. . . As Far As We Know

The emergence of human language some 150,000 years ago, it is said, also marks the beginnings of such things as our conceptions of time, visual perspective, and the scientific method. Even before the development of the phonetic alphabet, the requirements of language to move in a particular direction, with one thing following another, had conditioned our minds to perceive reality as directional or linear, which is the foundation of what makes humans unique among animals . . .  As far as we know.

Certainly, it's possible that other animal consciousnesses perceive reality as linear, but it's more likely that they don't given that physicists tell us that existence is almost surly not directional at all, that time has no arrow, and that the only thing that makes it seem that one thing follows the next is our unique human perspective. We are not, however, capable of comprehending reality as it is, with all things existing simultaneously and infinitely, except through mathematics. We cannot help but perceive cause and effect, and for the same reason we cannot help but tell stories, another thing that makes us unique among animals . . . As far as we know.

It might seem impossible to us, but human babies are born enmeshed in their environment through every bodily sense, one with the universe, so to speak, capable of perceiving the truth about existence, even as they are incapable of expressing it. Then, slowly, as language develops, they learn to perceive things as only humans do; to see life as, to quote my departed father-in-law, "one damn thing after another."

Language allows us to step outside of existence and observe it, and therefore, to some degree, control it. One of the key ways we do this is through storytelling, which is the ultimate way to prove that one damn thing does follow another. When a language-learning two-year-old is upset that their parent has left them alone at school, one of the surest ways to assure them is to tell them the story: "Mommy went away. You are at school. First we will play inside. Then we will clean up. Then we will eat a snack. Then we will play outside. Then we will read a book. Then mommy will come back."

The first several times I tell them this story it is meaningless to them; it does nothing at all to console them. They have not sufficiently learned the lessons of linearity, but as time goes on, as they both live the story and hear me tell the story, they begin to embrace it as a way to control and understand what is happening. Sometimes I even catch these young children whispering the story to themselves as they go about their days, ". . . inside, clean-up, snack, outside, book, mommy comes." They begin to anticipate, coming to me to declare, "It's clean-up time" or "Now it's time for outside," the word "time" being tested out as a way of understanding what is happening to and around them. As I come to the final pages of the book I always read at the end of our day together, their heads turn to look for mommy in the doorway. And if she is not immediately visible they say, "Mommy's not here," imagining a new possible ending to their story.

The centrality of stories to what makes us human cannot be overstated. Our stories are comprised of fact and fiction, of hopes and fears, of past, present, and future. When we tell stories to children, and when we listen to their stories (which are very often explicitly one damn thing after another), when we weave our stories together, we are collaborating in the human project of creating meaning and order. It's through storytelling that we come to finally take comfort from predictability and replicability. It's through storytelling that we come to understand that we can, in fact, change the story, to prove the rule of predictability by making it, at least in this instance unpredictable. It's through stories that we learn that we are not at the mercy of stories, that we ourselves can tell new stories or old stories in new ways.

Author Rebecca Solnit writes in her book The Faraway Nearby: 

"Fairy tales are almost always stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted away from their own selves and lives. Even the princesses are chattel to be disowned or sold by fathers, punished by stepmothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children's stories not in who they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one . . . In them, power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness -- from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis, in fairy tales and sometimes in actuality."

These are among the first stories that make sense to young children because they find themselves in a position of powerlessness, a condition that makes everyone, no matter our age, uncomfortable. It is the first among many injustices that we must process. These stories serve the same function as the story I teach to toddlers who miss their mommy. These stories serve the same function as all stories, which is to allow us to not feel so cast adrift. Stories are how we step outside ourselves to comprehend existence through our uniquely human perspective of linearity. And stories are how we re-enmesh ourselves with one another, connecting through our shared illusions of kindness and the comforting human illusion of one damn thing after another . . . As far as we know.

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

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

Desirable Acts Of Belonging

A couple weeks ago, one of our toilets stopped flushing: the chain that connects the tank lever to the flapper had broken. I cycled to the hardware store and located the replacement part I needed. Back home, I turned off the water to the toilet, flushed the tank dry, removed the old part, installed the new one, and turned the water back on. Then, although I was confident I'd set things to rights, I gave it a flush, taking satisfaction in watching the tank empty and refill as it ought to.

I've made this simple repair a number of times in my life. I remember my roommates and I panicking a little when it first happened in college. We were all slightly afraid of our landlord, plumbing repairs were not in our budget, and the internet didn't yet exist, but between the five of us young men we figured it out. I've not asked any of them, but I expect that the world is today populated by dozens of flappers that we have collectively replaced with our own ten hands.

I'm not a plumber, but I've learned to repair a toilet. I can also snake drains, replace faucet handles, and know when to put my tools away and call in a professional. 

As a boy, I admired my elders' knowledge about the world. They knew how to fix things, cook meals, drive cars, grow vegetables, chop wood, fold laundry, and operate lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and can openers. They inspired me to want to do those useful things myself.

Rudolf Steiner, the founding philosopher of the Waldorf school pedagogy, built his approach upon the idea that young children ought to be be immersed in environments in which they are surrounded by adults engaged in practical day-to-day activities and projects. Rather than assigning tasks to children, the adults' role is simply to go about their business of living, including children when they wish to be included and answering questions. Not only do children learn the basic skills of life in this way, but they also see that participating in practical day-to-day activities and projects are desirable acts of belonging, of community.

Parents often complain that their children refuse to tidy up their rooms or help out around the house, something most of them do, even eagerly, around our preschool classroom. I expect that's because we so often expect them to do it alone, which is unnatural, or we treat it like something undesirable, chores to be done grudgingly as an interruption to, rather than as a part of, our lives. 

As the great John Dewey wrote, "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." I'm happy to be an adult who can do things for himself, but that was never my goal, nor is it the goal of our youngest citizens. They are motivated by belonging and doing which is what makes life worth living.

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

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

The Worst Way To Solve A Problem

When I'm confronted with a hard problem, the kind that requires deep thought, I take a long walk or jump into the shower or call my mom. I do anything, in fact, other than actually think about it. If school taught me anything it's that the worst way to solve a problem is to sit down and think about it, yet that's what our teachers expected us to do. 

The stereotype of a good student is of a person hunkered over their desk in a quiet classroom or library, brow furrowed, pondering over a challenge, theorem, or thesis. And indeed, students are often found hunkered over desks, but I would assert that any thinking that happens is of a lower order, the kind required for memorization, which is to say to repeat an action or thought over and over until it has become a habit, which isn't what I call thinking. Indeed, things we do by habit, by definition, don't require any thinking at all, which means that the desired result of this sort of process is to achieve a point of not thinking. 

This is how most of us drive our cars: once we're beyond the habit development stage, we are, often literally, on auto-pilot.

When we recited the multiplication table in third grade the highest praised was reserved for those of us who could do it the fastest without sacrificing accuracy, which was the same standard that was applied to my high school typing class.

Thinking, for me, is much more closely linked to understanding and creating, and for that I've found these school-ish stereotypes about thinking to be counter-productive. Actual thinking, in reality, tends to be largely an unconscious process, which is why the first step after identifying the parameters of my hard problem, is to clear my mind, to get up and move, to release the hard problem into my unconsciousness.

Every psychologist, from Freud right up to today, knows that it is impossible for us to truly know our own minds. Indeed, the theory of dynamic unconscious rejects the possibility of this knowledge because it is so dynamic, which is to say ever-changing. It is impossible to fix by observation which sets it beyond our ability to understand through science. Yet this is where we do most of our thinking and conscious thought often just gets in the way.

A child at play, which is to say not sitting at a desk appearing to ponder, is in the natural state of a human in deep thought. Play is a place where conscious thought is applied to the present moment, freeing the unconscious to go deep and wide, to make connections, to solve, and invent. This is where Eureka! happens. It is where true understanding comes from. It frustrates us because it eludes our ability to pin it down with the logic of science or turn it into data with measurement because it is so dynamic and because we all live within it.

Our responsibility is not to make children ponder at their desks, but rather to free them to think, which is to say, to provide them with a safe-enough "garden" full of people, things, and ideas that they are free to manipulate and explore, to respond to them when they need us or ask us questions, but to otherwise get out of their way so they can actually think.

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

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

"Save The Earth Green Deal"

A couple days ago, a reader objected to a post by asserting that without being made to do things they don't want to do via a system of rewards and punishments, and do them to certain standards, children would grow up to become unemployable drags on society. I'm paraphrasing here, but his view was that life is hard, humans are essentially evil, and doing things for pleasure is a potentially dangerous waste of time. Without the firm control and guidance of responsible adults, he believes, they will never acquire the skills and habits necessary to become self-sufficient. He finished by writing, "All the while complaining how hard and unfair life is while trying to purchase i-phones and 60,000 dollar cars to save the earth green deal." (I fixed the typos, but not the grammar.)

This is a widely held idea, one that goes back at least to Thomas Hobbes and his masterwork of philosophy Leviathan with it's warnings of life being "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" without the strong controlling hand of institutions like government, the church, and schools. Later came the Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke and Jean-Jaques Rousseau who countered that humans are essentially good and that the function of institutions is to help us achieve our highest potential, both as individuals as well as society. It was from these thinkers that such things as modern democracy and universal education came about, but Hobbes is still clearly with us.

I share this by way of placing this reader in the mainstream of ideas. He is not an outlier. There are many who believe as he does. Indeed, when you look at how our schools tend to be set up, at the view of humankind that they embody, especially children, we see that his view may still be the predominant one. Looked at this way, school is not so much an institution designed around learning, but rather as a ritual ordeal that we expect our children to endure and overcome in order to enter the world of adulthood. It's a harsh desert they must cross or a frozen peak they must scale in order to join the rest of us in this nasty, brutish, and short life. We must, of course, use carrots and sticks because otherwise they will want to remain behind in the blissful, naiveté of childishness where they fantasize about how they can do impossible and silly things like "save the earth green deal."

If this is how one sees humanity, then it makes sense to prepare children in this way, to disabuse them of any ideas of greatness or genius lest they be disappointed and focus them instead on their own, individual achievements so that their life, at least, will be a little less nasty, brutish, and short.

Those of us who take the opposite view of humanity, and children in particular, approach learning as a way to raise ourselves as a society above the nasty, brutish, and short (an objective that, frankly, seems farther away than ever given the horrifying events unfolding in Ukraine and elsewhere). We wish not to prepare children for the world as it is, but rather to be better: to be smarter, more creative, and more compassionate; to be self-motivated and passionate; and to know that "self-sufficiency" and "bootstraps" are myths that divide rather than unite. 

We envision a future in which the hopeful, enthusiastic curiosity of childhood is never extinguished because, indeed, it will only be in this way that we can ever hope to save anything, let alone "the earth green deal."

This is not just the question of our time, but of all time. 

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

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

They Are Already Living Purpose-Driven Lives

A few days ago, I impulsively jumped up to touch the awning of a building. I landed awkwardly and twisted my ankle. As I endured the first wave of pain, I cursed myself. What business does a 60-year-old man have trying to touch an awning?

I would never, even were I to find myself in possession of Aladdin's lamp, wish to be any age other than the one that I am right now, but I often envy the impulsiveness of young children. I envy their ability to live their lives while we adults go about planning to live ours. We tend to think of the process of moving from childhood to adulthood as one of maturation, but looked at from another perspective, it can be seen as one of becoming increasingly calcified, hesitant, and afraid.

We say, "Curiosity killed the cat" or "Look before you leap." We save for a rainy day. We limit ourselves to only one cookie (then feel like failures when we exceed that arbitrary limit). We struggle with decisions, both large and small, freezing ourselves up with damned-if-I-do-damned-if-I-don't arguments, stewing over lists of pros and cons, pulling the covers over our heads some mornings, overwhelmed by the things that must be done and decided.

Of course, I don't envy the skinned knees and hurt feelings that inevitably attend childlike impulsiveness, just as I'd rather not experience the pain of a twisted ankle, but I find myself often craving a child's willingness to act upon the imperative of their instincts without consideration of consequences. It's almost as if this process we call maturing is simply one of trading the occasional bad consequences that may result making impulsive decisions with doubt, hesitation, and fear of the those occasional bad consequences. 

The price we pay, of course, and what every child knows, is that much of the time our impulsiveness pays off. After all, I did succeed in touching that awning, confirming for me that "I still got it." 

I'm using the words impulsiveness here because it's one we use to describe the behavior of young children, often with negative connotations, but what if, instead, we replaced it with the word purpose? 

When I jumped up to touch that awning, I didn't have a choice in the matter. One can certainly scold me for not thinking things through, but I genuinely had no choice. I saw that awning. In a flash, I wondered if I could still jump that high, I became suddenly filled with not just the question, but the imperative to answer it. In other words, I became filled, in a moment and for a moment, with purpose.

We tend to think in terms of capital "P" purpose, holding it before us as some sort of singular and high fallutin thing, but our purposes can also be many and small. Indeed, most of them are. The gold standard, they tell us, is to have discovered some sort of high-minded purpose for our lives, but when I watch young children impulsively dash from one purpose to the next, I see humans who are fully alive, fulfilling one purpose after another, filling their lives with meaning. When they succeed in their purpose they celebrate, "I did it!" and when they fail they may cry, but they rarely doubt, hesitate, or become frozen with the fear of making a wrong choice.

Humans are at their best when they have purpose, many purposes, small and large, immediate and in the future. Purpose, after all, is that thing that answers the question of how to live. Purpose is something what lifts us out of doubt, hesitation, and fear. We all wish for our children, as they mature, to find their purpose, but what we might be missing is that they are already living purpose-driven lives, from moment-to-moment, grandly, wonderfully, impulsively.

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

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

"I Don't Think Being Good At Things Is The Point Of Doing Them"

Our daughter played on a middle school soccer team in a league that didn't believe in keeping score. The kids, of course, simply kept score themselves, always knowing in the end who had won and who had lost. They knew that not keeping score wasn't part of the real world and they mocked the charade.

That said, her team was not very good, losing all of their matches, often by double digits. The girls were aware of this and mocked that too. I played on losing sports teams as a boy. Adults would try to buck us up, to assure us that today was our day, that we possessed the talent to win and we would win if we just stuck to it. They assumed that we must be down in the dumps from all the losing, but I don't recall feeling that way. Sure, I would have preferred to win, I suppose, but more important was getting together with my buddies and playing baseball or football or basketball. The camaraderie was everything and I saw that with our daughter and her friends. They loved playing bad soccer together, even as we adults worried about their self-esteem.

We ought not to have worried, of course, but it's hard. We live in a culture that emphasizes winning. It's not enough to be good at something, let alone to merely dabble in it. One must strive to be best and when someone falls short, we think, it must have shame attached to it. In school, we grade our children, ranking them according to how well they do some on some arbitrary thing like math or spelling or self-control. Indeed, our schools are in many ways set up as judgement factories. What else is this fear of "falling behind" all about if not winning and losing? Why else is failing the worst thing you can do? How else to you explain adults telling children, "You can do better." It's so embedded in our mentality that many of us can't imagine education without the competition.

Author Kurt Vonnegut told this story: "When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of 'getting to know you' questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What's your favorite subject? And I told him, 'No, I don't play any sports. I do theater, I'm in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.'

"And he went, 'Wow, that's amazing!' And I said, 'Oh no, but I'm not good at any of them.'

"And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: 'I don't think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you've got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.'"

What if, as educators, we were all free to take this approach? What if the point wasn't being good at things and rather simply doing them? What if we stopped keeping score? What if the goal wasn't creating winners, but rather interesting people? 

"And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn't been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could 'win' at them."

What if we understood education this way?

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

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

Thinking Of Things And Doing Them

Two freshly-minted three-year-olds were playing on the floor, not together, but near one another. I was lying amidst them, fiddling with whatever came to hand. The boy picked up a toy that was meant to impersonate a tiny version of the cast iron hand pump we have on our playground. After a moment, the boy said, perhaps to me, "Hey, it's a pump!"

The girl responded, "I want it."

That's what we have been encouraging kids to do all year, ask for things they want rather than just snatching them. The boy continued playing with the toy pump without saying a word. I briefly considered saying, "When you're finished with that, she wants it," but let the urge pass. The boy silently played with the toy for 30 seconds longer, then unceremoniously handed it to her. I was going to say something about that, some words of acknowledgement or even praise, but again thought better of it.

A five-year-old once told me, unprompted, as if it was something he'd given a lot of thought, "I don't like doing things people tell me to do. I like thinking of them myself and then doing them." Of course, that's how we all feel, right through our lives.

Adults say entirely too much to children, most of it either commands, which no one likes, or blather, to which no one listens. For whatever reason, we seem to feel that children are not listening simply because they don't respond to things like well-trained dogs. When the boy hadn't instantly acknowledged the girl's statement that she wanted the toy by replying, "I'm using it" or "You can use it when I'm done" or by simply handing it over, I was sorely tempted to say something, to amplify or translate or suggest. It was almost as if that silent space left after "I want it" was there for me to fill with blather.

And I know that whatever I said would have been blather because by remaining silent, I discovered that not only had the boy been listening, but it had prompted him to think. In that space of silence, he considered the information she had provided him, thought of what to do himself, and did it. He needed no reward from me, no pat on the back or "Good job," no benevolent overlord wielding carrots, sticks, commands, or blather.

After nearly nine months together as classmates, it was apparent that these kids understood that this is how free and equal humans are meant to live together: thinking of things themselves and doing them, and that is its own reward.

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

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

The Wednesday Bunny

There will always be unknowable things. For those things, even in this age of science, we rely upon belief. There are obviously religious beliefs, faith in a higher power, but even atheists build their lives upon belief.

We might, for instance,  believe in the essential goodness of humankind, and we might hold to that belief even in the face of contrary evidence. 

Many Wall Street types base their careers on the maxim that greed is good, a belief that allows them to turn profits in ways that many of us find distasteful, even immoral. 

Forty-four percent of Icelanders believe in at least the possibility that "hidden people" actually exists -- elves, fairies and the like.

We are all believers, in things both large and small.

Even those things we are most certain about, like the things we see with our own eyes or hear with our own ears, are likely based on beliefs about how the universe should operate rather than how it actually operates.

Even science is a system of belief, one that depends upon scientific consensus, a fickle thing at best. Indeed, the core belief of the scientific approach is that it doesn't rely upon belief at all. But even its most staunch advocates admit that today's consensus may, or even will, one day be found to be bunk. That's how science works: at any given moment "scientific truth" is a best guess based on what we believe we know. The purpose of scientific theories is not to demonstrate how the world works, but rather to offer an idea to be tested, challenged, changed, and, if ultimately found lacking by consensus, discarded and replaced with something new.

Our world is the way it is, because of how our beliefs interact with one another: religion and science and human nature and greed and fairies all stirred up together to create what we call reality.

Intelligence, I don't think, is ever our problem as a species. We have the necessary intelligence, even those of us who don't believe that we are sufficiently intelligent. No, it's our various beliefs, and how they interact with one another, that cause most our human problems.

The biggest challenge with beliefs is the simple fact that mine are true and yours, to the degree they vary from mine, are not. And vice versa. It is on the basis of this that our species organizes itself, with people of similar beliefs flocking together, allying themselves around those common beliefs, while othering those whose beliefs differ, even going so far as to label them as enemies.

This perhaps is the greatest difference between young children and adults. Young children have not yet learned to feel threatened by the beliefs of others. A girl once introduced an imaginary Easter Bunny into the game she was playing with her friend. The friend declared, however, that there was no such thing. The girl asserted, firmly, the way one does about an article of faith, "I know there's an Easter Bunny because he came to my house!" Her friend replied, "Well, I know there isn't an Easter Bunny because he didn't come to my house!" And there they stood, looking at one another for a moment, confronting the ambiguity they had uncovered. 

The girl called out to me, "Teacher Tom, what day is it?"

I answered, "It's Wednesday."

She turned to her friend, "Let's pretend it's the Wednesday Bunny, okay?"

That is what children know that we have forgotten: there is a place between your beliefs and mine where invitation ("Let's . . .") and imagination ("pretend") can build bridges. This is the place where young children live before we feel compelled, in our adult arrogance, to disabuse them of their "false" and childish beliefs. What if instead we leave them alone for awhile longer, or better, for our own good, seek to join them in this wonderful in-between place while it exists, a place where the Wednesday Bunny frolics?

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The Purpose Of Learning Is Joy

One of the big ideas behind play-based learning is that humans, and young children in particular, are learning all the time. 

When an infant lies in its crib watching shadows on a wall, for instance, we assume they are learning. We see their gaze, we witness changes in the movement of their appendages and we take that as evidence that they are learning. They don't need an adult to hang over them making silly sounds or to dangle a woodland animal mobile over their face in order for learning to happen. By virtue of the fact that the shadows are holding the infant's attention, we can surmise that the baby's curiosity is aroused, which is how the human learning instinct manifests. When the sun goes behind a cloud and the shadows momentarily disappear, we observe changes in the infant, their arms and legs stop moving, their eyes search, their gurgling momentarily stops as they try to understand, to find what is lost. And when the sun remerges, we once more see the changes, the evidence that learning is happening.

What exactly any individual infant is learning from those shadows on the wall is anyone's guess, and we would probably guess wrong anyway because the moment we try, we must put our guesses into words, and language is something a newborn hasn't yet acquired. There are no words for what that baby is thinking, so it is impossible for us to know what they are learning, and frankly, it's none of our business.

We waste everyone's time when we try to put a pin in learning, to assign a purpose to it. This is a concept that we adults often have a hard time comprehending, I think, this idea that not only is all learning deeply personal and individual, but it is also ultimately unknowable to anyone but the person whose curiosity and, therefore, thought is engaged. They may be able to tell us what they have learned or are learning, but most of the time, like with our infant, learning has no purpose other than joy and that cannot be turned into data.

We are born to seek joy and learning brings us joy, thinking brings us joy, understanding brings us joy. To the degree that we've made learning hard work is the degree to which we cheat children of their joy. 

That learning, in an evolutionary sense, makes survival more likely, is a happy accident, just as our opposable thumbs and capacity to cooperate with one another are a happy accidents. We don't possess these traits as a species for the purpose of survival, but rather they are traits that have survived within us. Survival itself is a happy accident.

We have evolved curiosity and the capacity to pursue the satisfaction of our curiosity, like we evolved hunger and the capacity to pursue the satisfaction of our hunger. And just as we don't survive without hunger we don't survive without curiosity. But in both cases, the urge, the instinct, is about pursuit and satisfaction, not survival; not utilitarian purpose, but rather the one purpose that really matters to any of us, which is to experience joy.

As adults we might make a decision to learn something for what appear to be utilitarian reasons. For instance, I might learn Spanish in preparation for a trip to Mexico. I make that decision to learn Spanish because I believe, based on what I've learned so far in life, that doing so will increase the odds of a satisfying trip. I am learning Spanish, therefore, because it is about my self-selected pursuit and the satisfaction of that pursuit. Even if the immediate satisfaction I pursue is a greasy buck, I must, at some level anticipate that this money will, somehow, some day, lead to joy. 

Otherwise, there is no point, and that is the path to depression. 

Should I presume to teach Spanish to a young child who has not chosen to learn it, I take curiosity, and therefore joy, out of the equation. I distract them from the shadows on the wall and force them to attend to my silly sounds and dangling woodland animal mobiles. When I do this, I cheat the child of their own, self-selected pursuit, which means, no matter how well-intended I am, leading them away from joy.

Curiosity is an imperative. It is one of the few universal purposes. It makes survival more likely, but survival itself is not a purpose. 

When we leave our babies to contemplate shadows on the wall we free them to play, to pursue their own thoughts, and to create their own understanding. The purpose of all learning, at bottom, is nothing less than joy.

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If you're interested in learning about what you can do, right now, to create a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For the past 20 years, I've been working in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? Click this link to register and to learn more. Discounts are available for groups. Registration for this cohort closes on March 31 (today!), so act fast!

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

What We Really Need Is To Bring Children Back To The Center Of Our Lives

If I go into Nordstrom and tell the shoe salesperson that I want high heels, their job is to say, "How high?" because the customer is always right. When I go into my doctor, however, and tell her I want Medicine X, her job is to say, "You might want Medicine X, but what you need is a splint."

In education, too many of us act like shoe salespeople when really need to start being more like doctors.

I've had the opportunity to visit schools in a dozen countries, on four continents. I've been to schools in most of the Canadian provinces and half the US states. I went to each of those places to talk to teachers and administrators about play-based preschool education. And everywhere I've gone, I've been generally well-received. Indeed, most of the time, those education professionals already know most of what I've come to talk about, yet I'm there because despite being knowledgeable, skilled professionals, many of their schools are still struggling to implement play-based education and I'm there to provide a nudge in the right direction. Some schools I visit are already fully play-based. I'm invited to those schools, to inspire educators to keep up their good work. They need the boost because most of us work in bubbles and even as we do the right thing, we find ourselves under constant pressure to introduce "just a little" developmentally inappropriate literacy instruction or add a tad more rigorous grading or homework or whatever. Play-based education, despite the overwhelming evidence to support it, is always under attack, even in the most friendly places.

I often ask my fellow early childhood educators about the barriers they face. Sometimes they blame regulations or their government's standardized curriculum. Sometimes they grumble about this or that administrator who refuses to look at the evidence. Sometimes they even blame corporations who are earning billions on the unmitigated disaster of high stakes standardized testing and various curriculum-in-a-box scams. And invariably, among the challenges these educators say they face are "the parents."

It seems that too many parents have come to see their children's schools as a kind of department store where the customer is always right. They've bought into the fear-mongering about "school readiness." They've heard about the higher reading scores at the school down the street. They've seen movies about the no-nonsense disciplinarian with a heart of gold who whips those kids into shape. They've watched online videos about the importance of "grit" and "a growth mindset" and "accountability," and even if it's all a little mixed up in their heads, they know they want that for their kids. And, of course, they've all been to school, so naturally they know a thing or two about a thing or two. Not all parents, of course, but enough that time and again "parents" show up as barriers. And all too often, it seems, professional educators find ourselves in the role of shoe salesmen, giving them what they want, or at least making them think they're getting what they want, even if we know that the shoe they're insisting upon will eventually cripple them.

Now, I'm not insensitive to the parent's plight. Most of us aren't professional educators. How can we be expected to sort through all the nonsense that's out there, not to mention the societal habit of traditional schooling, one that will likely take several generations to kick even with the right motivation. And yes, these are their children, the most precious thing in their lives: of course we must listen to them, consider their views, and understand that they are at least in part driven by fear. At the same time, education professionals are professionals in the way that doctors are. It's not our job to just give our customers what they want, but rather help them understand what it is that their children need in order to learn at full capacity.

From a teacher's perspective, perhaps the most important parts of the cooperative model of early childhood education is that parents are not just invited, but required to work in the classroom alongside the professionals as assistant teachers. There is nothing like being on the inside as a kind of apprentice to really understand how much they don't know, but how much they didn't know they didn't know, not just about their own child, but about children in general. Over the past couple decades, I've watched thousands of parents become educated about the kind of evidence-based learning that is characterized by play-based education. They've come to understand not only is their child a genius, so are all the others. They see that their child might be "behind" in some areas, but so are all the others. And they have front row seats to the incredible natural development of young human beings that takes place when we stop doing school to them and instead allow them to ask and answer their own questions in a beautiful, varied, and loving environment.

In our cooperative, parents rarely show up as barriers. In fact, the opposite is true: more often than not they are champions and allies, sometimes poking at sore spots or pointing out challenges, but always knowing that they must also take an active part in the solution.

Sadly, many American children are growing up in preschools and child cares, places to which their parents are connected primarily by email, the occasional phone call, and the quarterly parent-teacher conference. If we are going to truly transform education, this is something that must change. As it now stands, most parents are being educated about education by non-professionals: policymakers, journalists, and corporate hacks who haven't spent a day in the classroom, but who control the message nevertheless. They get elected on rhetoric about how our children are falling behind. They earn money by kindling the fear of missing out. They attract eyeballs with alarmist headlines. And the consensus of these education dilettantes is that some version of habitual schooling must continue, albeit with these extra grindstones added. Is it any wonder that parents show up as barriers to evidence-based education, which is to say play-based education, because they've been very poorly educated about education.

One of the primary projects of every human society is to care for children. For some ninety-nine percent of human existence, we understood this, which is why children always stood at the center of life. Today, in our wisdom, we have farmed this essential human activity to the fringes. Those who care for and educate our children are low-status, low-paid, and scarcely afforded the respect a professional deserves. We wonder what's wrong with modern society, well I'm here to argue that when we removed the care of children from the center of our lives, we removed the heart of community. We will continue to be "sick" as long as we keep insisting on Medicine X when what we really need is to bring children back into the center of our lives.

One of the ways to do this is to bring parents into their children's classrooms in a meaningful way. People will argue that I'm taking a privileged stand here, that too many parents find themselves too burdened with multiple minimum wage jobs to find the time. I can't imagine a better use of our education dollars than to then to simply pay these parents for their time.

People will argue that employers will never give parents the time off to attend preschool. Right now, that might be true, but here in the Pacific Northwest where there are thousands of thriving cooperative schools, many employers do make these allowances, often motivated by their own memories as co-op parents.

People will argue that employers will fight against us, fearing that having children at the center of their employees' lives will be too distracting. It sounds to me like these employers need to be educated, because whether they know it or not, parents are already distracted by being parents, not to mention the extra guilt and anxiety that comes from having their beloved children so far from the center of their lives. I would argue that employers who can be made to see the light will find that this transformation will result in happier, and therefore more productive workers.

For every objection, there is a solution, but the only way to find it is to keep talking about it. Again, I'm not saying that this is a silver bullet, but there is a lot we can learn from the cooperative model and it's commitment to educating not just children, but entire families.

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If you're interested in learning about what you can do, right now, to create a learning village that parents will wholeheartedly support, I've developed this 6-part course called The Empowered Educator: Partnering With Parents. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For the past 20 years, I've been working in a place that puts the tri-cornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. How would it be to have parents show up as allies? Click this link to register and to learn more. Discounts are available for groups. Registration for this cohort closes on March 31 (tomorrow!), so act fast!

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!