A Montessori home is not the same as a Montessori classroom. A home does not have the same community dynamic as a classroom. Maria Montessori marveled at, and emphasized, the concentrated, deep, independent work she saw in the first Children’s Houses (for 2-7 year olds), and this easily leads to the mistaken belief that children should be happy to work alone all day long. But in fact, the community of children is central to the Montessori classroom. Children learn from each other, support each other, guide each other, observe each other, and set limits for each other. Children want to be part of a community of other children.

While children do become deeply focused and work completely on their own at times, no child works entirely independently all day long. They have conversations, observe each other, help each other carry large objects, remind each other of the rules, show each other how to use different materials in the classroom, and more. As children get older and more able to collaborate, this becomes even more true. The so-called “nuclear family” (unless it has an exceptional number of children) is no substitute for this kind of community, though an extended family with aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends can be.

So what can we do to make Montessori work in our homes?

1. Community, community, community! Build a community any way you possibly can. Have playdates. Connect with neighbors. Connect with families from your child’s school, your church, your synagogue, your mosque, your neighborhood. Anywhere you possibly can. Move into a duplex with friends. Find a nanny share. It’s much more important to have a community, for both you and your child, than it is to limit your child to spending time with families who approach raising children the same way you do (within reason).

2. It’s not about the stuff! The feature that jumps out at people first when they visit a Montessori classroom is usually the beautiful materials (unless it’s the calm children). They are beautiful, and they can be wonderful tools for learning. Dr. Montessori herself was fairly enamored of them (and also made a lot of money from controlling their manufacture and sale, so perhaps she was a bit biased), but the materials are not the core of Montessori. The core is freedom. Freedom to be interested, even in seemingly meaningless activities whose purpose we can’t recognize. Freedom to concentrate. Freedom to move. Freedom to socialize. Freedom to direct one’s own time and growth. As a Montessori parent, your first job isn’t to prepare a perfect shelf activity for every little interest you see arising (Montessori guides don’t do this either), but to let the interest take its course. If it seems to be an abiding interest and the child is old enough, then you can collaborate on research, getting supplies, and all the rest.

3. Set reasonable expectations for yourself and your environment. If you’ve ever seen a photo of a Montessori classroom (or a perfect “shelfie” taken right after a shelf has been set up), you may feel like a failure if your house isn’t a perfect showpiece, with carefully curated and prepared activities set up on shelves around your house, and no sign of adult tables, chairs, or mess anywhere. This isn’t realistic. Your home is an environment that has to work for everyone, and you all have different needs. You can make the most beautiful shelves in the world, but your children will want to get into your grown-up things, not just the special stuff you put out for them. Ironically, these may even be the least interesting, because, unlike in a classroom, they don’t see other people working with these materials much

4. Include your child in your daily activities:

   “The child must be part of the adults’ life and see everything. This is the normal way for a child to grow. We know how intently he looks at everything; how interested he is in watching all that happens.” —Maria Montessori

   The reason children get into your stuff, follow you around, dump flour on the floor, pretend to type important messages on a phone and so on, is because they are primed to learn to do the things the grownups they love and trust do. At home, you don’t have the benefit of a big community of children, but you do have the potential for something else: including your child in your daily life. Include your child in as many of your regular activities as you can: cooking, cleaning, shopping, working (if you can), doing laundry. My daughter loves to brush her teeth with me; she even mimes using an inhaler while I use mine. She also loves to sit on my lap and type out the words I give her while I’m working. Yes, it slows me down. Is it worth it? Absolutely. Take the time you’d spend on making those beautiful materials that rarely get touched on including your child in your life (and the money you’d spend on those materials on replacing that beautiful glass vase your daughter dropped instead), and use it to include your children in your activities.

   In some ways, the child-centric materials and structure in a Montessori classroom are a compensation for not being able to provide a child-inclusive adult environment: one where adults go about their business and children can come and go as they please, observing, participating, imitating, and then going off to play at adult activities in groups of children.

5. Prepare your space for practical life. There is one place where I think preparing the environment specifically for children is really valuable, and that is making sure they have the tools they need to successfully participate in household and personal care tasks. This is especially true for young children, who can’t reach or use adult tools easily. Is there a step stool to get to the sink? Do your children know where to find cloths to clean up spills? Do they have easy access to their clothes and a stool to sit on while getting dressed? Are the dishes in a place where they can get to them to help set the table? (A lot of people purposely put their dishes out of reach so they don’t get broken, but then your child is dependent on you to be “allowed” to be helpful. No, don’t put the good china within reach, but a few broken plates is a reasonable price to pay for the joy of a child who loves to help.) Is there a broom that’s a reasonable size to use? A garbage can and a recycling bin that are easily accessible?

6. Keep it simple. One of the reasons a Montessori classroom is so peaceful is the simplicity and order of the environment. The level of order you maintain is going to reflect your personal habits (and that’s okay; mess is morally neutral), but try to avoid giving your children too much stuff. Excess stuff is overwhelming, encourages distraction, and honestly, is usually an attempt to substitute things for our attention. Choose a few beautiful and interesting toys, and let your children explore household objects.

7. Enjoy the skills/activities you want your child to learn. You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned “academic” skills like reading and math at all. In my experience, parents worry far too much about these skills and try too hard to teach them too early, which creates stress more than it creates learning. At home you have to substitute for an entire community for your child, so the most important thing you can do is enjoy the activities you want your child to take an interest in. Want your child to be excited about reading? Read! Read to them. Read near them. Read books. Read articles. Read aloud. Want your child to get excited about writing? Write! Want your child to be interested in math? Talk about numbers. Use numbers. Count things together. Ask silly counting questions (How many noses are in this car? How many fingers are there at this table?). Notice patterns. Draw patterns. Watch Numberphile or Vi Hart on YouTube. Immerse yourself in the world of numbers and patterns. You child will come along if this interest is real.

8. Let your child do their thing. The most important thing you can do is let your child focus on the things that catch their attention. This is especially true for younger children. Does your baby love staring at the light coming through the curtains? Put her where she can see the curtains and don’t interrupt her. Is your child busy pouring water back and forth between two containers? Let her pour. Then show her how to wipe up the spill when she’s done. As long as it’s not damaging or seriously dangerous, don’t interrupt.

   “We can desire so eagerly that they shall grow into fine men and women that we correct and frustrate them at every turn without once realizing that they have within themselves the power of their own development. We cannot see that a child who is interested and actively carrying out little plans and movements of his own is building up will power and self-control.” —Maria Montessori

9. Community, community, community! Again, I can’t stress this enough. People are meant to be in community. When we talk about leaving children to themselves, we need to remember that this doesn’t mean they should be left alone; it just means we shouldn’t interfere. Work on this now, because the older your child gets, the more friends and mentors matter.

But the entire time, there was this niggling voice in the back of my head: “I should be making them do something productive. This is a waste of time. This is too much fun. They should be doing some real math. I should be stricter about how they approach their crochet. It’s not enough.”

Does this sound familiar?

I call it the fear of joy. It’s not natural or healthy.

Joy makes our lives worth living. Relaxed togetherness gives us connection, which we need for our psychological health. We need downtime to listen to our own inner voice and understand our own desires and purpose. We need joyful, relaxed work to build up the resources to do challenging, scary work.

Why do we fear joy? Our culture of “grind”, which says that you are only as valuable as the work you produce, depends on this fear of doing anything too pleasant, relaxing, or enjoyable. It comes from our culture, but we learn it in school, with its constant demands for “productivity”, its sharp distinction between work and play, and its expectation to do more, more, more, sooner, sooner, sooner!

Unlearning this fear is hard, but it’s one of the most radical things we can do to live a contented life, raise healthy children, and push back against a culture of overwork.

I’ve been on this quest for years. I haven’t completely overcome the fear of joy, but now I’m inviting other people to join me in this journey with my new course, Deschooling Parenthood. We'll learn about how school teaches us to fear joy and parenting advice teaches us to be constantly anxious. Then we'll learn about how and why to let go of that worry and embrace joy. Click here to find out more and join me!

For context, I went to a liberal arts college with a reputation for extremely intense academics. I don’t think the workload was any higher than other schools, but the intellectual standards were very high and the work quite challenging.

Before college, I never got grades, but I had taken plenty of tests. They were never very high stakes, but I took the SAT several times (which is high stakes, but if you have the privilege to be able to afford it, you can take it several times and lower the stakes) and I’d taken plenty of tests at school, though they were never for a grade, just for feedback.

All of that experience was pretty much irrelevant for college. Standardized tests are very unlike anything in college, at least in my experience (I think this may be less true at huge universities that do large multiple choice finals for first year classes). But regular high school tests aren’t very relevant either. In high school, the expectation is that a good student will get close to 100% of the questions correct, and a poor student should still be getting the majority of questions right. On my very first calculus test in college, I got a two out of ten.

I completely panicked. I was convinced that my entire quirky, alternative education hadn’t prepared me for college after all. It turned out the average score in the class was a one out of ten.

No amount of high school testing is going to prepare you for that because that's not the way high school tests work. But it wasn’t that hard to adapt to, nor was the workload. I wanted to be there, and this was just another new situation. I’d been through many: going to different schools, going to different summer camps, and living in another country for a year.

The thing I found much more difficult to adapt to was getting grades. My alma mater didn’t report grades directly to students. Each semester, you just got a piece of paper that listed your grades as “satisfactory”, unless you were getting below a C. The theory was that grading is very hard, so if you’re getting above a C-, you’re doing just fine. We don't want you to obsess over grades and we’re just not that interested in them. They exist in case you want to go to graduate school.

I think that this was a huge relief for many of my classmates. For me, it made me feel like I was under secret surveillance. That was pretty stressful and difficult. For my first two years, I felt a lot of panic that I wasn’t doing enough work and was a complete failure. I had a lot of depression. (I wasn’t alone in this. Depression and anxiety aren’t uncommon for college students.)

At the end of my second year, my friends convinced me to check my grades. You could do that by asking your advisor or ordering a transcript from the registrar, but it was a really taboo thing to do, so I avoided it for a long time. But I finally ordered a transcript, realized I was doing fine, and was able to relax and mostly enjoy my last two years of college. (In fact, my grades went up in my junior and senior years, when I stopped worrying so much about whether I was working hard enough.)

What made the grading experience so hard was that, for my entire life, my own assessment of my knowledge and my learning was the one that counted the most. Now, it wasn't that I never got feedback. If I did a bad job on something, people would give me feedback, and that feedback helped clarify my picture of what I was doing well and what I needed to work on. But the feedback was always “formative” and meant primarily to support my ability to get better at things I wanted to do.

There was never a “point-in-time” external judgement that would then be attached to me for the rest of my life. But that’s the nature of grades, or at least that’s how they felt to me. This list of letters would determine my options for graduate school, and thus for my ability to meet my career goals. (At the time, getting a math PhD was the be all, end all of my life goals. Wow, I was naive.)

I don't think most of my classmates had so much trouble with this. Honestly, I think most people have been gaslighted into believing that your learning is what your teacher says it is, long before college. Your teacher is the real expert and their assesments are the ones that count; your own assessments are untrustworthy.

So that for me was the biggest adjustment to college. It took a couple years, and I did go through a challenging time. But I don’t think it was any more or less challenging than what most people go through in the transition to college. I was as academically prepared as anyone—a better writer than most; maybe not quite as good at organizing my reading and notes than many—and mature enough to avoid a lot of social drama. I credit that to having space to grow up before college.

But in the end, I came out of colelge side stronger for the challenges, with a much clearer view of the pros and cons of grading (mostly cons) and a really clear sense of the benefits and harms that come with external assessment. I knew I was capable of handling it where it was inevitable, i.e. in a job situation, and when to avoid taking it seriously. And I kept my curiosity intact.

Ah, the classic question. Let’s start with the learn anything part.

Children learn. It’s what they do.

Our ancestors evolved to live successfully in a difficult environment (dry savannah) by observing our environment, learning from each other, sharing, experimenting, creating, and exchanging knowledge. What our ancestors almost certainly did not do was teach their children in an explicit, systematic, and structured way. They may have told children the name for particular plants or how to tell the difference between two similar looking plants, but this wouldn't have involved a systematic curriculum. (In many cultures, asking questions is considered rude, disrespectful, or suspicious, so one thing children probably didn’t do was ask adults to teach them, though they may have asked other children.)

Though we no longer live on the savannah, and most of us couldn’t survive there if we tried, we still have these evolved tools for learning our culture and our environment. That means that we can’t not learn. Learning is built into us, and children are especially keen and capable learners.

But in my experience, this is not the answer people are looking for, because it doesn’t answer the real question: "How will my child learn the right things without a required curriculum and formal instruction?"

What are the right things? No, really, stop and think about this. Who decides what the "right things" are? How many of the supposedly critical skills you learned in school are actually relevant to your life? How much “crucial knowledge” do you vaguely remember once having lessons on, but couldn’t possibly recall now?

We are built to learn the culture around us, and to keep learning and adapting throughout our lives (though never as well as when we are young). The truly necessary skills, the ones that everyone around us use every day, we will learn. If no one interferes, we will want to know how to read, how to write, how to use a computer, how to participate in the kinds of conversations our community has, how to cook, how to navigate safely in a car-heavy city, and how to tell jokes, just like our ancestors were driven to learn how to hunt, how to gather, how to stay safe around wild animals, how to get along in their group, and how to tell jokes. And so we will learn what we need to know, whether by observing, experimenting, or asking someone to teach us.

“Okay,” I hear you say, “but what about "college and career readiness"? There’s a lot you have to know to get into college and get a good job, even if it’s not relevant to being an adult.”

This is absolutely true. In the past hundred or so years, school has evolved into its own self-referential, internally structured beast, and doing well in school serves as a signal to others (especially employers) that you are a well-educated, competent, hard-working, and probably compliant individual. (See The Case Against Education for more on the idea of college as signaling). That means that there is value to “doing well” at schoolish things, even if the knowledge is useless.

But this fact does not justify overruling young people’s agency over their lives; it justifies giving them honest information. Young people are not stupid and they want their lives to work out. Most will willingly do what is necessary to live a meaningful and successful life, including study a lot of topics that they may or may not see as valuable, in order to get the outcomes they want. In my classrooms, I've always had available a child-friendly version of the local school standards, and talked honestly with the children about what these standards are, where they come from, and the pros and cons of paying attention to them. More often than not, the children come to me asking for lessons related to these standards, not the other way around.

Furthermore, most willing young people need far less time to learn everything in those standards than the usual pace would suggest. The standards are spread over 13 years with massive repetition not because it truly takes this long, but because schools are dragging children, often kicking and screaming, through a set curriculum, and this is a much more difficult process than teaching a child who wants to learn.

In fact, sometimes waiting can, by itself, lead to faster learning. In an experiment in 1929, L.P Benezet, who was the superintendent of the Manchester, New Hampshire school district, had several teachers stop teaching any math before the 7th grade, though he did give them informal math and logic problems to think about. (By the way, these classes in the poorest schools, as Benezet quite explicitly recognized that the wealthier parents would never tolerate such an experiment). Once these children began formal math instruction, they caught up to their peers in the district within a year.

When children are in charge of their own lives, have agency over their learning, and can make well thought-out decisions about their plans, they can figure out what they need to learn and learn it quickly, provided they have access to adults and resources to help them. That applies whether the learning is filling in academic gaps in order to apply to college, doing a deep dive into a research topic purely for pleasure, or learning new skills on the job.

Now, I have a request for you. Please give me feedback on this video. Help me understand how to make it better! Please fill out the survey below and share with me!

Now, throw out everything you know about school and dream. Close your eyes. Imagine what you would have loved to spend your childhood and adolescent years doing.

• What would you have spent your days doing?

• What would you have been passionate about?

• What would you have wanted to know about, and how would you have found it out?

• Who would you have spent your days with?

Give yourself some time to really imagine the texture of this childhood. Be gentle with yourself. Depending on the realities of your own childhood, this may bring up some very strong emotions, especially if school was a traumatic experience. Get the support you need. Take some time to journal, or simply meditate.

Now, if you’re still with me and feeling stable, continue your dreaming. Imagine a space built just to support you and other children.

• What would the physical space have looked like? Felt like?

• What would the structure of the day have been like? The year?

• Who would be in the space?

• What would adults there have done to support you?

• How would all the participants in this space been in community with each other?

• How would you celebrate each other?

• How would you support each other?

These are questions I’ve been asking myself for years and years, in fact, for my entire life, but I’ve rarely heard about the dreams of others. Please, ask yourself, and then share in the comments. If you don’t want to share publicly, contact me privately to share. Really, I want to know. If you are open to exploring deeper with me, please be sure to include this in your comment.

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]]>Dream with me: What do you wish your school had been?Alexa Kapor-MaterWed, 07 Dec 2022 17:17:44 +0000https://www.montessoricosmos.org/blog/2022/12/7/positive-non-interference5b04c2a5e2ccd1368b356edd:5b04c31aaa4a99ccc100440a:6390cabda845a46ca59fd2f9For many years, whenever people ask me how I get their children so excited about learning, I’ve wanted to joke that my secret sauce is a certain amount of benign neglect. While I’ve said this to a few parents that I have very close relationships with, it’s obviously not a great joke to make—and I’m not talking about neglect in any form—but I’ve struggled to find a better term for what I do. Until now.

Harriet Pattison, in her book Rethinking Learning to Read (which I highly recommend for anyone who is interested in the question of how children acquire literacy) uses a term that perfectly encapsulates this secret sauce: positive non-interference.

As Pattison points out elsewhere in the book, the American approach to solving problems in schooling (and parenting) is always more interference: more teaching, more assessing, more scheduling. To do otherwise would be seen as neglectful.

The trouble with this interventionist strategy is that it ignores children’s need for autonomy. Besides causing a great deal of stress—and sometimes leading to worse performance—all this teaching and assessment puts children in a position that threatens one of the core needs of human beings: control over one’s own time and goals. (For more on this topic, I recommend William Stixrud and Ned Johnson’s book The Self-Driven Child.) My own observation of children is that they can instantly sniff out when we are trying to impose our own goals on them, and when this happens, their first priority is to protect their autonomy. This means that a child might reject a potential interest (or even an abiding passion) if they sense the adults around them are trying to push the child deeper, elicit better performance, or use the interest for their own ends.

Even in a Montessori context, once we break the trust children have that our offerings are simply that—offerings—and not obligations, they will no longer suspend their doubt to see if maybe we have some interesting ideas. This is why I am so opposed to obligatory follow-up work. If lessons come with an obligation to keep do more of whatever is offered, they are no longer gifts. This is rather like a nosy relative who gives you a really ugly vase, then comes over to your house and asks why that you haven’t given it a place of honor and changed your decor to match it.

Finally, this interventionism is based in a lack of trust. No one likes being told constantly that they are untrustworthy. At its heart, the message our interventions give children is: “you can’t be trusted to figure out what you need to know, and even if you are, you’ll never be able to learn it if we don’t teach it to you.” But this neither true nor a universal view of children:

Lancy goes on to say that children throughout the world are extremely successful at learning a full range of cultural skills and ideas through observation, experimentation, and collaboration with peers. While he doesn’t directly address the learning of deeply abstract skills like reading, Pattison does, as does Peter Gray in his book Free to Learn and in his online column Freedom to Learn. How do children learn to read? Mostly they figure it out for themselves, and they ask for help when they need it. They learn when it’s useful to them: because they want to do something other people are doing, or because friends and family have gotten tired of reading aloud to them. This is even true, or perhaps especially true, of children diagnosed with dyslexia.

Does all this mean we should never offer children any lessons? Never introduce them to phonics or math? NO. But it means we should remember our place. We offer, the children decide whether and where to put that gift in their mental house.

And when children are busy with their own business, we can get the hell out of their way.

P.S. This week we are starting a book club on Free to Learn over at Deschooling Ourselves. Come join us! It’s completely free to participate.

On the surface, a Montessori classroom fits this description nicely, but my experience–and the experiences of many of my Montessori colleagues–is that these principles are rarely a reality. Instead, "freedom with responsibility", as we like to tell parents, typically means something more like "freedom as long as you make choices that don't make us anxious that your parents will be anxious," or "freedom as long as you choose from a small menu of things we want you to do anyway." This is not true freedom. Among other things, it does not include the most basic freedoms of all: the freedom to quit and the freedom to do nothing.

There are many reasons for these limitations, some of them perhaps due to Maria Montessori herself, but at its heart, I think there is one basic cause: our society has created the illusion that adults can control children's learning, and expects the responsible parent to take charge of their children's learning (for the child's future benefit, of course). Even parents and teachers who don't really buy this theory of learning expect it, and parents sign their kids up for school with implicit expectations about what will happen at school. Those assumptions include that children will learn to read, write, and calculate “on time”, and that they will spend their days doing productive “work”. When those things don't happen, they are understandably upset, and usually have communal (and administrative) support for their view.

The result is that Montessori guides who want to offer children the freedom to be themselves, even if that self is not currently excited about learning to read, learning multiplication facts, or even sitting still, are caught in a bind. While trying to offer freedom, they are held responsible for ensuring that children make particular choices with that freedom, and thus can offer only limited freedom, or the illusion of freedom.

But here's what I've learned from exploring the world of self-directed education: It doesn't have to be this way! Sudbury Valley Schools, Agile Learning Centers, Liberated Learners centers, and similar communities begin by establishing the expectation that learning is the child's responsibility, and adults will inspire, encourage, consult, and guide, but they will not control. And it works. Families choose these programs, and their children grow up to be competent, capable (if sometimes unconventional) adults.

Montessorians, we can do this too!

And for regular MTaP readers who are new to The Montessori Cosmos, welcome! I blog about Montessori, math, and deschooling (in or out of school). For a really good picture of my thinking, read my Montessori Unschool Manifesto here.

Fun Facts about 158

• There are exactly 158 digits in 100!. (100! is 100 x 99 x 98 x … x 2 x 1).

• There are no numbers that have 158 coprimes smaller than it, which means 158 is nontotient. Two numbers are coprime or relatively prime if they have no factors in common besides 1, or in other words, if their greatest common factor is 1.

• The sum of the digits of 158 is 14, so it is not divisible by 3 or 9. In fact, 158 has only four factors: 1, 2, 79, and 158.

Articles with Activity ideas

Fraction Dominoes Puzzle: I’m excited to try this puzzle with my students. I’m even more excited to get them to make their own puzzles for each other or their younger colleagues. I’ve never thought of using dominoes as fractions before. I’m not sure it’s really necessary to use dominoes, but it’s a fun idea.

Five Fun Things To Do With 21st Century Pattern Blocks: Oh boy do I want a set of these 21st Century Pattern Blocks made by Math4Love. I want their Upscale Pattern Blocks, too, and I don’t even have a classroom right now! Christopher Danielson of Talking Math With Your Kids has put together a wonderful collection of activities/prompts for the pattern blocks. I especially want to try the mirror reflections. [Elementary Montessorians: I think the proportions of the blue magic triangles are the same as the red triangles in these pattern blocks, so you may be able to do most of these with materials you already have.]

Pattern Machines: What They Are And Why You Need One: Christopher Danielson has also figured out what to do with those silly pop-up multiplication machines from Lakeshore Learning—turn them into something else. I can imagine these being hugely engaging for those 6- and 7-year-olds who need to fidget. And I can envision some wonderful conversations about multiples and the patterns they make.

Speaking of multiples, I wrote about a wonderful conversation I had with some children about the patterns we saw in a 100 chart (and why I’ve switched from the traditional Montessori Multiples of Numbers paper to a 100 chart).

Here’s another great example of a simple question leading to wonderful mathematical debate: “It Depends on The Meaning of Almost.”

The Powers of The Multiplication Table: And here’s a great article from Plus with more multiplication table patterns.

Just One Cut: This is one of my favorite activities to do early in the year. Fold paper so you can cut a square out of the middle with only one cut. What other shapes can you make?

Math for Love has a review of Ben Orlin’s new book Math Games with Bad Drawings. I’ll add my vote for this book. It was hugely popular in my elementary classroom last year, even though I only taught two or three games from it. The children were constantly asking to borrow it to teach themselves new games. Now it’s sitting on my bedside table waiting for me to clear out some time to read it straight through.

Math in Nature: 5 Stunning Ways We See Math in The World: Math Geek Mama has a nice article about math in nature.

If you want to dig deeper into math in nature, check out this 3-part oldie but goody from Vi Hart on why plants love Fibonacci Numbers:

There is also lots of math to be found in the kitchen. Here are Three Ways to See Mathematical Structure in The Kitchen (with young children).

Denise Gaskins is writing a new book called Math Word Problems from Literature, and she has written a three-part blog series about some of the resources and ideas she mentions in the book. You can find them here:

• Problem Solving with James Tanton

• Numberless Word Problems: I have never tried numberless word problems, but I’ve wanted to for a while, and I’m excited to try them with my middle schoolers this year.

• Playful Math: Getting Students to Write Their Own [Problems]

Something Fun

Grant Sanderson over at 3blue1brown hosts one of my favorite YouTube channels. (If I call it a vlog, is it legit on a blog roundup?) This is a great video about lying with visual proofs.

Practical Theory—Stuff You should know

Math Beyond The School Mindset: An excellent article that explores a broader view of math. The article makes two key points that I think are crucial: 1) It may be cognitively and academically beneficial to delay the introduction of formalism/symbols for most children, and 2) Math needs stories. In fact, this article argues that we math teachers may be doing more harm than good, and I believe it. (To be fair, math teachers aren’t really the guilty party here; until we can get politicians, school boards, standardized testing companies, Bill Gates, and probably parents on board, most math teachers have little say in what they teach.)

Racks and Tubes: The Legend: Speaking of stories, here is my attempt at a story for the Montessori Racks and Tubes material. It works if you need to teach formal long division, although I’m still not wildly pleased with it, because it’s a story meant to teach a particular algorithm, rather than a story meant to provoke thought.

Why Kids Should Use Their Fingers In Math Class: In this article from The Atlantic, Jo Boaler writes about the importance of letting children use their fingers to count. As Montessorians like to say, “The hand is the prehensile instrument of the mind”. This applies as much to counting on our fingers as it does to using manipulatives to learn math.

Dehumanizing Math Educators: Jo Boaler has been the target of unrelenting attacks, primarily by white men, for years and years. Sunil Singh has a behind-the-scenes look at what Boaler has been going through. She has worked so hard to bring the beauty and humanity of mathematics to classrooms, but there are so many people who believe that math facts are the most important thing to learn in math class.

Cool Applications

Geometric Analysis Reveals How Birds Mastered Flight: Here’s a super fun article about using geometry to understand how birds fly.

Can Maths Help Improve The Communities of The Future? This article from Plus magazine explores different ways that mathematical models can be used to help local governments plan solve pressing problems. It’s got great examples of math applications that definitely don’t have one right answer, because the math is a tool used by humans to help organize and weigh human judgements.

The mathematics of gerrymandering got some big play this week in The Washington Post. I’m glad to see this issue going mainstream, and this article does a good job explaining the basics of the math, as well as the pros and cons of Monte Carlo simulation (basically solving problems by getting a computer to simulate lots of solutions to the problem using probability).

Mike’s Math Page has a nice article on exploring the mathematics of gerrymandering with kids. Unfortunately, the actual curriculum materials aren’t public, but you might be able to get them if you request them. If you’re an NCTM member, you can get a different set of resources here: Gerrymandering: When Equivalent is Not Equal!

Our community, Deschooling Ourselves, is designed to help parents and teachers rethink the nature of learning and the role of school in children’s lives. We now have a free membership option, which lets you participate in conversations and join our weekly livestreams. I am so excited to have you join us!

Coming Up: Playful Math Carnival

At the end of August, I will be hosting the 158th edition of the Playful Math Carnival, which is a collection of mathy fun for parents and teachers. If you’ve run across any fun math puzzles or blog posts recently, share them with me in the comments, please!

To find out more, you can read the current edition of the carnival on the Math Mama Writes blog here. It will be my first time hosting, and I’m really excited about it.

That is the metaphor of participation. In this view, learning is about becoming a progressively fuller participant in a community, whether a literal one, like a family, or a metaphorical one (see what I did there?), like the community of mathematicians (Lave and Wenger 1991). In this metaphor, the idea of learning as a separate activity is hardly meaningful. Learning is something one does in the course of participating in a community. Moreover, there is no need to test learning; the “test” is how fully you participate in the community.

The difference may seem, well, academic, and it’s easy to poke holes in both metaphors if you take them too literally. Obviously some amount of internal acquisition of skills goes on, even as one is participating in a community, and of course the purpose of acquiring those skills is to facilitate participation in some form of community (family, neighborhood, society, a business, etc). The point, however, is not to decide which one is the perfect description of reality–they are both metaphors, not reality–but to recognize that how we approach the business of learning depends a great deal on which metaphor we choose.

Below is a comparison between these two metaphors and their central implications:

So let’s bring this all back down to earth with a few examples. I’m sure you can think of some examples of “pure” acquisition-metaphor learning. The one that comes to mind for me is the classic weekly spelling test. Each week, the children in a class are given a list of words to study, memorize, and then write correctly on a Friday spelling test. If the teacher is skillful, the lists are organized systematically to teach spelling rules, so that one week, students work on the Milk Truck Rule and the next week they work on when to double consonants before a suffix. If the teacher is really skillful, the children may be able to work through the lists at an individualized pace, or even choose some of the words to be relevant to their own interests.

Now let’s consider an entirely different learning context, where the participation-metaphor becomes much more sensible. When I was about 11 years old, I had a chance to build a traditional(ish) Aleut-style sea kayak at school, and then take it out for several days of kayaking and camping. There were six or seven kids in our group of kayak-builders, as well as two “old-timers”, one of our teachers and a friend of the school who led kayaking expeditions in Alaska during the summer. In the course of building the kayaks, they taught us about all the parts of a kayak, how to steam and bend wood for the kayak ribs, how to tie together all the parts, how to cover the whole thing with canvas, how to safely exit an upside down kayak underwater, and a thousand little things like how to use a lighter to seal nylon cord and how to use a staple gun. The project took eight months, and in the entire process, I think there was one “lecture”: a brief explanation at the start of the project about all the parts of a kayak and how a kayak is built.

Moreover, even though we had “old-timers” no one was the absolute expert with all the knowledge: among other things, we all learned together than oak is a terrible choice of wood for kayak ribs. They snap instead of bending. Red cedar on the other hand? Mwah! We didn’t find this out because one person knew in our group knew all the answers in advance. Instead, we learned it through research and trial and error after breaking about ten-thousand oak ribs.

Although you can certainly tell from my descriptions which of these metaphors I prefer, I’m not arguing that we should completely switch our metaphor for all time. In a world where technical, cognitive skills (mind work) are crucial, there are times when systematically breaking down a cognitive skill is very helpful and effective. However, it doesn’t seem to be the way that we have evolved to learn, and for most of us, it is both boring and extremely difficult. Learning through participation seems to be much closer to the way we humans naturally learn, and in my experience, it is much more satisfying, enjoyable, and (frequently) effective.

So why isn’t a participation model of learning more common? Because it doesn’t lend itself to large-scale standardization, efficient instruction, and convenient measurement. When you are trying to design a standardized school system, or even a classroom, meant to teach everyone in the same way, the acquisition model is far more convenient than the participation model.

The problem, however, is that as schooling has become a foundational assumption within our culture, the acquisition model has become synonymous with learning, to the point that we don’t “trust” any form of learning that isn’t explicit, systematic, and measured. And so we fall prey to the “Learning Activity Virus”. Part of my mission with The Montessori Cosmos and Deschooling Ourselves is to help us move toward a participation metaphor of learning, at least part of the time, so that we can trust the many ways that our children are learning that cannot be isolated and measured.

In the comments, please share one time you have learned through participation without any formal syllabus, instruction, or measurement.

Bibliography

Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Learning in Doing. Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Pattison, Harriet, and Alan Thomas. 2016. Rethinking Learning to Read. Shrewsbury: Educational Heretics Press.

An Exciting Announcement

Deschooling Ourselves is now free to join! Come join us to see what we’ve already done and find out what options are available to dig deeper!

I spend a lot of time in Montessori parenting groups, especially on Facebook. I love seeing all the wonderful ways parents support their children, but I also see a lot of misconceptions about Montessori and what parents should be doing.

Perhaps the second most common misconception (the most common misconception is that it's all about the "stuff", but I'll write about that on another day) is that parents should be playing with their children or "giving them lessons". It's not surprising that parents (at least American ones) believe this, as we are constantly steeped in messages telling us to embrace the "Learning Activity Virus" or risk our children falling hopelessly "behind" and failing at life.

But this idea that we should be teaching or playing with our children goes against the central tenet of Montessori's philosophy: non-interference. To put it simply, the heart of Montessori is Never interrupt a concentrating child. Dr. Montessori herself says in Maria Montessori Speaks To Parents,

All children should be left a great deal to themselves, to play as we adults call it – though in reality they are carrying out important activities which strengthen their intelligence...Even if it merely consists of fitting a cork in a bottle and pulling it out again, the child is learning muscle control and mental accuracy. His attention is concentrated, and when he is ready for something more complicated this little activity will cease to interest him. (56)

...and we explained to her [a mother] how important it is not to try to share a child’s occupations unless he asks for help. So long as a child is actively interested in what he is doing and there is no harm in his activity, he is definitely working on his own development. Besides any new idea he may be grasping, he is developing concentration and self-discipline.(38)

Essentially, your job as a parent is to provide your children with some worthwhile objects to explore, people to connect with, and the tools they need to care for themselves as independently as possible, and then wait quietly by until they ask for help, trusting that they are building themselves. Even staring out the window has value for your child.

So I should just sit there?

Yes, at least some. This is observation and it is extremely valuable for getting to know your child and their interests. The trick is to try to understand what your children are doing and what they are trying to do, and resist the urge to judge or try to figure out how to get them to do more. Unless your child is at actually risk of hurting herself or someone/something else, leave her alone!

But it's important to realize that watching too much, especially if your children are older, can be quite disturbing to the child and make them feel like you are judging or assessing them. Let your children have their privacy! So long as your child is in a safe place, you are not a neglectful parent if you go off and do your own thing, or you sit nearby and read a book or knit or otherwise occupy yourself.

Here are some questions I try to ask when observing:

• What body/facial language indicates concentration?
• What is currently attracting my child's concentration?
• If my child is not concentrating on anything, can I identify what might be getting in the way?
• What do they do when they are struggling or frustrated?

For a deeper dive into observation, check out this article.

But what about the desire to be together?

"But my child likes to be with me! And I like spending time with my child!"

Yes, togetherness is an important part of healthy family life, and a sense of connection – of mattering to someone – is critical to everyone's psychological health. Here's the trick: children are built to join the community around them, so don't join your child in their world; invite your child into yours.

Children, especially young ones, love to be helpful. So think about ways your child can participate in your activities: helping to load the dishwasher, preparing dinner, coming along on errands, "writing" in their own notebook while you journal in yours. Eventually, maybe helping with some of your actual work. I started helping my dad balance the checkbook when I was ten or so, and I remember how proud I was to be able to do such a grownup task.

Keep in mind also that togetherness is as much about a sense of warmth and common cause as it is about collaborating on the same task at all times. Putting your two-year-old in the shopping cart and discussing what you're buying is as much togetherness as sitting on the floor giving a "lesson". For young children, togetherness can also be physical: wearing your toddler or putting him in the cart and letting him watch what's happening around him is also a form of togetherness.

Finally, the saying "It takes a village to raise a child" is absolutely true. The idea of the nuclear family – not as a living arrangement, but as an indiependent unit – is a historical and cultural aberration. Children have always been raised and cared for by "alloparents" – siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, and friends – alongside their own parents. Cultivate your own village in whatever way you can, and appreciate what those alloparents have to offer. trying to provide all the togetherness your child needs by yourself is a recipe for burnout and resentment. It's not healthy for you or your child.

In Summary

It's okay to relax! More than lessons and carefully prepared materials, your child needs time to explore and role models to observe. So instead of being a teacher, be yourself and let your child see you doing the things you value, whether that's reading, creating, working, visiting sick relatives, or doing the dishes.

I'm not a big believer in "school standards," or curriculum at all, except in very particular circumstances (when a person has requested orderly guidance through a topic). However, we live in a society that places academic expectations on children based on their age, and there can be consequences for ignoring those expectations. Even though I don't agree with the standards, it would be unfair to the children in my care to just pretend they don't exist.

So this is how I use the child-friendly school standards in my classroom in a private Montessori school. (The same basic idea applies to a public or charter Montessori classroom, though some of the details would have to change).

I typically don't say anything about school standards until a child is 8 or 8 1/2. My experience is that this is the sweet spot for most children, where the conscious desire to be "responsible" and meet expectations starts to blossom. Before that, the idea that society places expectations on them just isn't meaningful to most children.

When I judge a child or group of children is ready, I bring out the school standards and tell the children something like this:

Here in our Montessori school, you are very lucky because you get to decide how to spend your days and you get to work on what you're most interested in. Most children don't get to make those choices. However, you should know that our society has certain expectations about what children your age should be learning. These lists will show you what your peers in other schools are learning right now.

It's entirely up to you how you use this information. You might decide you want to work through them in order and be sure to learn every single item on them. I'm happy to help you figure out what you need to practice. You might just spot check the lists every now and then. Or maybe you'll ignore them completely.

Before you do that, I want you to understand what the consequences of that choice might be. As long as you're here in our class, there won't be any real consequences, though your parents might worry and you might not do as well on the standardized tests we practice in the spring. But, if you are going to go to another school after your time here, and especially if you are going to go to a traditional public school, your teachers and classmates will expect that you have studied these topics. You might feel embarrassed or have to do extra work to catch up if you haven't learned these things. [For young adolescents, I might add that what they learn now may affect their choice of classes in high school.]

On the other hand, if you follow them too closely, you might be bored and you might lose out on the chance to discover and follow a suprising interest. But the choice is yours.

Let's take a look at the lists together and you can ask me any questions. I think you'll find that most of the items on the list are things that you do anyway.

My approach has evolved over the years. I used to tell children that society gave them certain responsibilities, but I've started to avoid that term as I've come to appreciate the difference between real responsibility and faux-responsibility. Now I prefer to use the term "expectation".

I have also begun to emphasize the children's choice and the consequences of that choice, based on suggestions from William Stixrud and Ned Johnson in their book The Self-Driven Child. They suggest that our job as parents (and in this case, as a teacher) is not to make choices for children, but to ensure that children have the information to make a well-informed decision, and then we allow them to make their own choices, so long as they are in the realm of reasonable. In this case, I feel that most decisions a child could make are reasonable (even if their parents may not agree!), and so I put the child in charge. If concerns arise, I can discuss them with an individual child at a later date.

Share in the comments: How do you give children information to make their own choices?

But I've come to see this idea of responsibility as a concept that is easily abused. Of course, there will always be debates about what constitutes "appropriate" use of materials. Swinging the Red Rods around like a baseball bat is obviously a misuse of materials and puts people in danger. What about building a "house" with the Box of Geometry Sticks and the Pinboard? Dr. Montessori certainly insisted children should not use materials in ways that weren't intended, because they would come to see them as toys, not tools. Personally, I'm not sure where I land in that regard. But this isn't really the abuse I'm thinking of.

Instead, I'm thinking of statements like these (all of which have come out of my mouth at some point, so I'm not casting aspersions here):

• You have a responsibility to society to learn everything in the Common Core standards.
• You can choose how to spend your time, but you have a responsibility to follow up on lessons I give you.
• You must choose math and writing every day.
• You may work on whatever you want, but you must choose work.

The problem is, none of these have anything to do with responsibility. Instead, they are about perceived benefits to the child's future self, and turning them into obligations fundamentally says, "You can make choices, but we don't really trust you with your own education." By definining these specifics as "responsibilities", we take away the child's true responsibility for their own education and future.

Instead of thinking of "Freedom with Responsibility", I have begun to prefer the idea of "Autonomy, not Independendence", Which comes from Michaeleen Doucleff's excellent book Hunt, Gather, Parent. She defines the difference between autonomy and independence this way: Independence is being entirely free of others, without any obligation or commitment. Autonomy means making ones own choices freely within a web of communal connections: responsibilities to others and conversely, a community of protection and support.

"One night back home in San Francisco, Rosy [Doucleff's three-year-old daughter] eloquently sums up this style of parenting at dinner: 'Everyone does what they want, but they must be kind, share, and be helpful.'" (Doucleff, 2021, p. 261)

Within this definition, responsibility is the obligation to care for ourselves and our community. Children have a responsibility to treat others with kindness, to share in caring for the environment, to help each other out, and to stand up for their own needs, and these are the responsibilities that we, as parents and guides, have an obligation to insist upon.

Introducing Deschooling Ourselves

Would you like to work more closely with me? Dig deeper into how to rethink the idea of school?

Come join us at Deschooling Ourselves.

Learn...

• The principles of a deschooled mindset
• How learning really works
• How motivation works
• The many ways to define success
• The many purposes of school, good and bad
• How children make the transition to adulthood
• How to let your child be the architect of their own life
• The many ways to educate happy, healthy, capable children

With a deschooled mindset, you can...

1. Confidently choose an alternative to traditional school
2. Stay in a less than ideal school on your family's terms
3. Stop trying to live your child's life
4. Be a calm, non-anxious, confident guide and consultant to your children
5. Parent from wisdom, not fear
6. Build a child-inclusive life, not a child-centered life
7. Worry less. Trust more. Relax and raise happy, sociable, educated and successful children, with or without school.

Join by August 1 to be part of our kick-off party!

So I have begun a new community to work on deschooling ourselves and our mindset. It is called, logically enough, Deschooling Ourselves.

We had our first livestream yesterday, and I am making it public here so that you can check out what we're doing.

We would love to have you join us!

Find out more here:

Deschooling Ourselves

I'm excited to see you there!

- Children learn because they are taught.

- And therefore, if we want children to learn, we must teach them.

- If children aren’t learning according to the schedule we set, there is something wrong with the child or the teacher.

- Children’s activities must be carefully curated to ensure they learn the right lessons from them.

- The most important learning happens in a classroom.

You may think you disagree with these statements. If I challenged you, you would probably flatly deny you agree with them. But I suspect your actions say otherwise. Let me draw an important distinction, and then it will be clearer what I mean.

Work, Play, and Learning Activities

In Montessori, we tend to draw a sharp distinction, between “work” and “play”, and I think similar distinctions are drawing throughout American* society. In this post, I’d instead like to draw a three way distinction between categories of children’s activities and give some careful definitions.

- Play is any activity freely chosen by the child and done for the child’s own purposes. This can include social play, pretend play, physical games, reading a book, studying a topic of interest, or anything else the child a) chooses, b) structures for themselves, possibly in collaboration with others, and c) can put down at any time. 

- Work is activity done for the benefit of the family or community (this could include a classroom or school unit). For adults, this includes wage labor, but for children, it generally doesn’t. Work for children is mostly what we call chores, though it could also include helping friends sort out an argument or running an errand for an adult. It may be chosen or assigned, and its successful completion may be celebrated by adults. 

- Finally, we have learning activities. I define these as activities arranged and guided, or imposed, by adults for the future benefit of the child. They offer little immediate benefit to anyone. Learning activities can include schoolwork, organized sports, toys or games designed to teach specific skills (if they are guided by adults), all sorts of lessons such as music, dance, and art classes, tutoring, and homework. According to this definition, guided “playful learning” is also a learning activity.

The relative proportion of play versus work in a child’s life varies by culture and age, but according to anthropologists of childhood, the proportion of learning activities in the majority of cultures is zero, or close to it. Formal teaching, and the variety of learning activities associated with it, are largely recent inventions. The more typical attitude in hunter-gatherer and traditional agrarian societies is, “They will learn it anyway, so why waste time teaching them?”  In fact, it is a common belief that children learn better when left to their own devices. Even the original “school-like” structures, apprenticeships, involved little teaching, and relatively little room for practice that didn’t help the master craftsman economically.

At their heart, learning activities are about adults taking responsibility for children’s learning, and this is why I predict you act as if you are responsible for everything your child (or students) learn, even if you are not. Consider for a moment how often you let your children play without any interference (beyond basic supervision for safety) or expect they do chores. Now compare that to the amount of time you spend explaining things to your children, helping them with their work, picking out educational toys, or shuttling them around to lessons and activities.

The learning activity virus

Adult guided learning experiences aren’t necessarily bad.  What worries me is the way that “learning activities” have taken over the cultural zeitgeist to the point where parents and teachers literally have a legal responsibility for children’s learning. Parents are reluctant to accept the value of anything children choose to do on their own, and schools deal with problems by introducing more teaching. Children are bullying each other? Let’s introduce a Social-Emotional Learning curriculum. Children are bored on the playground? Let’s introduce “play coaches” to teach the children how to play. Children have downtime after school? Sign them up for classes so they can learn something else! Summer break coming soon? We better give them homework for the summer so they don’t “lose” learning. Want to market a new toy? Tell parents about its “educational value” and it’s sure to be a hit!

In fact, the culture of learning activities has so infected Americans that it’s common for adults to conflate it with work, as in “learning is your work”, and even exempt children from contributing to the household, in the form of chores, in order to make time for homework and various organized activities. Learning activities have become so strongly conflated with learning, that it is hard to convince people that there is valuable learning to be had in play or work if they are not explicitly “learning-ified”. And so they take a back seat to school, classes, and studying, and may even be eliminated altogether, because “learning” is what children are supposed to do, and that has to happen in learnified activities. 

And this is where we have a problem, because children learn plenty, even entire repertoires of skills and culture from work and play. They learn by observation, pretend play, playful practice, and “pitching in” (Gaskins and Paradise, in Lancy, Bock, and Gaskins, 2010). And these are tools that children have evolved to use for their learning, and according to both anthropologists and educators (Maria Montessori!), they do so joyfully, and with relatively little work on the part of adults. But as we take over more and more of children’s time with learning activities, we force them to try to learn in a way that is highly unnatural, and we may even take away their ability to learn in more typical ways. In his book Free to Learn, Peter Gray writes:

"Lancy and a number of other anthropologists have suggested that Western schools---by indoctrinating students with the idea that learning occurs through top-down verbal instruction from a teacher and that copying others is cheating--may be teaching children not to learn through observation. By way of illustration, Lancy told me of a recent experience he had while skiing in Utah. A boy of about eleven years old, who had apparently never used a Poma lift before, approached this unusual type of ski lift without paying attention to how others were using it. When it was his turn to board, he held up the whole line of skiers behind him while he asked someone to teach him how to use the lift. In any non-Western culture, according to Lancy, a child in a similar situation would have had the sense to hold back and learn by watching how others did it. It is far more efficient to learn a task like riding a Poma lift by observation than by verbal instruction" (Gray, 2013, p.194).

Explicit instruction is not always necessary, and sometimes it’s better for kids to figure things out on their own, but it can speed up learning in the contexts where the options for learning through observation are limited, or there is a “code” that the children can’t break (i.e. reading, for some children). But I worry more about the management of the activities that go along with this instruction. Here is where we get into dangerous territory. Rather that teaching to answer the children’s questions and then sending them back to their own activities, we build an entire edifice of control around the children’s learning in order to “force” them to accept and absorb the lessons we offer on the schedule we offer.

There is wonderful progress in creating learning activities that invite children to be active participants and thinkers. For example, there is an entire world of math teachers working to create opportunities for children to explore and invent mathematics. The Writers Workshop, invented by Lucy McCormick Calkins, gives children opportunities to actually be writers. Various forms of service learning and expeditionary learning give children a chance to make real contributions.

But fundamentally, all of these approaches are built around forcing the children to learn according to an adult agenda. Adults set the time for the learning to happen. Adults create the context where it will happen. Adults decide on the main activities that will be part of the learning. Adults observe to see if the children are “participating.” Adults judge the success or failure of the learning. Most importantly, adults decide what is to be learned. Children’s agency is limited to how they choose to interact with the learning opportunity carefully provided by the adults, unless they choose to reject the entire edifice and face the consequences of their rebellion. In other words, these methods are kinder and gentler than trying to literally beat lessons into children, but they still aim to manage children so that they learn on our schedule and produce something that adults can judge.

Again, there may be times when such management makes sense, though I think fewer than many imagine. But we should treat the management of children’s learning like an opioid medicine: it has its uses, but it is easy to abuse (by the teacher, not the student!) and it can create dependence. Every time we manage children’s learning, we take away their opportunity to manage themselves.

Montessorians, You’re Not Off The Hook

I’m sure a lot of Montessori guides are reading this and saying, “Of course, that’s how traditional school works. We don’t do that.” But I’m not letting Montessorians off the hook, because in my experience we do the same thing, just not quite as thoroughly as the best traditional teachers. You’ll have to return and read more though, because that is a story for another day.

I sat down next to her and wrote out the envelope, and then she put the stamp on and we took it to the mailbox. She was thrilled! Later in the afternoon, she wrote about six more cards.

I tell this story not to brag about how wonderful my daughter is (she is, but I also left out the hour long meltdown in the middle of this story), but to point out how play leads to competence.

This isn’t the first time she has “written” a card, though it’s the first time she got her own cards. In the past, she has drawn circles or tried to trace her hand, and been very proud of both efforts. But you can see from the photo that this time she is very clearly imitating writing. In fact, as far as she’s concerned, she is writing, although she knows that she’s not making real letters yet. You can see that her squiggles follow a pattern of rows, and they have curves and waves like adult writing. She also wrote from left to right and from top to bottom, just the way adults do. She talked the entire time about who the cards were for, so she knows the purpose of writing a card.

Our house is highly literate, and she is surrounded by books and by adults who read and write constantly (this is important, and we’ll come back to it), but we haven’t explicitly taught her anything about writing. We do have a set of sandpaper letters (a Montessori material that allows children to trace letters with their fingers), and when she asks, I’ll tell her the letter sound and show her how to trace it.

But mostly, she is learning by observing and playing, which is the normal way that children around the world learn just about everything (Gaskins and Paradise, 2010). In fact, in most traditional cultures around the world, explicit teaching is essentially non-existent. Adults expect children to observe everything going on around them (and there are few spaces where they are unwelcome), and then to imitate the adults through play and small-scale work in order to learn. And it works! Children learn the full range of culturally relevant skills and knowledge, including abstract ideas like cosmologies, from listening, watching, playing, and pitching in.

Unfortunately, this model of learning, has almost entirely disappeared in highly schooled, WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. The notion that children learn by direct teaching, and by input and control by adults, means that we are liable to “take over” this sort of play and use it to our own ends, or eliminate it entirely. 

Here are some ways I could become an obstacle to this play and its push toward intentional competence. See if any of them seem familiar to you.

• I could refuse to give her the tools, telling her that they are for people who know how to write. (Unfortunately, I see this happen far too often in Montessori classrooms, when adults tell children something like: “Those are for children who already know how to write. If you want to draw, let me show you something you can do.”).

• I could praise her writing and tell her how great it is. She knows she didn’t write real letters, and doesn’t need me pretending otherwise. (We did praise her, but it was about how kind it is to write cards to people you love.)

• I could belittle her writing by pointing out that it’s pretend. It’s not pretend. As far as she’s concerned, she is writing, she’s just not doing it with letters yet.

• I could take the pen from her and try to “help” her write a “real” note by taking dictation for her. (I tried this with one card. It did not go well. She’s interested in the act of “writing” and the recipient of the card, not the message.)

• Perhaps worst of all, I could take this as my cue that she is “ready” to learn to read and write, and start trying to teach her letters, colonizing her play to for my own ends.

Unlike village children, for whom almost every relevant skill is readily observable through watching and listening, S probably is going to need some explicit instruction in order to crack the “code” of reading and writing. There is too much purely cognitive knowledge involved in literacy for most children to work out on their own. 

But here’s the thing, we can provide explicit instruction without taking over and doing it on our schedule. S will continue to write, and it will become more and more like adult writing. She will continue to read by imitating and repeating and reading to “Baby” (a doll) and her infant sister. And as she notices more details and masters the reading skills she already has, she will ask about what she doesn’t understand. This may not follow any expert-approved pattern (for example, she is already an expert on exclamation points, despite knowing a few of her letters), but it will follow an S-approved pattern, and I fully expect that her own desire to be a competent member of our family and community will drive her to learn to read and write.

This isn’t to dismiss the value of a classroom community, nor of didactic materials like sandpaper letters. My children are lucky (from an academic perspective) to live in an extremely literate household with adults who model reading and writing. Writing is relevant to her world. Unfortunately, many children live in environments where they are told literacy is important to their future, but it is not important in their surroundings. This is where a classroom community can come in. Here, we have an opportunity to create a place where literacy is important, where grownups and older children use reading and writing on a daily basis, and where children are invited into the land of literacy. But we don’t have to view this as a kind battle against the child, in which the learning happens because adults drag the child down a step by step path of explicit instruction. Instead, we can invite children to play toward competence, and give them just the help they need.

What if we let our children play freely, knowing that this is how they learn to negotiate conflicts, win and lose gracefully, and recognize their limits?

What if we let our older children play with younger children, knowing that this is how they learn to become caretakers.

What if we let our younger children play with older children, knowing that this is where they find role models?

What if we let children change the rules of the game, knowing that this is how they learn positive cooperation?

What if we trusted that children can make and find their own toys, knowing that “educational” toys mostly serve the needs of manufacturers?

What if we handled problems by interfering less, not teaching more, knowing that children figure out a great deal by experimenting?

What if we didn’t worry so much about our children’s academic performance, knowing that this is only one route to a fulfilling life, and good enough is good enough?

What if we stopped worrying about “learning loss” and “grade-level benchmarks”, knowing that such constructions are for the convenience of schools and politicians, not the benefit of children?

What if we focused time on our own hobbies, not just on our children’s, knowing that children learn from watching us?

What if we focused attention on our own habits, instead of trying to force our children to be the people we wish we were?

What if we let children stare off into space during lessons, knowing that children learn and pay attention in many different ways?

What if we didn’t worry about children demonstrating their learning, knowing that learning and performing learning are not the same thing?

What our lessons answered children’s questions instead of making them answer ours, knowing that children will learn if it meets their needs right now?

What if we let children into adult spaces, knowing they will learn by observing and this is how children in the past and around the world learn every day?

What if we trusted children to guide their own learning, knowing that becoming competent community members is what children want to do?

What if we insisted that children do chores, knowing they are members of a family and community now and the want to contribute now, not only in the future?

What if we trusted children to handle difficult emotions, knowing that difficult emotions are an unavoidable part of life?

What if we let children take (reasonable) risks, knowing that they might get hurt, but probably won’t, and that this is how they learn to be competent and unafraid?

What if we let daily life be organized for our benefit as well as our children’s, knowing that children are part of a family and a community?

What if we spoke honestly to our children, knowing that they will follow our lead if we are honest, trustworthy, and reasonable in our demands?

What if we let go of the idea that mothers are the best caretakers, knowing that children the world over are cared for by all sorts of adults and older children?

What if we trusted that children’s play is their learning, knowing that they wouldn’t bother if it wasn’t providing an interesting challenge?

What if we just taught the things children truly can’t learn on their own, knowing that most things are best learning through experience and self-direction?

What if we trusted that there are many different ways to be in the world, knowing that our children will find one that works for them, and with gentle guidance, we can help them find a positive direction?

What if we let go of some control, knowing that our well-meaning efforts to mold our children into successful adults can be as much hindrance as help?

What if we allowed our children to be who they are, knowing that attempts to force our children into a particular mold is a legacy of tyranny and colonialism?

What if we let our children be less than perfect, knowing that this is the way of humans?

What if we allowed children agency over their lives?

American*: This post started as a question on my Facebook feed, where I wrote “What if anxiety were not the driving force behind white, middle-class American parenting?” One person took exception with the “middle-class” part, saying it was really upper class parents who are so anxious. Another proposed that it was all American parents who live under this cloud of anxiety. Personally, I feel that much of this anxiety is driven by school, media, and political narratives, as well as marketing and litigation, so I suspect most American parents feel some generic, undirected sense of anxiety about their children, but probably experience it in different ways, depending on their background. So just know that I am writing from the perspective of a white, upper-middle class parent and teacher, who has taught primarily in private schools.