himself wasn't a fan of the phonetic alphabet and its ability to lock things down. As he complained, if you want to question the written word, it cannot reply. Things that are written are fixed, whereas direct discourse between people allows for the kind of public square give-and-take he was, and still is, famous for.

Another of Socrates' most well-known assertions is that "the life which is unexamined is not worth living." But what he actually said (again, according to Plato who was writing it down) was, to me, far more interesting. The fuller quote from his Apology, in which he was defending his life against accusations goes, ". . . the greatest good of man is to daily converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that life which is unexamined is not worth living."

"The greatest good of man is to daily converse about virtue."

The Greek word that gets translated as "virtue" is aretē, which carries a broader meaning of excellence and fulfilling one's potential. He's not advocating for endless conversations about being morally upright, but rather asking what it means to live well, to be a good human. In other words, what he is advocating is something far beyond mere introspection. He is calling for conversations, daily, in which we engage our fellow human beings about what it means to be fully human.

I doubt anyone would have cared about Socrates had he been content to sit in his ivory tower examining his life and writing books about virtue. What outraged the establishment to the point that they condemned him to death was his insistence on conversing about it in the public square.

He was condemned by a jury of what was, by tradition, comprised of 501 fellow citizens (all free men). Apparently, his death sentence was decided by a slim majority, illustrating one of Socrates' objections to the kind of direct democracy practiced in Athens at the time: the tyranny of the majority. Without protections like "freedom of speech" and "freedom of assembly" his ideal of "daily converse" was a dangerous thing.

It doesn't seem that Socrates thought of "free speech" in the way we do today, as a legal protection for everyone. He was more focused on the moral obligation to speak one's truth and ask challenging questions, even if it did lead to ridicule and even death.

Although Socrates is recognized as one of the foundational figures of our Western traditions of thought and philosophy, his notions of democracy were different from how we understand it today. Indeed, he wasn't a fan, even though, in the end, he accepted his democratically decided fate. 

Our current experiments in democracy are attempts to fix the flaws of ancient democracy. The written US Constitution along with The Bill of Rights and the mechanisms of amendment were an attempt to balance majority rule with individual rights. It was intended as a living document, one that could be changed, just not in a willy-nilly-wims-of-the-moment fashion. It was, one might say, intended to be an ongoing, daily, conversation among we the people; a dialog about excellence, fulfilling potential, living a good life, and, yes, virtue. The fact that it has evolved beyond the framer's original ideas about gender, race, and other matters is evidence of this.

The fact that so many of us avoid politics is evidence that we are failing. I've long believed that "voting" is the bare minimum of democratic participation. The real work and promise of democracy is the conversations we have with our fellow humans. That includes through the media, social and otherwise, but perhaps even more central are those conversations we have with the actual humans in our lives -- our neighbors, those with whom we do business, in our churches, our workplaces, and above all, in our schools.

Preschoolers engage in daily converse about virtue. It happens every day, all day long as they express their opinions and show their emotions. It happens in each negotiation, in each agreement, in each decision about with whom and what we play. In my role as an adult who works with young children, my responsibilities are clearly defined as keeping the children safe and doing what I can to ensure their physical and psychological needs are met. And as a member of the community (one who perhaps knows "nothing") my role is not to direct, but to interact as much as possible as an equal. The rest, then, is up to all of us, and that is to engage in daily converse about excellence, living well, being righteous, and to discover, together, what means to be fully human.

This is a life worth living.

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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!

We Are the Gossiping Animal

What other people say about me is none of my business.

It's a rationale that pops up for me when I feel judged by others, when I suspect or know that someone is talking about me behind my back, or, and this is probably the most frequent circumstance, when I feel insecure about the opinions of others.

The truth is that for those of us who are not Taylor Swift, our fellow humans probably spend insultingly little time thinking about us, let alone judging or gossiping about us. Still, try as we might, it's almost impossible to not, at least at times, fret or wonder about the things being said about us when we're not present. And I suspect that's because, we ourselves, judge others, and at least sometimes, we express those judgments to others.

Judging and gossiping are part of being human. In his book Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari relies on anthropological research to assert that not only is gossiping part of human nature, but that it is one of the key traits that allowed Homo sapiens to evolve from a middle-of-the-food-chain mammal to an apex predator. Gossip, it seems, is at least in part how we create social bonds, friendships, and community. 

"Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction," writes Harari. "It's not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It's much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest and who is a cheat."

Given the centrality of gossip to our evolution, it might be surprising to consider that most of us, most of the time, are vehement in our disapproval of gossip. Indeed, one of the worst reputations one can have is of being an inveterate gossip. So most of us strive to keep our harshest judgements to ourselves or only express them in the strictest confidence to our best friends, managing our own behavior lest we become, in turn, the subject of judgmental gossip.

My mother used to scold us, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all," a worthy aspiration, but hardly possible when gossip is such a central part of what our species is all about. 

In a study out of Japan, researchers found that even children as young as four will adjust their behaviors when presented with the possibility that an observer, even someone they don't know, might gossip about them. Children in the study shared their treats with peers, not just when others were watching, but even when they thought their behavior would be conveyed to a stranger who was not even in the room. However, when the children were assured that there would be no gossiping, they were less likely to share their treats. "These findings," the researchers write, "suggest that 4- and 8-year-old children attempt to manage their reputation when they could be a target of gossip."

Of course, what we mostly despise is malicious gossip. We tend to not object to gossip about, say, the anonymous charitable giving of a neighbor or the romantic birthday gifts exchanged between spouses. Indeed, we might not even label those things as gossip because we tend to narrow our definition of gossip to the spreading of negative or harmful stories, true or not, about others. The habitual spreading this kind of gossip, if left unchecked, has historically lead individuals to be ostracized or worse.

Gossip stands as one of the most powerful mechanisms by which human communities manage themselves. We may bridle at the idea of being controlled in this way. Likewise, most of us are likely uncomfortable with the notion that we control others, not necessarily because we gossip, but because of the possibility that we will gossip. Even very young children seem to understand this: it is part of what makes us human.

I wonder, however, if this social function of gossip is starting to wane in this era of pervasive social media (which in many ways is just a gossip column on steroids) and political leaders who seem to be immune to the feelings of shame that gossip relies upon. In fact, it seems that malicious gossip is too often rewarded. It seems that there are some who have found that gossip benefits them no matter how heinous their behavior; who thrive, indeed, on infamy. I don't know if this is a modern thing or not. I suppose there have always been those who rise to positions of power and prestige due to their reputations for cruelty and debauchery. At the same time, I wonder how much evil we've managed to avert because of the power of gossip.

When our daughter was born, I was instantly aware that I cared deeply about how she would see me. I wanted her to know me as loving, reliable, competent, and kind, even though I often hadn't behaved in those ways. This is what I mean when I say that our children make us better people. At least in my case, I managed my reputation to the point that I am, today, a much more loving, reliable, competent and kind person than I was on the day our daughter was born.  I did it for her, but also for myself.

The American culture is one in which individualism is set on a pedestal. We respect the people who don't seem to give a damn what other people think . . . At least until they do or say things that make us wish they would be ore considerate of others. We admire those who blaze their own trails . . . At least until their blaze begins to scorch the earth for others. 

We want our children to grow up to be compassionate, to care for others, and a big part of that is caring about what others think and say about us. By the same token, we don't want our children to be driven by shame or to sacrifice good and unique aspects of who they are in the name of fitting in or getting along. 

This, I think, is the great dance of being human amongst humans. We are the gossiping animal. What others say about me may still be none of my business and that is often exactly the stance to take in the name of mental health, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter. 

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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 next week!

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!

Where Courage Comes From

Everyone over a certain age has a 9/11 story. Mine is that I was with my wife on a Holland-America Alaskan cruise. 

We were set to begin our third year of preschool with our daughter Josephine. This was the year that I would be approached by my mentors Chris David and Val Donato to consider becoming a teacher in the North Seattle College cooperative system. I don't need to go into details, but when the news of the terrorist attacks reached us, the ship stopped dead in the water, somewhere off the west coast of Canada, a metaphor for so many things.

Our daughter was staying with her grandmother who, wisely, kept the television turned off. My brilliant mother-in-law was inclined to anxiety, so it was probably a blessing for both of them. We returned to find a cheerful and blissfully ignorant four-year-old who had spent those first few days of aftermath, living a cozy, protected life, something of which those of us paying attention to the news had been robbed.

Hysteria is the word that comes to mind when I reflect back. But in those surreal times -- those impossible, mind-blowing, faith-stomping times -- hysteria was a perfectly valid response. I'm grateful that our daughter was spared it, as the rest of the world lurched about in fear.

A week or so later, we returned for the first day of our final year of preschool together as daughter and father. The parent community had discussed how we were going to approach current events. We weren't going to bring them up, but if they came up, and we expected they would, we had agreed that we would listen, only answer the specific questions that were asked as honestly as we could, and be prepared for emotional and behavioral responses. I had also learned that most of the parents felt their children had so far had very little exposure to the news. 

On that first day, I watched two boys fly "planes" (toy cars) into their block towers, over and over and over again.

The world gets through to our children and when it does they do what they need to do to make sense of it. 

Other than that, however, the events of 9/11 didn't play a significant part in our preschool classroom that year. We had all, more or less, "protected" our children from the dramatic images. In fact, looking back, I've come to understand that one of the things that convinced me to become a preschool teacher in my own right was this experience of it as a place where we could shut out the "noise" and focus on our little community of parents and children. It was a relief to escape the "real world" into the even more "real world".

A couple years earlier, we experienced an even more traumatic event. I had been walking along our school hallway, holding the hands of my daughter and another two-year-old girl when a significant earthquake hit. We had, as a community, "trained" for this. I knew that I was to usher children under tables, and stay away from windows. 

As we rushed into our classroom and under a table, Josephine was asking, "What's happening? What's happening?" When I told her it was an earthquake, my voice was soft and soothing, even as the walls around us shook. "I don't feel it!" she complained.

Other parents had done their jobs as well. I recall looking around the room to see adults calmly chatting with children, smiling, even laughing. Our teacher announced, "Good job, everybody! We're all safe!" And then we all spontaneously started applauding. 

It was only then that it dawned on us collectively that the ground was still shaking and we'd not even thought to protect ourselves. There was a dash for the floor as we attempted to crowd in with the kids. I remember Josephine saying, "This is cozy!"

After the shaking stopped, we followed our protocol, which was for the designated adult to check the hallway, then outdoors for hazards, before signaling the rest of us to assemble in the parking lot. We emerged from the building, every adult with children holding our hands, lustily singing our favorite circle time songs together. Across the lot was an office building. I stood so Josephine couldn't see that direction because the adults there were in a full-on, weeping and wailing panic. Hysteria, a perfectly valid response.

We, however, were singing, lining up, counting heads, making a kind of holiday of it all.

Why the difference? 

We had people who needed us, and we had something to do.

Caring for others, being responsible for fellow humans, is the ultimate source of all courage, especially when it emerges from community. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that community produces courage. We didn't experience hysteria, I think, because it wasn't called for: it wasn't a valid response and together we buoyed one another to a kind of human greatness. We were there to serve others who needed us, who were counting on us, and we did not, would not, let them down.

I often think that many of us spend our lives without experiencing ourselves as necessary to one another. We feel alone. We feel embattled and harassed. A fertile ground of hysteria. Those of us who work with children, who are parents, know the immense power that comes from selflessness, the confidence, the real, nurturing strength of a community caring for one another.

We protect them. We serve them. We, nor they, are alone. We come through for them because the alternative is unthinkable. Perhaps courage isn't the absence of fear at all, but what becomes possible when someone else is counting on us.

******

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!

"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!

What Preschoolers Know About the Future of Reading

I subscribed to The Atlantic for quite awhile, but recently let it expire when I decided to limit my consumption of "political news." I don't have the time or bandwidth. I'm too busy playing with children and reading books.

That said, they currently have a long article up about the demise of reading books. It's called The End of Reading is Here. All I've read is a longish excerpt because the rest of it is behind their paywall, but if I did want to read it I could find it at my local library. 

I don't, however, expect it to say anything surprising. People have been predicting the end of phonetic alphabet based literacy for some time. Probably the most famous is Marshall McLuhan who, in 1962, the year of my birth, in his mind-blowing book The Gutenberg Galaxy, introduced the idea that electronic media are returning us to a kind of "tribal" or "post-literate" culture. 

As early childhood educators, we know what it's like to exist in this kind of society. We spend our days surrounded by highly intelligent, yet illiterate humans, who create their culture through stories, music, gesture, curiosity, and play.

The adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet by the Ancient Greeks (~800 BCE) happened in a culture that stored and transmitted its knowledge, stories, and history via an oral tradition, not so unlike what we experience on a smaller scale in our classrooms. The creation of the Greek alphabet, however, with its letters representing vowel sounds, introduced a more efficient, but far less nuanced way to store and transmit. As McLuhan points out, 24 letters, even when we consider digraphs, trigraphs, and blended consonants, can't even come close to representing all the sounds we're capable of making with our voices, not to mention non-verbal communication. This means that as powerful as it is, the phonetic alphabet has greatly narrowed what and how we communicate compared to an oral culture. 

The temptation is to become concerned about the decline of literacy, but it was never going to last long as a human "fad." I mean, if The Atlantic is right (or even ahead of game by a few centuries) the kind of literacy we fret over in schools will have only been a "thing" for less than 1 percent of our species' history. At best, it will be considered a kind of bridge between the Ancient Greeks and electronic media.

The decline in novel reading in favor of movies and programs is one of the ways we're moving beyond reading, but I'm really curious about how we'll handle things like laws, contracts, and other bureaucratic things. The future will tell, but not in my lifetime.

Reading books is on the decline, but not in my home. I'm a product of the age of books. My wife reads even more than I do. Our walls are lined in books, most of which we've read, many we've re-read, and there remains an enticing sufficiency of "aspirational" reads. It makes me feel both wealthy and smart. 

I like having read The Gutenberg Galaxy with its dense, convoluted sentences. The kind of things that AI would try to chop up into more easily digested bits. The often ponderous prose of Moby Dick (Herman Melville) presents an ordeal for the modern reader that is every bit as difficult and messy as the lives of the whalers it depicts. I've tackled that white whale of a book twice, including, both times, the famously skip-able chapter on cetology. 

It's become popular to advise modern readers that there is no shame in not finishing a book if it doesn't spark something, but c'mon! Some of the greatest reading experiences of my life have involved real struggle. When I first tackled Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, I got to the halfway point only to realize that I had absolutely no idea what was going on. In frustration I began re-reading it from the beginning each morning, while simultaneously continuing to read in the evening from where I'd realized I'd gotten lost. Amazingly, this process revealed the novel's incredible architecture, its themes, and its story, in a way that I would have missed entirely had I not taken action or worse, stopped reading. I consider having read the book in this way to be one of the crowning achievements of my intellectual life.

The truth is that much of what we call classic literature, both fiction and non-fiction, is written for a different generation of readers, one that pre-dates me. Just has the oral culture of the pre-literacy Greeks produced people with the capacity for feats of what we would today see as prodigious memorization, the culture of literacy produced people capable of appreciating prodigious sentences.

Thomas Paine's Common Sense was published in 1776 and almost instantly became the best selling book up to that point in history. It was praised for its conciseness and clarity. Today, of course, it could never be published as it is. Editors (and AI tools) would demand shorter paragraphs, shorter sentences, fewer nested sentences, an eradication of semicolons and rhetorical flourishes, more frequent headings and white space, more concrete examples, and simpler syntax. 

Modern readers, for the most part, don't often make it beyond the first few pages of Common Sense, unless it's required reading. Of course, we're capable of understanding it, but sustaining engagement with long, layered sentences is a societal muscle that has atrophied in the intervening centuries, especially since the advent of radio and then television. What pre-electronic media cultures once found to be rich and rewarding reading now just feels like unnecessary effort to many of us. I feel that this is why I often struggle with older texts, at least until I get going. I'm lucky that I've discovered the joy of getting over the hump enough to delight in nested sentences, long paragraphs, and semicolons. 

"The medium is the message" is McLuhan's most famous line (sometimes phrased as "The medium is the massage.") His assertion is that new media don't merely change what and how we consume information, but they reshape our minds. This is clearly seen in this brief flash of human existence during which books were king.

Middle and high school teachers as well as university professors are reporting that many of their students simply refuse to read entire books any more. Even as recently as when I was at university in the early 80's, we were regularly assigned reading lists with a dozen books. I once read 20 books for two classes over the span of three months. Students from 200 years ago, I suspect, would have been ecstatic at the prospect of so many books, much in the way that we get excited today when a new season of our favorite network show drops. 

The evidence that this kind of print literacy is on the wane could not be more clear. It's not caused by intellectual laziness, but rather the kind of transformation of our species that attends the introduction of every new technology.

When I'm among preschoolers, I often find myself pitying them. So many are destined to move on to elementary school where they will be hammered with literacy instruction and made to feel badly about themselves when they find it difficult. Others will find reading easier, even enjoyable, but the "work" of reading books, I fear, will get them too. Just as I was born into the first generation for whom Latin was no longer considered a standard part of education, it's quite possible that these children could be among the last for whom reading books is prerequisite for being deemed "educated." It's quite possible that some of them will never read a book.

I also see the future when I'm with them, telling stories and jokes, negotiating, making agreements, then doing it all again the next day. They are citizens of today's world, becoming citizens of tomorrow's. 

In my lifetime, I've seen television become the dominant media, followed by personal computers, the internet, smartphones, and now AI. One could say that my life has been lived almost exactly at the hinge between what might be called the late age of print and the early age of electronic media. I feel lucky to have escaped Latin, one of the oldest rites of passage of print culture, but I'm even more lucky to have grown up with books. People my age are both products of the age of books and children of the beginning of its decline. Today's youth are living during a similar hinge. Maybe everyone always has.

I'm often accused of being too wordy here on the blog, of dragging my sentences out with comma after comma, of taking detours and side roads instead of getting straight to my destination. I try, sometimes, to accommodate the modern reader with more white space and fewer rhetorical flourishes, but sadly, I'm afraid, I've read far too many books for that.

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The Preschool Autism Summit is starts on Sunday! Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I can't wait to dig into all 30 of these sessions. I know I'm going to learn a lot . . . And I know I'm going to be a better teacher for it. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for 3 days of outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass right 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!

"Since We're Neighbors, Let's Be Friends"

For the past several years, I've been limiting my news consumption to about 5 hours of local news a week, usually "watched" while I'm preparing dinner. 

Yesterday, there was a story about a nearby town's preparations for the nation's oldest continually running July 4 parade. From the looks of it, the parade is mostly local groups, marching through the streets, making their music, performing their dances, and waving their flags, while the rest of the town comes out to wave their own flags and cheer. The key figure in the story was an older woman who has been part of organizing the festivities for the past several decades. The story concluded with her saying, "We're just as excited today as they were back then."

There was another "World Cup" adjacent story about a young teen whose health issues have made it impossible for her to play her beloved soccer. She has now started a drive to raise money to help others in her situation. The concluding thought from this girl, "I'm just happy I can help others."

There were more stories, of course, but I'm going to stop there because I'm tearing up as I write this. I often find myself tearing up as I watch my local news. There are, of course, darker stories. There was, for instance, the frozen food warehouse that recently burned down. That story was mostly interviews with the people who live around the facility. The smoke was bad, but some of the people say that the stench of tons of rotting food is worse.

But compared to national news, the overall slant of my local news is much more positive, probably because it's always about my "neighbors." Even national news stories are offered from a local perspective featuring interviews with local people whose lives are directly impacted. This is so much more elevating than professional pontificators who seethe and shout based on some sort of abstract political theory or other. As you know, national news tends to thrive on setting up everything as conflict and performative debate between partisans. It raises your blood pressure, but otherwise goes no where. 

What I enjoy about my small doses of local interviews is that the people on my screen aren't shy about not having all the answers, of being internally conflicted between this or that approach, and overall showing their genuine emotion and concern. Even when I suspect they don't vote the way I do, I still get to see their fuller humanity on display, which naturally allows me to better understand where they're coming from. This is what it means to me to be well-informed about the issues.

This is why I get teary. I get teary because these are the actual people amidst whom I live. And I like them. I like that they're my neighbors. Every year, right around the 4th of July holiday, I find myself getting teary. I know our great "experiment" in democracy is far from perfect. I know that people continue to be poor, oppressed, and left out. I feel for them and strive to use my own political agency to rise them up, set them free, and bring them in. I've shared many of these actions here on the blog over the years, for what it's worth.

I get teary because despite our ongoing failures, I'm moved and even amazed by this audacious thing we are trying to do as a nation. For 250 years, a relatively short time in the scheme of human existence, we have, in our way, as a nation of we the people, attempted to self-govern. It's messy, even ugly at times. And the way our media, politics, and technology has evolved makes it even messier and uglier. But when I turn to my neighbors, when I turn to the people amidst whom I actually live, I continue to be inspired by what we're capable of striving toward, who we are capable of being. Democracy will always be an experiment. It will never be perfect. The promise isn't happiness, but rather the collective pursuit of happiness.

This weekend, I'll be celebrating, not with family, not with old friends, but with my neighbors. 

Among my greatest inspirations is Mister Rogers' whose work with young children was rooted in the metaphor of the neighborhood. In his daily program Mister Roger's Neighborhood, he gave us a blueprint of how the medium of television could be used to pull people together rather than divide them. "Since we're neighbors, let's be friends." It's both a simple and breathtaking aspiration.

It's the neighborhood, the people amidst whom we live, the people we see at the local coffee shop, grocery store, out walking the dog, for which we are made. When I think of democracy, that's who I think about. When I get teary, these are the people, these every day people full of doubts, emotions, fears, and passions, that touch me the most. 

I worry that so many of us don't have the privilege that so many people my age had of growing up in real neighborhoods. They still exist, but they're much harder to find these days.

This is why I believe that the central purpose of every preschool is to be that local community for this generation of young children. To be a place where we learn about and from real people, rather than the cartoon cutouts that come to us through a media that thrives on stereotype and division. Our preschools can be the place where young children first learn that the messiness of self-government need not turn ugly; where empathy and compassion grow best; where real people come together to talk about their concerns, their ideas, and their needs; where negotiation, compromise, and ultimately agreement stand at the center of our relationships with one another. Our preschools can be places in which young children are marinated in community.

I've always approached preschool as an experiment, both for me, and for the children, because that's what our democracy is: an experiment in living together. It's an experiment in which the beaker sometimes blows up in our faces, in which the results are not always what we expected, and in which we the people are the only ones who have the power to do something about it. It's from this foundation of being good neighbors that we can hope for a better tomorrow.

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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 way 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!

16 Books That Transformed My Work With Young Children

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.  ~George R.R. Martin. 

What will you do with your summer? It's what our teachers always asked us as the school year wound down. As professional educators, many of us get to ask ourselves the same question.

My answer then, as it is now, is read.

Indeed, if I have one piece of advice for early childhood educators it's to read more books. Whole books. Education and development books, of course, but more importantly, books on any topic or by any person that sparks your interest.

Unfortunately, our time is limited. Much of the reading we do as educators tends toward "professional reading" -- curriculum materials, lesson plans, assessment tools, policy documents. Sometimes we might take a look at the latest book on play-based learning. Most of us have a stack of books that we "need to" get to. But the bottomline is that this is all just functional reading, reading to solve problems and produce results, like how to manage behavior, how to meet standards, and how to deliver content. 

When this forms the bulk of our reading, it tends to narrow our vision . . . not to mention exhaust us because we are reading for a purpose, as opposed to reading for pleasure. It keeps us circling around the same assumptions, the same language, the same ways of seeing children. We can too easily get trapped in a bubble of ECE orthodoxy. As John Dewey reminds us, education is not preparation for anything; education is life itself. And books give us life . . . a thousand lives. 

If our role is to create environments in which children are free to follow their own curiosity and teach themselves, then our most important tool isn’t a strategy or a script. It’s our capacity to see. The wider and more deeply we see the world, the more perspectives we possess, the more possibilities we’re able to offer. That kind of vision won’t come from staying inside the field of education. It comes from reading broadly—books that stretch our sense of perception, that challenge what we think we know about human nature, that invite us into relationships with the more-than-human world, and that immerse us in imagination, ambiguity, and even humor. 

When we read this way, we can’t help but become more reflective and less certain, more curious and less controlling. We’re better able to recognize the invitations children are constantly offering us, and less likely to fall into the trap of unsolicited instruction. In short, we become better at creating environments where real learning can happen. 

I have put together a list of books that have done that for me.

None of the books on my list are “how-to” guides for teaching, but they all made me a better play-based preschool teacher. This is not a list of my favorite books. It is, rather, a list of books that I return to again and again in my work as an educator. Seven of the books are fiction, including a pair of picture books. The other nine are non-fiction, books about history and science mostly, although there are two essay collections on the list. I don’t think of myself as a particularly avid science fiction reader, but there are three books on this list that fit (loosely) the category. Maybe that’s because these authors show us a vision of the future, and at the end of the day, that's what we do: build the future through our work with our youngest citizens.

These are all books that have expanded how I understand people, knowledge, and the world itself. And that, in turn, has transformed how I show up with children.

If you're interested in checking out my list of 16 Books that Transformed My Work With Young Children, along with the reasons I included them, download by clicking here. 

I'm not saying you should or will feel the same way. In fact, I found putting together this list such an enlightening exercise that I can heartily recommend that you make your own list of books that transformed your work with young children. I found it an interesting filter through which to consider the thousand lives I've lived. Many of the books I consider to be among the greatest ever written are not included. Most of my favorites didn't make the cut. But every book on this list -- these 16 lives -- made a direct and last impact on my work as an early childhood educator.

What will you do with your summer? How about living a few more lives?

******

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 way 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 Don't Know About That"

One of the hard truths I've learned over the past three decades is that research rarely persuades anyone of anything. If it did, we would have universal play based preschools. The data in favor of play in the early years is overwhelming. This clinical report from the American Association of Pediatrics (first published in 2018 and reaffirmed last year) is as definitive as science gets, citing nearly 150 peer reviewed studies.

I've provided this report to dozens of doubtful parents and educators over the years, many of whom have come back with an "I don't know about that" objection that let's me know that they  are not persuaded.

Continuing to push academic-style instruction down into the early years is a direct cause of mental illness in young children. Period. Play, and lots of it, is the antidote. That's what we know even if far to many people still "don't know about that."

The same thing appears to be happening with screen-based technology, and specifically smartphones. The data is overwhelming: we should be keeping young children away from them the same way we keep them away from alcohol and loaded firearms. Harm is being done. Jonathan Haidt's well-researched book The Anxious Generation is only two years old and in the intervening two years, the evidence of the harm these devices are doing to our young people is has grown exponentially. 

I get it. Smartphones are an easy way for parents and other adults to occupy a bothersome child, especially in a world in which "go play outside" can get you arrested for child endangerment. We obviously need more safe places for children to play outdoors in the kind of unsupervised way past generations did, but do we really need to stick phones in front of kids in restaurants, on airplanes, while driving in the car? I recently went to a movie in a theater and sat next to a pair of elementary-aged girls who spent most of the two hours on their phones. I just read a social media post from a teacher who says that when she releases her two-year-olds to their parents at the end of a school day most of them are immediately given their parent's phone. 

This is neglect. Children need to interact with real people. They need to have conversations with their loved ones. They need to be free to engage with the real world around them. That's what the research is telling us even if "I don't know about that."

But what is far more outrageous is what our schools are doing. Based on what we know about the harm that screen-based technology causes our young children, it is child abuse to provide these devices in schools. That's right -- abuse. There is no evidence that children learn better from screens than from human beings, books, or other more traditional methods. A recent Wall Street Journal investigation (the actual article requires a subscription, but this link provides a decent summary) found that students in US schools are using their school-issued devices during class time to view massive amounts of questionable content, including tens of thousands of YouTube videos a month. One child was found to have watched 200 in a single morning.

Of course, those who will not be persuaded by evidence simply argue that it's the teacher's fault, that they must do a better job of controlling the kids, because heaven forbid they have to give up those damned screens. The screens make the children quiet and passive, which is why parents resort to them. Studies consistently show that the use of screen devices in schools does not lead to improved learning, and many find they reduce learning. In other words, these devices are not only harmful to mental health (which should be enough), but also to educational prospects.

It's time for parents to start suing schools. 

In March of this year, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta (the parent company of Facebook) to pay $375 million after finding the company liable for concealing what it knew about child sexual exploitation and endangering children on its platforms. In that same month a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and YouTube to pay $6 million in damages to a young woman (and her mother) who sued based on the addictive nature of their products. If our schools are going to allow that kind of harmful crap into our schools, then they should be held liable for the damages. It's no different than feeding the kids poisoned lunches. We know for both a scientific and now legal fact that our children are being harmed.

And still, those who will not be persuaded will strive to keep the screens, while controlling the children and the content. Why? They're unpersuadable. They are not interested in what's best for children, but rather what's best for them. "I don't know about that" has become the go-to defense of the indefensible. 

And now we come to the nub. Why are screens so good for these educators? Because they have massive classes and expensive curricula they have to get through. The class size is because our elected leaders refuse to adequately fund education. And the damned out-of-the-box curricula from for-profit companies demand that teachers march the kids through it without any regard for the individual children in their care, meaning that a few get it, while most are either bored or confused. Screens "solve" both problems: they create passive children and deliver cookie-cutter lessons. Who cares about learning when you have a well-managed classroom and digital evidence that you "delivered" the content. Frankly, I don't blame kids for watching YouTube videos instead.

Research rarely persuades anyone about anything, but fear-mongering does. Fear-mongering over "falling behind" and "school readiness" is why we have the academic push down into our preschools. Science tells us that the healthiest, most educational thing we can do for young children is to let them play in a screen-free environment, but that, apparently, isn't a persuasive message. I've tried now for decades to be positively persuasive here on the blog. I don't want to fear-monger, but maybe, for the sake of our children, it's time to start.

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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!