We Can't Teach Mindfulness to the Experts

I was recently asked in a public forum if I've ever taught mindfulness to children. The question threw me. Yes, no, maybe, I don't know, can you repeat the question? 

Mindfulness is a radical Buddhist practice in which one focuses one's full attention on the present moment. This is something toward which I strive, even as I find it exceedingly difficult to achieve for more than a few minutes at a time. Recently, ironically, I was reading a novel in which one of the characters said something about mindfulness that sparked a train of thought that took my brain so far away from the present moment that I had to re-read several paragraphs. I find it a slippery thing to accomplish, requiring discipline, concentration, and practice. A quiet mind is a healthy thing, something valued by medical and spiritual practices from east to west.

Mindfulness as a concept has broken through into our popular culture, really taking off as a phenomenon in recent years. There are more than 100,000 books being sold on Amazon with some version of the word in the title, not to mention the proliferation of mindfulness workshops and seminars and gurus. My social media feeds are full of mindfulness memes.

As I reflected on being stumped by the mindfulness question, I had to admit that I've never attempted to teach children the practice of mindfulness. Yet I've spent my professional career surrounded by it. I see it being practiced wherever there are young children engaged in self-selected activities. A child bent over a puzzle in the midst of a noisy classroom is not just working a puzzle, she is the puzzle. Children negotiating their way through their games of princesses and super heroes are fully there in the moment, intellectually, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. And the younger the children are, the more mindful they tend to be: a baby staring off into the middle distance is, in that moment, the entire universe.

Every day, if I can manage to be mindful enough to see it, I am inspired by the children's ability to be mindful. How can I pretend to teach mindfulness to the experts? We are born mindful. The challenge is to not lose it as we grow up, and it seems that the best place to start is to not unlearn it in the first place. As important adults in children's lives, we too often allow our agendas, our drive to move from here to there, our unquiet minds, to override the mindfulness of children. We insert ourselves, uninvited, into their play with our ideas and concerns and scaffolding and witticisms, drawing their attention away from the present moment, often in a jarring manner. We can't teach mindfulness to the experts, but we can leave them to it. And maybe if we can manage to allow them the time and space for it, they won't grow to forget this wisdom with which they were born.

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It takes a village to raise a child. In this 6-part e-course I share my best practices to enable educators to make allies of the parents of the children they teach by bringing parents to the center of our work in the spirit of community, the kind of community every child needs. For more information and to register, click here. Act now to receive early bird pricing!

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The Original Affluent Society

One thing that the pandemic has done for many of us is to cut commute times down to zero. I live in an apartment building surrounded by Amazon, Google, and Apple offices that have been more or less vacant for a year. That's tens of thousands of people who have not been getting up early, eating, grooming, dressing, and transporting themselves, which translates to millions of hours that have been freed up for . . . what?

I hope most people have been sleeping longer or engaging in hobbies or some other self-selected activity, but I suspect not. I'm guessing most of that extra time has been used being in some way productive, which is historically what we do with the gift of time. Peasants in the Middle Ages, for example, working with the crudest of farming tools, for instance, worked far fewer hours each day than our modern farmers with their advanced farming machinery. Homemakers continue to always have work to do even as they no longer have to churn their own butter or scrub the laundry by hand in a tub of soapy water. Every day business tasks that once took days, can now happen in seconds, yet office workers still find it necessary to burn the candle at both ends.

Some companies have decided that even when the pandemic is over they will still give their employees the option of working from home. Why? Knowing the way corporations operate, I'm guessing that they've discovered that some employees, at least, are more productive not coming to the office. Productivity is a disease that we've contracted from human progress. It's a pandemic few recognize. Indeed, busy-ness is more often celebrated. No matter how many time- and labor-saving devices or systems we develop, we've proven ourselves to be largely incapable of using that extra time for anything other than more labor. We recoil at the idea of returning to the "primitiveness" of our hunter-gatherer past, but some anthropologists label that the "original affluent society" because that was when we enjoyed abundant leisure time compared to what we have today.

As a play-based educator, my goal is, in many ways, to create the conditions for such an affluent society to emerge. It's not terribly difficult because, unlike we adults, young children have not yet been induced by commercial markets to work harder in pursuit of material goods. All I really need to provide is time and a safe-enough place. Children know exactly what to do with themselves: they follow their curiosity, asking and answering their own questions, exploring, discovering, building, and inventing. I've had the privilege of having spent decades living amongst these people who are affluent when it comes to time and who know that its highest use is self-selected activity.

When adults dream of free time, too often it involves sitting on a beach, reading a trashy novel, while nibbling on exotic delicacies that are cooked for us and served to us. We imagine using our time to escape the busy-ness, to rest up, to re-charge. Escape from the grind might be just what we need at the moment, but I've found that most of us also have a deeper desire, one that we expect will never be fulfilled, at least not until retirement. And that is the dream to have the time to do what we really want to do with ourselves: write that novel, build a house with our own hands, master Italian cooking, form a band, climb a mountain. But none of these things have anything to do with productivity so we can't right now, at least that's what we tell ourselves. I have obligations. People are counting on me. And meanwhile we imagine if we just work a little harder, a little longer, we will somehow be free. Or as Albert Brooks puts it in his movie Lost in America, "I've finally achieved a level of responsibility. Now I can afford to be irresponsible." We laugh because we know that his self-delusion is our own.

I wonder if this is why I'm so passionate about protecting childhood, why I've dedicated my life to creating sacred places in which we vigorously defend against the plague of productivity, where children can experience what it means to be self-directed, where they can explore their world and know themselves in a place free from the voracious demands of efficiency, the ever-watchful eye of measurement, evaluation, and judgement, and the ceaseless nag of things left undone. I don't want them to ever feel the need to escape because, for at least one shining moment, they've experienced what it means to be free. And maybe, I hope, some of them will carry the seed of that memory with them into adulthood and plant it there.

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It takes a village to raise a child. In this 6-part e-course I share my best practices to enable educators to make allies of the parents of the children they teach by bringing parents to the center of our work in the spirit of community, the kind of community every child needs. For more information and to register, click here. Act now to receive early bird pricing!

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!

Thingmaker Featuring Creepy Crawlers

John Sain was a couple years older than me, which would have made him seven or eight. We always called him by his full name to distinguish him from his next door neighbor who was also named John. John Sain's father, Mr. Sain, had the caché of being retired military and having once killed a rattle snake in his garage with a garden hoe then called us kids in from the street where we were playing so that we could see first hand what these local dangers looked like. He even allowed me the honor of carrying the sack with the carcass around to the back of the house where we buried it. Mr. Sain once sucked blood from a finger I'd cut on a bit of glass while we worked together on a church-organized roadside litter clean-up crew. After spitting the blood onto the pavement, he told me it was to help avoid infection, which sounded both scientific and manly. Having such a father and being older, John Sain stood a little above the rest of us. He went to school during the day and so could only play with us in the evening and on weekends. When he was out there with us, it made our regular games special.

One day, I showed him some small plastic "army men" that I particularly treasured, which prompted him to invite me to his bedroom where he pulled out what he told me was an "army man making set." There was a small heating element, molds portraying the hollows of soldiers in various action poses, and pellets of lead. The idea was to choose a mold, put one lead pellet in it, melt it over the heating device, then, once the metal had fully liquified, you plunged it in a cold water bath to harden it. 

I expect Mr. Sain wouldn't have allowed John Sain to show such a "big kid" toy to a five-year-old, which is why we were being extra quiet and probably explained why he kept me at a distance as he worked. I admired how cautiously he handled the tools, how he used an oven mitt to handle the hot things, and the drama of the explosion of steam that leapt from the cold water bath. When he removed the newly shaped lead soldier from the mold, he handed to me saying, "You can't keep it" explaining that he would later melt it down again to make a new soldier.

This was the only time I got to see this toy, but I was sure I wanted one, badly. I begged my parents, who reminded me of Christmas and my birthday. I must have been consistent in my request for this toy because at the next gift-receiving opportunity I unwrapped my own casting set. I was only temporarily disappointed when the one my parents gave me melted plastic instead of lead and that the molds were of insects instead of soldiers. I suspect that the "Thingmaker featuring Creepy Crawlers" was considered a somewhat safer version of John Sain's set up, but it still involved heat, melting, molds, and steam blasts, although, to my disappointment, the instructions said to never try to re-melt cast figures. Still, I was absolutely thrilled. I can still experience the fumes of the melted plastic if I try, the heat on my hands, the electrical buzz of the heating element, the topography of the molds under my fingers, and the blasts of steam on my cheeks.

This was a toy I played with unsupervised, alone and sometimes with visiting friends. I emulated John Sain's authoritative caution, keeping others at a distance. Filling the molds took a steady hand. The whole process involved concentration, slow movements, and fine motor skills. The risk of doing things wrong was manifest. I didn't need an adult hovering over me to chirp "be careful" in order to be careful. I imagine my father must have helped me with the first batch, but from then I was on my own, a five-year-old with a toy that could not be sold today to children of any age, learning the kinds of lessons that simply can't be taught through theory. This is one of my earliest memories of play. To this day, I recall it as a kind of giddy balancing act. Always at the back of my mind was the reality that had been enforced by John Sain that one slip and I would be injured, perhaps badly. Indeed, without the danger, I expect it would have been a toy of a single day, something to which I'd never again return after that first afternoon, but as it was, I girded myself regularly. Each time I removed the box with its tidily organized interior from its shelf, I summoned a bit of courage as my heart beat with excitement that can only come direct experience. 

Lead is a hazardous substance, especially for young children, and while the box assured us that the plastic was non-toxic, I still wonder about the fumes it released while being heated. I'm not writing about this to "sell" anyone on the idea of purchasing such a toy for their own kids, but only to share what is one of my earliest memories, which is to say, an experience that made a significant impact on me. The two-time Nobel prize winning chemist Linus Pauling tells of a similar experience with an older boy who had a small home chemistry lab, saying that he was "simply entranced" by the experiments he was able to perform. I don't have a story anywhere near as dramatic, but to this day, I love few things more than cooking over gas flames on my stove top and undertaking art projects that require a steady hand and full concentration. I have no idea what impact my childhood experience had, whether it simply revealed something that was already there or inspired me to something that might have never been otherwise discovered, but I do often think of John Sain, Mr. Sain, and the Thingmaker as I work around heat or when I'm engaged in anything that requires a slow and steady hand.

What I do know, however, is that I have a fine memory of childhood, a real experience that is as much a part of me as the finger from which Mr. Sain sucked blood. There is truth and falsehood mixed up in it, science and myth. It lives not just in my mind, but also in my body and soul, having been fixed there by the manifest danger and the full concentration it demanded.

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If you think melting and casting might be something you want to try with your own preschoolers, here is a version I came up with for the kids at Woodland Park to try. It still involves real risk, concentration, and a steady hand, but without some of the unnecessary hazards.

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The Girl Who Didn't Know How to Play

A few summers back, a family moved to Seattle for the summer from Vancouver, British Columbia for the sole purpose of enrolling their five-year-old daughter Anjoli in Woodland Park's Summer Program. This sort of thing happens sometimes, because of the blog. I find it embarrassing and not necessarily in the best interest of children to commute long distances to attend preschool, especially when I know there are outstanding play-based programs closer to home. 

When I asked this father why they had left the girl's mother and older siblings to come so far just for four two-and-a-half hour sessions a week, he told me he was worried about Anjoli. "She doesn't know how to play." All of his children had attended school from the earliest age possible, schools that promised academic achievement, but he had recently seen the error of his ways. He told me that he felt it was too late for his sons, but he hoped that it wasn't for Anjoli.

It all seemed both heartbreaking and bizarre to me, but the father was sincere. I'd never met a child who didn't know how to play. Maybe, I thought, this father simply didn't know what play looked like. Indeed, I started our first day together on the playground with the theory that it was the father, not the girl, who didn't know about play.

Anjoli was a sweet, quiet girl with a tentative smile. I'm accustomed to children being nervous when they meet me, and she seemed shy, but stood boldly before me nevertheless, ramrod straight, wearing a smile that didn't look particularly natural. I greeted her, "I'm happy you're here" as her father hovered over her. When she didn't immediately respond, he answered for her, "She's happy to be here." 

We run our summer program as a cooperative, so the father was going to be serving as an assistant teacher for one day a week, but this first day he wasn't scheduled, so staying or going was up to him. He seemed as nervous as Anjoi and I took that as an indication that he was worried about leaving her, so I said, "It's not your work day, but you're always welcome to stay. I'll put you to work."

"No, I think I'll go for a walk now," then putting a hand on Anjoli's shoulder, added, "We've talked about this. She wants me to leave, don't you?"

She nodded assent without looking at him, her eyes focused on me. Her father kissed her atop the head then went on his way. Anjoli just stood there, not even really looking around, so I drew her attention to the features of the playground. She looked wherever I indicated, not saying anything. As we stood there, I greeted other children as they arrived, introducing them to Anjoli who considered them silently. As I moved around, she stuck close to me, so I invited her to sit beside me on a table top near the entry gate. It's a perch I often choose for myself because it gives me the best view of the entire space.

We sat mostly in silence as I was busy getting the day going. I didn't want to pepper her with questions, so I would occasionally make informational statements like, "That's Connor. He really like dinosaurs," "We have hammers at the workbench," and "Those kids like playing with the cast iron pump." I'd done this before with slow-to-warm kids, which is the theory I was working on. I was sure that if I just stayed nice and boring, her curiosity would eventually take over. I was wrong. We sat there for nearly half and hour, until I finally had to start moving around. When I did, she stuck with me.

We did a round of the playground together. I chatted with kids painting on easels. One of them had painted her arms up to the elbows and asked me, jokingly, if I wanted a hug. I laughed and said, "Not me! Maybe Anjoli wants a hug!" 

"No!" she shouted in alarm, leaping behind my legs. She said firmly, "I don't like to get messy."

We took a turn together by the work bench where I joined a group of kids pounding nails into scraps of wood. Anjoli kept her distance, saying, "It's too dangerous." She thought the playhouse was "too dirty" and the kids dancing on the stage were "too busy." The risk of getting sand in her shoes kept her from the sandpit, the concrete slide was too high, and the risk of getting wet at the water pump wasn't one she wanted to take. Finally, when we came to swings she took an interest, perching herself in one of the two seats, just hanging there, gently moving with he shifting of her weight. I left her there, only to find her at my hip a few minutes later.

The following day, was her father's work day. I assigned him to manage the art project. I had intentionally kept it simple and tidy for Anjoli and her father: colored pencils, paper, and a pair of electric pencil sharpeners. I anticipated that she would spend her day with him, but she chose instead to once more stick with me. I had thought that her behavior from the day before indicated that she had been longing for her father and that I had merely served for a day as a surrogate, but now I needed a new theory.

I was flummoxed, to be honest, because normally I get to learn about children by either watching them at play or through conversation, but in Anjoli's case, neither was particularly forthcoming. I was still, however, hoping that if I was boring enough, she would begin to take matters into her own hands, and in her way she finally did. 

"Teacher Tom, when are we going to do something?"

"We are doing something. We're sitting together on this table."

"I mean, do something, like . . ." and she waved a hand in the air."

"Like what?"

"Like learn something."

"I'm learning about you. I'll bet you're learning about me."

"Yes," she said. "I learned you're silly."

"That's a compliment. Thank you."

We sat swinging our legs for several minutes, watching the children play. Then she said, "When are you going to tell us what to do?"

My heart dropped. I was a "teacher," this was "school," and she already knew the worst of both of those terms. Maybe her father was right. Maybe she didn't know how to play.

I answered, "I don't think I'll ever tell you what to do."

"No! You must!" She didn't seem angry, but rather astonished.

"Do you want me to tell you what to do?"

"Yes."

"Go play with those other kids."

"Not like that. I want you to give me a lesson."

"The only lessons I know are about playing."

She rolled her eyes. It was the most animated I'd seen her. "That's silly. You don't know how to be a teacher."

"But my name is Teacher Tom," I objected. She remained firm, "No, you don't know how to be a teacher."

"Maybe you could show me."

"I will . . . But first we need some chairs." With this she jumped from the table where we had been sitting and walked down the hill, dragging two chairs back with her. She positioned them in front of me, then sat facing me. "Now you tell me something."

"The trees are tall," I said, pointing into their branches.

"Tell me something else."

"I'm getting hungry. I'm thinking of getting a snack."

"You're doing it wrong," she said, rising to her feet. "I will be the teacher." She made me sit in one of the little chairs and stood in front of me. Then in a calm, even voice she began a lecture that rambled from this to that, facts strung together in a seemingly random manner, punctuated with the question, "Now, what did I just tell you?" She did know how to play: she was playing school as she knew it.

For next several days, we played school together. Other children joined us at times, pulling up their own chairs, but they grew bored quickly. I had several conversations with Anjoli's father during this time. I pointed out that his daughter was playing. It seemed to me that she might be playing the only game she knew, or at least the game that gave her the greatest sense of comfort in a new, clearly confusing place. She was accustomed to order, I figured, and this game was her way to restore order. I gave her father the assignment to befriend some of the other parents with the goal of organizing one-on-one play dates with some of the kids. I hoped that her play instinct would emerge more readily in environments not tainted with the label of "school," which for Anjoli clearly meant sitting in chairs being told what to do. I learned over the next several weeks that most of her life in Vancouver involved going to school, then homework, then violin practice or some other activity, then bed. Her father explained that it was "cultural" to be so focused on achievement and that he had come to regret it.

Anjoli and her father stayed in Seattle for a month. During that time Anjoli continued to play the role she defined as teacher, although it didn't always involve the chairs. Eventually, she began to move away from me a bit, but she continued to avoid anything that seemed messy or dangerous. At one point, I found her sitting alone on a packing crate. She had arranged some wood chips as her students. Sometimes, she would instruct other children, younger ones who looked up to her. One day, near the end of our month together, she was explaining how the water pump worked to a group of children. Having never touched it, her entire body of knowledge had come through observation. When the water wouldn't come as expected, she instantly knew that the cistern was empty, calling out to me that it needed to be refilled. The spigot is just outside of the gate. As I stood there letting the water run, she came over to the fence.

"It's almost full, Teacher Tom."

"Okay, tell me when I should turn it off."

She looked at me with a curious expression, then laughed, "You don't tell me what to do. I tell you what to do!"

I said, "You're silly!"

And she answered, "That's a compliment."

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What the Evidence Tells Us We Should Be Doing in Our Schools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Curriculum of All-Bugs-All-The-Time vs. Hubris and Habit

I once taught a boy named Rico who had a passion for insects. He came to me that way as a three-year-old and was still hunting for bugs as a five-year-old. He didn't care at all for the tub of plastic insects we had inside the preschool, even the super-sized scorpion that every kid wanted, left him shrugging. Instead, he peered into the dark places -- under and behind furniture, for instance, or into the thin cracks between the baseboards and walls. -- because that, he knew, was where the bugs wanted to be. He included spiders in his studies, as well as snails and worms, even as he knew they were arachnids and mollusks, and for a time allowed himself to be fascinated with crabs and lobsters after the visiting "Bug Man" told us that they were, in fact, a type of insect. But his main interest were the bugs that live among us on a daily basis, the creatures he found in his garden, under his house, while on walks, and, of course, on the playground.

He would occasionally play with the other children, and often lure some of them to join him in his hunts, but he spent a great deal of time on his own, on his hands-and-knees, peering under leaves, turning over rocks, and investigating the damp, dark corners of the yard. When he found something interesting, he would begin to call out to others, drawing them together, excitedly telling them what he thought he had found. He wasn't always correct, but it didn't matter because he would go home and, with the help of his parents, do his research, then return the following day with the corrected facts. When children didn't respond to his excited calls, he would coax the living treasure onto his hand, then walk around the playground to show others.

The adults at Woodland Park didn't try to help him to find other interests. Occasionally, someone might, out of curtesy, invite him try something apparently non-insect related. If he wasn't too terribly hot in his pursuit at the moment, he would gamely give it a go. When he was handed a hammer he promptly drove six long nails into a piece of wood, leaving most of their shafts exposed, and called it a beetle. When he was handed a paint brush he painted a yellow and black striped yellow jacket, warning us that it could both sting and bite. When he was handed a pencil and paper he would ask for help spelling the names of his favorite insects. When he was handed the opportunity to tell a story it was about a family of termites. When he was handed play dough . . . Well, you know what he did.

When other children came across insects, they always rushed first to Rico to show him what they'd found, to have him name it, to inform them of its salient features. His lectures could be longwinded, but I never saw a child walk away. When we raised butterflies from caterpillars he gave us daily reports on their progress, often noticing minute changes that the rest of us missed. When our first butterfly emerged from its chrysalis, the child who discovered it, went to tell Rico first.

He was not the first child I've known, nor the last, who demonstrated this sort of laser-like focus on a single interest. Indeed, there have been other insect specialists at Woodland Park, as well as experts on dinosaurs, princesses, volcanos, outer space, Minecraft, and every kid's movie ever made. Indeed, most children find their passions. Not all of them, however, had parents like Rico's who simply delighted in his passion, including insects in everything they did, even tolerating, I was informed, "pet" bugs in their jars on the dinner table. 

But certainly, at some point, he's going to have to move on, right? What if he becomes stuck? What if that's all he ever wants to do? It's a question people ask about self-directed learning. Our conventional schools, after all, are designed specifically around the notion of a "well-rounded education" as determined by . . . Who? We blame school boards or administrators or governmental committees, for the top-down, hodge-podge curricula that find their way into our schools, but honestly, the real culprit is hubris and habit. We've always taught the kids, all the kids, no matter what their interests, no matter what is going on in the world, this certain, narrow, slate of subjects. Oh sure, there are often efforts made to include "relevant" material or to integrate current events, and particularly clever teachers might come in dressed as a the au currant super hero or come up with a learning game that involves the latest Disney princess, but it's all just packaging to sell a generalist curriculum of English, math, science, and history.

It's the kind of backwards approach that can only come from the hubris and habit of "that's the way it's always been done." It's as if we had compelled Rico to first learn to use his hammer before we allowed him to hunt for bugs. It's as if we were to make the poor boy learn to paint straight lines, then circles, then mix colors before we allowed him to turn over rocks. It's as if we insisted that he learn his A-B-C's and write his own name before we allowed him to let a ladybug crawl between his fingers and up his sleeve. Even if we had held the promise of insects before him like a carrot on a stick in an effort to trick him through the tedium of rote, it's likely we would have killed the passion long before he mastered the tools and skills demanded first and foremost by the curriculum of hubris and habit. 

As a teenager once said to me, "I never let my teachers know what I really like because then they use it against me."

The most frustrating thing is that as far as these curricula are concerned, no child has mastered the tools and skills required of them until they day they graduate from high school. Only then are they ready, according to the irrational logic of our hubris and habit, to hunt for insects, but by then they will have lost their allure, as they too get reduced to curricula.

Self-directed learning, play-based education, is the counter to the curricula of hubris and habit. It dismantles the hierarchy of subject matter and replaces it with every child's passion, be it an abiding one or, which is more common, one of the moment. And it's these passions that become the hub from which the lessons of life itself are most joyfully learned.

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Experience and Freedom Matter

I'm suspicious of most research performed on children. For instance, there have been several studies released over the last couple decades that conclude that we can't expect children, and especially teens, to make good decisions. (Here's an article that links to a few of these studies.) The leading theory is that humans are simply designed that way, that our frontal lobes, the part of our brain scientists think is associated with executive function, isn't fully formed until well into our 20's. So, you know, the kids really need us to help them make decisions well into young adulthood.

I trust and respect the scientific process and these results have, more or less, been replicated. The essential findings are that the older kids get, the better they get at making decisions, which makes sense to me, because experience matters, but I have my doubts about how much it has to do with the development of the frontal lobe. Oh, I'm convinced that something goes on in our frontal lobes as we make decisions. We can measure the electrical and chemical activity. That's the evidence we have that our brains do the thinking: we can either determine what part of the brain is active under certain kinds of stimulation or that suppressing or stimulating certain parts of the brain can cause certain types of "malfunctions." From that evidence, most scientists believe that our brains are the seat of thought, but there is evidence that other parts of our nervous systems play a role as well. How much, we have no idea. Not only that, but as much as we know about the brain, no one has any idea how our brains really go about creating consciousness, or if, at the end of the day, they even do. There is a correlation between our brains and thought, yes, but we've yet to come up with a workable theory for how it happens, and until we do it is all little more than educated guesswork.

But even if we stipulate that our brains control and create thought, I still suspect these studies because they never tell us where they found the kids upon whom they performed their research. My strong suspicion is that since these studies have been conducted in countries that mandate childhood schooling, that the children being studied have spent a significant part of their lives in institutions that allow them scant freedom to practice making their own decisions. They have been conditioned to go where they are told to go, to sit where they are told to sit, to attend when they are told to attend, to learn what they are told to learn, and to queue up, shut up, and put up with whatever the adults tell them to do. And more often than not, when they do make their own decisions, they wind up being punished for it. Experience matters and most modern children spend their lives being taught to not making decisions. Is it any wonder that when suddenly placed in a position to think for themselves, like in these studies, their inexperience shows? 

I wonder what would happen if these decision-making studies were performed on children from, say, our hunter-gatherer ancestors or even children from the Middle Ages when schools weren't anything like the schools of today. I wonder if these scientists could replicate their results with unschooled children. As Carol Black writes in her remarkable essay A Thousand Rivers:

Around the world, every day, millions and millions of bright healthy children are labelled as failures in ways that damage them for life. And increasingly, those who cannot adapt to the artificial environment of school are diagnosed as brain-disordered and drugged . . . It is in this context that we set out to research how human beings learn. But collecting data on human learning based on children's behavior in school is like collecting data on killer whales based on their behavior at Sea World.

I've spent most of my adult life around children who are not in school as we know it. I've known many, many teenagers, including my own, whose decision-making ability is superior to most adults I've known. I've known preschoolers who I would trust above the average man-on-the-street. That's because these are children accustomed to making decisions, who are experienced in decision-making. They have made plenty of mistakes, of course, but as Oscar Wilde wrote, "Experience is the name we give our mistakes," and when it comes to decision-making experience matters. 

When I read about these studies that purport to prove that children are somehow "scientifically" inferior to adults, that "show" that we are right to control and command them "for their own good," I think of those orcas living in the unnatural habitat of Sea World. School is an equally unnatural habitat for children. What would these studies show if only we would set our children free?

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Creating Pictograms for Instagram

The dog had walked me to Seattle Center and there at the base of the Space Needle a pair of teenaged girls were posing while a friend framed the shots. They pressed their cheeks together, lips forming matching buds. Their bodies assumed mirrored poses, with thrust hips and bent knees. Picture taken, they straightened up, spoke a few earnest words to one another, then on the count of three leapt into the air, throwing their hands over their heads like cheerleaders do, their knees bent to create the illusion of height.

I realized I'd seen those poses before on the social media pages of the young women in my life. 

I don't post a lot of "selfies," in fact I've never posted a selfie. They strike me as self-indulgent or show-offy or something, but as the father of a daughter who was a teen not too long ago I realize that this ritual has become a kind of necessity, just as posting a photo of one's restaurant meal or the obligatory shot of your holiday paradise from between outstretched legs and bare feet. They've always struck me as cliches. Couldn't they at least use their imaginations, come up with something new? 

As I passed on, the girls were positioning themselves to create the illusion that they were pricking their fingers on the top of the Space Needle, the classic tourist pose. Not far away, I came upon more young women similarly posing. I imagined their photos on my Instagram feed above and below those of the previous posers.

I've been thinking a lot lately about pictograms, ideograms, and hieroglyphs, those representative images that make up the Chinese alphabet or those found on the walls of ancient ruins in Egypt. The idea of a pictogram is to represent meaning, not by breaking words down into discrete sounds as happens with our phonetic alphabet, but rather to convey a more complete message, one that can be "read" using all of our senses. They are not lined up to tell linear stories as we do with our alphabet, but presented together in order to evoke thoughts, emotions, sounds, smells, and information; in other words, to provide a more complete picture. Of course, to do this requires tens of thousands of "letters." They say the Chinese alphabet has an unknown number of letters that exceeds 50,000. Even if you consider that most people only need to know around 2,500 for day-to-day living, that is still a thousand times more letters than we use. Can you imagine your preschoolers learning the Chinese alphabet song?

As I reflected on those girls, I realized that maybe the cliche of their selfies was the point. From the time of the Gutenberg printing press, that machine that allowed for the mass production of books, western society (and through our colonial practices, the rest of the world) has been increasingly concentrating its experiences into the written word as defined by the more efficient, more easily-learned phonetic alphabet, but maybe our current age is reversing that. What if what these girls were doing was creating pictograms to post on Instagram, messages that need a certain amount of standardization in order to effectively communicate? We old people often complain about the way younger folk endlessly scroll, clicking "likes" and "loves" while rarely stopping to read, but what if they are "reading" the way our pre-phonetic alphabet ancestors did, not by visually interpreting a handful of letters that represent a small range of sounds, but through a more complete experience. Maybe our social media feeds are today's walls of ancient times: temples and tombs and market squares, going right back to those cave paintings that obviously meant something to someone.

Our preschoolers are learning the conventions of social media use. I've been present as thousands of preschoolers have posed for photos. Today's poses are much more sophisticated and self-conscious than those of 20 years ago. Past generations often had to wait weeks to see the results of a photo, but today's children rush to "see" their picture the moment it's taken, sometimes even requesting re-shoots, sometimes even urging their parents "post it." It's easy to view this with a kind of alarm, to worry that they are somehow being warped by technology, and not without reason, but at the same time I see children who are already far more literate in this new pictogram-ic alphabet than many of us old-timers.

Tomorrow, perhaps I'll re-join those who bemoan the fate of this generation, the way Socrates bemoaned the advent of the phonetic alphabet:

“The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves . . . You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.”

But today I'm considering the idea that maybe it's a good thing that the kids are finding a way to break the hold that the phonetic alphabet has on us, translating all experience into a meager and inadequate 26 sounds, making so much of life into inert ideas, fixed forever on a page, not truth, "but only the semblance of truth." We are afraid of how much is lost as the printed word loses some of its power, but as these new alphabets emerge, I'm aware that I am largely illiterate, ignorant, which means I'm in no position to judge.

Jean Piaget asked, "Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool age on, throughout life?" This is the dilemma of relying so much on inert ideas that live only as text. Maybe learning to be creative, to create the world, requires a break from a phonetic alphabet that reduces rich experience to words on a page. Maybe we are witnessing a return of our more complex oral and pictogram-ic traditions, ones that live within us, and that require us to apply all of our senses in order to comprehend. Certain this world is far more complex and beautiful than can ever be expressed in by a mere 26 letters fixed inertly to a page. 

It might just look like teenaged girls posing for silly selfies, but maybe what it foretells is the end of forgetfulness in our souls.

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Despite My Utter Lack of "Teaching"

I never pretend to know what kids will learn on any given day and, honestly, any teacher who does is either deluded or blowing smoke. No one can possibly know what another person is going to learn. You can hope. You can plan. You can lecture yourself blue. You can even, if you're especially clever, trick someone into learning something, but the idea that one person can "teach" something to another, except under narrow circumstances, is one of the great educational myths.

There is a quote that is most often attributed to the Buddha, but is more likely of Theosophical origins, that goes: "When the student is ready the master will appear." I like these kinds of quotes that persist because they are true even when they can't be traced back to the utterances of Buddha, Socrates, or Einstein. This one is even so true that there is a corollary: "When the master is ready the student will appear."

Some days I accidentally "teach" something to a kid. For instance, I once improperly used the term "centrifugal force" (when I actually should have use "centripetal force") while a child was experimenting with a hamster wheel and the kid, months later, was still misusing my term while performing his experiments, even as I repeatedly tried to correct him. But most days I teach nothing at all except, perhaps, what I convey to my students by role modeling. I've tried, believe me, to convey specific information to kids, like when I tell them that dirt is primarily made from volcanos, dead stuff, and worm poop, but most of the time the only things that stick are the things about which the kids are already asking questions.

And still, despite my utter lack of "teaching," the kids who come to our school are learning. How do I know? I watch them. I listen to them. I remember when they didn't know and then I hear them saying and see them doing things that demonstrate that now they do. And even though I'm not teaching them, they mostly learn exactly what I want them to know.

What do I want them to know?

The joy of playing with other people.

The frustration and redemption of failure.

Emotions come and go and they are important.

I'm the boss of me and you're the boss of you.

Our agreements are sacred.

It's not only important to love, but also to say it.

It's not my job to "teach" these things. It is my job to love them and to do what I can to create an environment that is stimulating, beautiful, and safe enough: a place where children can ask and answer their own questions about the world and the people they find there. A place not of teaching, but of curiosity, exploration, experimentation, and discovery. We call it play and it's how we learn everything a preschooler needs to know.

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