Teacher Tom

Bicycles are Always Better Than Money

2024-02-22T07:13:00.000-08:00

When we're little, people tell us we can be whatever we want to be so we imagine ourselves to be princesses and superheroes. We don't aspire to become these things, we embody them.

Then we're taught we're just pretending so we start to aspire. We believe that we can one day be ballerinas and baseball players.

A precious few are never taught the long odds and go on to the stage or the diamond, while the rest learn that we must be more realistic. People still tell us we can be anything we want to be, but already our choices have been limited. We assert, "But I am an artist!" or "I am an actor!" or "I am an entrepreneur!" or "I am an inventor!" while the world, with a pat on the head, says, "Of course you are," while advising us that we still might want to consider back up plans in case that doesn't "work out."

"Work out," of course, means to result in sufficient income. And that from the start has been the bottom line. We've never been free to be whatever we want.

We don't often tell our children the truth about money in our culture. Oh sure, we scold them that this longed for item is too expensive or that we go to the office most days only so we can put food on the table. But when we tell them they can be anything they want to be, we know we are speaking the language of fairy tales. We don't mean to lie, of course. We do it in the spirit of bucking them up, of inspiring them, of demonstrating our belief in their capabilities, but at bottom we know the odds are too long and that money will eventually claim them.

That said, it would be a cruelty to tell our four-year-olds that they will never fly to the moon, so we let them dream. We even encourage them to dream. Many of us join them in their bubble for a time, temporarily convincing ourselves that they will one day fly a space ship, but we ourselves have learned the hard truth about money, even as we try, for these precious years, to protect them from it. Barring extraordinary luck or talent, we know that even hard work is unlikely to set them free from money's incessant demand that it be earned and managed and grudgingly spent. We've absorbed the dubious lessons of thrift. Some of us even believe that the entire purpose of childhood is to be shaped into an employee.

Money is nothing but an idea. It is a story we collectively tell ourselves.

Children who grow up in poverty begin to learn the story much earlier than those born to families that are well off. These children learn it because there is nowhere to hide from it. Their parents run themselves ragged in minimum wage, dead-end work. Any money that does come their way is converted directly into the food on their plates, a reality that is hidden from the children of wealthier families. Any dreams they might have are exposed as chimera beside the reality of money in a household in which money is scarce. It takes longer for a middle class child to learn the story of money because it can survive longer as an abstraction, but even those of us who try to protect our children from it for as long as possible, can't help ourselves. We buy them piggybanks in which they are to "save" each precious coin. We discourage them from "wasting" it. We even forbid them things that we can afford under the guise of teaching them that "money doesn't grow on trees."

Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg writes in her essay The Little Virtues: "If we deny him a bicycle which he wants and which we could buy him we only prevent him from having something that it is reasonable a boy should have, we only make his childhood less happy in the name of an abstract principle and without any real justification. And we are tacitly saying to him that money is better than a bicycle; on the contrary he should learn that a bicycle is always better than money."

Ginzburg suggests that our goal should not be to teach children the value of money, but rather "an indifference to money." After all, for most of us money is something that comes and goes all through life. If we overvalue it, when it goes it's such a blow that it tends to destroy everything else on the way out the door. We can hardly think any more. It makes people jump from tall buildings. It even threatens our most important relationships. If we overvalue it, when it does finally come, it's a boon that it ascends to a pedestal. We then cling to it to the exclusion of all else, praying that it never leaves us again, as if it is our savior or a loved one who can never love us back.

Being indifferent to money is such a shocking idea for many of us because it flies in the face of the story we tell about money. To be indifferent to money is to risk not having money, after all, and of all the things one might dream about being or doing, money is the one that we must never give up on. At the same time, isn't it objectively true that a bicycle is always better than money? It certainly should be for a child. Perhaps it should be for all of us.

People who think about money more than I do, tell me that money is simply a tool. When we drop a coin in our piggy bank it is the equivalent of hanging our hammer on a hook in our tool shed or storing our spatula away in a kitchen drawer so we can find them when there is a nail to be driven or a pancake to be flipped. But from a very young age, when we go to our piggy banks to use the money we've collected, say for a piece of candy, our parents caution us. "Are you sure you really want to waste your money on that?" "Didn't you say you were saving up for that bicycle?" And even when we've scrimped and saved enough to purchase the bicycle, it isn't long before the newness wears off and we begin to miss the money. Indeed, the empty piggy bank taunts us with its emptiness, sneering, You see, money is better than a bicycle. No one ever regrets using their hammers and spatulas, but there is always loss attached to the use of money. If money is a tool, it is a tool unlike any other.

These same money experts tell me to think of money as blood. It's meant to flow through the system, carrying the fiscal equivalents of oxygen and nutrients. Then doesn't that mean that when it stops flowing, like it does when left to sit in a piggy bank, it has clotted? Don't billionaires represent the ultimate blood clot? Blood clots kill. No, money is not anything like blood because if it were we would all understand it to be a sin to impede its flow by saving it. We would all know the very idea of accumulated wealth as pure evil. No, money is nothing like blood.

As we learn the story our culture tells about money our dreams begin to disappear to be replaced by years of striving at things we would rather not do in service to money. No wonder so many of us feel disillusioned and exhausted. This is what the pursuit of money instead of dreams does to us. We rationalize, telling ourselves that we will live life at the grindstone until we have enough and then, finally, in the few years we have left, we will pursue our dreams. Or as the character David Howard says in Albert Brooks' movie Lost in America, "I've finally reached a level of responsibility. Now I can afford to be irresponsible!"

And that's exactly the worst thing that our story of money does to all of us: it casts our dreams, the best of ourselves, as irresponsible. This, I assert, is why so many of us look back on childhood with so much sepia toned fondness or why we believe that young children live ideal lives compared to our own. That is the one place that the stories we tell about money have not yet penetrated. It's the one place where bicycles really are always better than money.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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

Pro Tanto Death

2024-02-21T07:43:00.000-08:00

As I entered first grade, the buzz amongst the kids was that Mrs. Dunn was mean. We all hoped for Miss McCutcheon as our homeroom teacher, who was rumored to be the nice one. I celebrated when I learned I was to be in "good" teacher's class. Two years later, my brother was assigned to the "bad" teacher's class, who, as it turned out, he adored.

Looking back, I'm quite certain that we gossiping children were responding to gender and age prejudices. Mrs Dunn was older than our mothers, a veteran teacher, or at least more seasoned than Miss McCutcheon who was a stereotypically pretty young woman in her first job out of teacher's college. It was the classic Disney juxtaposition of a young, innocent princess with a crone bearing a basket of poisoned apples. I doubt any of us were conscious of the connection, but it was there in our superficial judgements.

I recall this because it's one of my earliest memories of seeing behind my own prejudices. It was, in my life, one of those shocks of recognition after which everything, including myself was transformed.

The novelist Samuel Butler in his novel The Way of All Flesh writes, "Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another." In this case, my belief in the possibility of judging good and bad teachers through stereotypes and superficialities was left in the past, where it belongs, leaving me with a present, not free of prejudice, of course, but rather one in which the person I had become knew to be more open-minded, and less susceptible to gossip.

Another 20th century literary giant, Iris Murdoch put these words into the mouth of a character in her book An Unofficial Rose: "People don't grow old. Old age in that sense is an illusion of the young." I recently saw pictures of Mrs. Dunn and Miss McCutcheon posing with their respective classes. From the perspective of a 62 year old man, they are both young and pretty, hardly distinguishable from one another.

Nothing is new, yet any life worth living is one that is constantly renewed by these pro tanto deaths, these dramatic or subtle shifts in perspective that make it impossible to ever again be the person we once were, for the world to ever again be what it once was. This is what learning and growing is all about, but we must work harder at it as we do what the young might view as growing old.

Murdoch's character, later, when caught out in a contradiction says, "I've told you I'm not a continuous being. My words cannot be used as evidence against me."

As adults in the lives of young children -- parents, educators, caretakers -- we must know that no one, and especially these children, are likewise not continuous beings. From day to day, they experience these pro tanto deaths, emerging on the other side a new person in a new world with new ideas and passions. We can be tempted to label children things like "shy" or "aggressive" or "behind." We can be blinded by those ugly marks we call grades or those assessed deficits we use as evidence "against" them. Tomorrow they will be transformed and it will all be moot unless we make the mistake of staying in the past they have left behind.

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Am I Allowed to Be Who I Am?

2024-02-20T06:57:00.000-08:00

"I'm painting out of my mouth"

In the world of play-based learning, when we think about young children making art, we generally say "process over product." Like a mantra.

In fact, for many of us, this statement – process over product – is the gateway through which we enter play-based learning.

The idea is that when preschoolers make art, the creative process is where the learning happens. "Process over product," is a reaction to the all-too-common practice of marching kids obediently through step-by-step craft projects that produce cookie cutter results. If we want children to be creative, critical thinkers instead of rote rule followers, we must value their process over all else, we say. When you see a preschool wall full of matching teddy bear art, we tell parents, run like the wind.

On the most recent episode of Teacher Tom's Podcast, I talk with pedagogical consultant Suzanne Axelsson, the author of the book The Original Learning Approach and the blog Interaction Imagination. Over the years, Suzanne and I have had dozens of deep, wide-ranging, and often profound conversations, both online and in person.

A couple years ago, for instance, she called into question this bedrock idea of “process over product.” I was at first dumbfounded. I mean “process over product” is central to the play-based approach! But Suzanne asserted that product is every bit as important as process.

“Children are often very proud of their products,” she said. “They are often deeply connected to them.” It was this perspective, as simple as that, that allowed me to realize that “process over product” was an oversimplification that can lead us to be unintentionally dismissive of what children produce. The final product – be it art or anything – is as important as the child deems it.

And when working with young children it’s important that we steer clear of the temptation to oversimplify things just because they’re young.

Indeed, when it comes to preschool art – or anything preschoolers do, in fact – we must consider not just play, not just process , and not just product, but, as Suzanne and I discuss on the podcast, we can’t neglect the fourth P: permission.

Just at it took me a while to accept the notion that a child’s product can be as important as their process, I was at first taken aback by the idea of permission. I mean, after all, children shouldn’t need my permission to play, it’s their right to play. Who am I to give permission?

But the truth is that whether we like it or not, there are hierarchies in this world, which makes permission necessary, especially when adults and children are together. As I’ve come to understand it, permission is an experience between two people, or between two aspects of one's self, characterized by allowing, accepting, and belonging. We ask ourselves, "Am I allowed to be who I am? If the answer is 'yes,' that’s permission."

It doesn’t have to be a formal thing. In fact, it is usually as simple as a facial expression. In our conversation, Suzanne talks about her own experience as a child playing on the slide and how an adult’s frown let her know she definitely didn't have permission.

To give another example, imagine a toddler who discovers a beetle. If she turns to smile at her grandfather and he smiles back at the child, even without saying anything, this is permission for her to be who she is. The toddler now knows that they are in an environment of permission. Not only that, but it is a place where the child is also giving permission to the adult.

It is only within the environment of permission, a place where we know we are welcome to be ourselves, that we can fully and honestly engage in the playful process of producing art . . . Or anything else that is personally meaningful. It is in this context that we can share our unique individual potential with society. “You can't truly be yourself without community," Suzanne once told me, "You can only try to be your unique self together with others." This is why permission is essential.

This conversation about permission is part of a wider discussion about what Suzanne calls “the original learning approach.” Essential to her approach is a thoughtful adult, one who does not oversimplify, but rather embraces all the beautiful complexity of human relationships. It means understanding that we serve multiple roles in the lives of young children. It means being open to change. And it means listening with our whole selves.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! My interview with Suzanne Axelsson has just dropped. Please give us a listen. And while there, you might also want to listen to my conversations with other early childhood and parenting thought-leaders like director of Defending the Early Years Dr. Denisha Jones, "Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent, and founder of Free Range Kids Lenore Skenazy. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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 Magic Word

2024-02-19T06:58:00.000-08:00

When I was a boy the word "please" was said to be the magic word, and I suppose it was when we were performing for adults in order to get something we wanted, but "let's" is the word with real magic in it. "Let's" is, of course, really two words that we speak as one, meaning "let us." It's not a command nor a question, but rather an invitation and in the mouths of children it's most often used as an invitation to play.

"Let's play trains."

"Let's be princesses."

"Let's pretend we're pirates and I fall off the boat into the water and you have to rescue me." Without the word "let's" cooperative dramatic play would hardly be possible.

It's not so common in our 2's class, but by the time the children are 4 and 5 you hear it a lot as they play together, often at the beginning of every sentence.

And that would be enough, if this magic word could do only this, but it's a real magic word. You can use it for almost anything you need to do with the other people.

"Let's take turns."

"Let's make a rule."

"Let's try using a rock to open it."

Of course, there's always a dark side to every kind of magic, a way to misuse it.

"Let's take all the balls."

"Let's keep the girls out."

"Let's pretend we're pirates who push everybody else into the water."

But even so, even when we use it to experiment with the misuse of our collective power, there's no denying it's a magic word, one that brings us together, that creates room for other people, that makes our play better and our lives bigger. "Let's" is always an invitation, one that contains all of the open-ended possibilities of human beings together.

I don't worry about children who've learned the power of "Let's . . ."

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! In these first three episodes of Teacher Tom's Podcast, I talk with director of Defending the Early Years Dr. Denisha Jones, "Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent, and founder of Free Range Kids Lenore Skenazy. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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!

Beautiful Moments

2024-02-16T06:49:00.000-08:00

Let’s take a moment to think about our own childhoods.

I want you to recall a beautiful moment. A time when you were young. Go back as far as you can. Most people, they tell us, don’t have many memories from before they were six-years-old, but maybe you’re one of the lucky ones. Spend a little time with that memory.

Where were you?

Who, if anyone, was with you?

What were you doing?

What were you feeling?

The memory that comes up for me was playing with my neighborhood friend Pheobe Azar. I was probably 5. It was summer time. Neither of us were wearing shoes.

We would meet up every morning after breakfast in John Sain’s front yard because it was halfway between our houses.

The adults were all indoors, busy, off to work, so it was just us kids outside. Sometimes other kids would join us. Her brother John. My brother Sam. The Beale kids, the Weible kids, the Cozart kids. Inside belonged to the adults. When we were inside, they were always telling us what to do, but outside . . . That was the place where we felt free.

I’ve done this exercise dozens of times with groups of adults, then asked them to share their beautiful moments.

Most of the time, those beautiful moments came while playing outdoors.

Usually, like in my memory, the adults were somewhere else. We were unsupervised, or at least not directly supervised.

Another common characteristic is the sense that we had all the time in the world. In a just-released conversation with "The Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent on Teacher Tom's Podcast, she tells the story of how she recently rediscovered this feeling while killing time under a pine tree with her grandchild where they had ducked to escape a sudden rain storm.

People rarely mention toys, but they often talk about playing in nature, with sticks and rocks and hills and water.

Usually, these beautiful memories involve other children, of all ages.

And finally, a huge percentage of our beautiful moments involve us doing things that our parents would probably have forbidden. This is what we adults call risk, but as children it was just play.

Outdoors, unsupervised, lots of time, few toys, other children, and risk: that's the stuff of our beautiful memories. That's the stuff of an authentic childhood.

Being a parent today is much more difficult, I think, than it was when Maggie Dent and I were kids. We don't have the freedom to simply let our children roam our neighborhoods. Even the very nature of what it means to be a parent has changed.

In her book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, psychology professor, researcher Alison Gopnik discusses an academic literature search she performed using the key word “parenting." What she found was stunning. She says that the word barely appeared in the literature before about 1962, but since that time, the use of the word has exploded into the millions.

She sees this as significant. As she puts it, we’ve taken a relationship – being a parent – and turned it into a verb – parenting. She points out that this is the only foundational relationship we’ve done this to. We don’t do wifing. We don’t do husbanding. We don't do childing. We don’t do friending. No, we are a wife. We are a husband. We are a child. We are a friend.

The central metaphor in Gopnik's book is that we’ve made parenting into a job, like being a carpenter. And as carpenters, we will now be judged by the quality of our work. The table is too wobbly. It’s not level. It’s made from the wrong kind of wood. Except now, we’re being judged by the quality of our parenting, which fundamentally changes the relationship we have with our children. Now, we can’t just let them play, outside, unsupervised, with lots of time, few toys, and other children, even if we were allow to. Now, we have to manufacture our children, or else.

Gopnik agrees with Maggie Dent that play is central to early learning – it is foundational. She urges us to try to ignore the cultural push to make us carpenters and instead consider our role more along the lines of gardeners. We plant and water the seed. We protect it. We make sure it gets enough sun and other nutrients, but beyond that it’s the seed's job to do the growing, to become what is meant to be.

This is how most children throughout most of human history have grown up. It’s how evolution designed us to learn and thrive. It's what we re-discover when we step back and allow our children to engage the world through their own curiosity. We may not be able to, or even want to, recreate our own childhood's for today's children, but when we remember our own beautiful moments it reminds of what an authentic childhood feels like, and inspires us to set the children in our lives as free as we can, and then perhaps a little more, so that they will grow up to have their own beautiful moments upon which to reflect.

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Check out my full conversation with Maggie Dent on Teacher Tom's Podcast. In these first three episodes I talk with Maggie, as well as director of Defending the Early Years Dr. Den, and the founder of Free-Range Parenting Lenore Skenazy. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you find your podcasts.

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!

Play is Liberation

2024-02-15T06:52:00.000-08:00

I didn’t start out my adult life as a teacher. I have a degree in journalism with a minor in English. I’ve been a junior business executive, a freelance writer, and a baseball coach. It wasn’t until I was close to 40-years-old that I found myself with my own preschool classroom full of 3-5 year olds.

I didn’t know much that first year, but one thing I did know was that I didn’t want to spend my days bossing kids around. So I decided that, in the spirit of the grand experiment of democracy, these children were going to make their own rules.

So, on that first day of class, we started in an official state of anarchy.

And sure enough, within the first 15 minutes of class, a child complained to me: “I was playing with that doll and she took it from me.” In a standard school, I would have had to trundle over to the offending party and, in the role of cop, say something like, “No taking things from other people.” She then would have been faced with the choice: obey or disobey.

If she chose to obey, then the lesson taught was compliance to rules passed down from on high.

If she chose to disobey, I would have had to insist, or resort to force, or threaten her with a punishment.

I didn’t want to be teaching either lesson. Unbeknownst to me, I was taking a stand on behalf of liberation pedagogy.

Instead, I was left with saying, “Oh no. I can tell you didn’t like that.” And then to the whole group, I asked, “Does anyone want other people to take things from them?” There were shouts of “No!” and lots of shaking heads.

I said, “Nobody likes that. Why don’t we all agree to not take things from other people?”

And we all agreed so I ripped a sheet of paper from an art paper roller, taped it to the wall, and wrote at the top: Agreements. Then under that I wrote: “No taking things from other people.”

Then a child called out, “Unless you ask them first.”

Everyone agreed to that as well.

Then right there, in the matter of a few minutes, these free children in an anarchistic society, agreed, by consensus, to a dozen other things.

No hitting people

No kicking people

No yelling in people’s ears

No throwing hard things at people

No dumping water on people’s heads . . .

And to each of them, they added, “Unless you ask them first.”

We weren’t, as a society, talking about consent in the 90’s, but these free children were.

There are so many reasons that young children should be free to play. It is the way nature has designed us to develop and learn: cognitively, socially, emotionally, and physically.

We don’t often talk about play in the context of democracy, but that's exactly what I did recently with director of the non-profit Defending the Early Years, professor, and author Dr. Denisha Jones on Teacher Tom's Podcast. As she told me, when the adults are able to step back to become co-learners with the children, to see children as full-formed citizens with both rights and responsibilities, we see that play is equality. Play is equity. Play is justice. And, ultimately, play is liberation.

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Check out my full conversation with Dr. Denisha Jones on Teacher Tom's Podcast. In these first three episodes I talk with Dr. Jones, as well as "Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent, and the founder of Free-Range Parenting Lenore Skenazy. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you find your podcasts.

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!

In a World of Bubble-Wrapped Children

2024-02-14T07:05:00.000-08:00

As a boy, even as young as 4, mom would say, “Tom, you're driving me crazy. Go outside.” And then she would close the door behind me, not expecting to see me again until she rang the dinner bell – and she had a literal dinner bell as did all the other moms in the neighborhood.

Most of my childhood memories involve being outdoors, with other children, unsupervised.

I interviewed Lenore Skenazy for a just released episode of Teacher Tom's Podcast. She tells us that in stark contrast to my childhood, there is today an "expectation" that virtually every minute of a child’s life must be supervised by a responsible adult. The result is that today’s preschoolers will spend their entire childhood’s under adult supervision.

You may know Lenore as the founder of the Free-Range Parenting Movement and all-round advocate for childhood independence. Among her work is the Free-Range Parenting blog and book. She is the creator of “Take Our Children to the Park & Leave Them There Day” and hosted the reality TV show “America’s Worst Mom." She is also more recently the founder and face of Let Grow, a non-profit that promotes Free Range Parenting and childhood independence.

Today, my mom – and all the other moms on my block – would receive a visit from child protective services . . . Or worse!

Is the world more dangerous now than it was 50 years ago? Not according to crime statistics. Today, our violent crime and property crimes rates are about the same as they were when I was a boy, after a spike during the 80s and 90s.

But we definitely perceive that the crime rate is higher. And as Lenore points out, we are definitely more fearful.

Whatever the case, childhood independence is becoming increasingly rare and unless we take proactive measures, it is only going to become rarer.

I have no illusion that we are about to dramatically change our world or our fears any time soon. That means that it is on us – early childhood educators and parents of young children – to make our schools and homes places in which children can, as Lenore and I discuss, try a few “stupid things.”

It was Lenore's work that inspired me – and gave me the courage – to start putting woodworking tools into the hands of young children.

As you think about the important children in your life, what are some things you can do?

Perhaps the most difficult thing to do is to resist the urge to intervene or caution children over every little thing. As my friend and playworker Meynell Aimes jokes, “I have a three step approach to deciding what to do when a child is playing: take one step back, then take another step back, and then another.”

Obviously, we step in when life and limb are at stake, or when real bullying is happening, but much of the time, it’s our catastrophic imaginations that cause us to act when its entirely unnecessary.

A childhood is incomplete without a few scrapes and bruises . . . maybe even a broken bone or two.

When I first had the courage to bring real hammers and real nails onto the playground, I did it with the utmost of caution. We started with an old tree stump. I set up a ring of caution cones around it, then invited children in one at a time, with eye protection, to take a few swings at a nail that I had started for them.

That’s all I felt comfortable with at first, but slowly, as I began to see, with my own eyes, the incredible competence of young children . . . .

As I began to see the care and caution that they took on their own . . .

As I realized that my worst fears were very unlikely to be realized . . .

As we all gained experience, we added more hammers – along with other tools – until we had created a full-on woodworking experience for 2-5 year olds. Yes, there were some sore thumbs, but hitting your thumb with a hammer is an inescapable part of the process of learning to use a hammer. I’ll be 63 next week. If I picked up a hammer for the first time today, I assure you I would have to learn the lesson of hitting my thumb.

My point is that we don’t have to put our kids, alone, on a New York City subway (the way Lenore did) or let them run around the neighborhood all day unsupervised in order to give them the experience of childhood independence that everyone needs. We can all start small . . .

Stepping back . . .

Letting them use the stapler . . .

Letting them make their own snacks . . .

Letting them fail a few times in order to learn the lessons of perseverance . . .

We will never go back to the 1970’s, nor should we want to, but with the help of people like Lenore and organizations like Let Grow, it’s not too late for childhood independence.

We can do it in our schools and our homes.

In a world of bubble-wrapped children, helicopter parenting, and the fear of kidnappers lurking behind every tree, Lenore is the voice of reason we need.

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Check out my full conversation with Lenore Skenazy on Teacher Tom's Podcast. In these first three episodes I talk with Dr. Denisha Jones, "Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent, in addition to Lenore. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you find your podcasts.

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!

Teacher Tom's Podcast: Taking Play Seriously

2024-02-13T07:19:00.000-08:00

Hi. I'm Teacher Tom. And welcome to Teacher Tom's Podcast . . .

That's right, the first three episodes of my brand new podcast have dropped! You can find them at the Mirasee FM Podcast Network page, on Apple Podcasts, and on Spotify.

The tagline for the podcast is "Taking Play Seriously," and that's exactly what my guests and I do.

Play is not the dessert for young children. It's the main course. Play is the human instinct to educate itself made manifest. Play is the key to healthy intellectual, physical, social, and emotional growth in the earl years. Sadly, today, childhood play is in crisis around the world. Our young children are spending more and more time in those institutions we call school. And, tragically, schools, even preschools, are becoming increasingly academic, forcing our youngest citizens to do things that are no only developmentally inappropriate, but in many cases outright harmful to that development.

Not only that, but even in the evenings and on weekends, children find themselves enrolled in adult-directed activities or in front of screens or even doing homework, when past generations were outdoors, playing.

Play is at least part of the solution to so many of the things that ail us, both individually and as a society. Not only does play supercharge learning, but it sets us free to pursue our passions and become the humans we were meant to be. After all, that's what the world needs: more people who have come alive!

If this podcast has a goal, it's to support early childhood educators, parents of young children, grandparents, caregivers, aunts, uncles and any other adult who loves children, in providing them an authentic, playful childhood.

If you're reading here, you might already be aware that I've been writing almost daily here on the blog for nearly 15 years, that I've written two books, that I offer online courses for educators and parents, and that I travel all over the world to teach, coach, and inspire early childhood educators about play-based pedagogy. Don't worry, I'm not giving any of that up. I'm just adding the podcast.

But that begs the question: Why a podcast?

What other people tell me is that podcasts are the present and possibly the future. They tell me that people today prefer to listen or watch, that they don't read, and that I just need to keep up with the times. I know this isn't entirely true because tens of thousands of you read my blog posts every month, but fair enough, I suppose. I'll be 63 next week. I still have a third of my life ahead of me. I'm not ready to go the way of the ancient scribes who chiseled on stone tablets. So, you know, Teacher Tom is trying to get with the times.

Other people tell me that a podcast will help me reach a new audience. Specifically, a younger, hipper audience. That's a good thing, I think. After all, those are the people raising young children and there will never be a generation of children, parents, and early childhood educators who won't benefit from taking play more seriously . . . And on a very serious note, there is a genuine concern that childhood play is becoming alarmingly rare, which is not just a tragedy for young children, but for humankind.

But in all honestly, those aren't the reason I'm aspiring to be in your ear.

When I was younger, I used to love drive time radio. Specifically, there was a morning show on KLOO AM radio in Corvallis, Oregon, where I went to high school, starring station-owner Bob Houglam, called Toast & Coffee. Basically, what he did each morning along with his co-host, was talk about the community with the community. I always thought it would be fun to have my own show like that.

In a way, that's a little bit like the career I've experienced as a preschool teacher. I mean, you come together each day with your community. You talk and listen. You share, sing, dance, bicker, and agree. Sometimes you have special guests or go on a field trip, but generally ou follow a familiar, comfortable schedule. Then you go home, knowing that you'll come together again at the same time with the same people and do it all over again. This is, for me, the heart of what community is all about.

Community has always stood at the center of my work with young children.

Another thing that some of you might know about me is that I spent the better part of 20 years as a teacher; for most of the time, the only teacher, at the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool in Seattle, Washington.

A cooperative preschool is a school that is owned and operated by the parents who enroll their children. And I’m not talking about symbolic ownership, but actual legal ownership.

Typically, we would enroll 65 or so families each year, and they would become 65 equal owners of the school, with me, the teacher, being the only paid employee. Everything else that goes into running a school was done by the parents. Parents took on all the administrative work, they handled enrollment, gardening, repairs and maintenance, purchasing, food prep, field trip planning, photography, custodial tasks, and anything else that needed to be done.

When decisions needed to be made, it required the parent community to come together to discuss, debate, and, when consensus was impossible, to vote.

And as the only paid employee, I had, in a very real sense, 65 bosses. They hired me, they evaluated me, and they could, if they so desired, fire me.

Now, I imagine there are some of you educators out there thinking, “No way! I could never have 65 bosses!” I get it, but for me, it never felt that way.

You see, the part of being a cooperative that I came to value above all else, was that each family was required to provide me with an adult, one day a week, to serve as an assistant teacher. That’s right, one day a week, the parent or caregiver came to school with their child to serve under my supervision.

I often think the world would be a better place if more institutions or enterprises worked as cooperatives. I mean, the owners are also the customers and the employees. As customers, the motivation was to get your child a high quality preschool education at the lowest possible price. As employees, you wanted a satisfactory workplace. And as owners, you wanted a business that operated on sound financial principles.

But it was more than that. Every preschool becomes a community, but in a very real sense, a cooperative becomes a community of families, not unlike a tribe or village or neighborhood.

This is the kind of community humans have evolved to live in. For 99 percent of our existence we were hunter-gatherers living in communities of 20-200, closely-related individuals. It’s only been relatively recently that we’ve begun to aggregate ourselves into larger populations. Many of us have adapted, of course, but for many of us, and especially for young children, smaller communities like the one we created in our cooperative – or like those still found in some neighborhoods or churches or other affinity groups – are our most natural learning and living environments.

That’s my aspiration for this podcast: to become a kind of community for early childhood educators, parents, grandparents, and other caretakers of young children. And my hope is for it to be a community that takes play seriously!

Some of you may already know that I’m a married man. My wife and I have been together since 1984 – married since 1986. That’s nearly 40 years! So, you know, woo hoo! Our only child, Josephine, was born in 1996. When she was in kindergarten, I was talking with the head of her school about community. He said something that has stuck with me: “The sign of a healthy community is how quickly newcomers are brought into the center.”

We’ve all been part of – or tried to be part of – communities that seemed to resist our efforts to take part. Maybe there are too many rules – written and unwritten. Maybe the community is clique-y. Maybe there are divisions and divides that make it impossible to navigate. These are unhealthy communities. I’m hoping that the community that forms around this podcast can be the kind that brings newcomers immediately into its center.

That doesn’t mean that we all have to agree with one another. I mean, I have a few hard lines, like no violence, name-calling, or threats, but when it comes to young children, our adult roles, community, and what it means to be educated, I hope there will be room for everyone.

Another thing you might know about me is that my wife and I have produced global online early childhood education summits called – get ready for it – Teacher Tom’s Play Summit. A couple of years ago, I was interviewing an Ojibwe educator named Hopi Martin. He asked me to imagine a burning campfire around which people, including you, were sitting. If someone wanted to know more about that campfire, they could ask you to describe the fire. You might talk about the color, the intensity, the way the wood is stacked, what kind of wood you think it is, the smoke, the heat.

But that’s just the fire from your perspective. If this person really wants to understand that fire, they would have to ask the person sitting next to you to describe it, then the next person, then the next. They would have to do this all the way around the circle until, finally, they had learned about the fire from all perspectives. But even then, Hopi said, they wouldn’t have the full picture of that fire until they asked the birds in the trees . . . Until they asked the trees themselves . . . Until they asked the worms underground . . .

I love this metaphor because it makes it clear that there is always something more to learn because there is always another perspective to consider. It has allowed me to see that when someone disagrees with me, they aren’t my rival, but rather my teacher. Every time I can see the world from another perspective, my own perspective, my own ideas and knowledge get bigger.

In our preschool, this phenomenon came up every year around Easter when the children would debate the details of the Easter Bunny. Some thought the bunny laid eggs. Some thought chickens laid eggs and the bunny just painted them. Some thought the Easter Bunny was a normal sized bunny. Others thought it must be extra large. Some thought there were multiple Easter bunnies. Some thought the Easter Bunny was a girl . . . And, of course, there was always at least one Jewish child who insisted, “Your parents are lying to you!”

These debates could get intense – as debates about faith often do. Sometimes there was even yelling to the point that it sounded a lot like our adult political debates. And like our adult debates, at the end of the day, I don’t think anyone had changed their mind. In fact, most of them become even more convinced of their beliefs.

But that’s not the point. No one’s minds have changed, but what has changed is that now each child can look around and think, “I believe what I believe, but that friend believes something else.” “That friend believes bunnies lay eggs.” “That friend doesn’t believe in the Easter Bunny at all.” As individuals, none of us may have changed, but now, since we both shared and listened to all the perspectives, we have a bigger and more accurate picture of who we are as a community.

And then, the best part, is that the children do what we adults have forgotten how to do. Once the debate is over, they all go outside and get back to playing with each other within the context of this bigger idea of who we are.

I want Teacher Tom's Podcast to be like that campfire or those Easter Bunny debates, which is why most of the episodes will be about me stepping back and sharing the microphone with someone else.

I will be starting off by interviewing people I already know, people with interesting perspectives, people who I hope will help expand your perspective. But if there are people you want to hear from . . . Or people you think I’ll benefit from speaking with . . . Or topics you’re interested in hearing about . . . Shoot me an email (TeacherTomHobson@TeacherTomsWorld.com) and let me know.

Let’s grow our ideas together!

******

Teacher Tom's Podcast is on the air! In these first three episodes I talk with Dr. Denisha Jones, "Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent, and founder of Free Range Kids Lenore Skenazy. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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!

"If You Eat This Food You Can Have Ice Cream"

2024-02-12T07:04:00.000-08:00

The two-year-old said to me, "If you eat this food you can have ice cream." She placed a plate in front of me on which she had positioned a glob of purple play dough.

I said, "What is it?"

"It's healthy food."

"What kind of healthy food."

"You just have to eat it."

"I'll need a fork."

"I'll get one for you, Teacher Tom." She dug around on the shelf until she found a plastic one. "Here's your fork, now eat your food."

I pretended to take a bite. Sometimes when kids want me to taste their imaginary food, I make a comical face and say, "It's yucky" or "It's too hot!" but this time I said, "That is so good! I'm going to eat it all!" I stabbed the play dough with my fork pretending to shove the whole thing in my mouth, then hid it on my lap while mimicking chewing and swallowing. "Now I'm ready for my ice cream."

The "ice cream" was more play dough she held in a container. For a moment I thought she was going to serve it to me, but then she said, "First you have to take your bath, then you can have some ice cream."

"I don't want to take a bath."

"You have to take a bath if want to have some ice cream."

"I'll need a wash cloth."

"I'll get one for you, Teacher Tom." She found a small blanket in our cradle of baby dolls. "Here's your wash cloth."

I mimed bathing, then said, "All clean and fresh, now I'm ready for that ice cream."

"No, first you have to put on your jammies."

"I don't want to put on my jammies."

"You have to put on your jammies, then you can have some ice cream."

It went a couple more rounds like this. It was clear that I wasn't going to get any ice cream.

It was all pretend. The food wasn't real, the bath wasn't real, the pajamas weren't real. Even the ice cream wasn't real. Nothing about this was real, it was all a child's game, yet as she dangled that reward always just out of reach, I found a thread of growing annoyance and helplessness underneath my play. I felt manipulated and controlled. I'd jumped through her hoops, yet there was always another placed before me. The game was pretend, but the emotions it evoked were real.

Just think how much stronger those emotions would be were I the child, she the adult, and it was not a game, but rather a part of my day-to-day reality.

******

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

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

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

Getting Back to Playing With One Another

2024-02-09T08:40:00.000-08:00

Some years ago, an older relative got remarried. Her first marriage, a stormy one by all accounts, had lasted decades, producing two children. The divorce had seemed inevitable to her loved ones and her second marriage to a more even-keeled man seemed a good idea. One evening over drinks, however, she confessed to me that she fought with her new husband almost as much as her former. "I divorced the first man because of the fighting. Now I'm having the same fights with my second husband. If I'd known that I was the problem I would have never gotten divorced in the first place."

Psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler was among the first to point out this marital phenomenon, asserting that a person filing for divorce is often unconsciously trying to rid themselves of their "own inner conflict" by fighting "with great energy against (their) partner, on whom the conflict as been projected." His conclusion, which mirrors my older relative's experience, is that these people will almost certainly find another spouse in order to continue their quarrel.

As sad and tragic as her confession was to me, the essential truth of it has become one of the cornerstones of my relationship with my wife. We fight, as all couples do, but in the aftermath of every spat, sometimes right in the midst of it, I ask myself, "Am I the problem here?" And more often than not, I see that I am, at least in part, and that's the part I have the best chance of controlling. This isn't to say that I'm in the wrong or that I'm not making excellent points, but that the strong emotion at the center is my an inner conflict, a sense of sadness or fear or despair that has nothing to do with my wife.

Last year, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released an advisory calling attention to the public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection in our country. "Even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, approximately half of US adults reported experiencing measurable levels of loneliness. Disconnection fundamentally affects our mental, physical, and societal health. In fact, loneliness and isolation increase the risk for individuals to develop mental health challenges in their lives, and lacking connection can increase the risk for premature death to levels comparable to smoking daily." Surveys find that 27 percent of us report being estranged from a family member -- that's 67 million of us in the US alone whose conflicts with relatives are so extreme that they've ended the relationship. I have no doubt that some of that estrangement is valid, but I'm also quite certain that much of it, if not most, comes down to unresolved inner conflicts.

Our news is full of stories about our political divides, gun massacres, homelessness, racism, and sexism. Existentialist philosopher and author Jean-Paul Sartre, in his play No Exit, penned the line, "Hell is other people." Abstracted from its context, the sentiment appears to be one of a kind with the misanthropic writings of the most (tragically) influential philosophers of the modern era, Thomas Hobbes, who starts from the premise that humans are essentially evil and that without the control and order provided by institutions like government, church and schools, life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Too many of us have adopted some version of the "hell is other people" perspective. We see it in the cynicism, even nihilism, with which so many approach the prospect of communal life. We see it in the resignation, isolation, self-destruction, and alienation experienced by broad swaths of society.

Yet, when we look more deeply, we see that Hobbes' entire philosophy, and therefore the fruit of Hobbesianism, is based on a "state of nature" that has never existed. It's a thought experiment that ignores the actual practices of humankind. Indeed, throughout most of human existence, our species has practiced a kind of communal collaboration that historian and author Yuval Noah Harari argues (in his book Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind) is our single most significant adaptive trait. Rutger Bregman makes a similar assertion in his book Humankind in which he systematically dismantles the weak science behind the modern "proofs" used to support the Hobbesian point of view. And a closer reading of Sartre finds that the real meaning behind his famous and abused line is that "hell is other people" only if our relationships with them are bad.

Bregman writes "If we believe most people can't be trusted, that's how we'll treat each other, to everyone's detriment. Few ideas have as much power to shape the world as our view of other people. Because ultimately, you get what you expect to get. If we want to tackle the greatest challenges of our times -- from the climate crisis to our growing distrust of one another -- then I think the place we need to start is our view of human nature."

The great tragedy of our current era, it seems to me, and the nub of our loneliness, division, and misanthropy is that we have been taught (by capitalism, by colonialism, by racism, by fascism, by if-it-bleeds-it-lead journalism) is to distrust one another. And like with any vicious cycle, the more completely we learn these lessons, the more we hide away from one another, the more we are convinced that all of our problems come from outside ourselves.

Distrust is what makes our problems seem unsolvable. Distrust is what makes us throw up our hands over the climate, homelessness, and racism. And distrust, I believe, stands at the heart of our loneliness crisis. Humans have evolved to thrive by trusting one another, but our modern world is built upon the dubious mental experiments of Thomas Hobbes and his ilk who view conflict as our greatest flaw when, in fact, it is, when we put relationships first, our greatest glory.

At any given moment in a play-based preschool classroom, conflict is emerging. The Hobbsian approach is for the adults to place their authoritarian thumb on the scales, to take control, and to dictate solutions. Yet, when we put relationships first we understand that the goal is not to efficiently end the conflict, but rather to support the children in resolving their conflicts in ways that preserve and strengthen their relationships with one another. And this usually means acknowledging the thing that my older relative only learned after divorce and remarriage: at least part of the problem is me. As adults, our primary responsibility is safety (which is why we stop any violence), but beyond that these conflicts are the children's to resolve. When we can free ourselves from Hobbesian distrust and step back, what we find is that even very young children are capable of resolving their own conflicts, often in ways that surprise us, motivated by the urge to get back to playing with one another.

And isn't that our highest goal as a species: getting back to playing with one another?

******

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

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

"I Will Be Unique in the World for You"

2024-02-08T07:27:00.000-08:00

This is a fascinating experiment that you can try at home. Ask someone to sit across from you and say words, any words, with the only condition being that they leave time, say three seconds, between each word for you to write them down. If after every plural noun you say "good" or "right," or even if you just smile or repeat the word pleasantly, before long the frequency of plural nouns will increase significantly as they go on.

I'm not sure if this experiment works exactly this way with children because they are still in the midst of learning language, but it sure does with adults.

This is fascinating to me in a couple ways. First of all, it's an example of unconscious learning or what we more often label as training. That said, I've read that if the subject of the experiment is made aware in advance of the parameters it doesn't work nearly as well. In other words, the conscious mind tends to resist the manipulation, while the unconscious mind is helpless before it. This phenomenon is, of course, well-known to marketers and propagandists who craft their messages to evade conscious thought and appeal directly to our unconscious brain.

More interesting to me, however, is that we are all, every day, in our conversations, not only unconsciously training other people, but being unconsciously trained by them in return. This day-to-day tango is the dance of connection that we call relationship. This might explain why we so often take an instant and "irrational" like or dislike to a person, why we might trust or distrust them with no evidence. This dance of training and being trained is how we get to "know" someone. And it works because much of this process of creating relationship, this mutual training, takes place on an unconscious level.

When one side begins to consciously manipulate the other, the relationship changes. We might go along merrily for awhile, but the moment we recognize that we are being manipulated, we begin to resist. And more often than not we grow to despise the manipulator.

This happens quite often in relationships between children and adults. Young children, driven by the drive to connect with us, trust us to dance unconsciously with them, but too often, we adults seek to manipulate them, "for their own good," of course. We have behaviors and lessons we want them to learn so we take the role of marketers and propagandists, consciously training them without their knowledge or consent. As they get older, however, they begin to see through our tricks and naturally start to resist, not because our agenda on their behalf is wrong, but because we have an agenda at all. Here they were believing that they were in a dance of connection and relationship only to find it was one of manipulation.

No wonder children consistently, around the world, become less and less fond of school, their teachers, and even their parents as they grow older. This is exactly how everyone feels, no matter what our age, when we discover that we've been consciously manipulated. I will never forget a conversation I had several years ago with a sister and brother I had taught in preschool who were now in seventh and fifth grades. The anger these bright children expressed to me about the "stupidity" of what they were being taught in school, of the "uselessness" of it, was directed at not just their teachers, but the entire "system." I recall feeling similarly at that age. And they are right. It is a betrayal.

In his book The Little Prince, Antoine de Sait-Exupéry writes, "You are only a little boy for me just like a hundred thousand little boys. And I don't need you. And you don't need me either. I am only a fox like a hundred thousand foxes. But if you tame me, we will need each other. You will be unique in the world for me. I will be unique in the world for you."

It's not enough that we cause the children in our lives to need us. Unless we need them as well, we are mere marketers and propagandists, manipulating young minds. We may continue to fool them for a long time, but eventually they will see that they have been fooled, that we don't need them. And it will break their hearts to learn that they are only "a fox like a hundred thousand foxes," subject to the manipulation of our agendas.

It is wrong when we tame the children in our lives without also allowing them to equally tame us. That is the dance of connection and relationship into which they have, trustingly, entered into. To be unique in the world for one another is what we all most need from life. In many ways it is the only thing. When we forget that, we betray what it means to be human.

******

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

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

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

A Deep Sense of Who You Are

2024-02-07T07:23:00.000-08:00

As a 17-year-old considering college, I still didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. As a preschooler, I didn't give it much thought. I was too busy being a cowboy or Batman or a secret agent to concern myself with my future self.

As a younger teen, I'd discovered oil painting and was certain I was going to be an artist, or, alternatively, a baseball player, both of which were things I was already being. The caring adults in my life, however, fretted, on my behalf, about how incredibly difficult and unlikely it would be for me to "succeed" in those fields, hinting that it might be more practical to consider a less competitive profession.

By the time I was filling out university applications, I was considering architecture. It seemed both creative and practical. I was still tempted by the fine arts, but at the end of the day, I put a check-mark by Pre-Journalism mainly because there was only one required course until my junior year and I liked the idea that I could make a decision without really committing myself for two years. I wound up with that degree. I've never held a job that required that degree.

By the time our daughter was born, I was a 33-year-old man who had a work history that an HR executive would likely see as "spotty." I'd done some sales. I'd been in public relations. I'd coached a baseball team. And I'd been a freelance writer, which was the closest I ever came to making use of my degree. We enrolled in a cooperative preschool, which meant that I, as a parent, was required to spend at least one day a week working in the classroom as an assistant teacher. After three years of this, when I realized that I wanted to grow up to be a preschool teacher, I was already being one.

I wouldn't trade my path in life for anything. For one thing, had I not followed this specific trajectory, I probably wouldn't have meet my wife of nearly 40 years. Indeed, I see myself as one of the lucky ones: a person who has discovered, in time, what I really want to be when I grow up. And, like I'd done as a preschooler, as I was doing as a young teen, my discovery came not from searching and thinking and planning and credentialing, but rather first by being the thing I wanted to become.

Mister Rogers writes, "You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are." Looking back over my spotty career, I see that it was those times when I was "being" a cowboy or Batman or an artist or a baseball player or a preschool teacher, were the times when I was the closest to the deep sense of who I am, or at least was. The path, as they say, was my footsteps.

The problem with standard schooling is that it tends to focus on children becoming something other than they are right now, with a special emphasis on areas that "need improvement" as judged by someone other than that child themself. As educators and parents it's in our power to step outside of that model and instead celebrate who the child is, right now. We seek to understand this not because they will continue to be a cowboy or an artist throughout their life, but because they are experiencing, right before our eyes, that deep sense of who they are, be it for an hour, a day, a season, or a lifetime. And that way, when the future arrives and there are choices to be made, our children will have that deep and nourishing well of being from which to draw.

******

"This inspiring book is essential reading for every family choosing a preschool, every teacher working with young children, and every citizen who wonders how we can raise children who will make the world a better place." ~Dr. Laura Markham, author of Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids

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

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

Wiring Their Brains for Now

2024-02-06T07:38:00.000-08:00

As a very young child, I knew my way around our house like I do the back of my hand. To this day, a half century later, I can still recall the nooks and crannies of that house. I looked it up on Google Earth awhile back. It's still there and while it's possible that walls have been moved within it, from the outside it sits in the same footprint it always has, in both reality and my mind.

The neighborhood, too, is more or less the same: the streets are still there, the houses, even some of the trees are the same. It's a more mature suburb than it was in my youth, and I'm sure some of my childhood shortcuts have been severed, but I could still find my way around Winston, Macon, Wembley, and Christopher streets with no problem.

A few years ago, I revisited another childhood home in a suburb of Athens, Greece. I took the train from downtown, got off at the right stop, then followed the route from memory until I was standing in front of it.

For most of my life, when in a new place, one of the first things I would do was get hold of a map and make a study of it. Before driving to a new place I would draw a tiny map on a piece of paper along with step-by-step instructions as a guide. I prided myself in rarely getting lost and if I did, I took even more pride in figuring out how to get back on course.

Today, all of that has been replaced by GPS. I don't know if my own sense of direction, of where I am in space, is eroding, but I do know that children today are growing up in a world in which these abilities are anachronistic.

My instinct is to bemoan the loss of this capacity the way others bemoan the loss of the ability to read and write in cursive. What if they lose their phones? What if they can't get reception? What if they need to read a letter from an elderly person who still handwrites and posts them?

Composer and conductor John Phillip Sousa bemoaned the advent of machines that played music, recorded and otherwise. He worried that when people could just push a button or turn a crank to hear music they would no longer have a need for learning to make music for themselves. And he was right: there are far fewer amateur musicians today than there were at the turn of the last century. And I would assert that we, both as a culture and as individuals have lost something significant. Socrates worried, and he was right, that the widespread use of the new fangled phonetic alphabet would mean that humans would outsource their brains to manuscript form and would lose our ability to hold vast amounts of information in their heads. We know about these concerns because his student, Plato, wrote them down using the phonetic alphabet.

That said, I'm not about to give up my GPS, even if I do regret that my sense of direction is eroding. I enjoy Stevie Wonder, Stevie Nicks, and Vladimir Horowitz performing for me, on demand, in the comfort of my own living room. And reading and writing with a phonetic alphabet is central my way of life. Still, and there is no denying this, all of these technologies -- navigation apps, recorded music, literacy -- no matter how useful, have directly led to the atrophy, or even non-development, of other wonderful skills and abilities. Would my life be more complete if I could play an instrument? What if I could, like so many Ancient Greeks, recite the entirety of Homer? I still have some directional skills, I can still write in cursive, but I genuinely can't recall the last time I've found a need for either.

The real education of life itself is, at bottom, always about replacing one set of knowledge or skills or abilities with another. Our most distant ancestors could track prey, build fires with friction, and sort edible plants from poisonous ones. Their senses of smell and hearing were more acute than that of modern humans. They were physically stronger, had better endurance, and were more agile. Of course, today we live longer, never get lost, have access to the collected wisdom of the ages, and can bellow "Jolene" in duet with Dolly Parton any time we feel so moved.

A great deal of what is "taught" in standard schools, I think, falls into the category of tracking prey and reading maps: cool stuff, but ultimately useless in today's world, except in the spirit of preservation. One can argue, like people do who believe we must continue to teach cursive to young children, that these old processes are valuable in that they "wire" the brain in ways that will be otherwise lost. Of course, GPS also wires the brain, as does literacy, as does everything with which we engage.

"We have a hundred billion neurons in our brain," writes theoretical physicist Carlo Rossi, "as many as there are stars in a galaxy, with an even more astronomical number of links and potential combinations through which they can interact. 'We' are the process formed by this entire intricacy, not just the little of it of which we are conscious."

Our brains, in other words, have the potential to be wired for almost anything, yet are not wired for the vast majority of things. We've evolved to engage with and learn those things that support our survival, not in a theoretical world, but the one in which we find ourselves. Among the infinite possibilities, play is the behavior that best puts us in touch with our environment and what it requires of us. As adults, we're stuck with our old, outdated knowledge because the world, as it always does, is passing us by, yet we arrogantly imagine that we the ones to prepare children for the future. Some of it will survive into the next generation, but much of it will be rendered irrelevant. Much more important, I think, is that both we and our children learn how to learn those things we need or want to know, to make specific connections from the infinite potential we have within us. The most efficient way to do that is through play.

I continue to take pride in my ability to find my way in the world, but when my father says, "Go north on Main," I have to ask him, "Is that left or right?" You see, in the world in which he grew up, knowing your compass directions was necessary whereas I only had to know which turns to take.

When we stop teaching and allow children to play in the real world, which is to say with life itself, we allow them to make the connections that are required of them, to wire their brains for now.

And, inevitably, the day will come when they shake their heads in concern over youth who cannot read a map or track prey or play the piano.

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The Common Struggle

2024-02-05T07:09:00.000-08:00

It was born as a wicker picnic basket complete with plates, cups and cutlery, but was converted more than a decade ago into the container in which we stored a collection of dolls along with their wardrobe. They weren't particularly popular dolls as playthings go, but I continued to trot them out a couple times a year because there was occasionally a kid or two who would drop everything to engage in the challenge of dressing and undressing those dolls.

The basket is held closed by a pair of leather straps secured by metal clasps that operate in a manner that most preschoolers haven't before encountered. I had put the basket on a table with the straps fastened, which I intended as a sort of invitation, figuring that few kids would be able to walk past without wanting to solve the mystery of what was inside. And sure enough, as the kids began to arrive, my invitation was accepted as a cluster gathered around the table, asking, "What's in here?" their fingers prying at the edges of the lid, struggling to get it to open.

I was standing a distance away, watching, even a little excited to see how the children would solve the challenge of those clasps. That's when an adult stepped in and opened the clasps for them. The kids said, "Dolls," then stood looking at them unenthusiastically for a moment before moving on to something else. It's the sort of thing caring adults too often do: the kids were working together to solve a kind of puzzle, but they were robbed of an opportunity for independence, collaboration, and perhaps even epiphany by a well-intended adult. I was determined that the same thing wouldn't happen with the afternoon class.

This time, I gave specific instructions to the appropriate adult to not help. She asked, "What if they ask me?" I answered, "Play dumb."

Sure enough, a group of kids gathered around the basket as they had in the morning asking, "What's inside?" The first attempts to open the basket involved force, but soon they discovered the clasps. They tried pushing the mechanism; they tried sliding it. One boy thought that maybe the leather straps needed to be cut, but others were sure that the solution involved those clasps. After several minutes of hive minded teamwork, they managed it. As they opened the lid to reveal the dolls, they squealed, "Dolls!" "Cool!" "This one has a baseball hat!" Never before had this particular collection of dolls received so much enthusiastic attention.

It's quite possible that the kids would have responded this way even if one of us adults had "helped" them with the clasps, but I tend to believe that the dolls' newfound popularity, something that endured into mid-week, had a lot to do with the kids' common struggle with those clasps: it's the struggle, especially the common struggle, that makes the reward have value.

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Learning is an Ongoing Process of Self-Liberation

2024-02-02T07:18:00.000-08:00

"We figured out (two millennia ago) that the Earth is spherical," writes physicist Carlo Rovelli, "and (a half a millennium ago) that it moves. At first glance these are absurd ideas, since the Earth appears to us to be flat and still. In order to digest such ideas, the difficulty lies not so much with the new concept as it does with becoming liberated from old ones that seem too obviously to be true; bringing them into doubt seems inconceivable. We are always convinced that our natural intuitions are self-evidently right, and it is this that prevents us from learning more."

I started writing this blog in 2009, posting nearly every day. When I return to read what I wrote back then, I find I'm confronted by my past self. I'm always tempted to delete or heavily edit. After all, I'm a different person than I was 14 years ago. I'm a different person because of what I've learned in the interim. So far, I've left the posts as they are, however, because like the story told by out-of-date textbooks, its speaks to my journey from there to here. This is what learning is. We must constantly, and often consciously, overcome our natural intuitions and previously held notions in order to grow. This is how we become new people, while the story of our journey reminds us that we are continuous beings.

In the famous Ship of Theseus thought experiment, preserved for us by the Ancient Greek philosopher Plutarch, we are to imagine a wooden ship in a harbor. As its planks begin to decay, they are replaced, one-by-one, with new, stronger planks. The question is, once the planks are all replaced, is it still the ship of Theseus or is it a whole new ship?

Or, I suppose, we could ask, "Has the original ship been liberated from itself?" Maybe it's not such an apt metaphor when applied to an inanimate object, but isn't that exactly what we do as we learn? Our old self, our old ideas, our old opinions, must make way for stronger planks.

When a young child looks into a mirror for the first time, there is clearly another child inside there. In order to understand the concept of a mirror, they must liberate themselves from what they thought they knew. When we speak of young children as "sponges" that soak up everything around them, what we are reacting to is their incredible capacity to discard, without prejudice or sentiment, those decaying planks in favor stronger ones which, in turn, are replaced, and so on.

Looked at this way, learning is an ongoing process of self-liberation.

This is what too many of us unlearn as we calcify, if we're not careful, into middle age. If we're not careful we find ourselves trapped by our old ideas. If we're not careful, we loose our capacity for liberation. If we're not careful, we stop learning and when that happens all we have are absurd stories and decay.

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This is your final opportunity to join the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents and grandparents. It's a particularly powerful course to take with your entire team. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, click here

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What Gives You Pleasure?

2024-02-01T08:22:00.000-08:00

He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most; God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us. ~Samuel Butler

I find that more and more of my peers are retired. They tell me that their plans are to seek their pleasure, to enjoy the grandkids, to golf, to travel, to garden, to paint. In other words, they are doing, or aspiring to do, all the things that our younger selves were told were, at best, a waste of time. Of course, that's why most of these people can afford to retire: they've worked hard, pinched a sufficient number of pennies, invested wisely (or luckily) and now, during what will hopefully be the final third of life, they can, without guilt, take their leisure.

I don't know if I'll ever be in a position to retire. Oh sure, my wife and I could likely figure out a way to manage it financially, but the truth is that I can't quite imagine life without my work. While I've yet to enjoy the fruits of a lucky monetary investment, I have been lucky in how I've invested my time, which has allowed me the great privilege of living a life of purpose, which, at the end of the day is indistinguishable from a life of pleasure. I'm lucky because as many of my peers are just now getting to the part of our lives we set aside for pleasure, I'm decades ahead of them.

Aristotle believed that our highest calling was for each of us to find our true path in life and that the way to discover that was through the answer to the question "What gives you pleasure?" By that, he proposed that we seek out and embrace those things that we do without prompting, effortlessly. In fact, the Ancient Greek word for leisure, skhole, is the root of our English word for school. That's right, at the roots of Western civilization lies the transformative idea that school should be a place of leisure, a time to discuss and study, not what others assign you, but rather according to what gives you pleasure. And through that, we discover what it is that makes us come alive.

As the novelist Samuel Butler put it in his masterpiece The Way of All Flesh: "Pleasure, after all, is a safer guide than either right or duty. For hard as it is to know what gives us pleasure, right and duty are often still harder to distinguish and, if we go wrong with them, will lead us into just as sorry a plight as a mistaken opinion concerning pleasure. When men burn their fingers through following after pleasure they find out their mistake and get to see where they have gone wrong more easily than when they have burnt them through following after a fancied duty, or a fancied idea concerning right virtue. The devil, in fact, when he dresses himself in angel's clothes, can only be detected by experts of exceptional skill, and so often does he adopt this disguise that it is hardly safe to be seen talking to an angel at all and prudent people will follow after pleasure as a more homely but more respectable and on the whole much more trustworthy guide."

As a society, we hardly begrudge a retired person their leisure. After all, they've earned the right to it after a life at the grindstone, but there is a tinge of sorrow in it for me that so many of us arrive at that point having never known what it means to have lived a life of purpose. From a very young age, we are taught that the grindstone is our duty. To pursue pleasure, we're told, is selfishness, best confined to weekends and holidays. Many of us even define pleasure as a kind of sin against both man and nature. We're all too eager to subject even our preschoolers to the toil, and it is always toil when we are compelled to do things we'd rather not.

The argument, of course, is that if we allow children to live lives of leisure, they will simply squander their youth on television, social media, and video games. And despite the big talk about painting and golf and gardening, that's where so many of my retired peers wind up. And no wonder: when you've never had the choice, when leisure has always been the forbidden fruit, it's only natural, when finally "free," to gorge yourself. This is especially true for children, who are rarely allowed to forget that all too soon they will be forced back to their duty, back to virtue, and that their pleasure, if not brought to an end, will ruin them.

When we allow young children their leisure to play, however, we seen natural humans discovering purpose through the pursuit of pleasure. Unlike my retired peers, however, or any adult on holiday for that matter, the children's pleasure is not mere rest, escape, and irresponsibility, but rather curiosity and passion. That is the what Aristotle means by the question, "What gives you pleasure?" I don't need to pose it to the children, however, because without the impending and onerous threat of duty to the grindstone, or adherence to some code of virtue, leisure leads inevitably to discussion and study, to learning and action. This is the only way to discover our own unique path in life, that thing that elevates us beyond mere responsibility, to a life of purpose. Of course, I don't expect for preschoolers, through their play, to find their life's work, but I do hope that they learn what it means to come alive and that is exactly what the world needs: people who know how to come alive.

If you ask any elected official or policy maker a question about education, they will always connect it to the economy. "We must get the children ready for the jobs of tomorrow!" "We must out-educate the Chinese!" But they are not alone. Too many of us have likewise bought into this devil dressed as an angel.

I've spent my adult life as a play-based educator and as such I've spent much of my time defending what I know is right from these devils clothed in duty and virtue. Many accuse me of spoiling or ruining the children. Some have even declared that I'm the "problem with America." Through this blog, public speaking, courses, and other endeavors, I've attempted to give them a view from within our bubble, and perhaps some progress has been made. For instance, most reasonable people will today agree that preschoolers should be playing, although it all too often morphs into duty as they take up our words and twist them into "play with a purpose" or "teachable moments" or simply deploying the promise of play as a trick to turn their attention back toward duty and virtue.

Author and educator, John Holt described it like this: "One reason the walled garden of childhood does not work very well is that the people who build and maintain it cannot stay in it. This very often leads them to resent the children for whose sake the garden was built. How many times must adults, comparing the lives of their children and themselves, think bitterly, "Why should they have it so easy when I have it so tough?" Often they say it out loud. It leads to this, that the people who built the garden to protect the children from the harsh reality outside begin in the name of that same harsh realty to put weeds, and stones, and broken glass, and barbed wire into the garden. "They'd better learn," they say furiously, "what the world out there is really like."

This is the natural response of someone who has never been allowed the leisure to discover what it means to live a life of purpose. This is why Samuel Butler dared not publish his greatest novel during his own lifetime.

The biggest challenge faced by so many of my retired peers, from my perspective, is that they don't know what to do with a life that is suddenly free from the "harsh reality" of duty. They are suddenly confronted with the biggest question of all, the very one that preschoolers at play are always in the process of answering: Who am I going to be? It's a disconcerting thing, I imagine, to have lived most of your life only to find that without duty and virtue to hold them back, with the freedom to be anything, they simply don't know who they are. I can't tell you how many of my retired peers have resorted to working part time as cashiers and waiters, not for the money, but simply to feel that their life still has meaning.

As publisher and philosopher Antonia Case writes in her book Flourish (a deep exploration of what it means to live a life of purpose), "We are so governed by our minds that we can fool ourselves into believing that self-change comes from thinking about it . . . We fool ourselves into thinking that we just need a little time, some space, and then, once all the receptors are open, the voice within will tell us the way . . . But this is not how self-change happens. Your footsteps are the road and nothing more."

This is what we were born to do: for each of us to find our purpose and it is never discovered through duty or virtue. Indeed, duty and virtue are the very things that prevent us from enjoying the leisure that we need in order to discover what gives us pleasure (as opposed to escape), and is the ultimate guide to discovering, at any stage of life, what makes us come alive.

I dream of a day when we all understand that this is what it means to be educated.

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This is your last chance to join the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents and grandparents. It's a particularly powerful course to take with your entire team. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, click here

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

To Weave Our Selves Into the Fabric of Life Itself

2024-01-31T07:14:00.000-08:00

Time has passed over me," she thought, trying to collect herself; "this is the oncome of middle age. How strange it is! Nothing is any longer one thing. I take up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in the ice. Someone lights a pink candle and I see a girl in Russian trousers. When I step out of doors -- as I do now," here she stepped onto the pavement of Oxford Street, "what is that I taste? Little herbs. I hear goat bells. I see mountains. ~Virginia Woolf, Orlando

We tend to think of our selves as discrete dots of life amongst the other dots of life, existing along an inevitable arc of birth, living, and death as independent beings that exist for a moment and are gone. Yet with every inhalation we draw the rest of the world into us -- pollens, spores, gasses, and all those microscopic bits and pieces that we call dust. With every exhale we spread ourselves out into the world. Our senses are in a constant state of taking in and our bodies are in a constant state of giving out until it's hardly possible to really know where we end and the world begins.

Is it any wonder that our minds are the same way.

There are days in the preschool that can only be credited to the workings of a hive mind, projects woven or built from the raw material of "I have an idea!" and "Let's make a bad guy trap!" and "Yes, and I'll be your little sister!" We see it with bees and ants, we understand an aspen grove as a single root with tens of thousands of stems, but we often fail to see the awe inspiring, interconnected beauty of our own species at its best.

We see it most clearly in children's play, when the adults get out of their way. We see it when one child places a wooden plank over a log to make a lever or seesaw or kind of catapult to launch small objects into the air. Then, instantly, they all know about levers or seesaws or catapults. Our habit of thinking ourselves discrete makes us credit the first child while labeling the others as imitators and tagalongs. It's the same bad habit that causes us to make them stop playing so we can judge them through tests and with grades. We literally miss the forest (or the root system) for the trees.

As adults, we have forgotten the vast majority of what we were taught in school, but we remember our friends, we remember the ideas and things that had personal meaning, and we remember our play. Of course, we "remember" much more than what we can at any given moment recall, but it takes someone to light a pink candle in order for us to again see a girl in Russian trousers. It's a memory we've stored externally and is accessible only through the lighting of pink candles. Young children have fewer memories than those of us who are middle aged, but as they play, they are connecting their minds, their selves, with people, places, and things: inhaling and exhaling, hearing and being heard, seeing and being seen, smelling and being smelt, tasting and being tasted, feeling and being felt.

Psychologist Karl Groos wrote, "(T)he animal does not play because he is young, he has a period of youth because he must play." The past several decades has seen a dramatic decline in childhood play. Compared to children in the 1970's, unstructured outdoor play has fallen by more than 50 percent. It's probably not an accident that we are today confronted by a rapidly spreading, and extremely dangerous, epidemic of loneliness. Through play, we become larger, not because we are individual, but because we are integral.

The 19th century philosopher Hegel went so far as so propose that our perception of individual objects and people is an illusion and that the only real thing is the whole, or what he called the Absolute.

We have a period of youth because we must play and we play in large measure not to learn or to grow or to conquer, but rather to connect: to weave our selves into the fabric of life itself, the Absolute, to become an aspect of the hive mind, to inhale and to exhale through time and space and people.

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"The Most Beautiful Thing in the World is Conflicting Interests When Both are Good"

2024-01-30T07:38:00.000-08:00

The poet Jack London wrote, "(T)he most beautiful thing in the world . . . is conflicting interests when both are good."

Many of us have learned to be conflict averse. We find is unsavory, ugly, anxiety producing, or just plain unpleasant. I include myself in that category. The result is that, in the interest of avoiding conflict, we ourselves surrounded by people with whom we tend to agree. We seek out news sources that slant in our direction. We smile through gritted teeth instead of taking the bait of conflict. It seems like not a day goes by that someone from my social media circle declares that they've had enough of all the sound and fury in a goodbye-cruel-world-message. Conflict is unsettling, uncomfortable, and bears within it the seeds of abuse and violence.

Maybe some of us are born conflict averse, but you wouldn't know it from a play-based preschool classroom where conflict stands at the center of the work we are doing together. At any given moment, someone is bickering. As responsible adults we draw nearer as we hear the voices raise, alert to the potential for things to turn nasty. We try to nip it in the bud, stepping in with our adult solutions. We set timers, we make the children wait in lines, we invoke the rules, we redirect their anger and frustration onto ourselves with judicial determinations declaring winners and losers. All in the name of peace.

But peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the ability to resolve conflict by peaceful means. I would attribute this quote to someone famous, but it seems that it's a notion that has its origins in humanity itself. This is what Jack London was talking about when he finds conflict beautiful. When we are too quick to step in, even if we do so in the name of justice, we often rob children of the opportunity to discover that beauty. Indeed, all collaboration, all cooperation, starts with conflicting of ideas. We both want to be the pilot of the airplane we've built from blocks. We all want to be first to go down the slide. Only one person at a time can wear the blue princess dress. The beauty is discovered in the process of pushing, pulling, and shaping those conflicting ideas into agreement.

As adults, too many of us, I think, have learned the wrong lessons about conflict. One way or another, we've bought into the Hobbsian mythology that the natural state of humanity is for our bickering to inevitably escalate into abuse and violence, when, in fact, our glory as a species is our ability to use conflict to come to agreements.

As the responsible adult, I'm charged, first and foremost, with the children's safety. Hitting and kicking hurt people. Threatening and bullying harms people. Those things aren't safe, so that's where I must draw the line by saying, "I can't let you hurt people." The proceed to not let them hurt people. The challenge is that if I step in too early in the name of "nipping it in the bud" I risk teaching children to turn to authority instead of toward one another.

It's a balancing act, one that requires us to step closer, to be alert, but more importantly to have the nerve to wait before intervening, even as voices are raised. We're not always going to get it right. Sometimes there is hitting or grabbing. That's when we know for certain that they need us. I can't tell you how often I've caught a child's arm in mid-swing. But more often than not, I've found that if I allow children the space to engage their own conflicts without my intervention, violence is not the outcome, especially with children who have experienced the line that we draw in the name of safety. If we don't allow them to walk right up to that line, however, how else are they going to learn when they need to really defend their great idea, when to stand down, and how to listen to what the other person is saying about their ideas in order to make it part of your own. This is the only way agreements have ever happened.

My most rewarding days as a teacher are those when our morning of play are so full of conflict, which is to say, so full of ideas, that they spill over into our community meetings, our circle times. I'm inspired by the children's capacity to share their perspectives, to listen to the perspectives of others, and to work toward agreement. One of the approaches that has worked amazingly well when there is a clear divide, is to ask the children who want to, say, play "bad guys" to sit on one side, while those who are afraid of the bad guy play to sit on the other. Almost always, there will be those who don't care, so they will form their own, usually larger, group in the middle. As we take turns pushing and pulling our ideas, invariably there are those who crawl from one group to another as they listen to the dialog, shifting from pro to con and back again as their own ideas of the conflict grow bigger.

Once everyone has had their say, I might ask, "These kids over here think X, while these kids over here think Y. What can we do?" This is when the beauty happens as children offer their solutions. "I have an idea!" they shout. Or, even better, they phrase it as an invitation, starting their sentences with the contraction, "Let's . . ." Let us.

One time the kids agreed that if you wanted a turn on the swings, you had to ask, "Can I have a turn?" three times. If you did that, the other person had to make way. If you only asked twice, no deal. If you phrased it as, "I want a turn" or "May I have a turn?" it didn't count. As adults, we assumed that this quirky agreement would fail, but we quickly discovered that as long as we stayed out of it, it worked beautifully.

The late, great folk singer Utah Phillips sang, "I will not obey, but I'm always ready to agree." This, for me, is an idea that stands at the center of my approach to play-based learning. There is great beauty in conflict, if only we learn to find it.

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When we think of play, we naturally think of carefree frivolity, but anyone who has spent any time around children at play knows that bickering is central to the process of learning to live with the other people. As important adults in the lives of children, our job is not to prevent conflict, but rather to support children as they learn to find beauty in the process. This is central to my approach to play-based learning. This week is your last chance to join the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents and grandparents. It's a particularly powerful course to take with your entire team. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, 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!

This Difficult Business of Other People

2024-01-29T07:11:00.000-08:00

Marcus was working on a cardboard block tower. Lilyanna was helping.

They built it as high as they could, arriving at a point when they struggled to reach the top. It was really quite beautiful, these 2-year-olds spontaneously coming together in common cause like this, not talking, just doing. It takes a combination of concentration and speed to build something that tall, with another person, in a crowded classroom where everything is being continually jostled. But when they arrived at that point where their bodies were not tall enough to reach, their agendas diverged. Marcus clearly wanted to pursue the challenge of continuing to make it even taller, while Lilyanna joyfully pretended to fall, intentionally pulling the building down with her, where she lay on the floor laughing as the blocks rained down on her.

Marcus reacted by lowering his eyebrows, appearing irritated and slightly aghast, I think not at Lilyanna, but rather, if I had to guess, at the lost opportunity. He'd perhaps been planning to find a chair or something else to stand on in order to reach even higher. With a metaphorical shrug, he went back to rebuilding, with Lilyanna once more pitching in. They went through this full cycle 6 times, each go around reaching that point where their agendas diverged and the walls came tumbling down.

The general ethic of our classroom is that if you build it, only you can knock it down, but we don't really have a way to deal with this, when they build it together toward different purposes. I suppose I could have, after a couple repetitions, suggested that each child build his or her own building, but I didn't, mainly because Marcus didn't seem particularly upset. In fact, he appeared rather philosophical, and usually when young children repeat a play pattern over and over, I interpret that as a sign that they are trying to learn something that is personally important.

It's impossible to have a judgement here, to side with one child or another. Each was pursuing his own perfectly legitimate, viable agenda. It was incredible when they merged, and that they merged for so long. Together, for a time, they built higher and faster than either could have alone. I even suspect that had Lilyanna been able to hold off just few minutes longer, those agendas would have again converged and they could have knocked it down together, because that has often in the past been the destiny of Marcus' towers, but that is the way life with the other people works.

All human problems and all human glories result from the great truth that we go about our individual lives working our own unique agendas. From our first cries, using our only tool for connecting with the other humans, we seek out sensations, connections, and even objects that in some way satisfy those agendas, and we pursue them relentlessly. We have our conscious agendas and our unconscious agendas, overt and covert, ones we announce proudly and those we shamefully leave unspoken. And these agendas shape how we engage with the world. There are so many agendas working at so many purposes at any given time, that it seems a miracle that we ever get together on anything at all.

This is a big part of why we're in preschool, to learn to work our agendas together; to learn how to find where they match, because together we can do things that we can't alone, but also to learn how to deal with those inevitable times when they diverge and the building comes crashing down around us. This stands at the core of a play-based curriculum.

There are some hard, complicated lessons to learn about agendas. There are times, of course, when we must stand and fight, but we also must learn to pick our battles. There are times when we must step aside. Sometimes we must conclude, as Marcus finally did, that we will not be able to complete our agenda today, and learn when to walk away, hopefully to return another day. Most often we need to talk, to compromise, to find a way to alter our agendas in order for them to imperfectly merge in order to achieve a kind of "second best" result that leaves all parties both satisfied and dissatisfied. And, naturally, the more people, the more agendas, that must be included, the more difficult it gets. This whole business of living with the other people is an emotional tangle, full of pointy parts to navigate, made even more challenging as we begin to understand that those other people are navigating too. But as difficult as it is, it's important because it's exactly the process of picking our way through this jumble of agendas that teaches us empathy, and even compassion, which is just another complication in this complicated business.

Some days I have no idea how any towers ever get built in the world. It all seems so impossible.

Yet we keep doing it, throughout our lives, re-engaging in this difficult business of other people.

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This is the work of early childhood and is a key part of my approach to play-based learning. This week is your last chance to join the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents and grandparents. It's a particularly powerful course to take with your entire team. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, 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!

On Most Days I Teach Nothing at All

2024-01-26T07:14:00.000-08:00

I never pretend to know what kids will learn on any given day and, honestly, any teacher who does is either deluded or blowing smoke. No one can possibly know what another person is going to learn. You can hope. You can plan. You can lecture yourself blue. You can even, if you're especially clever, trick someone into learning something, but the idea that one person can "teach" something to another, except under narrow circumstances, is one of the great educational myths.

There is a quote that is most often attributed to the Buddha, but is more likely of Theosophical origins, that goes: "When the student is ready the master will appear." I like these kinds of quotes that persist because they are true even when they can't be traced back to the utterances of Buddha, Socrates, or Einstein. This one is even so true that there is a corollary: "When the master is ready the student will appear."

Some days I accidentally "teach" something to a kid. For instance, I once improperly used the term "centrifugal force" (when I actually should have use "centripetal force") while a child was experimenting with a hamster wheel and the kid, months later, was still misusing my term while performing his experiments, even as I repeatedly tried to correct him. But most days I teach nothing at all except, perhaps, what I convey to my students by role modeling. I've tried, believe me, to convey specific information to kids, like when I tell them that dirt is primarily made from volcanos, dead stuff, and worm poop, but most of the time the only things that stick are the things about which the kids are already asking questions.

And still, despite my utter lack of "teaching," the kids who come to our school are learning. How do I know? I watch them. I listen to them. I remember when they didn't know and then I hear them saying and see them doing things that demonstrate that now they do. And even though I'm not teaching them, they mostly learn exactly what I want them to know.

What do I want them to know?

The joy of playing with other people.

The frustration failure and the redemption of perseverance.

Emotions come and go and they are important.

I'm the boss of me and you're the boss of you.

Our agreements are sacred.

It's not only important to love, but also to say it.

It's not my job to "teach" these things. It is my job to love them and to do what I can to create an environment that is stimulating, beautiful, and safe enough: a place where children can ask and answer their own questions about the world and the people they find there. A place not of teaching, but of curiosity, exploration, experimentation, and discovery. We call it play and it's how we learn everything a preschooler needs to know.

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This philosophy of "not teaching" is a key part of my approach to play-based learning. Please join the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents and grandparents. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, 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!

Playing, Together, In a Safe and Beautiful Environment

2024-01-25T07:08:00.000-08:00

The long-term effects of the things we do to children in schools is a notoriously difficult thing to capture in research.

Generally speaking, however, we as a society have concluded, based on our collective behavior and with little evidence, that more academic training at earlier ages is the way to go. We assume that if we want kids to be good at school (a dubious goal at best) then we must give them lots of practice in preschool, which has lead in recent decades to two-year-olds being expected to sit at desks to be the targets of formal literacy and mathematics training. It has lead to our youngest citizens spending the bulk of their days indoors, focusing increasingly on things like worksheets and memorization drills. And it is harming them.

Many of us, including readers here, have looked on with horror. Preschoolers are simply not developmentally ready for this type of schooling. We see evidence that these unrealistic pressures are one of the leading causes of the current spike in childhood anxiety and depression. When we point any of this out, when we say that the push toward academic preschools is harmful to children and prevents them from working on the foundational social-emotional learning that young children need, proponents of top-down, adult-directed academic style schooling insist that it's the price we must pay for the long-term benefits, especially for disadvantaged children. They point to studies that show that children who are exposed to these "school readiness" types of curricula have a leg up with things like letter recognition and print awareness.

They can legitimately assert this because the research on the short-term effects consistently shows that children from academic preschool programs do enter kindergarten with certain advantages over those who have spent their preschool years playing. The part of the research that they ignore is that whenever an attempt has been made to study the long-term impact, we see that those advantages disappear rather quickly leaving the drill-and-kill kids largely indistinguishable academically, and worse off by other measures, from comparable peers who were not enrolled in academic-based programs.

This is a consistent finding, going all the way back to the Perry Preschool Project, still the gold standard for long-term research on the impact of preschool. This study continues to track low-income children from a play-based program since the mid-1960's. They were the first to find that academic advantages faded rapidly once the kids moved on to elementary school. It's a result that has been replicated repeatedly, right up to a recent study on Tennessee's Pre-K program for children from low-income families that not only recreated this result, but found that by 3rd grade the children who attended the academics based program performed worse on both academic and behavioral measures than classmates who were never in the program.

In other words, the Tennessee Pre-K program harmed the children it sought to help.

The children studied in the Perry Preschool Project, however, the ones who attended a play-based, child-centered program also lost their short-term academic advantages, but continued, into adulthood, to reap the benefits of their behavioral head start. They had fewer teenage pregnancies, were more likely to have graduated from high school, to hold a job and have higher earnings, to commit fewer crimes, and to own their own home and car. They are more self-motivated, better at working with others, and, generally speaking, are more personable.

The key, I think, is that these kids got to play when they were young, which is the soil from which healthy, happy, well-adjusted adults grow.

If you want to read more about the research into the harm caused by academic preschools, I urge you to take a look at this piece in Psychology Today from author and researcher Peter Gray.

I know that many of the people who read here do not need more research to tell them that young children need play and lots of it. We are in the classroom every day, seeing the benefits with our own eyes. But as the Biden Administration here in the US gears up to offer free universal state-run preschool for 3 and 4-year-olds, there is a great danger that they will ignore the evidence in favor of yet more academic-style schooling for our youngest citizens. This will harm the children and it's harm that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

I also know that many people who read here will, however, hold their noses and support anything that offers free childcare for low income families.

We are compassionate people. We know that the families of our low and middle-income students are struggling financially and free preschool, even free drill-and-kill preschool, will be a boon to them. Experience tells us, however, that nothing is really free, no matter what party is in charge. This "free" preschool will come with so-called "accountability" requirements that will invariably mean, among other things, high stakes testing (high stakes for those whose funding is on the line). This will mean sitting preschoolers in desks to be trained to pass tests. This will mean top-down school prep curricula, a grindstone that is completely inappropriate for these children who need to play. And we know from research that this will harm the children we seek to help.

Still, many well-intended educators have told me that it is a price we should be willing to pay for the economic relief that universal preschool will provide low and middle-income families.

Indeed, one of the Biden administration's strongest arguments in favor of universal preschool is the economic benefits it will bring to families. I can stand fully behind free universal childcare. This is something we should have done long ago. But labeling this as "school," even "preschool," is a real and present danger to the children and families we are hoping to help because our society has consistently demonstrated that it will do harmful things to children in the name of schooling.

My idea is to call it what it is from this economic perspective: child care. Maybe if we do that, we will shed some of the baggage that comes with society's definition of schooling. Maybe if what we are funding is "child care" we will be free to focus on the foundational social and emotional needs of young children in a developmentally appropriate way, which is to say create programs in which the adults know to get out of the children's way and allow them to learn as young humans are meant to learn, by playing, together, in a safe and beautiful environment.

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One of the most powerful aspects of my Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning course is that it supports entire "teams" of educators and caregivers to get on the same page when it comes to offering the kind of play-based learning young children need. It gives educators the tools to reveal, explain, and defend their play-based program to parents and other stakeholders who have been taken in by the "academic" snake oil. Parents will likewise find this course empowering as they will learn to become effective advocates for what their child needs. Please join the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based learning pedagogy, designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents and grandparents. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, 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!

Play is What Connects Learning With Living

2024-01-24T07:08:00.000-08:00

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. ~John Dewey

People tend to have one of two responses when I tell them I'm a teacher. Either they say something like, "Good for you . . . Such important work," or they roll their eyes and puff out their cheeks in comic mimicry of exhausted frustration and say something along the lines of, "You must be a saint."

Neither of these responses ever strike cords for me.

I mean, I've certainly been an important adult in the lives of thousands of young children, but it rarely feels like work. Or rather, it's the work everyone must do whenever other humans are involved, the work of being a human being living in the world with others. It's the work of relationships and community.

That's not work, that's life itself.

What we do with and for young children, I believe, is vitally important, don't get me wrong, the most important thing in the world, but to say that creating relationships and building community is work is to take the misanthropic position that life itself is toil and trouble.

Of course, I realize that these people who call me a saint are responding to their ideas of teaching, such as the widely held notion that schools are a kind of factory in which learning is manufactured like any other widget. Teaching, in this model, is the equivalent of being a worker along a super long assembly line, mind numbing, repetitive, with incomplete adults gradually taking shape over decades. And when we try to do it that way that's exactly what teaching becomes: hard work for both us and the children.

When they say, "You must be a saint," they're talking about the other widely held notion that children are fighting against their learning and that it must require divine patience to coax them open enough to shove the learning in.

Sadly, in many of our public schools, that is exactly how it's done. These very people who misunderstand teaching as a manufacturing process, who view children as incomplete humans who fight learning every step of the way, are the policymakers and education dilettantes who are, bizarrely, in charge of deciding what happens in the classroom. Life itself, in this model, is something that begins at 18; everything up to then is preparation.

When we understand our "work" as life itself, all of that goes away. When we view children as fully formed human beings due the dignity and respect due to all human beings, learning becomes one with living. Everyone is still exhausted at the end of the day, but not because we've labored, but rather because we've lived. Labor saps our life, while living, well . . . It's living.

The work of relationship and community is the real work of a play-based educator. We live our days in the flow of life, connecting, listening, and striving with all our being to understand these fully formed humans with whom we find ourselves. And that's what the children are doing as well -- connecting, listening, and striving to understand. When we turn it all into work and preparation, we are paddling against the flow of life, and yes, it becomes toil and drudgery for everyone.

Connecting, listening, and striving to understand: this is what we all do from the moment we are born until the day we die. This is life itself.

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. . . And play is the mechanism through which children connect, listen, and strive to understand. It is our education instinct made manifest. Are already a play-based educator or an educator wanting to bring more play into your work? Are you a director or owner who wants to get the whole team on the same page? Are you a parent, grandparent, or caregiver interested in providing children a playful childhood? Please consider joining the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning. This is a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed to make you think deeply about the role you play in the lives of children, and give you the inspiration, insight and tools needed to create an environment of genuine play for the children in your life. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, 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!

It's All an Experiment

2024-01-23T07:15:00.000-08:00

The opposite of play isn't work, it's rote. ~Edward Hollowell

This might sound like an odd thing for a teacher to write, but I sometimes get the idea that knowing stuff is the enemy of education. There is little gratification in it for me when I've envisioned how children will do something, then they proceed to do it in just the way I've imagined. Certainly I could claim it as some evidence of experience on my side, but it also makes me worry that it's also evidence of rote on the children's side.

I'll leave it to future teachers to worry about teaching the kids to follow instructions if that's what they feel they need them to do. Much better things are happening in our school, it seems, when instructions are minimal and I'm constantly proven wrong in my expectations. Fortunately, when working with young children in a play-based environment, that's more the norm than the exception.

Our classroom, every day, should be one big experiment, a place where things are not known by either the kids or the teachers, a place where we fiddle and argue and poke and prod our way toward knowledge, and where everything we come to understand is only a part of all the other things we're striving to know. It should be a place with lots of room for failure, frustration, and conflict. It should be a place with lots of room for wonder, epiphany, and friendship.

When a reporter asked Thomas Edison how it felt to have failed over a thousand times in his quest to invent the lightbulb, he famously answered, "I didn't fail a thousand times. The lightbulb was an invention with a thousand steps." Except we're not even trying to invent anything here, but simply discover, in the spirit of pure science, conducted for the purpose of getting closer to our own truth and nothing more.

Or maybe we are trying to invent something, after all, and if we are, it's not the sort of thing that can be put into words, but rather felt or intuited. I suppose it has something to do with inventing ourselves both as individuals and as a community. It's something that can only be invented by conducting thousands and thousands of experiments; by taking thousands and thousands of steps.

And even though billions of humans have come before us, if we are playing together, we are discovering and inventing a thing that has never been discovered or invented before: us.

Anyone who tells you they have a system or method or sure-fire technique for educating children isn't talking about education at all. They're talking about standardization and efficiency. They're talking about assembly lines and cookie cutters. Anyone who doesn't start with the idea that it's all an experiment isn't talking about education at all. They're talking about rote.

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. . . And play is the mechanism through which children connect, listen, and strive to understand. It is our education instinct made manifest. Whether you are just starting out as a play-based educator, are a veteran of play, or are a parent/caregiver interested in providing children a playful childhood, please consider joining the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning. This is my 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed to make you think deeply about the role you play in the lives of children, and give you the inspiration, insight and tools needed to create an environment of genuine play for the children in your life. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, 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!

We Must Demand Play-Based Learning for Preschoolers

2024-01-22T07:07:00.000-08:00

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Economic Forum, and Unicef (and according to the dubious measurement of standardized test scores) Finland has the best schools in the world. They have achieved this status by building their educational system on evidence. The US languishes around the middle of the pack, often falling into the bottom half according to some measures. We have achieved this lack of success by relying upon the busy-body guesswork of policy makers, billionaire dilettantes, and administrators who listen to them.

It shouldn't be surprising that the system based on evidence, on research, on reality, would outperform the one based on the fantasies and feelings of people who are not professional educators. In Finland, they do not try to teach kindergarteners to read because the evidence tells us that formal literacy instruction should not start until at least the age of seven and that children who are compelled into it too early often suffer emotionally and academically in the long run. In the US we are forcing kindergartners, and even preschoolers, to learn to read. There is very little research that points to longterm gains from teaching children to read in kindergarten. In fact, most of the research that has been done tends to find early instruction reduces comprehension and reading for pleasure in later years.

The evidence tells us that early childhood education should focus on equity, happiness, well-being and joy in learning. This is what Finland has done by basing their educational model on childhood play, which is, again according to the overwhelming preponderance of research, the gold standard. The US has based its early childhood education on standardized testing, increased "instructional time," bottoms-in-your-seats carrot-and-stick standardization, and an ever-narrowing focus on literacy and math despite the evidence that it causes longterm harm to children, because people in power who know nothing about education think that sounds good to them.

We are through the looking glass here. We are doing harm to our children. We are subjecting them to decades of "education" that is, again according to the evidence, doing them far more harm than good, while children in other countries are being provided the best education available because the adults are adult enough to look at reality and act accordingly.

This is not my feeling. This is not my opinion. This is not my philosophy. These are the facts as far as we can currently determine them. It is cruel, even abusive, to base our educational system on other people's feelings and fantasies, even if they are rich and powerful. For the sake of our children, we must demand play-based education because, damn it, that's what the evidence tells us.

(Please click the links in this post. Most of them take you to articles, research, and papers that provide even further links into the evidence.)

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The science tells us that young children learn most of what they need to learn through play, through their self-selected activities, through asking and answering their own questions. Whether you are just starting out as a play-based educator, are a veteran of play, or are a parent/caregiver interested in providing children a playful childhood, please consider joining us. Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning is a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed to make you think deeply about the role you play in the lives of children, and give you the inspiration, insight and tools needed to create an environment of genuine play for the children in your life. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, 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 Radical Idea That Children are People

2024-01-19T07:07:00.000-08:00

As we open enrollment for the 2024 cohort of my 6-week course, Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, I'm reminded once again how radical our ideas are about young children. I forget that not everyone trusts children even if most people say they do. I forget that most adults are convinced that children must be guided, coerced, tricked or otherwise manipulated to do "right" things, even as they genuinely profess a belief in their innate goodness. I forget that out there, outside our bubble, grown-ups might proudly say they want "kids to be kids," yet their behavior demonstrates that they can't imagine them thriving absent a background of near constant correction, "good jobs," and unsolicited advice. Most people think that we agree with one another about children, but once we get talking, they start to realize that what we're saying is radical.

It's the radical idea that children are fully formed people, due the rights and respect due to all the other people. When we treat adults as untrustworthy, when we seek to guide, coerce, trick or otherwise manipulate them, when we correct or offer false praise or unsolicited advice, we are generally considered to be jerks of the highest order. Yet somehow, many of us, maybe most of us, live in a world in which it's considered normal to treat children this way.

Do they need us when they're young? Of course they do, in the way that seeds need gardeners to make sure the soil is well-tended, that it is protected, and that it gets enough water, but the growing, the sprouting, the leafing, the budding, the blooming, and the fruiting is up to the plant.

I am spending more time these days outside of our bubble, interacting with adults who seem to genuinely want to do the right thing by children, to do better by children, but who are stuck with misguided ideas of what children are. They have no notion that, from an historical perspective, what they think is normal is not: for children to spend their days doing what the grown-ups tell them to do, to sit still, to spend all those hours indoors, to move from place to place driven by a schedule rather than curiosity. Recently, I was in a meeting with a pair of partners interested in investing in educational matters. Their own children had both been in cooperative preschools like the one in which I taught for nearly 20 years. One of them said, "On my first day working in the classroom I was down on my knees helping the kids build with blocks. Teacher Sandi tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'This is the children's project, not yours.' That was a real eye-opener for me."

I know Teacher Sandi. I know exactly how she said it. I've done it myself, often to highly accomplished professional people "slumming" for a day in the classroom. This kind of thing, as simple and as obvious as it sounds to those of us who have dedicated our lives to progressive play-based education, is for most people still a radical idea. Sometimes the thought of making the changes that need to happen seems overwhelming. It makes me want to crawl back into the bubble and stay there, focusing on the children of the parents who get it. But then I'm encouraged by how readily this radical idea can also become an "eye-opener," just as it was for me as I set out on the same journey more than two decades ago, and just as it continues to be.

Most of what I've learned from and about young children over the past two decades comes down to un-learning the modern lessons of parenting, schooling, and the capabilities of children. I've discovered that if I am to do right by children I must release control, shut up and listen, get out of their way, and love them. And whenever I'm challenged, whenever things are not going well, I've discovered that the answer always lies in returning to the radical idea of treating children like people.

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Treating children like people stands at the center of play-based learning. Please join this new cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, a popular 6-week foundational course on my play-based pedagogy, designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents and grandparents. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, 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!