"Actual Life"

Alfred North Whitehead spent the 1890's writing his Treatise on Universal Algebra, and the next decade collaborating with this former student Bertrand Russell writing Principia Mathematica, generally considered to be one of the most important works on mathematics, or any topic for that matter, of the 20th century. I share this only to point out that this guy was no slouch. A supremely well-educated man, who taught at places like Harvard, and who aged into the sort of old, white man upon whom the entire idea of Western Society has been built. Putting mathematics largely behind him, in his later years he turned increasingly to philosophy. In 1929, in an essay entitled, The Aims of Education, this dusty academic, from deep within the established order, wrote:

There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children -- Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of the living of it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together. 

This could be written today by any one of us who have spent their careers as teachers in schools and found them lacking. We are still making the same arguments that Whitehead did nearly 100 years ago. In this short essay Whitehead condemned standardization and testing:

Every school is bound on pain of extinction to train its boys for a small set of definite examinations. No headmaster has a free hand to develop his general education or his specialist studies in accordance with the opportunities of his school, which are created by its staff, its environment, its class of boys, and its endowments. I suggest that no system of external tests which aims primarily at examining individual scholars can result in anything but educational waste . . . It kills the best part of culture.

But mostly, this essay is a dignified rant against what he called "inert ideas," by which he means the disconnected trivia children are so often expected to learn by rote, the material that generation after generation of students have labelled "irrelevant" and generation after generation of educators have vainly struggled to make relevant. His alternative:

Let the main ideas which are introduced into a child's education be few and important, and let them to thrown into every combination possible. The child should make them his own, and should understand their applicant here and now in the circumstances of his actual life . . . (T)he understanding which we want is an understanding of an insistent present. The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. No more ready harm can be done to young minds than by depreciation of the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.

He calls for educators and students to work together toward what should be the true aim of education, which is not to simply impart knowledge, but rather "the acquisition of the art of the utilization of knowledge," and the only way to do that is to allow children to practice using it.

Whatever interest attaches to your subject-matter must be evoked here and now; whatever powers you are strengthening in the pupil, must be exercised here and now; whatever possibilities of mental life your teaching should impart, must be exhibited here and now. That is the golden rule of education . . . The solution which I am urging, is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum.

If you would like to read the essay for yourself, you can find it here, but my main point is that our "radical" ideas of what true education could and should be have been with us for a long time. The errors of our schools are so entrenched that they have withstood critiques from both within and without for as long as we've had schools. We have no excuse, really, for what we do to children in the name of education. I'm beginning to believe that our schools (and by that I mean the habit of schools, not individual teachers) exist to merely perpetuate themselves as the machinery by which we oppress and control our weakest citizens. The mistake those of us who seek transformation make is in assuming that if we simply construct our case with reason and science, society, out of love for our children if nothing else, will rush to reform our schools along the lines of reason and science. Sadly, however, although we might occasionally affect change around the edges, the modern schools of today are essentially no different that the modern schools of a century ago, which are little changed from the schools of a century before that. We are still engaged in the mind-numbing project of marching our children through inert ideas, detaching them entirely from relevancy, and making learning into labor. 

Whitehead ends his essay with a kind of suggestion for how we can change our schools, one that I find to be a non-starter, but his analysis of the problem seems so contemporary that it is both inspiring and depressing. When will we finally see that what we are doing to children, to all of us, in the name of education is "one of the most fatal, erroneous, and dangerous conceptions ever introduced into the theory of education?" We are not sharpening minds, we are dulling them, turning the genius of the next generation into grist for the mill. I'm beginning to see that reforming our schools might well be an impossibility. Perhaps the best thing we can do is to simply shutter them all and start over, but until the revolution comes, we're each left as parents and educators to find any way possible, both large and small, to trust each child with the freedom to live their "actual life" and dream that they will be the ones who finally free the rest.

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Tired of butting heads with kids? Scolding them? Bossing them around? Do you feel like they just don't listen? Sign up now for my new 6-part e-course, The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think, in which I pull the curtain back on the magic that comes from treating children like fully formed human beings. This course is for educators, parents, and anyone else who works with young children. It's the culmination of more than 20 years of research and practice. I've been speaking on this topic around the world for the past decade and know that it can be transformative both for adults and children. For more information and to register, click here. Thank you!

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!

These Aren't the Same People We Sent Home Last Spring

A few weeks ago, a father whose daughter is currently in kindergarten told me that he wasn't in favor of the schools re-opening any time soon. "It's not that I'm worried about Covid so much. It's that my poor girl has finally adjusted to online classes." Months ago he told me about how much the girl had struggled with sitting in front of a computer screen, how she missed her friends, how she missed her teacher. For a time, she had cried every day, begging to be allowed to do anything other than "go to school." He told me back then that he worried that his child was learning to hate school, to hate learning, but now, many months have passed. Things have changed. 

Like most of us, his daughter suffered a loss. This pandemic took something she loved away from her. Naturally, she mourned the loss, but as Iris Murdoch wrote, "In order to survive a terrible loss one has to become another person," which is what has happened. All of our children, all of us, have suffered losses. I imagine some of us are still grieving, maybe most of us, but some, like this kindergartener have been transformed into someone new.

This isn't the only story like this I've heard from parents. Last spring, nearly everyone's child was suffering from their loss, but by the time autumn rolled around parents were telling me about how their child was adapting. Most expressed themselves with an air of surprise and caution. After all, they were still struggling with their own terrible losses, so it seemed incredible that their child had moved on to "making the most of things."

Of course, this is what children are designed to do. Looked at from one perspective, childhood is a time of loss. Birth itself, leaving behind the warmth and security of the womb for the bright, loud, cold, and smelly world, is certainly a loss. We lose our grandparents. We lose our teeth. Our clothing and playthings are broken, put away, or handed down to even younger children. We leave teachers and friends behind with each new passage. Indeed, the process of growing up requires a near constant process of becoming another person. This is one of the facts of childhood. So it really shouldn't surprise us that many of our kids have become the people they need to be in order to best embrace the world as it is, not as it was.

Loss, of course, remains a constant throughout life, but as adults we tend to fret and regret them more, and  for longer. Many of us are still grieving, even as our children have become someone else. And we even often grieve for that, as their growth forces us to become the parents not of babies but toddlers, not of toddlers but little kids, not of little kids, but of adolescents, then teens, then adults. We're always a little behind them in the process of becoming new people, being regularly disappointed that they are not the baby we once dandled on our knees and held in our arms. Just as their bones and bodies are more flexible than ours, perhaps they are, by and large, more flexible than us when it comes to loss as well.

I made many predictions at the beginning of the pandemic. I couldn't imagine young children ever being in any way satisfied with online "learning." I assumed they would be too bored, too antsy, too much the people they were in the past for something so inhuman. I still worry that this era has left them damaged or stunted in some way, and I'm sure it has left lasting marks on some of them. But, loss is intertwined with growth and growth is the business of youth.

The schools in our state have about two weeks to submit their re-opening plans to the state superintendent of public instruction. This doesn't mean that the schools are opening on March 1, just that the plans must be in place by then in order to receive a share of the federal money available for doing so "safely." That said, some of them will want to open as soon as possible, but not because a majority of parents want them to re-open. Only 46.8 percent of the parents of K-1 students in our state are currently in favor of re-opening the brick and mortar schools, and within that number we find that only about 33 percent of the parents of Black and Brown children feel that way. One can read all sorts of things into statistics, but for right now, at least, most parents of young children, and especially those whose children tend to be marginalized at school, think their children are better off at home for now, simply being the new people they have become.

As that father said to me about online school, "She looks forward to school now, in some ways more than she did before the lock down. I wish they'd just leave her alone."

This dad is considering homeschooling, at least for a time, but he recognizes that he will likely wind up sending his daughter back to school at some point in the future. It's possible that some schools won't open again until next fall, but they will re-open eventually. The children who answer the morning bell won't be the children we knew when last we saw them. They will know things about the world that we don't know. They won't "go back" to the way they were any more than a toddler returns to being a newborn. I have little hope that our cookie-cutter schools as institutions will make a proper shaped space for these new people, but as individual educators we can. 

These aren't the same people we sent home last spring. They have survived a terrible loss by becoming new people. It's hasn't been easy. As schools re-open, let's begin by celebrating who they have become, then make it our business to understand them as they are right now. We can't let the hyperventilating over how far our children have "fallen behind," cause us to plough ahead as if a return to normal is even possible. Because everything has changed and the children we teach have changed as well.

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The Central Challenge of Our Time

Most people seem to think that preparing children to serve the economy is the primary goal of education. Indeed, many seem to think that it's the primary job of childhood. Adults obsessively ask young children what they are going to be when they grow up. Our policy makers fret about the jobs of tomorrow, parents worry that their preschool choice will ultimately impact their child's university options, and few people question the competitive grooming that takes place in schools as the children are forever graded like beef and ranked like show ponies. We hear the voices of business titans echo in buzz words like "grit" and "accountability." Some corporate types even see themselves as customers of schools, with your child being the product they will squeeze and compare before finally purchasing at the lowest price they can negotiate.

What we ignore is that our children don't exist to serve the economy. Indeed, it should be the other way around: the economy should be serving we the people, but as more and more of our nation's wealth has been transferred to our wealthiest citizens over the last several decades, we the people have grown poorer, less powerful, and more dependent upon these modern day feudal lords. 

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the future of the children I teach. To many that might sound like malpractice, but I'm more concerned about them right now. But when I do consider their futures, I hope they all become entrepreneurs or artists. In fact, I often secretly hope they all decide to become professional dancers. I hope all the children everywhere decide to become dancers. Imagine that. Our entire economy would have to transform into one that serves and supports dancers. It's a ludicrous thought experiment, but it brings me joy to consider it.

Of course, we can't all be dancers, at least not now when we face such challenges as climate disaster, not to mention rising fascism, racism, and sexism. These are existential issues that the economy, no matter how well-populated with straight-A students, will never be able to solve. It will require citizens, all of us, banding together in a ways and for reasons that the profit motive simply cannot comprehend.

From Rutger Bregman's incredible book Humankind:

If we believe most people can't be trusted, that's how we'll treat each other, to everyone's detriment. Few ideas have as much power to shape the world as our view of other people. Because ultimately, you get what you expect to get. If we want to tackle the greatest challenges of our times -- from the climate crisis to our growing distrust of one another -- then I think the place we need to start is our view of human nature.

And we all know that the best way to learn to trust others is to be trusted ourselves. From where I sit, this is the central challenge for our schools: to transform themselves away from institutions that view children as captives to be pitted against one another, where we control their bodies, minds, and spirits. No longer can we afford to simmer our youngest citizens in cauldrons of distrust where they are watched at every moment, told what to do, and when and where to do it. We must learn to trust children with freedom because that is the only way that they themselves will learn to trust others. When we trust children to ask and answer their own questions, to bump into one another in the pursuit of those answers, to bicker, debate, compromise, and agree, we free them to trust one another, to learn that working together, to be interdependent rather than so relentlessly independent. By trusting children, we create the conditions where the habits of trust can grow.  

It will take a generation that has learned to trust others to truly address problems that have been created by and exacerbated by the distrust that has, sadly, come to be the beating heart of our civic life. If I could give our educational system a single mission it would be this.

This is why I say that trusting children with freedom is perhaps the central challenge of our time.

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Guess what? Teacher Tom finally has a proper website. It's still under construction a bit, but please stop by and check things out. Thanks! 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!

"You Can't Play"

We were playing with cardboard boxes and cardboard blocks. A group of three-year-olds began to play a game that involved standing in a rough circle around a box while drumming on it together with long blocks. Before long they began to chant which allowed them to find a mutual rhythm. Periodically, they would then all fall down on the ground in a kind of pig pile. After a lull they began their drumming again, repeating the cycle over and over, joyfully.

It was a noisy, full body game that attracted others, both as participants and observers. Before long, we ran out of long blocks. Some children allowed this to be their barrier to entry into the game, so they either moved on or griped while watching the game as an outsider. A few, however, simply picked up shorter blocks and attempted to join in. Unfortunately, the nature of shorter blocks meant that they had to stand closer to the box that was the target of their drumming, placing them in position to be hit and jostled by the longer blocks. Each time this happened, and it began to happen a lot, the child with the shorter block complained, "Hey, you hit me!" which meant the game had to momentarily stop.

Before long, this previously fun game was in a time out as often as it was in motion, which caused the game to lose much of its savor for the kids who had originally begun playing it. Not only that, but those complaining about not having long blocks began to become louder and more insistent. First one, then another of the long blocks were dropped to the ground as the game was given up. These abandoned blocks were then bickered and tussled over. The game resumed with an altered cast of participants. There was no chanting. They were not smiling. The joy had been sucked out of it.

Meanwhile, the three kids who had originated the game, moved off together to an empty space, picked up short blocks and began to play their game together, just the three of them, joyfully, beaming into one another's faces and chanting as they had when the game first spontaneously erupted. They were clearly having more fun than the others, whose game had devolved into a kind of dreary contest. 

Before long, however, a fourth child attempted to join this new game, to the annoyance of the three short block drummers.

"You can't play with us," one of them said. "You have the wrong kind of block."

The ground was covered with dozens of blocks identical to the ones being used in the game, but no matter which one the newcomer tried, he was told, "You have the wrong kind of block." They were excluding him based on what might have appeared to be arbitrary grounds, but having witnessed the entire episode, I knew that their exclusion was based on experience. The previous game had been fun until it had gotten too big and even though the children weren't able to put it into words, they had learned that three was the right number for this game of drumming with cardboard blocks on a cardboard box.

Few things in preschool are more icky, emotional, and complicated than when children exclude one another. Had I only stepped in during the second phase of this game, I would have likely interpreted their attempt to exclude as unfair and would probably have intervened in some way on behalf of the child being left out. But as it was, I knew that their reluctance to add another child to their game had a basis in reason and experience, even if their way of expressing it, of drawing the line, appeared arbitrary. This isn't to say that children (and adults) don't sometimes exclude one another arbitrarily, but only to point out that there is more gray area here than not, which is why children must explore it if they are to ever understand it.

I helped them with their words, "This game is a game for three people." Then I supported the boy who had been excluded, for a perfectly acceptable reason, to find another game to play.

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Tired of butting heads with kids? Scolding them? Bossing them around? Do you feel like they just don't listen? Sign up now for my new 6-part e-course, The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think, in which I pull the curtain back on the magic that comes from treating children like fully formed human beings. This course is for educators, parents, and anyone else who works with young children. It's the culmination of more than 20 years of research and practice. I've been speaking on this topic around the world for the past decade and know that it can be transformative both for adults and children. For more information and to register, click here. Thank you!

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!

That's the Real Work of Being a Parent

When parents complain, "He doesn't listen to me" what they really mean is that their kid doesn't do what they want them to do when they want them to do it. Believe me: they are listening to you. They are almost always listening to you. You just disagree with what they opted to do, or continue doing, after listening to your words.

Of course, some of the time, they simply don't understand us, they're not ready to "get" what we're saying to them, like when I talk to young two-year-olds about knocking down other people's block constructions, but more often than not they are listening, then choosing something else.

We know they're listening because our own words come back to us, channelled through them, often days or weeks or even months later. I remember when my own daughter first cursed traffic from her carseat. We know they're listening because they repeat word-for-word, usually at a holiday party right in front of everyone, the mean joke we made about the harvest of hair growing from Aunt Millie's nose. I know a child's been listening when she can repeat, word for word, the argument her parents had that morning over a piece of dropped toast.

We know they are listening when they insist on wearing their unicorn bicycle helmet ice skating, like a four-year-old did, saying, "I'm going to wear my helmet because I might really fall instead of almost."

We know they are listening when they turn to us and say, like a three-year-old did on the playground, "When someone does something mean to me I talk to them to stop."

We know they are listening when they are courteous to their friends, like the two-year-old I overheard saying, "Hello Anna. My name is Elliott. Let's play!"

And we know they are listening when they put their arm around a sobbing friend, like one two-year-old year old did to another, saying softly into his ear, "You're crying about something. I'll take care of you."

They are always listening. Not just to the words we say to them, but those we say in their presence to others. That is their real classroom. When we adults take that seriously, that's when our children begin to make us better people, the kind who think about the words they say and the tones we use with the people in our lives. They make us work to become the people we've always wanted to be if only because that's the sort of person we want them to be.

Children don't learn anything from obedience other than how to command and obey, a dubious education at best. They learn almost everything else they learn from us by listening (and watching, of course). Real learning requires processing, repetition, time, and experience to fully comprehend. It takes place on their schedule, not yours, which is why it can seem as if they are not listening. But they are, know it, and strive to be the person you want your children to be. That's the real work of being a parent.

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Peter Gray says, "I recommend this book to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." In case you just can't get enough of me, I've also written a couple books, entitled Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book, respectively. Perhaps in the future I'll run some sort of contest to see who can predict what we'll name the third one . . . If you'd like to add one or both of these books to your own shelves, or if you know someone who would want their own copy, 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!

Leaving Our Children Illiterate in Body and Spirit

I prioritize reading books. Growing up, our daughter got to know me as a father who read books in the morning and in the afternoon. My wife and daughter are book readers as well. Our homes have always had book-lined walls. I also read a lot as a young boy. I remember keeping a stack of the books I'd completed at the foot of my bed as if they were trophies. I obsessively read every Hardy Boys Mystery, then every one of the books of Oz. Sometimes I would just hold those books in my hands and meditate on the memory of the experience of reading it. I read fiction for pleasure, but among the side effects is a sense that I'm getting to know other human beings from the inside out, rather than the more distant outside in way of getting to know characters in a play or a movie. I read non-fiction to excite my thoughts, but among the side effects is a sense that I'm a part of the great conversation that humans have been having since there have been humans.

It may sound like I'm boasting, at least a little. I mean, reading books is generally held up as one of the few worthy, perhaps even noble, past times. Smart people read books, educated people read books, if only more people would read books our world wouldn't be in the mess it's in. Reading, and reading books in particular, has been elevated in our society nearly to the level of "pure good," like being kind to animals. Only anti-intellectuals scoff at book readers and we all condescendingly "know" that it's simply because they're jealous.

In 1870 our illiteracy rate in the US was about 20 percent, but with the expansion of access to schools and, more importantly, books, by 1900 we had cut that in half, and by the middle of the century we had that down to two percent. For the most recent seven decades our literacy rate has held steady at 98-99 percent, perhaps because there's not a lot of room for improvement. The nearly universal access to books and schools, without any other interventions, has created what must pass statistically for universal literacy, yet to listen to the literacy hawks out there, one would think we're in some sort of crisis. Our schools in many cases have become little more than literacy factories, places where children, even preschoolers, are subjected to unproven literacy curricula that have demonstrated, time and again, their capacity to strip reading of it's pleasure, making it a mere task one must do in order to earn a grade. The boogyman of illiteracy has become the obsession of our school system. These kids will learn to read, damn it, and we're going to make them readers even if it costs them their childhoods. It's not an accident that the only time in my life in which I didn't read many books for pleasure was between about 15 and 22, when my schools were pushing this method of teaching literacy. I didn't even read many of the books teachers assigned during that time: I learned that skimming and paying attention in class was usually enough to pass the tests and receive the rewards (grades). I'm lucky I regained my love of books. Not everyone does.

Most experts tell us that the "natural window" for learning to read tends to be around seven-years-old (although we shouldn't find it surprising that literate two-year-olds and illiterate ten-year-olds might also fall into the range of "normal") which matches up with first grade in our country. I distinctly remember when my own formal literacy instruction began in first grade back in 1968 when our literacy rate was 99 percent. This is likewise the approach for more progressive school systems today, such as in Finland and other Scandinavian nations, which also have 99 percent literacy rates. In the US, however, we've increasingly adopted an earlier-is-better approach over the past couple decades in which formal literacy instruction is being pushed upon younger and younger children, not even sparing two and three year olds in some cases. And still our literacy rate remains at 99 percent. It's not working, or rather, it's not working any better than what we were doing in 1950, but with some pretty ugly side effects.

Much has already been written about the cost in terms of anxiety and depression among children being forced to engage in developmentally inappropriate academic instruction. Likewise, there has been a great deal said about how we've stripped reading of its inherent joy, creating a generation of reluctant readers. But I've been thinking lately about the pre-literate brain and wondering why we evolved such a long period of pre-literacy in the first place.

The consequences of print-culture run far deeper than seeing linear perspective. It conditioned not only the physical eyes but also the internal one. Or rather, it created the internal eye by conditioning thought into a visually dominant form. Under the influence of print, western thought became increasingly linear and specialized. And just as mass reproducibility was the hallmark of the press, so replicability became the basis for the scientific method. In short, print-culture produced the form of thinking we would recognize today as rationality . . . No longer enmeshed with the environment through every bodily sense, the environment has become something to be looked at -- and controlled -- at a distance.  ~Andre Dao

What if it's necessary to master other forms of literacy before subjecting our brains to the linear conditioning of print-culture? Maybe it's more important for the developing human to begin with literacy in a broader sense. We dance before we read. Maybe that's because dance literacy must precede print literacy. The same goes for drawing, pretending, storytelling, laughing, wrestling, digging holes to China, and pretty much everything else we do as children. All of these activities require a kind of literacy that must be embodied, that isn't linear, that can't be looked at or controlled at a distance. The fact that these sorts of literacy emerge first, should tell us that they are, at a minimum, the necessary foundation for print literacy. But it could also tell us that being enmeshed with the environment through every bodily sense is the primary form of human literacy. Or maybe there isn't a hierarchy of literacy at all. Maybe rationality isn't a superior way of thinking, but rather one of many vital and equal ways of engaging and understanding the world. And who better to teach us about these other forms of literacy than children who have not yet had their internal eye conditioned by print-culture. We rush them at our own peril.

When we watch and listen to children, we often don't understand them. They strike us as irrational. We struggle to reason with them. In part, this is because evolution has designed us to be pre-print-literate before we are print-literate. It is adaptive. It is necessary. When we force print-literacy on children before they are ready, we do so at the risk of leaving our children able to read, but illiterate in body and spirit.

And now I'm going to read a book.

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Tired of butting heads with kids? Scolding them? Bossing them around? Do you feel like they just don't listen? Sign up now for my new 6-part e-course, The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think, in which I pull the curtain back on the magic that comes from treating children like fully formed human beings. This course is for educators, parents, and anyone else who works with young children. It's the culmination of more than 20 years of research and practice. I've been speaking on this topic around the world for the past decade and know that it can be transformative both for adults and children. For more information and to register, click here. Thank you!

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!

Always Raising One Another

The other day I was walking along the sidewalk, just me and my own thoughts. As I came to the crosswalk, a woman approached at an angle that meant our paths would cross. I slowed my walk slightly and she responded by speeding up a bit so that we wouldn't collide. My actions guided her's and her actions guided mine, and so we passed one another without incident and went on our way.

We are among the species who raise their children. It's mostly a mammal thing, although birds do it as well. Most other animals, like sea turtles, lay their eggs and that's where their responsibilities end. We are at the other end of the parenting spectrum, with our babies remaining dependent upon us for years. Raising our young is so important to our survival that we've evolved females with lifespans that tend to extend for decades beyond menopause (who we call grandparents), a rarity in the animal kingdom, at least in part for the purpose of having extra adults on hand for the project of raising children. 

It's hard to argue that caring for children doesn't stand among the most important projects of every human civilization. But what of this business of raising children. It suggests something beyond merely caring for them. Implied is this idea of teaching, or at least guiding. It contains within it, the ideas of shaping and moulding children, fine concepts in and of themselves, but also, jarringly, also terms most commonly used in reference to lumps of clay. None of us would choose to be treated like lumps of clay, except perhaps on the massage table. And then there are more problematic connotative verbs like manipulating, coercing, indoctrinating, and even, at the extreme, brainwashing. A good parent naturally strives to avoid going this far, but it's such fine line that it's difficult to know where it is. When does guidance become manipulation? When does teaching become indoctrination? 

On top of that, the power imbalance between adult and child, especially in the earliest years, is such that the only natural checks on us are our own judgement and our child's rebellions, which we are often tempted to quell by excerpting, at least a little bit, our power, thus introducing even further imbalance into the relationship, the beginnings of the classic spiral.

Thanks a lot, Teacher Tom, right? Parents are already under enough pressure. The last thing we need is to be told, on top of everything else, that we're all potential, or even actual, dictators and brainwashers. 

None of what I've written above takes away from the fact that when we are involved in raising children we are engaged in the most important, noble, and beautiful expression of what it means to be human. Raising children stands at the core. It is the beating heart of our species. Without it, there would be no purpose, no reasons, no meaning. Parents, and others who spend their time raising children, are the past, present, and future. Without exaggeration: we are the alpha and the omega.

We are not sea turtles and our children are not clay. We are all human beings who go through a long period of dependency, during which we are to learn how to survive and thrive. And the first thing we learn, the most important thing we learn, is that it's impossible without the other people who are there to protect and guide us. My prejudice, one that is shared by many, is that humans are born to be free, but there is no denying that we are also, and at least equally, born to be raised, and in turn, to raise others. We are not solitary creatures capable of living in isolation. No, in that direction lies insanity. Babies roll over and simply die without human touch. Prisoners kept in isolation lose their minds. Our babies don't need to learn this, of course, they are born reaching out with every fiber of their little beings, with their hands and lips and voices, seeking first and foremost the connection that is essential. We guide them with our breasts and arms and kisses, already raising them from the very first moments. This, we teach them, is what it means to be raised and they begin, from the very first seconds of life, to raise us.

And so it goes on throughout life. Aren't we all, always, seeking to raise each other? We are born to be raised and to raise others: it's human destiny. Whenever we find ourselves with others, we reach out like newborns. Of course, we've learned to be cautious because we know about the dark side. We're wary of manipulation, for instance, but every relationship is a search for the fine line. It's not wrong to want to guide others, just as it's not wrong to allow others to guide us. Indeed, this ongoing, lifelong ebb and flow is what makes our species what it is: our innate urge to guide and be guided by others. 

Every parent knows that their children have guided them at least as much as they have guided their children. Good teachers should be able to say the same thing. 

Like everyone else, I reckon, I just want to be me. That's the pure freedom I think I want, to be unrestrained by the rules, prejudices, and manipulations of others; to be, in any given moment, exactly who I am. I even say that's what I want for the children I teach. Ah, but what of the other people? They will always be there and they, because they are human, will continue to raise me, just as I, despite my best efforts to the contrary, will continue to raise them. This is what we do, over and over again. Maybe the words raise or raising sound wrong in this context. We tend to think of our adult relationships as ones amongst peers so to suggest that we are raising them, or that they are raising us, comes off as presumptuous. It places both people in a hierarchy, an unsavory, even destructive practice, yet we don't hesitate to do this with young children, even as we know in our hearts and heads that our relationship with them is likewise a two-way street. This is why I often find myself, before interacting with a child, asking myself the question, "Would I interact with an adult in this way?" If the answer is "No" I must make a serious study of where I'm standing with regard to the fine line.

When two strangers adjust their speed and trajectory in order to accommodate one another, they are, at a most basic level, both guiding and being guided by one another. In a moment, it's the story of our species, one to which I worry we too often lose the plot. But it can always be found right there in the first moments of life, this thing that makes us human: we are all, always, raising one another.

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Tired of butting heads with kids? Scolding them? Bossing them around? Do you feel like they just don't listen? Sign up now for my new 6-part e-course, The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think, in which I pull the curtain back on the magic that comes from treating children like fully formed human beings. This course is for educators, parents, and anyone else who works with young children. It's the culmination of more than 20 years of research and practice. I've been speaking on this topic around the world for the past decade and know that it can be transformative both for adults and children. For more information and to register, click here. Thank you!

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Even If We've Forgotten

I'm guessing, but we probably planted the tree around 1965 or 1966, but it could have been earlier. What I do know is that the tree wasn't always there. 

This would have made me around three or four when Dad, with my help, dug the hole in our front yard, right through the lawn we kids weren't supposed to dig up. We kept putting the sapling's rootball into the hole to measure its depth. Dad showed me on the tree's skinny trunk how deep we wanted it to be, so we dug and measured until it was perfect. Then we pushed the pile of dark, somewhat clayey soil back into the hole, packing it in around the roots.

It wasn't much of a tree. Our neighborhood in Columbia, South Carolina was populated with the towering remnants of a pine forest that had been carved out for our suburban cul-de-sac. This tree wasn't a pine, although it was an evergreen of some sort. I remember thinking it looked a lot like a tiny Christmas tree.

We fertilized and watered, then Dad stood up, leaning on his shovel, and told me we were done. 

I silently told myself that this would be my job, caring for this baby tree. It clearly needed help and protection. I imagined myself tending it day-after-day, raising it, I suppose, in imitation of my own mother and the mothers up and down our street. I would also tend it like my own father and the fathers up and down our street cared for their lawns and gardens, bending over it, on my knees, doing whatever it was that they did. I'd been lucky enough to see a lot of adults raising things, so I knew this is what one did with smaller, weaker, more tender living things.

For a time I went out there every day to check on this tree that we'd positioned near the roadway, right at the corner of our lot. We knew it was the corner because there was a metal spike sunk into ground right there marking the spot where our property ended and our neighbor's began, put there, I guess, by the developer of the sub-division. The original people who had lived there, who I knew of at the time merely as "Indians," were the Natchez, Cherokee, and Iroquois people. I recall looking into the branches of the full-grown trees and wondering if these original owners of the land had planted them.

I knew it took a long time for a tree to grow. Dad had told me that. But I was nevertheless disappointed each day when I could see no noticeable progress. The branches were far too feeble for climbing. It wasn't even full enough to hide behind. I once tried decorating it with a set of colorfully painted croquet mallets, but they wouldn't stay in place. I worried about the tree's lack of apparent growth for a time, but since no one else seemed worried, I let it go, eventually forgetting about it. Or rather, not forgetting about it entirely, but only forgetting it until I saw it, then forgetting it again, the way we do with so much of the world.

I, however, did grow, and with that my world became larger than my house, yard, and cul-de-sac. I made friends, went to school, and then we moved away just before my 10th birthday. I know the tree grew in that time as well, but it did so off my radar, so my only memories are of that sapling we planted.

A few days ago I was playing around with Google's "street view" and decided to travel virtually for a look at our old house, the place we left nearly half a century ago. And there was the tree we had planted. It is still more or less the same shape, just larger, big enough for climbing. There are other trees around it now. Trees I don't remember, pines that tower over it. Dad had obviously chosen a slower growing variety. Even so, it appears to be on the verge of overhanging the next door neighbor's driveway. It doesn't look like it's been pruned to accommodate cars yet, even now, 50 years later. Dad really knew what he was doing when he planted that tree. He had seen into the future, wanting both the tree and the neighbor to have the room they needed. In the street view picture, I can count six smaller trees, two still saplings, that subsequent families have scattered across the front lawn. Some day, there will no lawn, what with all the shade and those giant roots sucking up all the moisture, but that day is still decades away.

Trees naturally live for hundreds of years, so the one we planted is still in its youth. That boy I was when it was a sapling wonders if it remembers me as I remember it. Trees have long memories, longer than humans. 

Every day, we are digging holes and planting saplings. We might not be able to identify them any longer, but they continue to grow and shape the world. We remain connected to them, even if we've forgotten them. This is the business we are in, all of us, all the time. The expression tells us that we reap what we sow, but that only refers to crops. Most of the things we plant in our lives are like this tree, planted, tended for a time, then left behind for others to tend or chop, cherish or neglect. And we too are shaped by what others have planted, tended, and left behind. Trees are connected through their root systems, communicating, sharing, growing together. What we see above ground is merely the illusion of solitary life. We're like that too, connected, communicating, and sharing across time and space, over decades and centuries, even if we've forgotten.

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Tired of butting heads with kids? Scolding them? Bossing them around? Do you feel like they just don't listen? Sign up now for my new 6-part e-course, The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think, in which I pull the curtain back on the magic that comes from treating children like fully formed human beings. This course is for educators, parents, and anyone else who works with young children. It's the culmination of more than 20 years of research and practice. I've been speaking on this topic around the world for the past decade and know that it can be transformative both for adults and children. For more information and to register, click here. Thank you!

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Their Play is Not Evidence That They are Fine

We've all seen recordings of children playing in refugee camps and in war zones. In Peter Gray's book Free to Learn, he tells about the games Jewish children played even in concentration camps. They were games of survival, for the most part, like challenging one another to touch an electrified fence, but they were games and it was play. Children play with or without toys. They play with or without freedom. They play alone and together. They play when afraid. They play when they're sad. They play when they're confused.

We point to the irrepressibility of childhood play as evidence of the resilience of children, and they certainly are resilient, but we make a mistake when we point to their play as evidence that they are "fine."

Children don't play because they are fine: they play because play is how children instinctively process (or, in other words, learn about) the world around them. I watched children who could only have been frightened and confused (because we were all frightened and confused) fly their toy airplanes into block towers over and over in the weeks after 9/11. My daughter was part of a classroom of three-year-olds who spent days playing "earthquake," yelling and ducking under tables as they had been compelled to do during a real one. Play is not evidence of joy and happiness. Play is not evidence of being fine. Their play, even under the best of circumstances, is how children attempt to answer their own questions and explore their own emotions about what is going on in their world. The only conditions under which children don't play is when they are very sick or when they are in isolation.

A child psychiatrist friend once told me that he keeps a doll house in his office because he learns far more from troubled children by playing with them than he ever can through talking alone. So yes, when young children play, they are demonstrating resilience, but they are not necessarily showing us they are fine.

Several friends have told me stories of their children's play during this time of isolation. One mother told of her five-year-old whose babies are constantly falling sick and being taken away from their mommy to the hospital. Some get better, but some die. Another tells of her sons who are chasing one another around the house pretending to have poisonous breath. Yet another has been wearing his superhero costume to violently punch throw pillows that he's named "Coronas."

Under normal circumstances, when everyone is busy facing their own personal, private, and familial travails, figuring out exactly what any individual child is processing can be a next to impossible thing to puzzle out, even for professionals. But during times like these, times when the questions, the anger, the fear, and the confusion are virtually universal, the way children use play to process their experiences becomes far more clear to us. So yes, our children are resilient. They are processing strange times, they are doing exactly what they ought to be doing, and I have no reason to believe that most of them won't one day be fine, but right now they are sad, frightened, weary, and confused. Their play is not evidence that they are fine, it is evidence that they are doing their part in the hard work we all have to do right now.

If we want to do what is best for children, and ultimately our world, child's play should be the work of schools as they re-open.

******

Tired of butting heads with kids? Scolding them? Bossing them around? Do you feel like they just don't listen? Sign up now for my new 6-part e-course, The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think, in which I pull the curtain back on the magic that comes from treating children like fully formed human beings. This course is for educators, parents, and anyone else who works with young children. It's the culmination of more than 20 years of research and practice. I've been speaking on this topic around the world for the past decade and know that it can be transformative both for adults and children. For more information and to register, click here. Thank you!

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!