Shooting At Shadows That Are Running Away

When I was bored as a child, I would go door-to-door, ringing doorbells at the homes where I knew children lived, asking the adults who answered, "Can Angie play?" "Can Johnny play?" "Can Pheobe play?"

This was the 1960's a time of incredible political turmoil. There were protests, even riots, over the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, women's liberation, and school desegregation. Richard Nixon was running for president. Accusations of "Communist!" and "Fascist!" drove much of the political dialog. The violent crime rate was surging. Drug abuse was rampant.

Of course, as a young child I knew next to nothing about those things. We lived in the protective bubble of suburban Columbia, South Carolina, but more importantly, "the news" came mostly in the form of our daily newspaper and if my parents watched TV news, it was after us kids had gone to bed. When conversations turned to the ills and dangers of our society it sounded to us kids like the old Peanuts cartoons -- Wah-wa-wah-wah -- and we would head outside. There we would get up to classic childhood games like hide-and-seek, ball games, and, if we were feeling cheeky, we would sneak up to our neighbors front doors, ring the bell, then run away.

On Sunday in Louisiana, a girl playing hide-and-seek was shot because she made the mistake of hiding in an armed and frightened man's yard. The man admits that he was shooting at shadows that were running away. Shooting at shadows that are running away is a perfect metaphor for where we are today. 

Of course, we have always lived in a dangerous world. And in the US at least, especially in the south, there have always been too many guns.

One major thing that has changed in the past half century are 24/7 "news" networks that profit from violence, conflict, division, and conspiracy theory. As we all know, "If it bleeds, it leads." Time and again, studies find that the more televised news a person consumes, the more dangerous they think the world is. This is particularly true for elderly people who are more likely to be shut in with only these news channels for company. Even people in suburban bubbles come to fear the boogyman in the shadows, which has at least in part spurred us to own more guns than ever before.

Today, when a kid innocently rings a doorbell, they're liable to be shot by one of these terrified gun owners, as happened recently in Kansas City. Teenager Ralph Yarl made the death-defying mistake of going to the wrong address to pick up his younger brother.

A six-year-old was even more recently shot in North Carolina when she went into a neighbor's yard to fetch an errant basketball.

In upstate New York, a young woman was killed as a homeowner opened fire on the car she was in when it accidentally turned into the wrong driveway. 

In Texas, teenaged girls were shot when they mistakenly got into the wrong car at a school carpool pick up area.

I know nothing about these armed and frightened men other than that they were shooting at shadows, the ghosts of their fevered minds. Fear and firearms have turned them into the very monsters of their imaginations.

Our Constitution's First Amendment gives those network news channels the right to spew pretty much whatever crap they want to spew, even if it is lies, hyperbole, and slander. Our Constitution's Second Amendment has been interpreted to allow virtually unlimited access to firearms to anyone, no matter what their intent or mental state. The result is a world in which hide-and-seek, chasing after escaped basketballs, and even ringing doorbells, the substance of my own childhood, have become death-defying activities.

The girl who was shot in Louisiana while playing hide-and-seek was 14-years-old, a middle-schooler or freshman in high school. We worry that kids these days are growing up too fast, so it warms my heart to know that she was still outside playing with the other neighborhood kids. It crushes me to know that it will likely be the last time.

Perhaps I should be dwelling on the horrific prospect of the next random mass shooting event. Those are the real baddies after all. It could even be argued that these frightened men hiding behind their doors, shooting at shadows, are victims as well; victims of our gun culture and 24/7 news run amok. Psychologists tell us that anger is a "secondary" emotion, one that most often masks sadness and fear. Looked at through this lens, it's hard to not lump all of them into the same bin: sad, frightened, mentally ill, and armed.

I don't think there is any thoughtful person who doesn't recognize that we must get serious about mental health. This isn't controversial. Virtually everyone, no matter how they feel about guns, recognizes this. 

Polls likewise show that some 80 percent of us are in favor of some sort of legislation around keeping guns out of the hands of mentally ill people, and a similar number want to ban the sale of the weapons of war that are almost always involved in mass shootings. We all know it's the guns and the mental illness. This is what's called common ground. There are very few things upon which there is so much unanimity in our divided country. This should be something we can get done tomorrow.

In a functioning democracy, it would be political suicide for any representative to stand against increased funding for mental health and common sense legislation to keep guns out of the hands of those who will turn them on shadows. I know the devil is in the details (which is nearly always a euphemism for "too expensive") but damn it, the cost of inaction is far higher than inaction. I will continue to demand that my representatives, on a local, state, and national level, get serious about those details.

None of this does anything about 24/7 news, but from where I sit, that's on us. We can turn it off. We can stop rewarding them for sensationalizing. I've gone back to getting most of my news from my local news channels. I've found that I don't need 24/7 coverage of every scandal or tragedy, plus I like that much of what my local channel covers as news is actually about my neighbors doing cool stuff, like founding charities, restoring natural habitats, making art, or hosting community events. Every night, I discover interesting new shops, attractions, and exhibits at museums. I learn how the high school sports teams are doing, what their theater departments are producing, and which of my community's teen scientist nerds are moving on to nationals. And then, I turn it off, my faith in humanity more often restored than otherwise.

It's long been my belief that the greatest good we can do for our fellow humans is to place a soothing hand on their shoulder to let them to know they are not alone and to urge them to not be afraid. We all know someone who is alone, keeping themselves company with television. Those are the people who most need our hand on their shoulder. Those are the people who panic when someone rings their doorbell, even if it's a child. Perhaps if we reach out to them, they won't feel they need to shoot at shadows.

Objectively, we live in one of the safest times in the history of the world. This is what the data tells us. Violent crime is down, even with all the gun violence in the news. Life expectancy is up. Childhood morbidity is low. We are less likely to die in natural disasters than ever before. Yet we're afraid and well-armed because we've created a world in which "if it bleeds, it leads." 

I've probably written something here that angers you, or saddens you, or with which you disagree. But please don't hear me as a threat. Please know that I'm just trying to understand why so many of us are shooting at shadows who are running away. I hope you are too. I hope I've inspired you or at least given you something to think about. My hope is that you reach out to your representatives. My hope is that you turn off the 24/7 news and find a shoulder that needs your hand. 

Those shadows that we see outside our windows are our neighbors, our children, and most of them, most of the time, are just out there doing cool stuff. 

******

 

"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

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

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The Only Place Utopia Exists

Growing up, it was rare to have watched any movie more than once, other than The Wizard of Oz, which was annually broadcast on CBS, like a holiday event, throughout my childhood. The exception to that for me was the movie The Swiss Family Robinson, which I saw at least three times on broadcast television during my childhood.

I loved everything about that movie: a family shipwrecked on a remote, unpopulated, South Pacific island, who created a kind of utopia. They lived in a magnificent treehouse, played games with the local fauna, and cleverly used the local flora to not only survive, but thrive. It was perfect. Not only was the family lovingly together, but they had managed to discover joyful freedom and harmony both with one another and the world around them. Yes, there was an episode when pirates threatened, but the worst thing that happened was that, in the end, they were "rescued." To this day, I wonder how anyone who had created such a wonderful place, such a peaceful, joyful lifestyle with nothing but sun, fun, and love, could want to return to the hum-drum work-a-day world of school, rules, and proper clothing.

But that's utopia for you. Even in our fiction, we can't keep living there. 

Of course, I didn't understand it at the time, but I know now that we create utopias, nirvanas, and heavens, not as destinations, but as directional arrows. There will always be pain and suffering, at least in this world. People who have survived real life shipwrecks don't build wonderful treehouses, but rather scrimp and scrap and barely get by. Often they die. History is full of stories of utopia communities that either imploded, or evolved into, at best, hum-drum work-a-day worlds of schools, rules, and proper clothing.

I recently spent a couple days at a preschool in Florida where I observed classrooms and interacted with both educators and children. The older children, in particular, remembered me from an earlier visit. They played with me, climbed on my lap, held my hand, made space for me at circle time, and generally included me in everything they did. It was like a reunion of old friends. When I left their classroom to go elsewhere, they made me promise to come back. 

That brief time I spent with them was, indeed, utopia. Fleeting perhaps, but real nevertheless. Big, systemic utopia may be beyond us, but these small ones, these moments when pain and suffering disappear, when school, rules, and proper clothing don't matter, are the actual article. Utopias can be created on desert islands. They can also be created in schools, homes, and anywhere that humans are together. 

As I was leaving at the end of the day, I said goodbye to one of the children who had created utopia with and for me. "Oh, there you are," she said, as if she had been looking for me, "I made this for you." She handed me a piece of paper that she had folded into a card. On all four pages, she had drawn hearts in a rainbow of colors.

This is the only place utopia exists outside of our hopes and dream, in these small moments of human kindness and connection. And that is more than enough.

******

 

"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!

To Do Great Things In This Short Life

A pair of girls in fancy gowns were digging in the sand pit. They were not, as far as I could tell, digging for a purpose other than to dig a hole.

Not far away, kids carrying sticks were bickering heatedly over who was the real Batman versus who was Batman 2, 3, and 4, while others insisted in the tone of irrefutable logic that "we can all be Batman."

As I observed, a boy in a dinosaur costume crawled past me on his hands and feet, growling.

There were no smiles among these children, no giggling, no shouting for joy. I feel safe in saying, however, that none of them were unhappy. I also feel safe in saying that all of them were deeply engaged in applying themselves to their self-selected work

"He who would do some great thing in this short life must apply himself to the work with such a concentration of his forces as to idle spectators . . . it looks like insanity." ~John Foster

As an idle spectator, I didn't see anything as alarming as insanity, of course, but rather children engaged in play. On the other hand, if one traded out the children for adults, everything changes, doesn't it? I mean, were I to come across adults in fancy gowns digging aimlessly, I'd wonder about their mental health. I'd likely cross the street if approached by a man wielding a stick insisting he was the real Batman or someone crawling along the sidewalk like a four-legged dinosaur. 

It would, indeed, look like "insanity," to use John Foster's word.

I've been fascinated by the NASA finding that 98 percent of the five-year-olds who took the test they use to identify "creative genius" proved to be geniuses, while only 2 percent of adults they've tested are up to that high mark.

Most observers, including myself, suspect that this is the result of schooling; that despite our best intentions, our schools are managing to not foster, but rather undermine and erode the natural capacity for "doing great things in this short life." Indeed, most of these children will be, within a few short years, expected to begin behaving like "big kids," which is to say, stop digging holes in fancy gowns, stop pretending to be Batmen, and most certainly stop crawling on all-fours and growling, except perhaps during certain, unimportant scheduled times like recess. The older they get, the more they will be shamed when they "work" like this. And if they don't give it up, if they can't display their "creative genius" in the proscribed manner, they will eventually be punished, scolded, made to undergo therapies, or even be drugged. 

Apparently, around two percent of us are born with the kind of genius actually supported by our current system of child rearing and "education." Although, I would assert that a certain percentage of those we've labeled as "insane" possess one of the countless forms of genius that we don't authorize.

Perhaps society doesn't want to raise our children to do great things. Great things, by definition, are disruptive. But as an educator and parent, that is exactly the opportunity I wish to offer to the children in my life. I can't know what those great things might be and I should have no say in how they express their genius as long as they aren't hurting themselves or others. Yes, it's disheartening to know that the tall poppies are likely destined to be cut and the nails that stick up will be pounded down. But having lived so long amongst the only people who are free to fully express their genius, I continue to be inspired by the great things they are doing. I only hope that their time with me will increase the odds that their unique genius, their apparent "insanity," will survive the years ahead, and that they will emerge capable of doing great things in this short life.

******

 

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

"Ready for a book that makes you want to underline and highlight? One that makes you draw arrows and write 'THIS!!!!!' in the margin? Then you are in for a treat." ~Lisa Murphy, M.Ed., author and Early Childhood Specialist, Ooey Gooey, Inc.

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!

A Pedagogy Of Learning, Not Teaching

Pedagogy is generally defined as a method of teaching. I've often discussed what I and others like me do in our classrooms as a "play-based pedagogy," although to be honest there's never been a lot of teaching involved. The children are learning, of course, they are learning at full capacity, they are learning the way the brain is designed to learn, they are learning through the method of asking and answering their own questions in their own way at their own time. But at the end of the day, this pedagogy, if it can even be called that, is a method of learning not teaching, and anything we do teach is almost accidental, through role modeling for instance, or sporadic, most often done at the specific request of the one doing the learning.

Play-based educator Nick Terrones, director of the Daybreak Star Preschool in Seattle writes in his book A Can of Worms: Fearless Conversations With Toddlers about a girl who asked him if a worm had a penis, a direct question to which he owed her a direct and honest answer.

Kisha Reid, founder and director of Discovery Early Childhood Learning Center, recently told me about a ballet class she taught in the midst of her play-based program because the children themselves, and especially one girl with a passion for dance, insisted upon it.

I once brought in a stack of my old comic books at the children's request because they wanted me, in my role as a Marvel universe elder, to help them settle an argument over the "real" colors of The Hulk (originally gray, but the printers couldn't get a consistent shade, so they switched to green), Ironman (also originally gray, then all yellow, before finally settling on the yellow-red combination for which he's now known), and Spiderman (blue and red, although he started off with little spider web winglets under his arms).

These are exceptions that prove the rule. 

I played a lot of baseball in my youth and the longer I played, the more I came to understand that the common trait of all good players is the capacity to "be ready." As a fielder, you might go an entire game without a ball coming your way, but you still had to be ready on every single pitch, just in case. As a batter, you spent most of your time not swinging your bat, but being ready to swing your bat. I often think of this in the context of play-based learning: I want to have my head in the game so I'm ready to go when I'm needed, so I can keep children safe, and so I can respond when needed in ways that best supports their play. But entire days go by without a ball coming my way. 

When I think of my own pedagogy, I get a bit embarrassed, because it seems like a kind of highfalutin word for what I do. 

Nona Orbach, art therapist and author of the book The Good Enough Studio, talks about the importance of "permission" in her work. I struggle with the word permission because I shouldn't be a position to grant or not grant permission to anyone for anything, even children, but in a world that tends to distrust our youngest citizens, I must admit, in all honesty, that granting permission is exactly what a play-based program is all about: a place, maybe the only place in the world, where children know they have permission to follow their own curiosity.

Permission means that I must release any notions I have of controlling children, which is to say that my relationships with them cannot be hierarchical. This too is a challenge in our very hierarchical world, and especially when it comes to being an adult working with children. Daily, I have to remind myself that I am not in charge of these young people, but I am responsible for them. Perhaps more importantly, I'm responsible to them in the way one is responsible to any person with whom you have a relationship.

When I think of my own pedagogy, I see it as being entirely grounded in my ideas about how to treat other autonomous humans. In everything I do, I must consider it in the context of relationship and responsibility and resist the temptations of control and hierarchy. It is a pedagogy in which best practice means the conscious creation of healthy, caring, even loving relationships. Indeed, that is what the children demand of us. From the moment we are born we are connection-seekers. What else is curiosity other than the drive to enter into relationship with people, places, and things? And curiosity is the business of a play-based pedagogy, even if there is very little teaching involved.

Most pedagogies can only be fully understood as a theoretical concepts, but our pedagogy, the one embraced by educators like Kisha, Nick, Nona and thousands of others around the world -- the one of being ready, of responsibility, of permission, of relationship -- doesn't live in ivory towers. It is a pedagogy of learning, not teaching, of dirty hands, of tears and joy, of beating hearts, and of curious minds.

******

 

"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

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!

To Encourage And Empower Free People

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

We do not educate children so that they might one day hold a particular job, although that might be a result. If that were the only goal, however, then maybe we would be better served by giving up on the idea of public education and let the corporations train their own damn workers.  

We do not educate them so that they are better able to worship their Creator, although, for many that may be integral to their pursuit of happiness. But if that were the only goal then maybe we would be better off letting the churches train their own damn adherents. 

And we certainly don't do it so that they are better able to obey and serve the elites: that defies the whole purpose of self-governance. But if that were the only goal then maybe we should return to a feudal system and let the elites train their own damn serfs.

The experiment of our nation is, at bottom, self-governance, and that requires nothing less than a unwavering focus on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

When Jefferson penned his foundational sentence, of course, the word "men" literally meant "white men," but today most of us understand this to mean all adult humans. The only broad category excluded from this are children. Legally, they are citizens, of course, but without most of the rights or responsibilities of citizenship. Personally, I find this troublesome, but I'll leave that for another day.

Still, we at least grant them the right to life. As educators and parents I think that most would agree that keeping the kids alive, protecting them, is our foremost objective. More broadly, caring for the young is the primary project of every civilization that has ever existed. They are born with the right to life in the form of food, clothing, shelter, and to the degree we are able to provide it, safety. Indeed, most of us would lay down our lives to save the children in our care.

Liberty, however, is barely on the radar for anyone under 18, at least not under law. Of course, most of us provide our children, especially as they get older, some degree of extralegal freedom, but since it can always be infringed or taken away, it's hard to call it liberty, at least in the Jeffersonian sense. And as for the pursuit of happiness, we actively prevent that from happening, "for their own good," except perhaps in very small doses, usually as a reward for obedience, which is to say, the opposite of the pursuit of happiness. When I consider what most children spend their days doing in school, being told where to be, what to do, and even what to think about, it's clear that we do not consider the pursuit of happiness to be a right of childhood.

That said, the reason that those of us who advocate for play-based or self-directed learning are considered "radical," is that we strive to place the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness at the heart of our work with young children. In the United States, and frankly, in anyplace where self-governance is the goal, these three unalienable rights should, in my mind, rightly stand at the heart of what we do as educators. I have no illusion that children will be granted full citizenship in my lifetime, but I've done what I can to provide the children in my care with an education in self-governance. I have a responsibility to keep them safe, which is to say, to protect their right to life. Beyond that, I avoid commanding them when anything other than safety is at stake, and to empower them with the freedom to choose the what's, how's and why's of their day-to-day life, which is to say, their rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The Ancient Greeks recognized that freedom is the secret to happiness, something that Jefferson undoubtedly knew. That is, after all, the basic principle behind democratic self-governance: freedom leads to happiness. And as the Declaration makes clear, the pursuit of happiness stands as the highest goal of our grand experiment. 

Thucydides, the Greek historian and general, was among those who recognized freedom as the secret to happiness, but in an acknowledgement of the fallibility of any system, even self-governance, he added, "The secret to freedom is courage."

Without courage, the rest is just pretty words on paper. It's not enough, therefore, to set the children free, to allow them to play. We must teach them to be courageous with their freedom. In her book Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit writes, "What I'd wanted to offer was encouragement, a word that, though it carries the stigma of niceness, literally means to instill courage. Encouragement not to make people feel good, but too make them feel powerful." 

And that, I think is the nub of the matter: our role as educators is to encourage and empower free people so that they will grow up knowing that their highest responsibility as a citizen is not obedience, or it's glamorous cousin loyalty, but rather to pursue happiness.

******

 

"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 Long-Legged Bobcat

Becker, 1999

I invite you to take a moment to notice your breathing. Inhale, feeling the air inflate your lungs. Notice that brief moment when you've reached the end of your inhalation. Then exhale, feeling the air leave your body. Notice that brief moment when you've reached the end of your exhalation. Do it again and again, feeling the world enter you, then feeling yourself enter the world.

Breath is our foundational connection to the rest of the world, but there is also our digestive process that takes in nutrition, then eliminates it. The world enters us through our ears, through our noses, fingertips, and skin. We return ourselves to the world through our voices, glands, and movement. We are so permeable to the world, and it to us, that it starts to become impossible to think of ourselves as anything other than an integrated part of a larger whole.

The sound of mocking birds outside my open window, enters me. In the process of taking their songs in, I alter them, if only because the human ability to hear is incapable of appreciating the fullness of the music. My dog, with her superior hearing, likely comes closer to that full appreciation, although it hardly matters because the moment those sounds become a part of me, I transform them into bodily sensations, emotions, thoughts, and memories according to my own capacity. And then, perhaps right away, perhaps on my death bed, but probably somewhere in between, I return what I've made of that birdsong to the world through behavior, which in turn, is transformed, but never destroyed, just as our breath is never destroyed.

Division is an illusion, one created by the myth of the individual which is grounded in Western ideas of science, reason, machines, and progress. I'm not saying that this isn't a valid perspective, but rather pointing out that is indeed a myth, one that inevitably pits us as outside of, or even opposed to, everything beyond what we perceive of as our bodies, our tribe, our culture. It is a perspective that leads to a glorification of competition and that views cooperation, even within the tribe, as weakness. By their very nature, perspectives cannot be wrong, but they are likewise, by their very nature, incomplete.

The other day, I heard a billionaire who was born into a family with emerald mines say that he is opposed the "the woke mind virus" because it threatens "meritocracy." From my perspective as a man who didn't start life with an emerald mine, I can see the silly (if it weren't so dangerous) hypocrisy. I want to say to him that I agree about meritocracy. Let's take away all the emerald mines from all the babies who were accidentally born with them and leave them to fend according to their merits rather than relying on the golden crutch of inheritance, be it of wealth, skin color, gender, or social class, which is, essentially, from my perspective, what the so-called woke mind virus is actually all about. 

From my perspective, I can see how this billionaire and I might agree, although I imagine that this billionaire will never be capable of seeing it that way because, it seems, he is so deeply invested in the myth of the individual, and the obvious logical fallacy that asserts, "I have it, so I must have merited it."

Of course, he might say to me, "You talk about perspective, but you haven't considered mine." But just as I really can't imagine what my dog hears in the mocking bird's song, I am, I guess, incapable of comprehending his point of view on the matter. Because to me, when I do the mental experiment of being a billionaire, I cannot imagine a scenario in which I don't give most of it away, enriching others, just as I strive to give away my power in order to empower others or my courage in order to encourage others. This is what breathing has taught me.

The older I've grown, the more I find myself craving connection and cooperation and that, from my perspective, means allowing myself to be increasingly permeable to the world; to notice there are no genuine divisions. I find myself becoming a seeker of new perspectives, breathing them in, allowing them to become a part of me, then exhaling them, transformed by their time within me, even as they have transformed me. I feel as if, with each breath, I become larger, and that causes me to want to enlarge others, however they fit their own permeable selves into this wholeness of which everything is included.

It makes me sad, that so many people my age seem to go in the other direction, becoming more absolute in their perspectives, less permeable. It's like they're holding their breath and just, I don't know, waiting for the end? It feels like fear. 

Life's too short for that kind of imaginary fear. I'll take genuine fear any day.

There is a bobcat that has been stalking our neighborhood lately. People are talking about it. I've not seen it, but several of my neighbors who have say that it has extraordinarily long legs. It's body, apparently, is the size of a normal bobcat, but it stands much higher than average. One neighbor held his palm a good three feet off the ground while describing it. Some of the neighbors want it killed or at least relocated. Maybe it is a threat to our pets or even ourselves, but so far it's only been known to dine on the local rabbit population, which, frankly, is a bit out of control.

The long-legged bobcat has been on my mind. It's a nocturnal creature, so whenever I'm out after dark, I'm looking for it. I want to see it with my own eyes. Some of my neighbors have told me to be afraid of it. Some have stopped taking their dogs out for walks after dark. But I want to breathe the same air it's breathing. I want to see those long legs and meet those shining eyes. I wonder if I could smell it. I wonder if it would hear my heart beat as I experience the authentic fear that comes from being directly confronted by this kind of ultimate permeability. A neighbor cautioned, "It could kill you." And all I could think was, But what a way to go! Eaten by a bobcat; a long-legged one at that. When people tell the story of me, the part of the individual me that, like an exhalation, will remain, dispersed, but eternal, that long-legged bobcat would be the aspect of the story that would keep the individual me, and the collective us, alive.

Breath in, breath out. Our permeability to the world is both the cause of and the meaning of life. When we allow ourselves to be permeable, when we don't fight it, that is when we are most like young children, I think, those humans who freely empower, and encourage and who are empowered, and encouraged in return. Sorry, billionaire, enrichment doesn't matter here. It's as natural as breathing in and breathing out. And when the day comes that we are finally face-to-face with that long-legged bobcat, we will know we are alive. Perhaps the long-legged bobcat will turn tail and run, frightened by our pounding heart, interpreting it, from its perspective, as a threat. Or maybe the long-legged bobcat will devour us, making our bodies one. But most likely, it will breath us in without violence as we breath it in without malice, and in that moment of mutual permeability we will both be transformed and enlarged, which is what, I think, we are here to do.

******

 

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

"Ready for a book that makes you want to underline and highlight? One that makes you draw arrows and write 'THIS!!!!!' in the margin? Then you are in for a treat." ~Lisa Murphy, M.Ed., author and Early Childhood Specialist, Ooey Gooey, Inc.

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 Cult Of Cute

Over the last couple decades, I’ve listened to a lot of early childhood experts. More often than not, I find myself nodding along. They say things I think are true about children. Or rather, they say things I want to be true about children. I hear that children are honest, open, and loving. That’s what I want to hear, for sure. They tell me about children who are curious, eager to learn, daring within reason, and who delight in getting messy. These children are instinctively thoughtful, caring, unspoiled, and above all cute. I often catch myself speaking of children in this way as well.

But the truth is that children aren’t like this at all. Or rather, they aren’t always this way any more than adults are. They lie, deceive and hate. They can be self-absorbed contrarians, fearful, manipulative, and persnickety. It’s a mistake to confuse their inexperience with innocence, and they often don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves. In other words, children, like all the rest of us humans, are a mixed bag, prone to the same flaws and weaknesses, even as we tend to place them on a pedestal.

Of course, every parent knows this, even if we’re not always willing to admit that our child is not the ideal child as described by experts. Sometimes, no matter how much we strive to be the perfectly calm, connected adult, our kids will behave like utter jerks. Still, we tend to persist in the myth of childhood as a kind of paradise and children as charmingly flawed little angels. 

Perhaps it’s because when we compare our “adult” world with theirs, their troubles seem so mundane, silly, even. Crying over the wrong kind of cracker just seems so cute. Being afraid of pine cones (which was an actual phobia of a two-year-old I once taught) makes us chuckle. I mean, we adults have real problems: mortgages, expanding waistlines, and marriages that aren’t as fulfilling as we’d like. Of course, any thoughtful adult knows that our children’s problems, emotions, and phobias are every bit as real and important as ours, yet even the best of us find ourselves sometimes minimizing them into cute stories we tell our friends or record in baby books.

When we idealize childhood, when we persist in the cult of cute, we minimize their experience while elevating them onto pedestals. We objectify them in a way that serves our needs at their expense. They are not better or worse than us: they are us. 

What is true is that young children are less likely be have become embittered or disillusioned by their experiences. They don’t tend to carry their grudges as long as we do or waste as much of their precious emotional energy on worrying about the future or regretting the past. They are incapable of Machiavellian machinations. They don’t save their energy out of a concern for being tired later. And they are much quicker to forgive us when we fail than are we with one another.

Childhood isn’t a special time in life. It is life. And everything children need we all need: compassion, forgiveness, and space to be fully human. There is nothing cute about it.

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

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There Has Always Been Too Much Information

The video below is the original, world-famous awareness test designed by researchers Daniel Simons and Christoper Chabris. If you want to play along, I would suggest that you expand the video to full screen or click through to watch it on YouTube. It's only a minute and a half long. You'll be asked to concentrate on the individuals wearing white shirts and to count how many times they pass the ball to one another. At the end, you'll be asked two simple questions. I'll meet you on the other side.

If you read the sentence following this one before you watch the video, you will spoil the experiment for yourself.

Half of the people who watch this video do not notice the man in the gorilla suit until it's pointed out to them. This isn't a trick. It happens to us all day long. We think we're paying attention to the world, but really we're only paying attention to a tiny fraction of the world at any given moment because to do otherwise, to pay attention to everything, is simply impossible.

In this case, the experimenters told you where to focus your attention, which is more or less how magicians amaze us. Most of the time, however, we are doing it to ourselves. The human mind has evolved the capacity to focus on those things we are looking for (like people in white shirts passing a basketball) or novelty (like a tiger stalking into the room). The rest, we tend to eliminate from our awareness. Right now, for instance, there is a mocking bird singing a crazy song right outside my open window, but I wasn't conscious of it until I paused to intentionally take notice of what else is going on around me beyond my laptop screen. 

We complain today about information overload, but it's important to note that there has always been too much information. Socrates worried that the phonetic alphabet was causing the world to be overwhelmed with a confusing flood of information which he feared would make us unable to discover truth. Philosopher René Descartes complained in the 17th century that the printing press was overwhelming us: "Even if all knowledge could be found in books, where it is mixed in with so many useless things and confusingly heaped in such large volumes, it would take longer to read those books than we have to live in this life and more effort to select the useful things than to find them oneself." Today it's the internet that is serving up truth mixed in with "large volumes" of "useless things," disinformation, and other distractions that are leading us astray.

Take a walk in the forest, they tell us, in order to escape the deluge. It's a great idea. I love taking long walks in nature, but that doesn't allow us to escape the abundance of information. Nature itself is bombarding us with information and disinformation (think camouflage or those mocking birds that imitate other species). Perhaps what we tend to find relaxing about nature is that this is the kind of informational environment in which our minds have evolved to thrive. After all, for some 99 percent of our existence as a species we lived in natural spaces and being able to interpret that information was a matter of life and death. Heck, for half of our 300,000 years on the planet we didn't even have language with which to bombard one another, so heeding, interpreting, and understanding nature was all we had. Of course, most of us today are so ignorant about nature, compared to our ancestors, that they would likely view us as too stupid to survive. We're liable to be distracted by the pretty the flower as we fail to notice the wolves closing in around us.

As the awareness test demonstrates, our minds are really quite good at eliminating distractions, cutting through the crap, and identifying what among the miasma is worthy of our attention. Of course, we don't all agree on what is worthy. We find the flower worthy, but our ancestors, in light of the wolves, might beg to differ.

The whole idea of schooling is based on adults attempting to compel children to focus, like a laser, on what the adults have determined is worthy. Of course, because the human brain has evolved to make these determinations for itself, in the name of survival, this is no easy task. So, by way of reducing distractions, we confine the children in buildings, in rooms within buildings, and often in chairs in those rooms. We prevent them from talking to one another, from reading unsanctioned texts, from scrolling through their social media feeds, and even from daydreaming, all in the name of reducing distractions. Some teachers even go so far as to demand the children's eyes be on them -- "One, two three, eyes on me!" -- whenever they speak. And still, we have problems with wandering minds. We are even drugging preschoolers because they can't help focusing on what they find worthy rather than what the adult, arrogantly, insists is worthy.

Today's go to explanation for our failure to compel children to focus on what we want them to focus on is to blame the internet, or video games, or social media, when the real problem is that there is a massive disconnect between how human brains work and how schools try to teach. Our minds are designed to be distracted.

Studies consistently find that our so-called "window of consciousness" -- that time during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem -- tends to open, on average, for somewhere between seven and 12 seconds. Schools see this as a problem because their teaching methods have little to do with how human brains work. Human minds think by bouncing from one thing to the next. The exception to the seven to 12 second rule, however, is when we're in conversation with someone else. Then we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems for hours on end.

A one-way lecture doesn't fit the definition of conversation, whereas the 1:21 minute video at the top of this post, because it actively engages us in the experiment, holds our attention. Socrates worried about the phonetic alphabet because his famous "Socratic method" was based in dialog, a back-and-forth of minds, and he worried about what we would lose when we lost the dialog. As an adult who has spent much of his adult life among children at play, choosing from minute-to-minute what is worthy of their attention, the only time I've ever seen a child distracted from their intellectual pursuits was when adults intervened. A play-based environment is one in which children are always in dialog with one another and the things that surround them, turning their attention, unfailingly to the most worthy thing.

Human perceptions have evolved to allow us to make predictions about our environment. Neuroscientists believe that what we perceive is mostly a projection of what we expect to find and that we then modify those perceptions based on incoming sensory data. Most of what we perceive in our world is of our own creation. We tell ourselves (and the way we do schooling is a classic example of this mistake) that we are mere receptors of outside information, but the truth is that what we perceive is largely the creation of our own minds. This explains why so many of us miss the man in the gorilla suit. We think we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the world, but, in fact, we create most of it ourselves, based on the predictions we've made.

It's the dialog, the conversation, the collective creation of knowledge that really stands at the center of our search for truth and knowledge. It is only through dialog, be it in conversations with friends, teachers, or Mother Nature that we are able sort through the distractions and actually see the man in the gorilla suit.

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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. 

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