"The Truth Will Make Me Free"

Man is nothing else, but what he makes of himself. ~Jean-Paul Sartre

Among the founding principles of our American democracy is the ideal that we each be free to pursue "happiness." That's not a guarantee of happiness, but rather an aspirational statement, one that envisions each of us having the opportunity to choose our own course in life; whether that leads to happiness (however that is defined) or not is up to each individual. 

I don't think anyone believes that we have, as a society, fully achieved this particular freedom of pursuit, but it's an ideal that has the virtue of being noble.

I think about the "pursuit of happiness" nearly every day, my own and that of the children I teach. Indeed, I consider it my highest goal on most days, to do what I can to create a bubble within which we are all free to ask and answer our own questions, which is, I think, the key aspect of anyone's pursuit of happiness. Answering other people's questions simply makes you a tool of their pursuit. It's only through finding answers to our own questions that we come a little closer to our personal truth, and as Mister Rogers sang, "The truth will make me free."

As adults we tend to take a longer view, pinning our future happiness on a set of circumstances that, when achieved, will, we believe, cause us contentment and satisfaction; that will fill us with joy in the morning, love during the day, and peace at night. Children are more focused on their immediate futures and they typically don't spend a lot of energy contemplating even that, choosing rather to apply themselves to the pursuit, to their self-selected path, the one that is paved with their own curiosity. They understand better than we do that the word "pursuit" is best understood as a synonym for "search."

What I see children doing each day as they play is search for nothing more or less than the meaning of life. As sophomoric as that sounds, I've come to understand that this is what education in a democracy must always be about and the degree to which we lose sight of that is the degree to which we rob others of their right to their pursuit of happiness. Discovering the meaning of life, our own life, our one unique life, is what we're here to do. It's a question that we were born to ask and one that only we can answer for ourselves. And we can only do that when we are free to seek our own answers: in that direction lies the meaning of life.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

Compulsory Education

"We should banish the idea," writes Alfred North Whitehead, "of a mythical, far-off end of education."

We require our children to go to school, not just for their own good, but, ostensibly, so that they will be prepared for the rights and responsibilities of being citizens in a self-governing society.

At least that's the theory. Polling finds that the overwhelming majority of Americans favor compulsory education for children between the ages of six and eighteen. But if education is so important, why does it only apply to children?

What if, instead of declaring childhood the "end of education," we required all of us to continue going to school? I mean, if it's good for the kids, and good for democracy, then why not make it mandatory for everyone?

I can already hear some people saying, "Screw that! I don't need the government telling me what to do." Fair enough. Governmental overreach is one of the reasons we fought our Revolutionary War. But if we accept that argument (and I'm not saying we shouldn't), then why do we overwhelmingly believe that every child must spend their formative years under the yoke of compulsory schooling? 

Just as a thought experiment, what if every citizen was required to take a four-week (or six-month) paid educational leave every five years. Let's imagine for the sake of this thought experiment that employers were on board, holding your position for your return and that entrepreneurs would be paid a fair stipend. Let's also make it clear that this isn't mere professional development and there would be no fixed curriculum, but rather an open-ended opportunity to learn about whatever interests you. And you would continue to be obliged to do this even in retirement.

At 30 you might study constitutional history, ceramics, ecology or statistics. At 45, philosophy, child development, artificial intelligence or music. At 65, geology, poetry, evolutionary biology or local government. Some portion could involve gathering with people unlike yourself to discuss genuinely difficult public questions. 

We currently devote our compulsory education and resources almost entirely to the people with the least political power. Children can't vote. They can't sit on juries. They can't run corporations. They can't legislate. They can't serve on school boards. They can't even legally own property. Meanwhile, the people actually exercising all those powers have no corresponding obligation whatsoever to continue learning. It's not a reach to wonder if this stands at the heart of much of our political dysfunction.

We commonly justify compulsory childhood schooling by saying something like, Children don't yet know enough to know what they need to know. But surely that remains true of us at 40, 60 and 80. Indeed, one of the things education ideally teaches us is just how enormous the territory of our ignorance is.

The idea of compulsory schooling sounds somewhat reasonable when we talk about children, but quite authoritarian when applied to adults. What does this tell us about our attitudes toward both children and education?

The objection most of us would have, I think, is that we don't want our government mandating our own education, but let's try flipping it around. What if society was compelled to provide the conditions for lifelong education? Your employer couldn't say you're too busy. Lack of money would not exclude you. Childcare couldn't make participation impossible. Education would become something society owed you, not just in childhood, but throughout life.

And here's the key to this thought experiment. What if we made it radically free: you must learn, but nobody gets to tell you what to learn?

Here are libraries, universities, workshops, museums, laboratories, studios, teachers, craftspeople, naturalists, historians, artists, scientists, and communities available to you. Your job is to spend this month learning something. What that is would be up to you.

Suddenly, "compulsory education" doesn't sound quite so much like coercion. It starts sounding like a right that is so important that society insists you exercise it. And, to my ear at least, it begins to sound like an opportunity more than an obligation. The compulsion has subtly shifted from the learner to society.

Of course, the devil is always in the details, but so is god. 

And it raises the question: why can't our children's education be like this? Our current educational system is fully compulsory. We tell children what they must learn, when they must learn it, how long they have to learn it, and how they must demonstrate that they've learned it. 

If I proposed giving every adult a month (or 6 months) every five years in which they were required to pursue an education of their own choosing, would we experience that as an infringement on our liberty? Or would we see it as an astonishing expansion of it?

Speaking for myself, I'd answer the latter. I don't think I would be alone in welcoming the idea of periodically setting everything aside to fully exercise my curiosity, to expand my knowledge and skills, not for monetary gain, but for the joy of it. The fact that it would make me a better citizen is a wonderful side-effect. 

And it makes me wonder if perhaps the problem with compulsory childhood education isn't that it's compulsory, but rather it's what we've made compulsory.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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

The Trouble With Being Right in a Wrong World

In the country of the blind, goes the proverb, the one-eyed man is king.

In his 1904 short story "The Country of the Blind" H.G. Wells writes of a sighted man named Núñez who finds himself in exactly this position. Instead of being crowned king, however, the concerned citizens find his claims about "seeing" to be delusional and propose removing the organs that are clearly the cause of his mental illness. The story ends with Núñez fleeing into the wilderness where he presumedly dies in the effort.

The message is clear: possessing an ability (or knowledge or genius) that nobody recognizes is more likely to cause others to see you as defective rather than superior. 

For instance, there are those, like Thom Hartmann, who assert that their ADHD is his superpower. The big idea behind his "Hunter/Farmer hypothesis" is that traits we label as distractibility, impulsivity, stimulation-seeking, hyper focus, rapid shifting of attention and risk-taking, would have been quite valuable to hunters, while the modern classroom and workplace only tend to reward the steadier "farmer" traits. Hartmann says the genesis of his theory was an attempt to give his ADHD-diagnosed child a less-disempowering story. "It's only a flaw," he concludes, "if you're in a society of farmers."

In a similar vein, several of my autistic adult friends and colleagues have at various times confessed that they often feel themselves superior to us "normies," especially when it comes to understanding things like complex systems or accurately remembering details.

None of this is to suggest that neurodivergence doesn't come with challenges, only that it cannot be viewed only as a deficit.

Thirty-five years after his short story was first published, Wells extended it with a new ending. In the revised version, Núñez escapes into the wilderness, but looks back to "see" that a catastrophic rockslide is about to destroy the country of the blind. He returns to warn them, but they don't believe him precisely because his warning depends on this delusional thing called "sight." Núñez escapes, but the rest are crushed under the rocks.

In the original version, the tragedy is Núñez's alone, while in the retelling the tragedy is everyone's.

There is, of course, an irony in using blindness as a metaphor for deficit in a story about the dangers of deficit thinking. Wells was writing more than a century ago, and his metaphor carries assumptions about disability that I don't share. What's interesting, however, is the deeper question his story raises: Who gets to decide which human capacities count as gifts and which count as defects?

Modern schooling is focused almost exclusively on defining and "fixing" the perceived deficits of children. We shame them. We tell them disempowering stories. We cast their superpower as a delusion, a flaw, and an illness. The one thing we rarely consider is that maybe it's us who must change.

This is one of the great promises of play-based (or self-directed) learning. When children are free to play, we aren't compelled to measure them against any single standard of what a child ought to be. There is a place in our country for the child who can't sit still, the child who becomes obsessed with a single idea, the child who takes risks, the child who notices what the rest of us cannot "see," the child who thinks and communicates and connects in ways we don't immediately understand.

Our job isn't to "cure" children of the things that make it difficult for them to thrive in the world we've made. Maybe our job is to join them in remaking the world in which there are no kings.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

Toward Wisdom Rather Than Mere Education

It's "fire season" here on the West Coast of the US. Currently, there are 32 active "large" fires burning, not to mention the dozens of smaller fires or the 50 or so large fires currently burning in other regions of the US.

The whole idea of a "season" during which destructive fires burn out of control is a modern invention. Up until the late 19th century, Indigenous people across the US, but especially on the West Coast, regularly engaged in prescribed or cultural burning as a tool for tending the landscape. These intentional small, low-intensity fires cleared undergrowth, encouraged grasses and other useful plants, improved forage for game, maintained open woodlands, made travel easier, stimulated plants used for basketry, and reduced insects and disease. And, of course, one of the consequences was that these small burns done during cooler, wetter months, consumed the fuels that otherwise accumulate and feed the catastrophic fires we today experience every summer.

When Europeans began colonizing North America, they thought they were "settling" pristine, untouched, wilderness, when, in fact, for thousands of years, the native population had been responsibly working cooperatively with the land, not just with fire, but in countless other ways. Europeans missed it because it simply didn't look like the sort of clear-cut and plow methods of "dominating" or "subduing" nature employed back home. They missed it so badly, that they criminalized Indigenous fire practices, creating the "fire season" that is currently destroying thousands of acres of precious forest and filling our air with toxic smoke.

Every species shapes its environment at least as much as its environment shapes it. Beavers are a famous example. They have been at work engineering and shaping the planet's surface for some 8 million years. 

And it's not just animals. Plants also "tend" their environments. "When grasses emerged between 100 and 70 million years ago," writes Ferris Jabr in his book Becoming Earth, "Rather than rely on robust and elaborate defenses (as did their plant predecessors), certain grasses negotiated a symbiosis -- an ecological partnership -- with large herbivores. These grasses offered grazers endless fields of tender green leaves that quickly regenerated when shorn (or burned). In exchange for this perpetual sustenance, mammoths and the megafauna trampled, ate, and otherwise deterred the grasses' main botanical competitors, such as shrubs and trees, and fertilized the fields with their copious dung." 

Humans seem to be unique in that we are able to be conscious about our efforts to shape ourselves and our environment, both for good and bad. 

Cultural burn practices emerged over centuries during which conscious humans observed and experimented with fire, not as a destructive force to be feared and fought, but rather an essential aspect of a thriving environment. It was an ongoing process of learning to, not manage, but live reciprocally with a fire-adapted landscape. 

This process led to a kind of collective wisdom that wasn't just passed down from generation to generation, but rather continued to grow and evolve, through the conscious practices of observation and experimentation.

In our rush to fill our children's heads with "knowledge" in the name of mere education, we continue the colonizer's practice of domination and management. So much of what passes for schooling is the intellectual process of clear-cutting and plowing in order to plant the crops we think we prefer. When a child isn't compliant, when a child is incapable of being a docile empty vessel to be filled, we treat it like an emergency, a fire to be doused or a weed to be eradicated. Many of the mental health and other challenges our children face today, are the result -- the wildfire -- of this approach.

The practice of observation and experimentation, however, causes us to ask, "What is this child telling us?" The practice of observation and experimentation leads us to explore how we can work with children rather than attempt to somehow manufacture them. When we place observation and experimentation at the center of our work, we discover that the children are likewise observing and experimenting: adapting and tending, which is the essence of all human wisdom. 

At the core of this wisdom is the awareness that there is always more to learn from observation and experimentation. It's the process of living, one that cannot be undertaken alone, but in cooperation, collaboration, and reciprocity with the other people, animals, and plants, not to mention the earth, the wind, and the fire.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

Not Vanquished

I was once engaged in a massive battle for the ages, pitting my powers against those of a five-year-old boy.

It began when he declared that he was going to shoot me with his gun that had the "power of elephants."

I countered with the power of love.

He responded with a laser that had the "power of lightening."

I bewildered it with the power of love.

He retrenched with a cannon that was made from the "power of a tsunami."

I absorbed it with the power of love.

He summon up a rocket that was fueled by the "power of a tornado."

I embraced it with the power of love.

He attacked me with a sword forged in the sun, a light saber containing bees, a tank that shot earthquakes and finally a weapon made from all the power in the universe, except, he insisted, love.

When I stuck with love he finally fell, into my arms, laughing, not vanquished.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

Motivated By Belonging and Doing

Not long ago, one of our toilets stopped flushing: the chain that connects the tank lever to the flapper had broken. I cycled to the hardware store and located the replacement part I needed. Back home, I turned off the water to the toilet, flushed the tank dry, removed the old part, installed the new one, and turned the water back on. Then, although I was confident I'd set things to rights, I gave it a flush, taking satisfaction in watching the tank empty and refill as it ought to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

They Will Forget Most of Today

Much, if not most, of what you experience today will be forgotten by tomorrow.

It's why we write things down. We know that if we don't, we'll "forget." It's why we keep calendars, maintain "to do" lists, and write diaries. We think of these things as memory prompts, but they can also be thought of as ways of extending our minds beyond our bodies. We've not evolved to remember everything on our own, so we devise ways to make sure we don't forget certain things. 

It drives my wife crazy sometimes, but if I want to, say, remember to make a dentist appointment, I'll leave my toothbrush in an awkward spot before going to bed, in the spirit of tying a string around my finger. The idea is that when I see my toothbrush in an odd spot the following morning, it will remind me of what I need to do. If my wife decides to "tidy up" after me and put it away, I'll "forget" to make the appointment. 

There are techniques for improving one's memory (e.g., "memory palaces" or Method of loci), but most of us don't need that level of recall. In fact, for most of us most of the time, it's extraordinarily unimportant.

I'm thinking about memory because I've just returned from a visit with my parents, my brother, and my sister. As you might expect, when the five of us are together, we talk about our memories. At one point, my brother was telling a story about something that had happened to him. It was a familiar story, but in my version, it had happened to me. I realized that my memory had managed to reshape his story as my own.

Experts tell us that literal recall isn't the primary function of memory. As memory researcher Charan Ranganath puts it, "The human brain is not a memorization machine; it's a thinking machine. We organize our experiences in ways that allow us to make sense of the world we live in. To handle the complexities of the world, without falling prey to interference, we exploit one of the brain's most powerful tools for organizing information: the schema . . . A schema is a kind of mental framework that allows our minds to process, organize, and interpret a great deal of information with minimal effort. The way the human brain uses schemas to construct new memories is not unlike how an architect uses a blueprint to design a house. An architectural blueprint functions as a kind of map of the bare-bones information about the structure . . . of a building that shows how everything is connected. The abstract nature of a blueprint means it can be reused over and over."

In other words, it's not so important whether or not we can recall the specifics of what happened (episodic memory), but rather that we recall what we've learned about the world, "regardless of when and where that information was learned" (semantic memory). And quite often, the process of thinking causes us to reshape the specifics of our memories into a more useful story about what must have happened.

My brother and I remember the same story differently because we have different goals, emotions, and beliefs that cause us to interpret the story from our own particular perspectives. This, of course, shapes how we reconstruct our memories.

And that's the most fascinating thing about memories: they are not something we have, but rather something we construct. Indeed, experts tell us that the more often we recall a memory, the more often we've constructed it, the more it tends to stray away from what actually happened. In other words, we re-tell the story, the memory, to fit within our schemas.

This is what the children in our care are doing as they play and why the specific things we try to teach them are relatively unimportant. What they are doing in these early years is building a repertoire of schemas, of blueprints, that will serve them as they move through the world. Indeed, most of us recall very little from before we were five-years-old, but the important learning remains in the form of those schemas. 

At the end of a preschool day, I'm aware that most of what happened, the children will have forgotten by tomorrow, but that doesn't mean they haven't been doing important work. This is why I often do the minimum of tidying up. I try to leave things on the playground and classroom as the children left them. To put them away might well be the equivalent of my wife putting away my toothbrush. This pile of stones, that arrangement of twigs, these costumes on the hooks, may or may not be mind extensions, prompts, that the children have left, intentionally or not, to remind them of where they were and where they were going.

The hope is that they will more readily return to yesterday's play as through no time has passed. They see the stones and remember something about what they were thinking about. They find the cape hanging where they left it and are reminded of who they have been. They discover the half-built structure and know what comes next. Naturally, they may not remember any of this at all. They may look at the stones and see something entirely new. That's how memory works as well. We don't simply retrieve the past, but rather reconstruct it in service of the present.

This is why I'm wary when adults become too concerned about whether children "remember" what they've been taught. We ask, "What did you learn today?" as though learning can be measured by their ability to retrieve information. That's what computers are for. The most important learning, especially in early childhood, is almost never available to us in that form. What's important is the blueprint: what other people are like, what happens when I try, what my body can do, how friendship works, what happens when things fall down, how conflicts unfold, what it feels like to belong.

They will forget most of today by tomorrow. But tomorrow, they will use what they learned today to think.

And perhaps we'll have the good sense not to put away all their toothbrushes.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

"May I Dump This Bucket of Water Over Your Head?"

There are three broad categories of things about which we adults know more than the young children in our care: safety, schedules, and courtesy.

The rest is trivia. Yes, I may know more about Elizabethan novels than the typical five-year-old, but they know more about, say, Kpop Demon Hunters, so that's a wash.

Safety is obvious. Indeed, it's our number one job. None of us will last long in this profession if we're regularly sending kids home with major injuries. We say, "My job is to keep everyone safe. That's not safe. I can't let you do that." Then we don't let them do that.

Schedules can be inconvenient. We do what we can to minimize interruptions to the children's play, but the reality is that most of us have some sort of schedule to which we must adhere, even if it's just a matter of getting everyone ready when it's time to go home. We say, "My job is to make sure we're in the lunchroom at 11:30. It's 11:30. Now is lunch time." Then we usher them into the lunchroom.

Courtesy may not at first blush seem to fit with these other two, but this is where I see "consent" living. I don't expect children to align their behavior to the etiquette formulas with which many of us grew up (e.g., Emily Post), but I can't let them, say, dump a bucket of water on someone's head without first checking to make sure it's okay. I mean, it's only basic courtesy.

I once watched a boy sneak up behind a girl and dump a bucket of water over her head. He was shocked when she burst into tears. Later, as we discussed what he might have done differently, he asked, "Why is it funny when it happens on TV?"

The difference is consent. I explained that those people on TV are actors who have agreed to have water dumped on their heads, even if they pretend they didn't like it. Obviously, this kind of thing can be confusing for preschoolers and it's why they need our help to tease out the difference.

I remember when the Miss Manners column began appearing in our local newspaper back in the 1978. What made her advice different from what came before her was her insistence that etiquette wasn't about arbitrary rules, but rather about making social life work while preserving everyone's dignity. Courtesy is the answer to the question: how do we behave toward other human beings so that we respect their autonomy while still making it possible to live together? 

Young children might not grasp that concept exactly, but by the time they're three or four, most children are capable of understanding the concepts of consent and agreement. And this requires dialog, even going so far as to ask the question, "May I dump this bucket of water over your head?" then respecting the answer.

The Golden Rule is often offered as a kind of catch-all guide to living with others, but its weakness is that it allows us to judge the autonomy and dignity of others by our own sense of autonomy and dignity, rather than, you know, actually asking them how they feel about it. It's only basic courtesy.

A boy one time spent an entire morning asking his classmates if he could shoot them with his finger-gun. I admired his sense of fairness even as I found his line of inquiry unsavory. One after another, the children told him they didn't want to be shot. At some point he complained, "No body wants to play with me."

I answered, "Well, no body wants to be shot. I know I don't want to be shot. But maybe they'll play a different game with you."

He didn't like that idea. "But I won't really shoot them," he moaned, "It's just pretend."

"Maybe they don't know that."

He thought about this for a moment, then approached another child, "Do you want to be pretend shot?" Before long, half the kids were joyfully blasting each other with their fingers, everyone's dignity and autonomy intact.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

Forever Changing

We converted an old, worn out sensory table into a worm bin that lived adjacent to our playground garden.

I began by drilling holes in the bottom so it could drain, then filled it with soil, from a previous garden that had been left to fend for itself for years, maybe decades. A variety of weeds had taken root, native plants hearty enough to survive in our urban setting. The children had already discovered that there were earthworms aplenty, so we filled our aspiring bin one afternoon with spadefuls of dirt, stems, leaves, roots, and worms. 

The worms weren't having it. Within hours they were dangling from the bottom of the table, making their escape from the holes I'd drilled in the bottom. They had found themselves in the wrong ecological niche. Earthworms have evolved to dig in all directions, including vertically. The shallow bin was simply the wrong habitat and they took matters into their own hands (so to speak) by returning to where they belong. 

This is when we learned that what we wanted were red wigglers, which are a compost-dwelling type of worm. Once we introduced a handful of those (donated from one of our families' compost piles), we never had to add another worm on our own. For nearly two decades, from those original worms, we managed to maintain a thriving population in that tiny space, through a move, many freezes, flooding, neglect, and, most impressively, the constant intrusion of curious children. We had obviously created a place in which they could thrive.

Our worm bin was a place of constant change. In early November, for instance, we would toss our rotting Jack-o-lanterns in there, already growing beards of mold, then observe, and actively participate in, their decomposition. We added leaves, apple cores, paper napkins, wood chips, and all kinds of other organic matter (and some not so organic matter), then, day-after-day let the worms and various microbes do the work of manufacturing soil. Occasionally, we would use some of the compost in our garden beds, but mostly it was a kind of laboratory in which we studied the slow, steady process of earth creating itself by transforming one thing into another.

In her novel, The Parable of the Sower, Octavia Bulter's protagonist, Lauren Olamina, creates a spiritual belief system she calls Earthseed:

All that you touch You Change.

All the you Change Changes you.

The only lasting truth is Change.

God is Change.

Some change is sudden, of course, like a move from one house to another or switching to a new school. I imagine it was quite a surprise to those earthworms to suddenly find themselves bin-bound. But most change is like the changes that occurred in our worm bin, incremental, day-by-day, happening right under our eyes, fingers, and feet. The children themselves are growing, transforming at every moment; we ourselves are changing, adapting to the changes around us. We change right up until the day we die, and beyond, our bodies, like those Jack-o-Lanterns, returning to the soil.

I know too many adults for whom change is something to fear, who gird themselves against it. They fight aging, they rage against social or cultural progress, they fear that every new technology is a harbinger of doom. They seek to steer or stop it, hearkening back to the "good old days," shaking their heads over "kids these days." And they're not entirely wrong. Change always begins with the death of something, often something treasured, something precious, something we cannot quite imagine life without.

“The old world is dying," writes Fiamma Montezemolo, "The new one is slow in appearing. In this light and shadow, monsters arise.” And those monsters are both real and imagined, even as we, living, as we must, in the present, cannot possibly distinguish between the two. Even a casual review of history tells us that change is always a blessing and a curse for something or someone. The fossil record is a record that tells us that well over 99 percent of every species of life that has ever existed is extinct. So yes, some of the monsters are real.

For our youngest citizens, however, there is no "old" world. They live in the ever-emerging present, part of the world being born, with no foot in either the past or the future. Their only motive is to be a part of it, to grow, to learn, to connect (i.e., to change) and to explore their world as agents of change.

In her novel Eva Trout, Elizabeth Bowen introduces a child by what he has done while the adults fretted over their uncertain future: "The boy straightway tipped his handfuls of treasure on to the rug at Eva’s feet, then crouched down, absorbedly starting to sort things out — half of a mangled teaspoon, a minute wheel off some minute toy, the crushed empty shell of some wild bird’s speckled egg, three or four slivers of splintered mirror, particles of Woolworth willow pattern, flower-pots, Crown Derby and, not least, one orange wooden button. Could his hands have held more, more would have been deployed. What there was, he was making into a pattern."

This is what children have always done and continue to do when we are busy looking the other way. They collect the parts of the world that is dying, the loose parts, and play with them, making new patterns, inventing new things, actively participating in the holy work of change. They dig their fingers into the soil to help the worms transform what is into what will be. We adults would do well to join them more often with no other goal in mind than to live.

"Accept the images that God has provided," Butler writes through the eyes of her young protagonist, "They are everywhere, in everything. God is Change— Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river, river to sea; Grubs to bees, bees to swarm. From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving— forever Changing. The universe is God's self-portrait."

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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