It's Respect that Matters

As a new parent, I was convinced that our daughter would grow up to be a sports playing, hammer wielding tomboy. After all, I was playing the role of stay-at-home-parent in our family, and I just assumed that my male influence would make it so. We didn't exactly try to raise her in a non-gender specific way, but her mom was the one heading off to the office, while her dad handled childcare, cooking, and cleaning. Not only that, but we both preferred her in short hair and overalls, and for the first couple years of her life, whenever she was out with me, everyone just assumed she was a little boy, a mistake I didn't always correct. If anyone was raising a child outside the cultural expectations for little girls, it was us.

When she was around two-years-old she came across a bejeweled crown in a toy store, put in on her head, looked me in the eye and said, "You don't know what girls do." She then proceeded to wear a crown, princess dresses, tutus, and sparkles every day for the next three years.

I wasn't disappointed, but I was surprised. After all, the mainstream debates over gender back then tended to be of the nature v. nurture variety and I was convinced that our nurturing would, of course, result in a girl who was not so, well, girly. I began to wonder if maybe nature had, indeed, won out. It was around this time that the two-year-old daughter of one of our friends began to dress herself in her brother's "boy clothes" and insist that the rest of us call her Joe. It wasn't a "phase" and today, nearly 30 years later, we all know him as a young man. Was this even more evidence for nature? Or was it nurture?

Who cares? I mean, I'm sure there are scientists out there trying to figure it all out, and I'm convinced that they will continue to find that it's some combination of both, but as a parent or educator in the real world, my responsibility is to stay out of it. If the child says they're a girl, they're a girl, even if it's only for a day or a week, and even if they aren't choosing frilly dresses. If they say they're a boy, they're a boy, even it it's only for a day or a week and even if they aren't choosing overalls. And if they don't want to be forced to pick a gender, it's not my job to push them one way or another. 

I know that for many, our attempts to raise children in a gender neutral way seems like a radical concept, simultaneously dangerous and silly. "Dangerous" because they fear our nurturing will result in forcing something on their children and "silly" because they expect that in-born gender wiring will win out. But "gender-neutral" only means that we seek to be neutral, which is to say we strive to take their word for it.

We do it because we respect children and there is nothing dangerous or silly about that.

In an interview with Australian early childhood expert Maggie Dent that I conducted for a few years back, she told me that she continues to have to "heal the wounds" she suffers due to gender expectations and stereotypes. Even though her gender identity matches her biology, she was, as she tells it, a loud, physical "tomboy" who was forever being told to quiet down, know her place, not get to big for her boots, and, above all, to be compliant, because girls are expected to be "people pleasers." She tells of an old family photo in which she is wearing an expression of "rage and disgust" over being forced to wear a fancy dress.

She's not the only woman to object to being shoved into the "woman box" even as she identifies as a woman. I can tell you that as a man, I resent being shoved into the "man box." We are all more and bigger than the stereotypes. Maggie talks of Australian fathers who are upset when their boys come home from school wearing nail polish fearing that it will somehow turn them gay or female, which is as silly as thinking that a stay-at-home father will turn daughters into macho men. As for the argument that children will be somehow confused if we don't stick with their "biological" gender, I ask you to consider how confusing it must have been for little Joe who knew, even at a very young age, that he was a boy even as the rest of the world was telling him he was wrong. 

Everything is confusing until it is not. That's what learning is all about. Humans can deal with confusing. It's lack of respect that wounds us.

We are born with the bodies we're born with, but the rest is a social construct enforced by expectations and stereotypes that serve no one but those who would shove others into boxes. I might continue to struggle with things like gender neutral pronouns. I have 64 years of social conditioning to overcome. But I'm working on it, not because it's politically correct, but because I want to show my fellow humans, even if they are young children, the same sort of respect that I want for myself.

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

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Let's Grow Our Ideas Together!

The latest installment of Teacher Tom's Podcast is ready for your ears. In this episode I tell my personal story with a particular focus on the kinds of communities we can create with young children at the center. If you've ever wanted to know more about cooperative preschools, you'll definitely want to give it a listen either by clicking this link or through your favorite podcast player.

Community has always stood at the center of my work with young children. 

I spent the better part of 20 years as a teacher, for much of the time, the only teacher, at the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool in Seattle, Washington.

A cooperative preschool is a school that is owned and operated by the parents who enroll their children. And I’m not talking about symbolic ownership, but actual legal ownership.

Typically, we would enroll 65 or so families each year, and they would become 65 equal co-owners of the school, with me, the teacher, being the only paid employee. Everything else that goes into running a school was done by the parents. Parents took on all the administrative work, they handled enrollment, gardening, repairs and maintenance, purchasing, food prep, field trip planning, photography, custodial tasks, and anything else that needed to be done. 

When decisions needed to be made, it required the parent community to come together to discuss, debate, and, when consensus was impossible, to vote.

And as the only paid employee, I had, in a very real sense, 65 bosses. They hired me, they evaluated me, and they could, if they so desired, fire me.

Now, I imagine there are some educators out there thinking, “No way! I could never have 65 bosses!” I get it, but for me, it never felt that way.

You see, the part of being a cooperative that I came to value above all else, was that each family was required to provide me with an adult, one day a week, to serve as an assistant teacher . . . That’s right, one day a week, the parent or caregiver came to school with their child to serve under my supervision.

I often think the world would be a better place if more institutions or enterprises worked as cooperatives. I mean, the owners are also the customers and the employees. As customers, the motivation was to get your child a high quality preschool education at the lowest possible price. As employees, you wanted a satisfactory workplace. And as owners, you wanted a business that operated on sound financial principles. 

But it was more than that. Every preschool becomes a community, but in a very real sense, a cooperative becomes a community of families, not unlike a tribe or village or neighborhood.

This is the kind of community humans have evolved to live in. For 99 percent of our existence we were hunter-gatherers living in communities of 20-200, closely-related individuals. It’s only been relatively recently that we’ve begun to aggregate ourselves into larger populations. Many of us have adapted, of course, but for many of us, and especially for young children, smaller communities like the one we created in our cooperative – or like those still found in some neighborhoods or churches or other affinity groups – are our most natural learning and living environments.

That’s my aspiration for Teacher Tom's Podcast: to become a kind of community for early childhood educators, parents, grandparents, and other caretakers of young children. And my hope is for it to be a community that takes play seriously!

Some of you may already know that I’m a married man. My wife and I have been together since 1984 – married since 1986. That’s nearly 40 years! Our child, Josephine, was born in 1996. When she was in kindergarten, I was talking with the head of her school about community. He said something that has stuck with me: “The sign of a healthy community is how quickly newcomers are brought into the center.”

We’ve all been part of – or tried to be part of – communities that seemed to resist our efforts to take part. Maybe there are too many rules – written and unwritten. Maybe the community is clique-y. Maybe there are divisions or fiefdoms that make it impossible to navigate. These are unhealthy communities. I’m hoping that the community that forms around our podcast can be the kind that brings newcomers immediately into its center.

That doesn’t mean that we all have to agree with one another. I mean, I have a few hard lines, like no violence, name-calling, or threats, but when it comes to young children, our adult roles, community, and what it means to be educated, I hope there will be room for everyone. In the pat, my wife and I have produced global online early childhood education summits called – get ready for it – Teacher Tom’s Play Summit. A couple of years ago, I was interviewing an Ojibwe educator named Hopi Martin. He asked me to imagine a burning campfire around which people, including you, were sitting. If someone wanted to know more about that campfire, they could ask you to describe the fire. You might talk about the color, the intensity, the way the wood is stacked, what kind of wood you think it is, the smoke, the heat. 

But that’s just the fire from your perspective. If this person really wants to understand that fire, they would have to ask the person sitting next to you to describe it, then the next person, then the next, all the way around the circle until, finally, they had learned about the fire from all perspectives. But even then, Hopi said, they wouldn’t have the full picture of that fire until they asked the birds in the trees. Until they asked the trees themselves. Until they asked the worms underground.

I love this metaphor because it makes it clear that there is always something more to learn because there is always another perspective to consider. It has allowed me to see that when someone disagrees with me, they aren’t my rival, but rather my teacher. Every time I can see the world from another perspective, my own perspective, my own ideas and knowledge get bigger.

I want this podcast to be like that campfire, which is why most of the episodes will be about me stepping back and sharing the microphone with someone else.

I've started off by interviewing people I already know -- Denisha Jones, Lenore Skenazy, Maggie Dent, Lisa Murphy, Kisha Reid -- people with interesting perspectives, people who I hope will help expand your perspective. But if there are people you want to hear from, or people you think I’ll benefit from speaking with, or topics you’re interested in hearing about, let me know.

Let’s grow our ideas together! Please have a listen.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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A Picture Of Regret And Forgiveness

"I didn't do it!"

I'd seen the boy push his friend, knocking him to the ground. He was lying there still, whimpering.

His mother had told me, crossly, that she believed in punishment. She understood, however, that I was not going to resort to punishments, although she doubted that I could stick to that, not with her son. "Punishment is the only thing that works," she insisted.

"I saw you push him," I replied matter-of-factly. I strive to never threaten children, even with the volume of my voice, although I will, when I want to make sure my point is made, speak firmly, which I did then, "I can't let you push people."

"I didn't do it!" he shouted again, on the verge of tears himself.

The temptation is to keep pressing, to get him to confess, but there was no point. Everyone involved knew what happened. I was knelling by the fallen friend. I'd already determined that there were no external injuries, so I was rubbing his back. "Malcolm is crying. I'm taking care of him."

"I didn't do it."

This time I let his denail stand. This is the greatest flaw in the theory of punishment: fear of it makes it difficult, even impossible, to come clean and face the harm for which you need to make amends. The threat of harm makes it impossible to deal with the real harm. There are far too many adults in the world like this boy, people in positions of power, people who cannot come clean no matter what. When punishment is off the table, however, it clears the way for making amends.

I focused all of my attention on Malcolm. He shook his head when I asked him if anything hurt. I continued to rub his back. 

Again, the boy said, "I didn't do it," but without energy, almost pleading. I did not need to punish him because he was punishing himself, facing the natural consequences of his behavior, his entire being focused on it. He wasn't denying it any longer, but rather, wishing with all his being that he hadn't done it. We call it regret. It's not uncommon for adults to assert, "I have no regrets." It's meant as a statement of bravado masquerading as strength, but all I hear is a pathetic, "I didn't do it."

We have all done regretful things and the only way to move beyond them is to take responsibility by striving to undo the harm we have done. Punishment leads only to denial. I don't believe anyone who says they have no regrets because none of us has undone all the harm we've caused. "I have no regrets" is just more denial.

Regret is a great teacher, but only if we manage to not allow it to become guilt. And the way to do that is to strive to make amends.

The boy stood watching us as tears brimmed. He picked up a toy truck and tried to hand it to Malcolm, but it was refused. He squatted down and put his face into Malcolm's, "I didn't mean to."

Malcolm replied softly, "Yes, you did."

Now the boy broke into a full cry, "I'm sorry!" He dropped down beside Malcolm, putting his arm around him, his hand replacing mine on his back. Malcolm placed his hand on his friend's head and they lay there for a time, in the dirt, a picture of regret and forgiveness.

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If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

"Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices

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"I'm Not Really Dead . . . But I'm Real Pretend Dead"

"I'm a fairy," she told me. I guess I didn't respond as she was hoping, so she widened her eyes and raised her voice, "A real fairy!"

As she flitted away, I believed her. "Real pretend" isn't a term I've ever taught children, but it regularly emerges from children as they engage in dramatic play.

"I'm not really dead," a child once told me when I checked on him as he was lying on the ground. "But I'm real pretend dead."

Most children, most of the time, know the line. If an adult presses them, they'll tell you they're children pretending to be dinosaurs or snow leopards or Elsas or Batmen, but from within their games, it's all real. Some of the most intense preschool arguments I've ever encountered are over real pretend things. "I'm shooting webs from my fingers!" "No you're not! Spiderman shoots webs from his wrists!" "Fingers!" "Wrists!"

As the adult, we might be tempted to find it silly, to step in by telling them that Spiderman isn't real, but that is entirely beside the point. The kids already know that Spiderman is pretend, but the story they are creating together is real.

Actor and New York City Children's Theater educator Caitlyn McCain describes acting as the process of "trying on" what it might mean to be another person. "Young people do it literally when they try on costumes," she points out. The worst thing you can do, she tells us, is to form judgments about a character prior to "trying on." For instance, even if she knows from the script that the character she's playing is the villain, she has to set that aside because, this real pretend person, no matter how heinously they behave on stage, does not necessarily view themself as evil. There is a reason they act as they do and it is the actor's job to find an answer the question of "Why?"

It's easy to see the connection between what actors do when they truly embody their characters and what children do. Both are seeking to understand, from the inside, what it means to be another person. "We would all be better off," Caitlyn says, "if we made a habit of 'trying on' before forming our judgments."

When children try on costumes, when they step inside another person, they are engaged in radical curiosity. What does it mean to be this person, to think like this person, to experience the world as this person? How does it make me feel? How does it make others feel? We've all heard actors talk about the research they do in order to better understand their characters. Young children do their research from within the characters they embody. 

This, I think, is at least part of what children mean when they say it's real pretend. The "real" refers to the learning.

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If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

"Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices

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!

Talking About Spirit

Karntakuringu Jakurrpa

When we die, the arrangement of our physical parts remains the same as it was in life, yet something quite essential is suddenly, from one moment to the next, missing. The people of ancient India called this missing thing, prana. Chinese philosophers gave it the name qi. French philosopher Henri Bergson coined the term Élan vital. Having been brought up as a Lutheran, we spoke of the spirit leaving the body. Whatever we call it, this vital life force, has been an obvious reality for humans throughout our time on the planet. We feel it. We see it in others. And, perhaps most telling, we know when it has gone out of a human body.

In recent centuries, however, we find ourselves, in the West at least, talking less and less about this essential aspect of what it means to be alive. Indeed, it seems we've turned most of the discussion over to the practitioners of alternative medicine, religion, and fiction ("May the force be with you!"), where it can be boxed up and patted on the head as a sort of sweet, abiding myth. Science is ascendant and since scientists are no where close to understanding what qi is or how it works, many of us are suspicious of its existence. Certainly, we think, there must be some sort of tick-tock mechanism still awaiting our measurement and testing, something quantifiable and concrete that will explain this illusion of a ghost living in our bodily machines. Talk of qi or prana or Élan vital or spirit strays too much into the mystical and magical for our scientific age.

We have no problem talking about our bodies, of course. In the early years, we talk heaps about the importance of children moving their bodies, especially outdoors. We fret and worry over proper nutrition, eye protection, and the avoidance in injuries (at least severe ones). And, naturally, we have no problem talking about the mind. I mean, that's our business, isn't it, as educators, to develop their young minds? There are few of us who can't cite this or that bit of neuroscience to describe behaviors or defend practices. And then, there is the old mind-body connection that we insist upon. Much of what we think we know about the body and mind is rubbish, because science is always moving forward, leaving those of us on the "front lines" scrambling to keep up, but that doesn't stop us from talking about it, investigating it, and deploying what we do know (or think we know) toward the betterment of the children in our care.

Founder and director of Connecting 2 Culture, Jackie Bennett, a consultancy committed to bettering childhood services for Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander populations, draws upon her culture when she speaks about spirit:

"So what does spirit mean to me? For me, spirit means my ancestors and my elders. It is my connection to my culture. It is my connection to Mother Earth and to the country where I was born. Spirit is my family -- my mum, my dad, my brothers and sisters, and my cousins. Spirit is my husband, my four children, and my eight beautiful grandchildren. And the relationship that I've had with friends and all the people that cross my path and everything in between. Spirit is my old people and my ancestors . . . They are the ones that have guided me throughout out my life to do what I do every day, every hour, every minute . . . My spirits have guided me here to share the story of my people in Australia and to talk about the adverse effects that colonization is having on our children and that the effects of it are still having on my people today . . . Spirit has brought us all together."

She speaks, not of the "science," as Westerners so often do, but rather of the reality of spirit as it manifests within her. Instead of breaking spirit down into smaller and smaller parts the way science wants to do with everything, Jackie is speaking of spirit as an active, motivating force, a unity that is not only found within herself, but as the thing, the vital force, that connects all of us. 

When we restrict ourselves to the science, I think, we sell ourselves and the children in our lives short. What I learned from talking to Jackie is just how narrow our Western focus is. Don't get me wrong, I value science, but I'm also keenly aware that when it comes to the most important questions, science remains as mute as a stone. Scientists still have no idea, for instance, what consciousness is or how it works, yet we all know, quite clearly that it not only exists, but is vital. Even something as fundamental as energy is a complete mystery to physicists. I wonder sometimes if the problem with our relentless reliance upon science, which calls on us to engage in taking things apart, in breaking everything down into pieces and equations, leads us to lose the very thing we hope to understand.

Part of the process of colonization that Jackie speaks about has been, and continues to be, the process of pushing ancient wisdom aside, of laughing at it as myth and mumbo jumbo. It has left us high and dry, however, as we increasingly concentrate on mind and body at the expense of the spirit. No wonder the world is limping along. No wonder so many of us feel disconnected. No wonder society seems hopelessly deformed. No wonder we feel helpless as we continue to destroy Mother Earth.

We must talk about spirit, as Jackie does, examining it from within and without. What does it mean to you? What does it mean to me? Science tells us, I believe falsely, that there is always a right answer and that, by definition, all the other answers are wrong, but what if truth can only be found in that thing, that qi, that prana, that Élan vital, that spirit that connects us all? Perhaps we are not meant to understand it, but rather to live it. That's the evidence before us. Perhaps spirit is what we see wherever free children play together. 

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Today is the final day to register for my brand new course: a 6-week deep dive into transforming your classroom, home, or playground into the kind of learning environment in which young children thrive. This course is for educators  parents, and directors. Start the new school year with a new and improved "third teacher" I hope you join me! To register and learn more, click here. 

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We're Probably Wrong

My earliest memories of television were of watching our family's black and white Zenith set. I remember the day dad climbed onto the roof of the house to install the antennae which allowed us to receive two broadcast channels with relative clarity and one, very fuzzy, UHF channel. We didn't have a lot rules around TV viewing, mainly because it wasn't all that attractive to us kids. Most of what was on during the day were news shows and soap operas, boring stuff that filled up all that time between the worthwhile programming like Batman, The Brady Bunch, and The Wonderful World of Disney.

Television was my introduction to the concept of schedules. In a world without video, not to mention on-demand programming, if we were going to catch our shows we needed to understand such things as days of the week and how to read an analog clock. It was a big deal, it changed me. I diligently saved up my pennies to purchase a wristwatch, which I needed if I was going to live in the television age. We neighborhood kids would plan our play around the television schedule, disappearing indoors to watch the latest episode of Batman, for instance, then reconvening in our capes (made from our fathers' old dress shirts) to reenact and connect over what we had just seen. Mom called it the "boob tube" and promptly fell asleep whenever she watched it. Adults warned us we were ruining our eyes, our ears, our brains, but television was here to stay and we knew it.

Many of us have now grown up to express those same concerns about the kids of today who are too absorbed in their screens. We've been particularly traumatized by the pandemic, which made even school a screen-based activity. Gallons of virtual ink have been spilled on the tragedy of it all. Those poor kids, we fret, they're having their brains re-wired and their young parents don't know any better. If only they would read books! 

Of course, two hundred years ago our parental counterparts were expressing similar worries about the reading of novels. The common wisdom was that young women in particular were destroying their brains, becoming incapable of distinguishing between reality and fantasy, and dirtying their hands with library books. And long before that, people like Socrates and Chaucer were concerned that literacy itself was robbing our youth of the ability think and feel, making them into lazy oafs and even liars. In other words, it's in the nature of adults to fear that the latest technological advance will destroy us all. So, if we are to be intellectually honest, we must be wary of our knee-jerk reactions. Oh sure, this time, we might be right. Maybe the digital age really will turn our children square-eyed and mushy-brained. 

But, history tells us that we're probably wrong. Or at least, not entirely right.

"I don't think online education is going anywhere," says Caitlyn McCain, artist, educator, creator of the New York City Children's Theatre's "Creative Clubhouse Stories," and presenter at the most recent Teacher Tom's Play Summit. For one thing it's incredibly efficient. "As a student, there's a great convenience to being able to learn online and then, as an educator, I'm like, 'There's a great convenience of being able to educate online.'" But it's more than just convenience that makes Caitlyn so certain that digital space is here to stay. For her it's about accessibility. "It goes a lot further than what I do in a physical room . . . I have students in California, and I would have never reached those young people. Or, even in New York, I mean, we're so separate that I have kids in the Bronx who would probably not get down to Manhattan for a class."

It's natural for those of us with decades of experience with young children to worry, and we no doubt make some good points, but I also have no doubt that Caitlyn, a digital native like the children we teach, is right. The pandemic merely accelerated something that was inevitable. I've heard stories from educators and parents who have been pleasantly surprised at how well the children adjusted during the pandemic. Caitlyn's stories of children who not only love their online time, but who actually connect with her through the screen is a testament to children's adaptability and Caitlyn's skills as an educator and actor. Will this become the norm for education? Of course not, but like television, novels, and literacy itself, it's not up to us, but the "natives" who will ultimately determine its place in our world.

As we've returned to our classrooms, we do so as changed people as will the children, but what hasn't changed, and what will never change, is that most children, most of the time, will take change in stride, adopting it and adapting it. I can't imagine what online learning will look like in the coming years, let alone the coming decades and centuries, but I do know, as Caitlyn says, it's here to stay. And children will continue to surprise us because the two things that won't go away is their instinct to learn and connect through any all media available to them. It's part of the glory of humans. 

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book 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!

Alert Awareness

Psychologist and author of the book Changing Our Minds, Naomi Fisher, while speaking with me at the recently completed Teacher Tom's Play Summit, told me that her three-year-old son took an early interest in numbers. One day as they walked together through their neighborhood, he noticed of the house addresses. "Did you know," he asked his mother, "that there are lonely numbers and friendly numbers?" He had, she said, "discovered odd and even numbers."

I doubt there is an educator on earth who would "teach" this mathematical concept in these terms. Indeed, most school curricula don't introduce the idea until first or second grade when children are twice Naomi's son's age, and even then it's typically done using the dry convention of numerals and ciphering, rather than the rich, relevant metaphor of lonely and friendly numbers on a street of houses.

As a preschool teacher, I've known hundreds of children who discover mathematical, scientific, literacy and other concepts well before they're "supposed" to. Parents have been taught by our educational system to treat this, should they be so lucky as to be the owner of such a child, as a matter for pride in their obvious genius, to jump on it, to get them enrolled in advanced enrichment programs. The truth, however, is that sometimes their youthful proclivities foretell an abiding passion, as was the case with Dr. Fisher's son, but generally their epiphanies are indicators of nothing more than a typically curious child taking note of their world.

As a teacher in a cooperative school, my entire classroom career has been spent in the company of both children and their parents, and often even grandparents. I recall having a conversation with one of these grandparents who was visiting for a week. She wanted me to know that her grandson's obvious brilliance was the product of his mother's genes, who had, she assured me, been a genius child. She also let me know that she loved her daughter, but was disappointed that she had "wasted" her genius on such commonalities as stay-at-home motherhood. If she had anything to do with it, she was not going to allow the same thing happen to her grandson Max, which is why she was saving up to pay for expensive private schools. She also let me know, kindly but firmly, that she disapproved of our play-based curriculum. Perhaps it was good enough for the rest of these more common kids, but her grandson, she assured me with a wry nod, needed something more.

It was both sad and touching, mainly because I knew the mother (her daughter) and she was fully onboard with her son spending his childhood at play. In fact, she was considering avoiding school altogether, opting instead for a self-directed version of homeschooling called unschooling. "Max has already taught himself to read," she shrugged. "He's shown me that he's his own best teacher." 

Not every child is a literacy or mathematics prodigy, of course, but they all, if allowed to be their own teachers, are driven to discovery. I've rarely met a parent who was not, rightly, blown away by their preschooler's capacity to learn in this way. "Children who don't go to school," explains Dr. Fisher, "live in a state of alert awareness because they're not expecting to be told what to do and not expecting to be evaluated." It frees them up, she says, to look for patterns and make connections. A child who has not yet been taught the dubious lesson that they need adult instruction and approval for their learning instead comes to rely upon their own curiosity, which is what play-based, or self-directed, learning is all about.

In his book The Search After Truth, rationalist philosopher Nicholas Malebranche writes, "The mind does not pay equal attention to everything it perceives. For it applies itself infinitely more to those things that affect it, that modify it, and that penetrate it, than to those that are present to it but do not affect it." This is the idea behind not just self-directed learning, but learning in general up until the relatively recent advent of what we today call school. "Schools are the new bit," says Dr. Fisher. "Sadly, society thinks that self-directed learning has to end at seven."

Yes, Max had taught himself to read, but his driving interest during his grandmother's time with us was working with his buddies to construct devious traps. They would spend their days snickering and scheming, using scrapes of wood, fabric, old mesh produce bags, and whatever came to hand to create contraptions that they were certain would ensnare a classmate or two. His grandmother was appalled, whisper-begging me to guide them into more useful endeavors. Then one day, a trap made of rope was sprung on his grandmother, who found her ankles tied together as she tried to traverse the playground. As the boys cackled, I helped extricate his grandmother who was laughing along with them. I couldn't help remarking, "Pretty genius, huh?" 

It's hardly likely that Max will grow up to be a professional trap maker, but that's beside the point. The beauty of play-based learning is that it is always relevant to the learner and that is what's important if are goal is live a life of alert awareness.

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"Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices

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Most People Are Not WEIRD

I am of Danish and English heritage, with some Irish and French mixed in for good measure. I know the most about my Danish background in that my grandmother immigrated to the US as a child and was therefore a bit more connected to her roots than a lot of White Americans. I also know that my English ancestors immigrated to these shores in the late 1800's, then proceeded to the Midwest where they were farmers. I was baptized and confirmed Lutheran; I own a beer glass commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. I am a natural born citizen of the United States.

To be honest, that's pretty much it for my national, ethnic and religious cultural markers. I rarely refer to them when describing myself. This makes me WEIRD, which is an acronym coined by a trio of Canadian psychologists: Western Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic. 

Most people are not WEIRD. They do not live in the West. They are not highly educated. They do not live in an industrialized or democratic nation. And while I do not feel particularly rich, compared to most people in the world, I am. Not only are most people not WEIRD, but they never have been.

Even within my own country, most people are not WEIRD.

Being WEIRD means that I, and people like me, see the world much differently that most people. For one thing, we don't know or care all that much about our national, ethnic, racial, or religious backgrounds, instead perceiving ourselves as autonomous individuals free to create our own identities regardless of our backgrounds. In contrast, most people around the world and throughout time have more often viewed themselves as woven into the cultural background and social roles into which they were born. Indeed, while us WEIRD-os conceive of the self as something we create from the inside-out, most people see it as something that is forged from the outside-in.

That concept really comes through for me when I interact with educators from indigenous backgrounds as I recently did during Teacher Tom's Play Summit. I find my mind expanding, sometimes painfully, as I listen to them talk about interconnectedness and the importance of honoring ancestors, "past, present, and future" or when they talk about honoring Mother Nature. It's clear that for these people who have learned how to thrive on both sides of the WEIRD divide being Maori or Cree or Aboriginal is central to their identity. This is where they "come from." Within my own country Black and Hispanic adults feel significantly more connected to their roots than do White adults. According to the Pew Research Center, only 36 percent of White Americans saying they feel a "strong connection" to the cultural origin of their family, while 61 percent of Black adults and 71 percent of Hispanic adults feel this way. Over half of Black and Hispanic people surveyed likewise see their origin as central to their identity, whereas fewer than one in four White people do.

Why am I sharing this here on a blog about "teaching and learning from preschoolers"? Because much of what we think we know about human psychology comes from research conducted on WEIRD people, and specifically US college students who participate for class credit. As educators, we tend to rely on psychological studies to shape our approach to children, but since WEIRD folks only comprise about 12 percent of the global population we are missing data on the other 88 percent who tend to view themselves as being created from the outside-in. This greatly impacts such things as moral decision-making, reasoning style, sense of fairness, and even visual perception. In other words, what we take for psychological orthodoxy is really just a deep dive into a narrow, WEIRD, segment of the world's population which is then crudely applied to the rest of humanity.

No where am I more aware of this flaw in our psychological research than when I'm trying to convince a fellow WEIRD-o that children consistently demonstrate, unprompted, traits of kindness, selflessness, fairness, and connectedness. They are so entrenched in their inside-out WEIRD-ness that they simply cannot conceive of humans who are not naturally selfish, covetous, and wildly independent, so they assure me that my approach to young children is doomed to result in some sort of Lord of the Flies or "law of the jungle" scenario. Then they point to "research" that they claim supports their WEIRD view of human nature.

For years now, I've been viewing psychological research through squinted eyes, especially when it doesn't jibe with what I have observed through my own decades of working with developing humans who are not yet fully WEIRD. Specifically, I seek out the make-up of the test subjects. This usually means I have to go beyond the mass media reporting, which nearly always leaves out that vital piece of information. And what I usually discover is that I've just learned something that is perhaps true for a narrow, WEIRD, slice of the population, but not necessarily useful when it comes to understanding young children or, for that matter, most of the world beyond the WEIRD perspective.

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The free live portion of Teacher Tom's Play Summit is over, but it's still not too late to join Suzanne Axelsson, Lisa Murphy, Lenore Skenazy, Maggie Dent, Kisha Reid, Mr. Chazz Lewis, Monique Gray Smith, Vanessa LaPointe and the rest of us. What if the whole world understood the power of trusting children with the freedom to play, to explore their world, to ask and answer their own questions? What if everyone respected their right to learn in their own way, on their own time? What if we remembered that children must have their childhoods and that means playing, and lots of it? Every one of these people are professionals who have placed children first. You will walk away from this event transformed, informed, challenged, and inspired to create a world that respects children and sets them free to learn and grow. Together we can, as presenter Raffi sings, "Turn this world around!" Click here to learn more!

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Anything Is Possible

For the past several days, I've been wishing that I could be with Teacher Tom's Play Summit presenters Anitha Mereka and Jan Brown in Rwanda, working with children at the Bright School. What an incredible life's work that would be.

Presenter Mina Tobias reminds me that if I hadn't made my work early childhood education that I believe that I would have found my way into the mental health profession, specifically to work on some kind of cure or remedy for such debilitating mental illnesses as schizophrenia. What an important, transformative thing I would be doing.

When I hear about the work that presenters Nona Orbach and Roberta Pucci are doing in Isreal and Italy respectively, I wonder why I gave up on my youthful artistic aspirations. How much richer my life would be today were I to be spending my days in a well-lit studio in the act of creation.

When presenter Kisha Reid talks about her school that has become a nest for generations of families, I wonder what I would have been like to have started my own school in a small tight-knit community like Pooseville, Maryland where everyone knows everyone. What a warm and cozy life that would be.

I make these wishes and consider these roads untaken without regret or envy, but rather with a sense of wonder over the infinite possibilities that life presents. It awes me to recognize that every decision we make, even the smallest, is a fateful one.

On our good days, we look at young children through the lens of anything is possible. We take on an awesome responsibility when we care for young children because, for better or worse, we are the ones making those fateful decisions on their behalf. Some of us, both as parents and educators, do so with the kind of "swagger" that presenter Vanessa LaPointe talks about. Others are more like Tiersa McQueen who took her young son's complaints seriously and transformed her entire family because of it. Others map out every detail, plotting a child's course from diapers to Dartmouth, while others attempt to keep every door open until the children in their life decide which one through which to pass.

Psychologist and author Alison Gopnick writes in her book The Gardener and the Carpenter, "(I)t is very difficult to find any reliable, empirical relation between the small variations in what parents do -- the variations that are the focus of parenting -- and the resulting adult traits of their children. There is very little evidence that conscious decisions about co-sleeping or not, letting your children "cry it out" or holding them till they fall asleep, or forcing them to do extra homework or letting them play have reliable and predictable long-erm effects on who those children become." I suspect the same also goes for the small variations in what we do in the name of education.

The central metaphor of Gopnick's book is that our role is not to manufacture children in the spirit of a carpenter, but rather to allow our children to grow in the spirit of a gardener. And this means that whenever possible, we must grant them "permission" (as summit presenters Nona Orbach, Roberta Pucci, and Suzanne Axelsson talk about) to make make their own decisions about their lives, both big and small. Of course, we are responsible for keeping them safe and healthy, but the earlier and oftener we allow them to practice making genuine decisions (as opposed to manufactured decisions like which color tumbler to drink from), the better they will be at knowing what is best for themselves.

This means avoiding the trap of controlling children "for their own good" or tricking them with artificial choices. It means giving up the "unhealthy habits," as presenter Chazz Lewis labels them, of punishment and coercion. It means allowing the children in our lives to take actual risks, to fail, and to give it all up for any reason or no reason at all, as presenter Lenore Skenazy suggests. It means saving our advice for when they make it clear they want it. It means that we strive to see, hear, and feel them with the goal of understanding, and to not be cowed when others attempt to place their judgments on us. And it means to never stop loving them.

When we take this stance with our children, we see that so much of what the world tells us about teaching them is about what Italian author Natalia Ginzburg calls "The Little Virtues": things like thrift, caution, shrewdness, tact, and a desire for success. "(W)e rush to teach them respect for the little virtues, on which we build our whole system of education." This is not what children need from us. What they need most are adults in their lives who aspire to the great virtues, among which Ginzburg includes "an indifference to money," "courage and a contempt for danger," "frankness and a love of truth," "love for one's neighbor," and a desire not for success, but rather "to be and to know." And finally, she urges us to find our own "vocation," that thing that makes us come alive. The world doesn't need any more successful people; it needs more people who have come alive. "This," she writes, "is perhaps the one real chance we have of giving them some kind of help in their search for a vocation -- to have a vocation ourselves, to know it, to love it and serve it passionately; because love of life begets a love of life."

When a child has learned the great virtues, the little virtues will take care of themselves no matter what fateful path we are on. When a child knows that they are on this earth to find their vocation and to then serve it passionately, they will know to refuse every path, opting instead to make their own.

And we are to do the same.

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Today is the fifth and final day of Teacher Tom's Play Summit. You can still get a free pass for today's four sessions with early childhood education and parenting experts from around the world. And it's not too late to purchase full lifetime access to all 20 sessions for $97. The price will go up after today, so act fast. Click here to register and upgrade . . . If you upgrade now, you will also receive lifetime access to all 24 of last year's sessions as well! That's 44 hours of professional development for under $100. We are also offering a discount for groups. Please join us!

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!