The Grand Gallery of Consciousness

I dreamed that I was at a school that was an amalgamation of all the schools I've ever experienced. There were aspects very much like my high school, others like the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool, and others that reminded me of North Seattle College. There were some aspects of the dream that were reminiscent of our daughter's K-12 school and some that I can connect to the public and private schools I attended while growing up. In this dream, I was a teacher. My classroom was at the far end of a very large campus/building and I needed to get back to it, but kept finding myself distracted, derailed, and detoured by people who needed my help. 

There was a time when my dreams about school were of being a student again. Usually in these dreams I was late for class or had forgotten an assignment or was surprised by a test. And yes, I've had those dreams when I suddenly realize I'd forgotten to wear clothes, leaving me in my underwear, or even in my all together, in front of classmates and teachers. Sleep experts tell us that these kinds of school dreams are very common and speculate that they have to do with anxiety, stress or unresolved issues from our time in school. Some suggest that this "return" to school may have to do with a desire to go back to a time when we felt happy and secure, although the most common theory is that these dreams have more to do with our feelings about being judged or evaluated. 

If return-to-school dreams reflect anything at all (and it may well be that dreams are nothing more than random neural activity), I imagine it's mostly that: anxiety over being judged, which is the experience of schooling for many of us. Researchers find that these dreams often occur when we are feeling judged or evaluated in our waking life.

David Hockney

I have no idea what my most recent school-based dream means. It wasn't stressful. In fact, it was a "good dream" in the sense that it felt good knowing that all those people needed me. What struck me most about this dream, however, was how clearly I saw. I mean, my eyes were closed of course, yet my inner eye produced clear and vivid detail as if I were seeing actual people, places, and things.

Giulio Tononi is a professor of psychiatry and sleep medicine as well as the Distinguished Chair in Consciousness Science at the University of Wisconsin. He writes, "The eye is just the door through which (the sun's) rays enter our mind. Vison is in the mind, not the eye."

It sounds crazy until you realize that we see when we dream. We also hear. Some people report smelling scents, tasting flavors, and experiencing touch, temperature, and even pain in their dreams. In other words, our dreams demonstrate that it's all in our heads. As Tononi puts it, "When we are awake, and our eyes are open, they tell the mind what it ought to see -- they look outside and then select, out of the varied collection in consciousness's grand gallery, which painting should be shone with the light, but they don't do the seeing, no, that's something for the mind alone. For even though the eyes may be shut, as when asleep, or injured . . . the mind still sees, and of its own accord decides what's to be seen . . . (W)e see what we can imagine."

Looked at through this lens, education, learning, is a process of expanding the grand gallery of consciousness: of increasing the store of what we can imagine.

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to visit a school I attended for three years in a suburb of Athens, Greece. It was a discombobulating experience. I was at first convinced that we had come to the wrong place. I asked if maybe they had relocated during the intervening fifty years. Had the old buildings been replaced by new ones? But no, I was assured it was the same place, that the buildings were largely unchanged, but it was emphatically not the picture that hung in my own grand gallery.

Dale Chihuly

It was a struggle to make what I was experiencing fit my memories. By the time I left, I'd puzzled enough of the pieces into place that now, as I envision the school to write about it, my memories and my more recent experiences form into a single picture once more, one that I can "see" because I've imagined it so.

"(I)nformation is what the consciousness requires," writes Tononi in his book Phi. Most of what comprises reality swirls around us unnoticed. We can't see it because we can't imagine it. Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinkler says, "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that are life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness," which is to say that we are oblivious to almost everything that doesn't impact our survival. And even when we're told, say, that time doesn't exist or space is curved, we can't imagine it. Another cognitive psychologist, Donald Hoffman, asserts that it's a near mathematical certainty that what we "see" is not actually what is there, but rather our mind creating visions that help us survive.

It takes great effort, and great imagination, to see things that are not already hung in our gallery. Einstein famously attributes his general theory of relativity to thought experiments, including imagining himself riding on a photon. He "saw" himself doing something that no other human had ever seen. Today, there are countless humans who include this theory in their grand gallery of consciousness, but it was this singular man who first hung that picture.

Of course, Einstein was a certifiable genius, but his leap in perception is exactly the kind of leap every preschooler makes every day. From the moment we are born, probably even before, the doors of our senses admit massive amounts of information that their minds must sort into comprehensible sights, sounds, tastes, scents, and other sensations before they can be hung in the grand gallery of our consciousness. Every day, children perform these grand acts of imagination on par with Einstein's.

The more I learn about learning, the more inadequate I find the methods of standard schooling which is, after all, based on manufacturing models more than anything else. If left to their own devices, our children's minds are perfectly adapted for the task at hand, operating at a level far beyond any hierarchical system of direct instruction. 

Learning isn't a mechanistic process, but rather an act of imagination, one that has far more in common with our dream world than the classroom. And it's our great privilege to have young children in our lives to remind us that even as our own grand galleries may be fuller, there is always still room to hang more paintings.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

It Takes a Child to Raise a Village

I've spent my entire classroom career working shoulder-to-shoulder with the parents of the children I taught. As a cooperative school, to enroll children in our classes, an adult, typically a parent, but sometimes a grandparent, nanny, or other caretaker, was required to attend a minimum of one day a week to serve as an assistant teacher.

I would not have accepted a job in any other type of school. Our daughter and I had attended cooperative preschool together. When I observe more typical classrooms, I can't help but think how much easier and better the experience for both the educators and the children would be with more parent participation. For one thing, there's the math: our cooperative enjoyed child-adult ratios from 2:1 to 5:1. The simple presence of so many arms, legs, and laps meant that we didn't need to interrupt our classroom flow every time a child needed help in the toilet or with tending to a scraped knee or simply being supported through an overwhelming emotion.

Because our ratios were so high, and because it was presumed that the presence of loving parents automatically reduced risks of all kinds, we were in a position to develop and enforce our own regulations and policies. Even our insurance company left us alone -- not once in 20 years did a representative of the company feel the need to inspect our school. They just kept renewing our policy year after year no questions asked.

But, the biggest advantage of the cooperative model, from the perspective of a classroom teacher, was that I got to work as a colleague with every child's primary caregiver at least once a week. And once a month, we all came together in the evening for parent education, a time to collectively discuss our children, and the intentions, theories, practices, and practicalities of what was happening both at home and in the classroom.

When I tell educators in conventional preschools about our cooperative, their responses tend to fall into one of two categories. Either they sigh and say something like, "It would be so nice to have more parent participation, but they're too busy," or they roll their eyes and say something like, "I've had it up to here with the parents already." The assumption is that our cooperative must only serve privileged families and/or that I must be some sort of charismatic leader or saint or something.

The truth is that 20 percent of the families we served in any given year received financial aid to pay tuitions that were already among the lowest in our city -- $200-$400 a month. And while there were always a few families that made ends meet on one salary, most were two-income households. The children, however, were privileged in the sense that their families had consciously arranged their lives, often taking pay cuts or working odd hours, in order to spend this time with their children, in a community of likeminded families. Our cooperative was still not right for everyone, but the parents in the co-op were every bit as busy parents elsewhere, they were just able to prioritize their schedule to include cooperative preschool.

As for my own skills in working with parents, I spent my entire first year finding it difficult to even make eye contact with many of the adults in the room. I worried every day that I was being judged, that I would make someone angry, that I'd be accused of favoritism or neglect or not teaching this or that in the right way. And while I certainly received feedback of all kinds from parents over the years, the real sense of things that emerged, and continued to emerge, was one of a community, working together as neighbors and colleagues, under the unifying umbrella of caring for our children. Our children.

For me, this is the greatest beauty of a cooperative. Every preschool becomes a community of children, but a cooperative becomes a community of families. Like the tribes, villages and neighborhoods of bygone eras a cooperative becomes a place where we, together, share the responsibility, pain, and joy of performing the primary function of every civilization that has ever existed: caring for our children. Our children.

Over the past couple years, I've been receiving feedback on my posts insisting on the parent's right to bully educators about how and what they "teach" in their classrooms, which includes banning books, forbidding honest discussion of certain topics, and otherwise insisting, as one person recently did, that "Parents, not schools, develop a child's potential." It makes me sad, this narrow focus on my child.

Everyone knows it takes a village to raise a child, but it seems that too many of us have no idea why. Maybe they think it's just about having access to those extra arms and legs, but the real reason children need a village is that, by definition, a village provides children with an array of values, ideas, traditions and perspectives, many of which differ from those of their parents. That is the strength of community and it is the kind of education our children need.

The children from Christian families enthused about the Easter Bunny, for instance, while the Jewish children insisted that the Easter Bunny was a lie. I once sang a song in class that included the word "hell," and not in a religious sense. As I sang it, one girl's jaw dropped. It was clear that in her family it was a forbidden word. She was sitting on her mother's lap, however, and I read her mother's lips, "It's okay in this song." Some of our families were strict vegans. Some were gay. We all had differing racial and cultural backgrounds. 

That is the purpose of coming together like this, especially in the early years. We're not here to somehow collectively learn to count and recite the alphabet; we are here to begin to move beyond me and mine into the wide, wonderful world of we and us. This doesn't mean that we must change our minds. It doesn't mean that our own family heritage or values or beliefs are wrong. It doesn't mean that the Jewish children must now adopt Easter, that our daughters will now start using the word "hell" as an expletive, or that everyone must become vegan or gay or melting-pot gray. What it does mean, however, is that we must learn to live together, and even rejoice in our diversity.

The sad thing is that too many of us have forgotten what community is, even as, at some level we all crave it. It's sad because it seems that too many parents have the idea that they own their children, that they have the exclusive rights to "develop" them, and that the children themselves have no say in it. And in a misguided attempt to exercise control, these parents have decided that they have a right, even a responsibility, to shield them from anything that differs from their own narrow perspective. They fear diversity, which is to say, they fear community, they fear the village, because, at bottom, they fear that they will lose ownership of their child. It's sad because that loss of control is inevitable. It will happen sooner or later and the more they try to control their children, the more they try to "protect" them from our wide, wonderful world, the more complete, ugly, and painful the break will be when it comes. 

The greatest gift we can give our children is go out into our villages and neighborhoods alongside our children, living and learning as they live and learn. It takes a village to raise a child, even if that child is an adult.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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 Price of Hurrying

Several years ago, I had an aisle seat on a flight from Perth to Sydney in Australia. To my right, in the center and window seats, sat two sisters, 7 and 9, whose parents were in the row in front of us. I'd offered to exchange seats with one of the adults, but they, to my delight, waved me off. I might be the only airline passenger who hopes to be seated next to kids, even fussy babies, and in this case the girls were electric with their excitement.

They told me they had never been to Sydney before. They were only staying for a day, then jetting on to a resort somewhere in the South Pacific. It was all exciting, but what had them quivering in their seats was simply the prospect of being on a plane. They clicked their seat belts, they flipped their tray tables open and shut, they dug through the seat back pockets, they fiddled with the overhead controls, they repeatedly retrieved their backpacks from under the seats in front of them, even offering me a choice from their selection of candy. They chattered about what they were seeing on the tarmac from the window, agreeing with one another that they would swap seats every "ten or twelve" minutes so that they had equal turns to see. Everything about the plane and the prospect of flying was exciting.

And I was along for their ride. There's nothing like children to make us old people see things afresh. 

Our excitement built as the plane began to taxi. We were rapt as the flight attendants went through their spiel. The girls' voices became higher pitched as they expressed every fleeting thought or feeling to one another. They clenched one another's hands as the engines roared, and giggled, wide-eyed, as we accelerated, then lifted into the sky. "I don't think we're on the ground any more!" "We're really flying!" "Eeee!" They leaned into the window to see the ground recede below us. "Look how far we can see!" "We're higher than everything!" "The cars look like ants!"

By this time on a normal flight I'm well into my book or crossword puzzle or sleeping. I'm often, these days, asleep before the plane takes off. A woman a few rows ahead of us began to fill in the voids in a coloring book. As soon as he was allowed, the man across the aisle lowered his tray table, broke out his computer and began fiddling with an Excel spreadsheet.

Slowly the girls' enthusiasm cooled. "There's nothing to see out there." Before long, they had their tablets out, and like the rest of us, settled in for the long haul.

"Early railroad travelers," writes Rebecca Solnit in her book Wanderlust, "characterized this new technology's effects as the elimination of time and space, and to transcend time and space is to begin to transcend the material world altogether -- to become disembodied . . . Speed didn't make travel more interesting . . . but duller; like the suburb it put its inhabitants in a kind of spatial limbo. People began to read on the train, to sleep, to knit, to complain of boredom."

It wasn't long ago that traveling from Perth to Sydney was an adventure of months if not years, a fully embodied experience that demanded strength and stamina, alertness, and a deep connection to the natural environment that required the use of all the senses. And time. It required time. Railway travel, followed by cars and then jets, has done away with the necessity to set aside big chunks of our lives to go from here to there, but it has come at the price of, as Solnit puts it, "atrophy as both a muscular and a sensory organism."

Of course, many of us have joined gyms as a way to mitigate the muscular atrophy, setting aside chunks of our lives in a factory-like setting, complete with shiny machines, to apply ourselves to the meaninglessness of squating, lifting, and stretching -- activities that once occurred as part of a normal, productive daily life. Even walking, which was for most of human history our primary mode of travel, has been reduced to a treadmill that goes literally no where. And none of this does much for the atrophy of our senses.

My travel companions were disappointed by the view from their window. Even what they could see -- clouds, the horizon, flat, ruddy earth -- was stripped of its essence, its scents, sounds, sensations, and flavor. Even the weather was made moot just as it is in a gym. No wonder we get bored.

It's hard not to compare this to the experience of schooling, which is, like flying in an airplane, objectively the swiftest way to get from Perth to Sydney, but at the price of everything that actually connects them to one another. Humans, like all living things, are connection-seekers. Knowing that two plus two equals four is one thing: understanding what it actually means is quite another. And that is what we lose when we compel children to disconnect from the world, as we were doing in that airplane, to spend hours and hours being told about Perth and Sydney without the opportunity to actually experience, in a fully embodied way. The result is that much of our learning is superficial, lacking the depth that results in a genuine understanding. It is the difference between spending an hour on a treadmill versus an hour ambling about the countryside. Solnit bemoans the "disappearance of . . . unstructured space in which so much thinking, courting, daydreaming, and seeing has transpired."

When the captain announced that we were to prepare for landing, the girls revived, turning once more to the windows. "There's the Sydney Opera House!" one of them squealed. "I see the Sydney Harbour Bridge!" shouted the other. "Mom! Dad! Can we go see them? Please!" They kicked the backs of their parents' seats in excitement. They knew, deep down, that they needed a fully embodied connection with these famous things that they only "knew" superficially from photos and screens.

"But, you can see them right now," their father began to object. "We've only got one day. Maybe it would be better if we . . ."

"Please! Please!" the girls plead together.

"Okay, okay," he answered, letting their enthusiasm to learn and connect sway him. "We'll go the harbor as soon as we've checked in." Then he paused, "But we'll have to take the train because I don't want to rent a car."

"Yay!"

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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 (So-Called) Age of Reason

The Age of Reason is another name for what we call The Enlightenment, a European historical period typically recognized as having taken place between the end of the 17th century into the beginning of the 18th. It is commonly associated with the elevation of science and rational thought. It was a time of European revolution and discovery.

The term "age of reason" is also commonly used, under certain codes of law, to refer to a child of seven, when it is said that they can assume moral responsibility for their behavior.

Many of us use the word reason as a synonym for logic, but in the real world reason seems to have little to do with logic. The great thinkers during the age of enlightenment, those individuals we still recognize by one name -- Descartes, Kant, Locke, Newton, and Voltaire -- applied what they called logic and reasoned their way to all kinds of bizarre, incorrect, even deadly, notions.

Enlightenment era reasoning held that the indigenous populations of the Americas, Oceana, and Africa, for instance, were either primitive savages to be exploited or children of nature . . . to be exploited. 

Enlightenment era reasoning was perhaps pro-logic, but looking back with the perspective of history, we can see that much what is wrong with today's world, such as competing nation-states, racism, capitalism, and imperialism, are the bitter fruit of the so-called Age of Reason.

Having worked with children under seven for my entire adult life, let me assure you that humans don't wait until they are seven to begin to exercise reason. 

One two-year-old pricked his finger on a pinecone, it hurt, so he reasoned, given the information available to him, that his best course of action was to avoid pinecones. As experienced adults, we tried to reason with him, but from his perspective we were ignorant, irrational savages, incapable of reason. When he later noticed that there were pinecones in the branches overhead, he decided to forever avoid that whole area of the playground.

Another two-year-old came to understand that there was a connection between hitting and crying. And so, when a child cried, she would, of course, race to their side and begin to compassionately pummel them about the face and head. Even as we adults pulled her away, she fought against us, determined to heal the hurt with her tiny fists. She would watch us gently attend to the crying child, clearly annoyed with, from her perspective, our irrational behavior.

From our perspective, we see the flaws in the children's reasoning, but they, in turn see flaws in ours. We might argue, that our adult perspective is more reasonable, more logical, perhaps even more moral, but since both reason and logic are always a product of perspective, the children are equally valid to view us as the unreasonable ones.

Enlightenment era poet, William Blake wrote in his poem Jerusalem:

The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man, & when separated

From Imagination and closing itself as in steel . . .

It thence frames Laws & Moralities

To destroy Imagination

Blake worried about reason and logic as destructive forces and we can see from history, that he wasn't wrong. But he worried most of all that the cult of reason would "destroy Imagination," which is, at the end of the day, at least as important to human thought as logic. Indeed, thinking is always the product of imagination. Imagination is a powerful way to understand because it allows us think beyond our "Laws & Moralities" in a way that logic cannot. Logic cannot, of its own accord, take us beyond the perspective of established "facts." Only imagination can do that.

There have been times and places in human history when we mere mortals didn't need to concern ourselves with such things. Our kings and queens, our priests and priestesses, handed truth down to us, but in today's world, we are all expected to be seekers of truth and because we all represent a unique perspective, our attempts at logic, with its false promise of objective truth, can only yield a small sliver, a piece of the puzzle. Imagination is how we come to discover the other puzzle pieces that we must have in order to make a complete picture.

Our schools tend to embrace the Spectre of Reasoning at the expense of Imagination and it goes beyond the unhealthy focus on literacy and mathematics at the expense of all else. It leads to a culture of right answers, of Laws & Moralities. It is the imperialism of reason and logic that is, in many ways, the most destructive legacy of the so-called Enlightenment. It destroys imagination with its insistence that there is, somehow, one truth. But experience tells us that truth arrived at by logic alone is fragile and incomplete, a mere piece in an infinitely larger puzzle.

All it takes is to shift one's perspective slightly and it vanishes like the Spectre it is.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Making Decisions

Salvador Dalí

My wife and I moved to Germany in the early 1990's. She grew up in Austria, Germany, and northern Italy, so for her it was a kind of homecoming, but for me it was a true fish out of water experience.

For instance, I was accustomed to American style supermarkets with massive aisles of, say, chips, offering dozens, if not hundreds, of choices. At German supermarkets in 1992 there were two choices, both potato. Of course, there were 1,500 types of wurst available at the butcher's counter, but as far as American style packaged goods went, options were limited. 

From my perspective, these "supermarkets" didn't seem so super. My first reaction was to feel put out. Where are all my choices? But the longer I lived there, the more I came to appreciate the freedom that came from having my freedom of choice narrowed. Without so many micro-decisions to make, not only did shopping go a lot faster, but I rarely had cause to regret the decisions I'd made. Start with the cheap bag. If that didn't work out, try the expensive bag. If that didn't work out, stop buying potato chips. Simple.

Twenty-five years ago, researchers conducted the famous "jam study" (officially entitled "When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?"). Essentially, one group of shoppers encountered a display of 24 flavors of jam, while another group was offered only six choices. The larger display attracted more shoppers, but only around 3 percent of them actually made a decision to purchase jam. In contrast, 30 percent of the shoppers with only six choices decided to make a purchase. The conclusion: some choice is good, but too much seems to paralyze many of us to the point that we make no choice at all.

Long before that, philosopher Herbert Marcuse suggested that many of the apparent freedoms of the west are illusory because they are of this superficial consumerist variety.

Indeed, on the surface it may seem that the more choices you have, the more control you have, but as anyone who works with young children knows, too many choices can easily lead to feeling overwhelmed. I'll never forget a parent who asked me if I would use my "Teacher Tom magic" to persuade her son to brush his teeth at night. After a few questions, however, I found that in a misguided attempt to give their child freedom of choice, they had allowed him to pick out his own toothbrush . . . Every time they were at the drug store! Each evening, this poor boy was faced with the choice of some dozen toothbrushes and it overwhelmed him to the point that, like those jam shoppers, he couldn't make any decision at all. It wasn't until they got his choices down to none that he began to brush without a fuss.

This phenomenon also at least partially explains why play gets chaotic when there are too many toys, loose parts, or whatever. As Goethe wrote, "It is within limitations that he first shows himself the master."

One of the most important things we do in life is make decisions and the practice we get making these kinds of small decisions -- like about toothbrushes, potato chips, or jam -- prepares us for the more important decisions we will make in the future. We want our children to practice making real decisions for themselves, of course, because that's what ultimately makes a life: decisions, both large and small. And this is a particularly important skill for children growing up in a world of superficial consumerist choices. 

I'm a 63-year-old man who has made many "life altering" decisions. Looking back over my life, I see how I got to be who and where I am, in large measure, for better or worse, because of the decisions I've made. One thing I've learned over my decades of decision-making is that no matter how many lists of pros and cons I make, no matter how much I try to peer into the future, my best decisions have always been those that come down to following my gut, a practice I've been honing since I was a preschooler. In hindsight, many of my decisions weren't necessarily "good" ones, but neither were many of the decisions I made after systematically weighing the options. I often happily reflect on the series of lazy, superficially "bad" decisions I made leading up to the moment I met my now wife of nearly four decades.

At the end of the day, the future remains unknown, and the decisions we make today may or may not be the right ones. What we learn from a life of decision-making, however, is that, good or bad, we must strive to make the most of them, or recover from them, which is really the story of a life. Some of the most "successful" humans who ever lived made horrible decisions. Abraham Lincoln went bankrupt as a young man due to bad business decisions. Oprah Winfrey admits to bad romantic decisions. Robert Downey, Jr.'s decisions landed him in prison. Some people even assert that their success was a result of their bad decisions.    

When our children are very young, we make their important decisions for them in order to protect them from the negative consequences of bad choices, but there must be a gradual letting go, as we allow them to experience the natural consequences of their decisions. When we try to help this process along with punishments and rewards, we derail their learning by turning their attention to the power-dynamic between adult and child, instead of allowing them to experience the real world consequences of their actions, and, with our love and support, figure out what to do next.

Of course, we give them our best advice, but if it is truly their decision to make, we let them. Sometimes we're surprised when their apparently "bad" decisions turn out okay. Other times their "good" ones go awry. Most of the time, however, things go pretty much as our "gut" expected because we ourselves have a lifetime of practice with decision-making and its consequences. And we got there by making our own decisions.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

When I Was a Stranger

I was a stranger, and you welcomed me. ~Matthew 25:35

We had only just met, this four-year-girl and I, but we were already sitting around chatting like old friends. Markers, scissors, and plain white paper were scattered across the table top before us.

She was drawing a spiral shape, so I said, "You're drawing a spiral."

She stopped and considered it, then said with a shrug, "I call it a nautilus, but you can call it a spiral if you want."

Once she had drawn the outline of her nautilus in purple, she capped the marker, before choosing a green one. I said, "You capped the marker."

She nodded, "Yes, if you don't, they dry out."

She colored a patch of green, capped that marker and selected another color. Then she switched to orange, then red, until I got the idea that she was making a rainbow nautilus. I said, "You're making a rainbow nautilus."

As she went back to purple, she replied, "I call it stripes, but you can call it rainbow."

I was struck by the compassion this girl was showing me, a newcomer, a stranger in their midst, making space for my difference.

We sat in silence for awhile as she finished coloring in her nautilus. When she was done, she pushed it toward me along with a pair of scissors. "I went outside the lines a little bit, but that's okay because you can just cut right around the edges." She pointed to the outline of the nautilus, showing me where she apparently meant for me to cut.

As I started, I asked, not wanting to ruin her masterpiece, "Like this?"

"Yes. Just stay right outside of that line and cut off all the poking out parts."

She encouraged me as I carefully made my way around her drawing with the scissors. I felt a little stress at having been made responsible for her artwork, especially as she gave me several tips and cautions as I went. I asked her if she wanted to cut it herself, but she held her hands up to me as if allowing me a great pleasure.

When I finished, I said, "All done," and pushed the striped nautilus back across the table to her. She pushed it back, saying, "It's for you."

Before I could take possession of it, however, she snatched it back, carefully rolled it into a tube, then flattening it. She handed to me, saying, "This will make it easier to carry in your pocket."

I told her, "Thank you."

And she answered, "You're welcome."

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Pro-Social Lies

We teach our children that lying is morally wrong. At the same time, we also don't want them blurting out the less-than-generous things they've heard us saying about about Aunt Gladys behind her back, even if those things are objectively true. The bald-faced truth can be every bit as awful as a bald-faced lie.

As adults, most of us have learned how to commit lies of omission. To this day, one of my mom's mantra's is, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." We justify this kind of lie by telling ourselves that we've not actually lied because we've not "told" anything, we've merely "edited" ourselves for the sake of social-emotional harmony. 

But we've also gotten good at what are referred to as "little white" or pro-social lies, those untruths we tell with the idea of not embarrassing or hurting another person, or even with the intent of bucking them up. It would never occur to most of us, for instance, to tell the bald-faced truth, "Yes, those pants make your butt look big." Or more honestly, "All your pants make your butt look big . . . because it is big" which is a direct quote from an actual 3-year-old.

According to a study performed by a team of Chinese and Canadian researchers, forty percent of 7-year-olds will tell a gift-giver that they like their gift even if they later admit to researchers that they don't like it. The percentage who avoid the bald-faced truth goes up as the children tested get older. Nearly ninety percent of 3-7 year olds will tell someone with lipstick on their nose that they "look okay" for a photograph, even though they will later tell researchers that the people did not look okay. 

This telling of pro-social lies isn't something that most of us attempt to teach children, possibly because we ourselves are still navigating it. But our kids seem to pick it up nevertheless, teaching themselves the nuanced differences between immoral or harmful lies and this other kind that we don't often speak about. In other words, most of us learn, without being taught, that the goal is to be basically honest without being a jerk.

I've had several autistic adults tell me that this was one of the most difficult lessons they had to learn as a child. Indeed, one friend first recognized her own autism while trying to coach her autistic son through these lessons and remembering her own childhood confusion. "People told me not to lie when they lied all the time. It was so confusing."

Animals don't lie, at least we don't think they do. Yes, they deceive -- that's what things like camouflage are all about -- but lying appears to be a product of language. We know one thing to be true, yet speak words that indicate something else. There are those who assert that lying is always wrong, that even those "little" pro-social lies are the moral equivalent of making others into mere tools toward achieving our own dishonest ends. It's an extreme position to take, however, one that is certain to result in social ostracism. The relentlessly honest person is just as miserable to be around as the habitual liar. 

And as social animals, we are driven to be included, and to do so, we must learn to walk the line between honesty and being a jerk. This is why, at the end of the day, most of us, most of the time, hold kindness as a higher moral value than truth. Of course, there are times when only the truth will do, when it is the only moral way forward, and we should err on the side of truth when in doubt, but kindness also lives equally in those little lies we do and must tell. 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Our Superpower

Increasingly, modern humans are living our lives online, which is to say that we exist without a physical presence. Of course, this isn't entirely a new phenomenon. The landline telephone likewise allowed us to "be" with others without being physically present. Even before that we could engage remotely through letters we stuffed in envelopes and posted. But, the sheer volume of time we spend in this kind of disembodied state is unprecedented.

The pandemic itself was tragic, of course, but one of the most alarming consequences for me has been that so many people "discovered" that they preferred working from home. No matter how physically alienating our previous technologies, at least, for most of us, our jobs kept us fully in touch with our fellow humans. As a natural introvert, I get that it might be a relief to not have to make all that small talk, but that's a high price to pay for a disembodied life.

I'm reminded of H.G. Wells classic sci-fi horror story The Invisible Man in which a mad scientist named Griffin learns to make himself invisible to his fellow humans while retaining the rest of his faculties. Unfortunately, he didn't have the foresight to create an antidote. After the novelty of being a fly-on-the-wall wears off, he begins to assert his presence through small tricks and pranks, what we today might call "trolling." Dissatisfied with that, however, this disembodied man rapidly descends into burglary, blackmail, and even murder in what he calls his "Reign of Terror."

As a social species, we have evolved to be in the physical presence of one another, which is to say that our communication and connection is more than just words, more than just voice. Indeed, as Rutger Bregman writes in his book Humankind, one of the ways we stand apart from our fellow species is that our internal states, and particularly our emotional states, are quite easy to detect. "Humans," he writes, "are anything but poker-faced. We constantly leak emotions and are hardwired to relate to the people around us. But far from being a handicap, this is our true superpower because sociable people aren't only more fun to be around, in the end they are smarter too." 

This capacity toward sociability and interconnectedness is one of the primary reasons we out-competed (in an evolutionary sense) our fellow hominoids the Neanderthals. By all accounts, they were, as individuals, much more intelligent than individual Homo sapiens. But as Bregman puts it, "If Neanderthals were a super-fast computer, we were an old-fashioned PC -- with wi-fi. We were slower, but better connected." This is why our distant ancestors rarely idolized the individual: they knew the power of the collective. This is why "trolls" were routinely ostracized, even, in extreme cases, banished, which was a death sentence. Likewise, they knew that "having more friends ultimately makes you smarter." 

I don't think it's an accident that young people today report having fewer close friends than young people of previous generations.

I don't know what, if anything, is to be done about the direction we are taking as modern humans. Predicting the future in the light of our fears is no more effective than attempting to predict it through rose tinted glasses, but we are definitely risking one of our most important adaptive advantages in this project of becoming friendless and invisible. I certainly believe that this contributes to our growing feelings of alienation, division, and loneliness. I often think of The Invisible Man when I learn about the lives of mass murderers who are are compelled to enact their own reigns of terror against "enemies" they've created in their lonely and fevered minds. They say that prisoners who are kept in isolation for too long begin to doubt their own existence. I can't help but wonder if these acts of senseless violence aren't at some level driven by alienated individuals trying to prove that they do in fact exist, with tragic consequences. 

As early childhood educators, we live in the opposite kind of world, one more akin to our species' heritage. Our days of physical presence with groups of young children puts us in the world of the legacy of community and friendship. We spend our lives together in the same physical space, fully embodied, where we learn to read and respond to our fellow emotionally "leaky" people, creating, discovering, and deciding together. We allow children "space" when they need it, of course, but the default is to be together in the flesh where we have evolved to thrive because no one is invisible. 

I couldn't care less about preschoolers learning to read or cypher. My only goal is that the children in my care learn how to live in a world with other people, and, most importantly, what it means to be a friend. I want them to experience their visibility, their embodiment, and their connection. Being fully visible is our superpower.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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 Know What it Means to Be Free

In Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning Summer Camp, we have been discussing freedom.

I must have been four when I started playing with my first "best friend" Pheobe. She lived several houses down the street from us, on the other side of the street. Nearly every morning of that summer of 1966, I would cross the street, then cut through several neighbors' lawns to meet her in her own front yard. I know it was summer because I would wear nothing but a pair of shorts. She would greet me as Tarzan, then we would spend the morning, or the day, playing together. The only time we went indoors was to use a bathroom. Occasionally, our younger brothers joined us.

There was a military base nearby which inspired us to play soldier. We contrived sports based on our collective sketchy knowledge of actual sports. We created or found forts in shrubbery or amongst pine branches that neighbors had pruned, then piled along the curb for the city truck that removed large yard waste every few weeks. Sometimes we would cut through the Hix's yard to explore Christopher Street, a virtually identical cul-de-sac to our own Wembley Street, but with the savor of a foreign land complete with foreign children who were sometimes our friends and sometimes our rivals. There was an undeveloped suburban lot on Christopher that contained the vestiges of the pine forest that had recently grown from the land on which we played. This was a setting for games in which we became explorers, cowboys, settlers, and animals of all kinds. 

I'm 63 years old now. Casting my gaze back over my life, this period of time stands out, which is why I've so often written about it here on the blog over the past 16 years. It doesn't live with me as a continuous memory, but rather as a series of moments tied together by a feeling that I've come to recognize as freedom. I didn't think about it as freedom as I lived it, of course. I didn't know that my future held so much school and work. I didn't know that my time and space were soon to become less mine, less ours. As children of that time and place, we were simply living life itself.

I tend to reflect on that freedom in terms of play, which suggests for most of us a sense of joy, fun, and abandon, but that's a trick of unreliable memory and the slippery meaning of words. There was joy and fun, but I also know that this freedom, this play, taught me that life is unfair, that there is pain and heartbreak, that conflict threatens whenever people come together. Likewise, childhood freedom taught me to value fairness, that wounds heal although they often leave scars, and that most of that treasured thing called friendship is an ongoing process of coming to agreements. Ultimately, freedom taught me that I am capable, a lesson learned through the trial and error that stands at the heart of play. Through both success and failure, I learned that I could do things for myself, that I could solve my own problems, and that I could make my own decisions as well as inherit the consequences of those decisions. In short, freedom taught me to be confident in my own ability to engage, on my own terms, with life itself.

Most of us who were children in the 1960's and 70's, or before, have memories of this sort of freedom.

Over the course of the past decade or so, psychologists have noted an alarming increase in mental illness like anxiety and depression in children, even very young children, compared to past generations. Writing in the Journal of Pediatrics, Drs. Peter Gray, David Lancy, and David Bjorklund point out that this is actually just the continuation of a trend that covers the last half century. 

Their thesis, which they support with a comprehensive survey of the available data and research, is that the rise in childhood mental disorders is primarily caused by "a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults. Such independent activities . . . promote mental well-being through both immediate effects, as a direct source of satisfaction, and long-term effects, by building mental characteristics that provide a foundation for dealing effectively with the stresses of life." 

As children have lost their freedom, they have likewise lost out on the lessons that freedom teaches, leaving them increasingly in a world without the skills, habits, and experience that humans need to thrive. No wonder so many of our youngest citizens are plagued with depression and anxiety.

I've held the position of "teacher." The children with whom I've spent the bulk of my adult life have called me Teacher Tom. But that title is really nothing but an honorific because I've spent very, very little of my decades actually instructing children. Instead, I've simply tried to give very young children, 2-5 year olds, the opportunity to know what it means to be free, even if I know that most of them will spend their entire childhoods under adult supervision. I'm not under the illusion that they will, as adults, remember the specifics of their time with me, but I pray that the feeling of freedom and confidence will be something they grow up to recognize in themselves. 

Over the past half century adults have come to increasingly seen our role as ever-present teachers and protectors, which means that we are charged with constantly "doing" things to and for the kids in one way or another. What children need, however, are adults who allow them to feel what it means to be free. To do things to and for themselves. This is how we most effectively empower (i.e., give power to) and encourage (i.e., give courage to) them. It's only when we do this, that we can hope to reverse this decades long deterioration in childhood mental well-being.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!