Teacher Tom

"Appreciation is a Holy Thing"

2026-07-06T07:00:27.620-07:00

After reading a story, then singing our final song together, the children came forward to hug me, not one at a time, but all together, and there we were, a massive scrum of bodies, wrapping one another up in our arms.

Since my first year teaching, this was the way the two-year-olds said goodbye to me at the end of the day. I never asked for it or encouraged it in any way other than, I suppose, to be open to it. It always started on the first day of class each year because there was always that one child who genuinely felt the urge to hug me, to receive a hug from me, then others saw it, thought, "I want some of that," and came for their hug as well. I said the children's names as they approached, "Here's my Sarah hug, my Nora hug, my Alex hug . . ."

Mister Rogers said, "I believe that appreciation is a holy thing." We were saying goodbye to one another, of course, but we were also saying thank you, expressing our gratitude, showing our appreciation, not in payment for any particular favor, but simply for the time we had together. It started spontaneously, then, as the year progressed, became a sort of ritual, each child making it their own. There were some who rushed to be first, others who waited for the crowd to thin. Some didn't want to let go. Some come back for a second and third and fourth hug. A few didn't want to hug, preferring a high five or simply eye contact. Some were moved to hug their classmates.

It was a beautiful way to end our time together, topping one another up before heading off into our separate lives.

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

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Happy Interdependence Day!

2026-07-04T06:47:45.002-07:00

We must hang together gentlemen . . . else we shall most assuredly hang separately. ~Benjamin Franklin

Happy Independence Day! And “happy” is the appropriate greeting for this long weekend. The Declaration of Independence was the first historical instance of the word "happiness" appearing in the founding documents of any nation.

In 1776, 56 men signed their names to this radical document. As a result they were, without trial, proclaimed traitors by the government and sentenced to death. These were middle class people. John Hancock was the wealthiest among them and he was not even a millionaire by today's standards. The wealthy sided with the king. Most of the signers were working people -- farmers and tradesmen primarily. None of them left behind a family fortune, or a foundation, or any other kind of financial memorial of their lives. Our nation is their legacy.

Their average age was 33 (Thomas Jefferson's age at the time). The youngest was only 20-years-old. The oldest was Benjamin Franklin, who was 83.

As a result of having signed the Declaration of Independence, all 56 of the signers were forced to flee their homes. Twelve returned to find only rubble.

As a result of having signed the Declaration of Independence, 17 of them were wiped out financially by the British government.

As a result of having signed the Declaration of Independence, many of them were captured and tortured, or their families were imprisoned, or their children were taken from them. Nine of them died and 4 of them lost their children.

As I read the Declaration of Independence, as I do each July 4, I find myself in awe of their courage. They were all aware of the likely consequences, but they did what they knew must be done. Two centuries later, I still feel the outrage they must have felt as I read through the specific governmental abuses that lead them to that critical moment.

Even more than our Constitution, the Declaration of Independence is the beginning point for the United States of America. I find it both educational and inspirational to return to the source before heading out for fireworks.

When Franklin was asked what kind of nation they were forming, he answered, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

I worry at times that we won't be able to keep it, that, in fact, we've already lost it. I worry that too many of us have declared our independence not from tyrants, but from one another, not understanding that in creating a constitutional government of, by, and for we the people, we were also declaring our interdependence.

At the signing to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Franklin famously said, "We must hang together gentlemen . . . else we shall most assuredly hang separately."

And while we come together this weekend to commemorate our independence from tyranny, this is also a day for embracing our fellow countrymen, for celebrating our interdependence. In that direction lies happiness.

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"Since We're Neighbors, Let's Be Friends"

2026-07-03T07:33:29.879-07:00

For the past several years, I've been limiting my news consumption to about 5 hours of local news a week, usually "watched" while I'm preparing dinner.

Yesterday, there was a story about a nearby town's preparations for the nation's oldest continually running July 4 parade. From the looks of it, the parade is mostly local groups, marching through the streets, making their music, performing their dances, and waving their flags, while the rest of the town comes out to wave their own flags and cheer. The key figure in the story was an older woman who has been part of organizing the festivities for the past several decades. The story concluded with her saying, "We're just as excited today as they were back then."

There was another "World Cup" adjacent story about a young teen whose health issues have made it impossible for her to play her beloved soccer. She has now started a drive to raise money to help others in her situation. The concluding thought from this girl, "I'm just happy I can help others."

There were more stories, of course, but I'm going to stop there because I'm tearing up as I write this. I often find myself tearing up as I watch my local news. There are, of course, darker stories. There was, for instance, the frozen food warehouse that recently burned down. That story was mostly interviews with the people who live around the facility. The smoke was bad, but some of the people say that the stench of tons of rotting food is worse.

But compared to national news, the overall slant of my local news is much more positive, probably because it's always about my "neighbors." Even national news stories are offered from a local perspective featuring interviews with local people whose lives are directly impacted. This is so much more elevating than professional pontificators who seethe and shout based on some sort of abstract political theory or other. As you know, national news tends to thrive on setting up everything as conflict and performative debate between partisans. It raises your blood pressure, but otherwise goes no where.

What I enjoy about my small doses of local interviews is that the people on my screen aren't shy about not having all the answers, of being internally conflicted between this or that approach, and overall showing their genuine emotion and concern. Even when I suspect they don't vote the way I do, I still get to see their fuller humanity on display, which naturally allows me to better understand where they're coming from. This is what it means to me to be well-informed about the issues.

This is why I get teary. I get teary because these are the actual people amidst whom I live. And I like them. I like that they're my neighbors. Every year, right around the 4th of July holiday, I find myself getting teary. I know our great "experiment" in democracy is far from perfect. I know that people continue to be poor, oppressed, and left out. I feel for them and strive to use my own political agency to rise them up, set them free, and bring them in. I've shared many of these actions here on the blog over the years, for what it's worth.

I get teary because despite our ongoing failures, I'm moved and even amazed by this audacious thing we are trying to do as a nation. For 250 years, a relatively short time in the scheme of human existence, we have, in our way, as a nation of we the people, attempted to self-govern. It's messy, even ugly at times. And the way our media, politics, and technology has evolved makes it even messier and uglier. But when I turn to my neighbors, when I turn to the people amidst whom I actually live, I continue to be inspired by what we're capable of striving toward, who we are capable of being. Democracy will always be an experiment. It will never be perfect. The promise isn't happiness, but rather the collective pursuit of happiness.

This weekend, I'll be celebrating, not with family, not with old friends, but with my neighbors.

Among my greatest inspirations is Mister Rogers' whose work with young children was rooted in the metaphor of the neighborhood. In his daily program Mister Roger's Neighborhood, he gave us a blueprint of how the medium of television could be used to pull people together rather than divide them. "Since we're neighbors, let's be friends." It's both a simple and breathtaking aspiration.

It's the neighborhood, the people amidst whom we live, the people we see at the local coffee shop, grocery store, out walking the dog, for which we are made. When I think of democracy, that's who I think about. When I get teary, these are the people, these every day people full of doubts, emotions, fears, and passions, that touch me the most.

I worry that so many of us don't have the privilege that so many people my age had of growing up in real neighborhoods. They still exist, but they're much harder to find these days.

This is why I believe that the central purpose of every preschool is to be that local community for this generation of young children. To be a place where we learn about and from real people, rather than the cartoon cutouts that come to us through a media that thrives on stereotype and division. Our preschools can be the place where young children first learn that the messiness of self-government need not turn ugly; where empathy and compassion grow best; where real people come together to talk about their concerns, their ideas, and their needs; where negotiation, compromise, and ultimately agreement stand at the center of our relationships with one another. Our preschools can be places in which young children are marinated in community.

I've always approached preschool as an experiment, both for me, and for the children, because that's what our democracy is: an experiment in living together. It's an experiment in which the beaker sometimes blows up in our faces, in which the results are not always what we expected, and in which we the people are the only ones who have the power to do something about it. It's from this foundation of being good neighbors that we can hope for a better tomorrow.

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Imaginative Play is Thinking Play

2026-07-02T07:06:53.300-07:00

Imaginative play is the backbone of most of the play we see in our preschool classrooms. It might be making art or building with blocks or playing house or putting on costumes and creating entire worlds. It's the opposite of our cultural stereotypes of "school" because it's not about "just the facts." On the contrary, it's about counter-factual thinking, which is, as it sounds, using our imaginations to create something that isn't, in fact, real.

They use their imaginations to paint a "spooky ghost with spider legs" or build a Lego laser or bake a pan of play dough muffins. They play games in which they are mommies or baddies or baby snow leopards. Sometimes critics of play-based learning point this out as a nothing more than a silly waste of time, but nearly everything around us that isn't nature is a product of counter-factual thinking. Someone had to first imagine a vehicle that propelled itself with a motor before it could ever become a reality.

Imaginative play is more than invention, of course. It's also how children come to understand their world. When they pretend to cook they are exploring, from the inside, something that is obviously important to understand. Dress up play is a gateway to storytelling and ultimately literacy. It's also a part of how we develop empathy and understanding of others.

The imaginative play of children often seems dreamlike as they cobble together their play from fragments of past experiences, loose parts, compromise, and agreement. In imaginative play there can be two queens, talking gorillas, and healthy cookies. An orange rind can become a rainbow. A stick can be . . . well, almost anything.

Yesterday, I wrote of our memories as something we construct, or as experimental psychologist Frederic Bartlett put it, an "imaginative reconstruction," born anew, altered, adapted, and improved, each time we evoke them. He also argued that imagination is a product of memory. Indeed, the process of assembling bits and pieces into a cohesive product of imagination is, in our brain, remarkably similar to the process we use to call up memories.

As neuroscientists Charan Ranganath puts it, "the hippocampus and the DMN (default mode network) . . . function at the crossroads between memory and imagination by allowing us to extract the ingredients from past experiences and recombine them into new creations. In other words, our brains are not memorization organs, but rather thinking organs, and imagination, not being a silly waste of time at all, stands at the center of it.

When we attempt to make children stop playing in order to force-feed them academics we are, in a pathetic adult-centric way, attempting to control their memories, the raw material they have at their disposal for thinking. And what dull stuff it is. Foolishly, we declare that all children must be forced to know this or that, ignoring the fact that our brains have evolved to be singular, to take in meaningful information and transform it in unique and idiosyncratic ways (i.e., by thinking) into something else. That is the entire story of human evolution.

And that is exactly what children are doing as they engage in their imaginative play. They are making memories and meaning, meaning and memories, in a creative cognitive process, which is, at the end of the day, what our brains are meant to do.

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"Well, He Won't Do That Again"

2026-07-01T06:59:52.774-07:00

"Well, he won't do that again."

We've all said, or at least thought it. And more often than not (but not always) we're right. Like when a child goofs around on the edge of a fountain on a cold day and falls in. We expect that unpleasant experience to "teach" them a lesson. At least, we hope, it's less likely that they're going to need us to caution them about it the next time. Either they're going to avoid it or they're going to use the information they gathered the next time to exercise a bit more caution

This doesn't mean that we don't care about their tears. Of course, we comfort the child. Dry them off. Get them new clothes. But we don't need to add to the unpleasantness by attempting in our heavy-handed adultness to "drive the point home" with a lot of "So what did we learn today?" style scolding. That just shifts the focus from the actual lessons learned to whether or not the adult is pleased with them, which is a different thing.

In his book Why We Remember, neuroscientist Charan Rangnath, writes, "We are wired to learn from our mistakes and challenges -- a phenomenon called error-driven learning." It's learning that derives from actively doing (playing on the edge of a fountain) rather than passively memorizing (listening to a safety lecture). If a child really wants to play by the fountain, no amount of our cautioning will teach them as effectively as that error.

Memory is a strange thing. Most of what you will do today will never become part of your memory. The boy who fell in the fountain will likely never fully recall the events leading up to his fall. He will, if necessary, be able to construct a "memory" involving walking to the bus stop with his classmates and riding to the Wooden Boat Center, but that will mostly be his brain determining what "must have" happened rather than what "actually happened."

Our brains have not evolved for literal recall, which is why we struggle with things like remembering the name of that movie with that actor from that other movie. Or as cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness."

No, what this boy will remember of the events leading up to his fall will be largely cobbled together from what is called his semantic memory, which is "our ability to recall facts of knowledge about the world, regardless of when and where that information was learned" and applied "across a range of contexts." In other words, other field trips and bus rides will play at least as large a role in what he remembers.

When he recalls the fall itself, however, and perhaps the immediate aftermath (the shivering, the discomfort, the consequences), that will be called up by his episodic memory, which is "the kind of remembering that allows us to call back, and even reexperience, events from the past." It's still a construction, but one that requires us to "mentally return to a specific place and time." Episodic memory is what we generally refer to when we talk about "our memories." (Although, this too is a construction, or an "imaginative reconstruction.")

Much of what passes for education in our schools involves training children to do something that isn't natural to the human mind, which is precise recall, usually assessed by testing. The problem, as Rangnath puts it is that "tests are optimized for last-minute learning that enhances short-term performance at the expense of retention." And as we know, most of what we store in our short-term memory is gone within days, if not hours.

"Lasting benefits come from error-driven learning, during which we are not always going to be successful," writes Rangnath. "We learn and retain more from the struggle of pushing ourselves to the edges . . . than we do by memorizing and regurgitating on command." This is a big part of why play-based learning, which could really just be another name for error-driven learning, is so powerful.

"Perhaps," concludes Rangnath, "instead of rewarding success, we should normalize mistakes and failures and incentivize constant improvement. Rather than emphasizing mastery, we need to celebrate the struggle -- working to learn, rather than to prove you have learned something."

In this case, he's writing about his university students. Fascinatingly, he is not opposed to testing, but rather believes that we do testing in the wrong way. In his work, he uses tests not as a foundation for grades, but rather as learning tools in which his students are free to be wrong. He's found that "when we look under the hood of the hippocampus . . . we see that the benefits of testing do not come from making mistakes per se, but rather from challenging yourself to pull up what you have learned." The more often we do that, the more likely it is that we will be able to recall it.

"Well, he won't do that again."

The boy tested his world. He fell into cold water on a cold day. The consequences tell him it was a mistake. But this is different than a university test with its precise answers. As adults we might think there is a "correct answer," that the boy has learned to never again goof around on the edge of a fountain. We may even try to drive that point home, but that may not be how he sees it. His urge to goof around on the edge of the fountain may remain, but what he has done, through error-driven learning, is gain information that will make it less likely that he fall in the future.

He may still hop up on that fountain if, say, it's a warm, sunny day when the consequences of a fall won't be so uncomfortable

He may still hop up on that fountain if, say, he feels he has developed a better sense of balance.

He may still hop on that fountain if, say, the adults turn their backs, because, at the end of the day, he was curious about testing a different kind of limit.

Perhaps the worst thing we do in education is make children afraid of being wrong. They worry about bad grades, adult disapproval, or even punishment, instead of being free to struggle toward their own learning. Error-driven learning is play-based learning. It's not the successes that matter, but the pursuit of success that gets us out of bed in the morning. And that's where the learning is.

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The Preschool Autism Summit is going to be great! Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I can't wait to dig into all 30 of these sessions. I know I'm going to learn a lot . . . And I know I'm going to be a better teacher for it. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for 3 days of outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass 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!

Making Our Preschools Worthy of Autistic Children

2026-06-30T06:53:48.543-07:00

Play-based preschool should be the default. Research consistently tells us that young children -- all young children -- need play and lots of it for both intellectual and healthy social-emotional development.

Unfortunately, ignorance and fear continue to drive too many parents to seek out factory model schooling for their children in the misguided hope that they'll get a leg up on the competition for getting into Harvard or Stanford. These settings, in contrast to play-based settings, do not serve all young children, which means that kids who need to move their bodies, who need to learn with their hands and hearts, who need to be outdoors, who need to learn with all their senses, who need to followed their curiosity, and whose neurotype doesn't match up with command-and-control models, wind up being a "problem."

The superpower of play-based learning is that it adapts to the child rather than forcing children to adapt to the school. This is why so many of these "misfits" thrive with us. I can't tell you how many children wound up at Woodland Park after having been essentially expelled from other programs. And many of those children over the years were autistic.

When I first started teaching, I didn't really understand autism, even though, looking back, I can see that I worked with dozens of children who were likely autistic, but since play-based theory requires that we adapt our environments to support children in their self-directed learning, these kids never showed up as "problems." Indeed, these children were some of my most important teachers.

Back then, about 1 in 150 children were identified as autistic. In the intervening two decades, autism research and awareness has had its day. Today, about 1 in 30 children will be identified as autistic. This is because we've come to increasingly understand autism as a spectrum of traits, with each autistic person possessing a unique pattern of strengths, challenges, and support needs. And that can't be standardized for the "generic autistic child," because such a human doesn't exist. In other words, the infinite flexibility of play-based learning makes it the right approach for all children.

There continues to be a great deal of research and debate in the autism community, which is normal when the science is moving so rapidly. It can be confusing for classroom educators to keep up, especially given the amount of misinformation that's out there.

This is why I was so eager to take part in the upcoming Preschool Autism Summit, July 12-15. This free online gathering features presentations from 30 experts, bringing together the latest research and approaches to working with autistic preschoolers and their families. My session is called Making Our Play-Based Preschools Worthy of Autistic Children and I will also be taking part in a live panel discussion.

Please join us!

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"A Deep Sense of Who You Are"

2026-06-29T06:29:28.105-07:00

As a child, my family moved around a lot. I'd called four places home before my first day of kindergarten. I attended three different elementary schools and three different middle schools. My parents, themselves, had grown up in a small, tightly-knit farming community in which everyone knew everyone. To this day, they are still in touch with some of their childhood friends. In contrast, I'm in touch with none of mine. In fact, I can't even remember the names of some of the kids I once called "best friend."

I sometimes wonder if I've missed out on something, especially when my wife gets together with her lifelong besties, but the experience of being the "new kid" is so much a part of who I am that I can't really imagine what it would be like to share such a long history with anyone other than family members. My greatest life lesson, I think, was how to make new friends wherever I go.

For this I credit my mother. Mom was determined that we would have friends wherever we went. If the new neighbors didn't show up on the front porch with casseroles, she would make her own casseroles and show up on theirs. She went out of her way to connect with other families with kids. As we got older, she signed us up for team sports wherever we moved, not as a way to learn the dubious lessons of competition, but rather so that we would have the opportunity to make friends.

Not everyone enjoys sports, but fortunately we did, and throughout my childhood, my social life tended to emerge not through school, but rather through baseball, soccer, football, basketball, and swimming. Of course, there was competition when another team would come to play, but the core of the experience was daily practice where we built relationships with one another around the cooperation of teamwork. There was never any expectation that we would go on to become professional athletes, nor were we graded or tested. The idea was to have fun with friends.

Some time ago, before I began my journey as an educator, in the spirit of paying it forward, I volunteered to coach what is called a "select" baseball team comprised of middle schoolers only to find that youth sports have changed in horrible ways. These kids and their parents already had their eyes on the big leagues, or missing that, at least college scholarships. It was an unpleasant experience for me, but even more so for the kids who, frankly, demonstrated very little joy, and even less friendship. This wasn't the baseball I grew up knowing. When I tried to lighten things up, parents would pull me aside to let me know that they appreciated the sentiment, but really, they didn't want their child to "miss the opportunity," so, you know, knuckle down. Ugh.

One of the foundations upon which our educational system is built is the myth that we live in a "competitive society" so we must get the kids ready for that. Now, I've never been a stock market day trader, nor have I had the misfortune of being part of a corporate hierarchy. I've never been a professional athlete or a contestant on RuPaul's Drag Race. Indeed, the only time that I found myself in genuine, ongoing competition with my fellow humans was during my time in school and only then when I began to understand that I was being judged (graded, tested) in comparison to my classmates. But outside of school, I've found that competition beyond the occasional friendly board game, is not a meaningful part of my life.

Mister Rogers once said, "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."

Competition only gives us, at best, a superficial sense of who we are. It teaches us that if we aren't a winner then we're a loser. But even more harmful is competition's lesson that our fellow humans are impediments, stepping stones, and rivals. It makes "things" of them, it dehumanizes them, and it ultimately prevents and perverts our relationships. What my mother knew was that the only way one can ever discover the key to that deeper sense of self is through relationships.

For the most part, those of us who work with young children understand what my mother understood: relationships are the foundation for any life worth living. When we observe children at play, we see that they are driven, not to competition, but rather to cooperation and teamwork. That is where they find joy. When competition emerges, it always does so as both a threat to their games as well as their relationships. In these cases, when we allow the children to solve their own problems, the unpleasantly competitive games either come to an end as children exercise their freedom to quit, or, impressively, they scramble to remove the prospect of winners and losers, restoring the cooperative balance to their game.

This, not competition, is the reality I've discovered everywhere I've gone in life. It's inhuman systems, like conventional schooling, that create the illusion that competition is everywhere. When it's just us humans playing together, the only thing that matters are our relationships, built through cooperation and teamwork. And through that our deep sense of self emerges as the only guide we will ever need to make choices that will bring us joy.

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Dear Grown-Ups

2026-06-26T06:05:21.367-07:00

The 5-6 year olds Abby works with in Bellingham, Washington wrote this wonderful letter:

Dear Grown-Ups,

Kids need you to know:

We can jump off tiny waterfalls.

We can use shovels and real tools.

We can help you

We can do hard things

We can make breakfast in the morning

You can trust us more than you think

We need time to play

We need playdates

We need time to slow down

Please stop hydrating us all the time

Please stop talking so much sometimes

We can hear you

Our ideas matter

We have cool ideas

We deserve to make some of our own decisions

Please listen when we say no

Please treat us properly not just boss us

Sometimes we don't want help

Sometimes we want to picture it ourselves

We can touch thorns without getting spiked

We can find a way to reach things high up

Magic is real

We love you

And also:

Say yes more!

Love,

The Kids

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Practicing Courage

2026-06-25T07:15:05.983-07:00

A little over a week ago, my wife Jennifer shook me awake shortly after midnight. "Someone is outside!"

Sure enough, there was person just outside our bedroom window, which is a glass slider, dressed in black from head-to-toe, including a balaclava covering his face. Classic "bad guy" attire. I banged on the window, shouting, "Get out of here! Get out of here!" He glanced my way, but otherwise ignored me as he went through our stuff.

As Jennifer called 911, I ducked into the closet where I keep a baseball bat. For the better part of four decades, I've joked that this was our "security system," but this was the first time I'd resorted to it. I returned to the window, hoping that the sight of me wielding a bat would suffice. I banged on the glass again, warning him we were on the phone with the police. He completely ignored me as he moved about looking, I assume, for something to steal. I wouldn't have cared so much if he'd just taken something and run off, but his continued, unconcerned presence felt dangerous.

I waited until he moved away from the door, then flung it open and stepped outside. Jennifer later told me I "leapt" out shouting a fierce line from the Quentin Tarantino movie we'd watched together before going to bed. I don't remember that. All I knew was that I needed to be ferocious and loud.

Over the years, I've occasionally imaged how I'd use that bat to protect my family, but the reality was something else. Instead of backing away or running off, the man came toward me, taunting, "I'm sooo scared." In that moment, I recognized the situation I was in. There was a very real chance that he would wrest control of the bat from me. In a flash, I realized that my only hope was to swing as hard as I could.

I've played a lot of baseball in my life (hence the bat) and I put everything I had into it, aiming for his head. His hands came up protectively, but I could also see that he meant to grab the bat. Fortunately for both of us he withdrew his hands and dodged away only to then immediately take another step back toward me. But I was ready, bat poised. He took a couple steps back into the lawn, staying out of reach, then began to dance about a bit, again taunting, "I'm sooo scared. I'm sooo scared."

I know I spoke to him. Probably something like, "The police are on their way." Finally, he danced off, then cockily, over his shoulder, he called out, "Have a nice night!"

I imagine that some of you, having read this, are thinking, "Well, that was stupid" or "Teacher Tom got lucky." You might even be thinking, "Good thing he didn't have a gun." And you're not wrong. But still . . .

The Ancient Greeks, and Plato in particular, identified what they called the four "cardinal virtues": wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage. In our psychological age, we tend to think in terms of temperament, our innate tendencies, but the ancients spent more time considering character, those qualities we cultivate.

The interesting thing about these virtues is that they all exist at the mid-point of a continuum. In the case of courage, it stands between the extremes of cowardliness and rashness. It might have all gone terribly wrong, but had I stayed safely inside shaking my fist, I suspect I'd not be feeling so good about myself. And I do feel good about myself. I've felt particularly alive for the past week or so. One after another, my neighbors have told me that I was both a fool and a hero.

Goethe wrote, "Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." I've been feeling the reality of that.

We tend to avoid talking about "virtues" in the modern world. That's probably because Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas adopted and adapted Greek philosophy for theological purposes and in our secular age, especially in our schools, we steer clear of anything that smacks of religious indoctrination.

That said, we continue to value wisdom, justice, and temperance, even if we don't use those labels, while courage is something that's been, in many ways, commandeered by the kind of machismo found in movie action heroes. It's almost embarrassing to talk about courage. Even writing this, I worry that I'm coming off as boastful.

I'm not sharing this story here to encourage anyone else. In fact, I've already talked one neighbor out of purchasing a bat of her own and told others that I'd never do it again. I'm telling this story because I see how narrow our definition of courage has become. As the Ancients understood it, courage is that trait that's called for whenever we face uncertainty. It's not an absence of fear or doubt, but rather, an action in the face of fear and doubt. When a child climbs a tree, when they ask another child to play with them, when they attempt new things, they are being courageous. And each act of courage leads to another. That's where the magic is.

None of us are courageous, but rather we practice courage. It doesn't mean that we must all take up bats to chase away intruders, but rather that when we're faced with uncertainty our best bet is to swing as hard as we can. It might not always go to play, but the more we practice, as with all the virtues, the better we get at it. This is what our children are doing as they play together, practicing courage and discovering the genius, power, and magic it brings with it.

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The Lively Alert Fearless Curiosity of Children

2026-06-24T06:58:52.749-07:00

Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as one of the "godfathers of AI," famously said, "The jobs that are going to survive AI for a long time are jobs where you have to be very adaptable and physically skilled, and plumbing is that kind of job."

People who write for a living, especially those who are creative writers, like novelists and screenwriters, are, rightfully, concerned that these new tools will take their jobs. And they aren't the only ones. The jobs of anyone who works with their mind is in jeopardy.

Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, HVAC technicians, mechanics, chefs, and other "embodied" professions that require dexterity, spatial reasoning, and an ability to handle messy, unpredictable environments -- like crawling under the house to improvise a repair -- seem to be, at least in the near term, relatively safe from being replaced by AI.

I'm also going to include early childhood educators in the safe category. For one thing, our work is physical work. But more to the point, our work depends on relationships, judgment, empathy, and responding to unique (messy) human situations. These are not things AI will be able to do anytime soon.

But that's not primarily what we're worrying about when it comes to AI. We're mostly worrying about how a world in which AI is appearing in every context is going to impact the cognitive development of today's children. For instance, I recently read an article in which the author made the case that children who are growing up today risk never learning to "think for themselves." It's a valid concern, but it echoes the concerns that educators have had about every technological development.

Socrates, the most celebrated educator of us all, was famously opposed to the introduction of the phonetic alphabet. That's right, literacy, the backbone of what we moderns call education, was going to make the minds of our youth feeble. From the perspective of today, this concern seems hilariously misguided, but he wasn't wrong. Being educated in Ancient Greece meant possessing the ability to memorize. For instance, an educated Athenian could recite the entirety of The Iliad and The Odyssey from memory. Today, we're so lazy of mind that if we're going to quote Homer, we have to look it up. That, to Socrates, was tragic.

But it wasn't just literacy. The printing press, according to no less an "educated" person than René Descarte, resulted in so much inferior work being published that it distracted the serious mind. Again, in his day, being educated meant being well versed in "the classics," whereas this democratization of mass printing meant that the young had access to all kinds of dubiousness. From the perspective of education as he understood it, he was, like Socrates, correct.

The Enlightenment itself, this explosion of science, reason, and art, was going to separate the young from their God. And again, they weren't wrong because religious instruction was the foundation of education in those days.

Locomotive travel was going to make us all batty. Novels were going to rot the minds of our youth. When pocket calculators were introduced educators clutched their pearls.

Indeed, every major (and even minor) human development has been met with valid worry about how it would impact the education of the young. It's too soon to know if AI is really going to be on par with literacy, the printing press, or The Enlightenment. The hypers are hyping, but I'm old enough to remember when Microsoft founder Bill Gates, in 2001, hyped the Segway as being "as significant as the PC." (The Segway?) My guess, however, is that AI will prove to be a transformative tool. And it will, without a doubt, change both our children and how we educate them.

But taking a step back to look at education in our modern world, it's not as if we've designed our current system to encourage children to think for themselves. I mean, there's a ton of test taking, a ton of right and wrong answers, and a ton of standardization. The goal for most kids is grades, graduation, and jobs, none of which require original thinking. Indeed, original thinkers, those who doubt, who argue, who refuse, who dance to the beat of a different drummer, are penalized by modern schooling. They're all too often failed, drugged, punished, and generally made to feel inadequate. So it's not just AI that discourages "thinking for themselves."

In other words, our schools are less about learning and more about jumping through hoops, which is exactly what AI is good at. No wonder children, like adults in the workplace, are eager to adopt this tool that will help them more easily achieve the highest goal of school, which is to graduate with high marks. Actual learning is obviously, at best, secondary.

It's also important to point out that in today's world, schooling is mostly about preparing children for the workforce. At least that's what standard schools and policymakers seem to think. They can't talk about education without referring to those "jobs of tomorrow." The whole purpose of our schools is to produce young adults with the proper degrees so that they can get the very jobs that AI is going to be doing. If I were a kid graduating right now, I'd be pissed if I'd kept my nose to the grindstone and my eye on the prize only to discover that I should have been in trade school all along.

My point is that AI, like the technologies that came before it, is exposing our flawed approach to "education" and it's freaking people out.

In play based preschools, our students are self-motivated learners. We need no tests or grades or carrots or sticks because the whole point is self-directed learning, asking and answering our own questions, and learning, not with a job or degree in mind, but for the sheer joy. This is something AI will never be able to do, but it can be a powerful tool in a world in which human curiosity is finally set free.

We have to decide what we want our schools, what we want education, what we want childhood, to be about. AI is obviously a threat to our current system, but what happens if we set our children free to learn as humans were meant to learn?

"Education means only this," writes novelist Doris Lessing, "that the lively alert fearless curiosity of children must be fed, must be kept alive. That is education."

What if that is what stood at the center of our understanding of education: that lively alert fearless curiosity of children? If it did, would we be worried about AI at all?

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Our Minds Extend Into One Another

2026-06-23T06:29:59.686-07:00

It takes humans years before they fully comprehend their separateness from their caretakers. At least that's the widely accepted psychological theory. A newborn doesn't know that they are not their mother and vice versa. This is understandable, of course. After all, it wasn't long ago that they were growing inside of this other person where they were literally one, mind, body, and perhaps even soul. One of their first acts, upon emerging into this bright, noisy world, is to seek the intimate reconnection of nursing and other kinds of physical touch.

Even as we grow into toddlers, we continue to struggle to understand that we are independent people. It's part of why separation anxiety is so common. As we get older, we must learn that we are not our parents: we have our own bodies and minds.

We learn about our separateness. It is not a concept with which we are born.

There is a growing body of research around the tantalizing idea that maybe human infants are on to something and that what we are teaching them about separateness is all wrong. Certainly, our bodies are separate from the other bodies, but it's beginning to look like this thing we call "the mind," our essential self, extends beyond us and into our environment, including, perhaps especially, the other people.

In an influential 1998 paper, cognitive psychologists and philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers posed the question "Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?", concluding that there is no identifiable line. This concept of the "The Extended Mind," as they labeled it, was at first laughed at, but has over the last quarter century come to be regarded as one of the most important recent insights into how the human mind functions.

It was the work of Russian psychologist and early learning pioneer Lev Vygotsky that initially set Clark's course. Famously, Vygotsky noted that young children learn with the help of what he called "scaffolding" from the outside world, such as the help of an adult or an object. Clark realized that even as adults we rely on the outside world to scaffold our own thinking, including things like writing which is impossible without an interplay between pen and paper or fingers and screen, objects that scaffold our minds.

What Clark and Chalmers realized is what babies are born knowing.

Our minds cannot be confined to our heads. Oh sure, the conscious part might feel like it's self-contained, but much of what we know, think, and recall is actually stored in the outside world. A prosaic example is when I write down my "to do" list. Other people might hold their list in their conscious mind, but functionally there is no difference between us -- we both have our "to do" lists. This is the same phenomenon that is taking place between us and our smartphones, tablets, and computers: our minds extend into them, making them an essential part of our thinking process. A more complex example of how our minds extend into the world, and indeed, other people, is while in conversation. That process of give and take becomes a melding of the minds an interplay that isn't contained within any one person, but rather takes place beyond the confines of our bodies.

When we moved my wife's mother from her long time home to an assisted living facility because it wasn't safe for her to live alone, it became clear to us that a part of her mind was left behind in that house. Indeed, in hindsight, it's clear that the death of her husband was a trigger for her rapid decline into dementia, which is to say, the process of losing her mind. When we removed her from her environment, we unwittingly removed much of the scaffolding that supported her extended mind.

Some time ago, I wrote about what Eleanor Duckworth called "the collective creation of knowledge," that process by which young children learn together, thinking, discovering, and exploring, as if they have a kind of "hive mind." In the language of Clark and Chalmers, their minds extend into one another, scaffolding one another, erasing the distinction between your mind and my mind, blurring the lines that separate you from me.

Our schools are based upon outmoded models of how human minds think and learn. Specifically, we have bought into the idea of brains as organs that must be muscled up on academics, drilling, testing, and the artificial rigor that characterizes so much of what happens in school. We treat children like self-contained silos into which we must stuff teaching. However, when we understand, as newborns do, that learning is scaffolded by our environment and that our minds work most naturally when they are extended outward in all directions, including into that space that connects us with other people, we see that learning is, necessarily, a collective, collaborative process: not an academic one, but an experiential one.

The more I learn about learning, the more I find myself returning to the Reggio Emilia notion of the environment as a teacher on par with adults and other children. Indeed, in this theory of the extended mind, we see that adults and other children can actually be included in our notions of environment, which means that environment is the only teacher. And as every baby knows, we learn when we extend our minds outward, driven by curiosity and the irrepressible urge to merge our minds with the things and people we find there.

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Don Quixote

2026-06-22T07:08:54.592-07:00

As if you didn't indulge me every day, today I ask for a little extra indulgence.

Our windmill is a former prop that was was regularly set afire in a performance based upon Don Quixote by the now defunct Cirque de Flambe. We've removed the heavy metal vanes and replaced them with swimming noodles.

The fire in the performance, I assume, represented the intensity of Alonso Quijano's imagination as he sallies forth into the world, believing himself to be the chivalric hero Don Quixote de la Mancha. I prefer to think that he is neither "a madman nor a fool," as the great critic Harold Bloom writes, "but someone who plays at being a knight-errant." Bloom, in his book The Western Canon cites Dutch historian Johan Huizinga who in his masterpiece Homo Ludens asserts that play is the source of all human culture.

Play is a voluntary activity, unlike madness and foolishness. Play, according to Huizinga, has four principal characteristics: freedom, disinterestedness, excludedness or limitednss, and order. You can test all of these qualities upon the Don's knight-errantry, but not always upon Sancho's faithful service as squire, for Sancho is slower to yield himself to play. The Don lifts himself into ideal place and time and is faithful to his own freedom, to its disinterestedness and seclusion, and to its limits . . .

There is no greater universal image than the Don's impossible dream quest, that thing that brings us all every day out into the world to unreasonably stand before windmills and fight them as if they be giants that "move more arms than the giant Briareus." If each of us is not standing from our beds each day, our minds afire with our dragons and Dulcineas, then we are the more sane Sancho Panza, the one who says, "the arms you fancy, are their sails, which, being whirled about by the wind, make the mill go." Throughout our lives all of us are sometimes the Don and sometimes Sancho, both of whom see the world with a clarity that makes the other seem mad or foolish. (Although I will point out that in the end, when the Don is at last defeated, he returns to "sanity," giving up his play, and dies, an indication, I think that Cervantes put the special star of life by his "insane" Don.)

And play is what this is all about, the first novel, and perhaps the greatest thing ever written. It's about play's sanity, it's insanity, and it's bulls-eye central-ness to what kind of thing we are in the universe. That's why we still read Don Quixote and why when we see a storybook windmill, those of us who haven't forgotten how to play, always take a tilt at it.

I did not want our windfall of large pieces of canvas to become one of those prizes that I wind up curating while it sits on the shelves for months, if not years, awaiting the "perfect" moment, so I'd promised myself they'd get used as soon as possible. The children arrived to find their windmill a canvas wrapped giant in the center of their classroom.

We sallied forth on our adventure, paint brushes in hand, together dreaming our impossible dream.

We marched right up to this giant and made our marks, shoulder to shoulder, still seeing a windmill I suppose.

Perhaps we were a troupe of Sanchos as we set out, still seeing vanes instead of arms.

Playing, yes, but practically with our brushes and our quiet little cups of paint. There's a goodness and rightness about that; an innocence, certainly. It's the kind of place from which the best adventures start.

Some of us, in the freedom of our play, chose to swing around to the back stage side of things, where we found something magical to do, that being the moment when we first suspected that there was more here than a mere windmill.

And perhaps is was then that we began to understand that we were dealing with a giant.

It had grown right here before us. We needed to reach higher so we began to call for ladders to allow us to scale its ramparts.

It continued to grow as we painted and its many arms to spin like the giant Biareus. This would not be enough.

That's when we decided to manufacture lances for ourselves, long sticks onto the ends of which we duct taped brushes to allow us to do proper battle with those long arms, all the way up in the clouds where they waved about so fiercely.

Of course, these particular children may not have been battling at all.

In fact, I'm inclined to believe they were not, but rather playing an entirely different story, but one, I'm sure nonetheless was a quest worthy of knights.

They just were playing; you know, building a little human culture.

Tell me this is not the stuff of legend.

We reached into the clouds indeed, our knight-errantry taking us to heights beyond ourselves, and many simply beside ourselves, like the peculiar incident that involved someone planting a green dot on someone's cheek unawares.

But the invention of this new slice of human culture was far from complete as we then proceeded to the launching of paint besotted projectiles, such as sponges, and something (I don't exactly know what; they predate me) in the toes of nylons that we generally use for splat painting (dipping them in paint, then dropping them onto paper from a height).

Look how boldly we stand here before the giant.

We are the Don.

Adding an extra challenge was the group of peasants who sought to ride their donkey's in the neighboring pastures, so we were careful to avoid collateral damage.

After each toss, we approached the giant to survey what we had managed.

And oh, we had some technique.

Amazingly, this one hit it's target!

Lest you get the idea that we were playing a kind of war game here, I should point out that I'm the only one of us (meaning me and the kids) who has read Don Quixote, so this fantasy combat imagery was only in my head, as it was in the Don's. Up to this point, all the tools we'd used -- ladders, long paint brushes, paint soaked projectiles -- were all discussed as attempts to paint to the "very top" of the canvas. I mention this because this last thing we did is quite martial and I don't want you to think we'd been the whole time building ourselves up into a combat-ish frenzy.

That's right, we took our dangerous spear throwing to a whole new level, taping paint brushes to the ends of our bamboo stakes, dipping them in paint . . .

. . . taking aim . . .

. . . and letting them fly!

It was an idea one of the kids had suggested and we just had to give it a try, you know, because we're the Don, and Sancho, for the time being, is no where to be found.

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Creepy Crawlers!

2026-06-19T06:16:28.979-07:00

John Sain was a couple years older than me, which would have made him seven or eight. We always called him by his full name to distinguish him from his next door neighbor who was also named John. John Sain's father, Mr. Sain, had the caché of being retired military and having once killed a rattle snake in his garage with a garden hoe then called us kids in from the street where we were playing so that we could see first hand what these local dangers looked like. He even allowed me the honor of carrying the sack with the carcass around to the back of the house where we buried it. Mr. Sain once sucked blood from a finger I'd cut on a bit of glass while we worked together on a church-organized roadside litter clean-up crew. After spitting the blood onto the pavement, he told me it was to help avoid infection, which sounded both scientific and manly. Having such a father and being older, John Sain stood a little above the rest of us. He went to school during the day and so could only play with us in the evening and on weekends. When he was out there with us, it made our regular games special.

One day, I showed him some small plastic "army men" that I particularly treasured, which prompted him to invite me to his bedroom where he pulled out what he told me was an "army man making set." There was a small heating element, molds portraying the hollows of soldiers in various action poses, and pellets of lead. The idea was to choose a mold, put one lead pellet in it, melt it over the heating device, then, once the metal had fully liquified, you plunged it in a cold water bath to harden it.

I expect Mr. Sain wouldn't have allowed John Sain to show such a "big kid" toy to a five-year-old, which is why we were being extra quiet and probably explained why he kept me at a distance as he worked. I admired how cautiously he handled the tools, how he used an oven mitt to handle the hot things, and the drama of the explosion of steam that leapt from the cold water bath. When he removed the newly shaped lead soldier from the mold, he handed to me saying, "You can't keep it" explaining that he would later melt it down again to make a new soldier.

This was the only time I got to see this toy, but I was sure I wanted one, badly. I begged my parents, who reminded me of Christmas and my birthday. I must have been consistent in my request for this toy because at the next gift-receiving opportunity I unwrapped my own casting set. I was only temporarily disappointed when the one my parents gave me melted plastic instead of lead and that the molds were of insects instead of soldiers. I suspect that the "Thingmaker featuring Creepy Crawlers" was considered a somewhat safer version of John Sain's set up, but it still involved heat, melting, molds, and steam blasts, although, to my disappointment, the instructions said to never try to re-melt cast figures. Still, I was absolutely thrilled. I can still experience the fumes of the melted plastic if I try, the heat on my hands, the electrical buzz of the heating element, the topography of the molds under my fingers, and the blasts of steam on my cheeks.

This was a toy I played with unsupervised, alone and sometimes with visiting friends. I emulated John Sain's authoritative caution, keeping others at a distance. Filling the molds took a steady hand. The whole process involved concentration, slow movements, and fine motor skills. The risk of doing things wrong was manifest. I didn't need an adult hovering over me to chirp "be careful" in order to be careful. I imagine my father must have helped me with the first batch, but from then I was on my own, a five-year-old with a toy that could not be sold today to children of any age, learning the kinds of lessons that simply can't be taught through theory. This is one of my earliest memories of play. To this day, I recall it as a kind of giddy balancing act. Always at the back of my mind was the reality that had been enforced by John Sain that one slip and I would be injured, perhaps badly. Indeed, without the danger, I expect it would have been a toy of a single day, something to which I'd never again return after that first afternoon, but as it was, I girded myself regularly. Each time I removed the box with its tidily organized interior from its shelf, I summoned a bit of courage as my heart beat with excitement that can only come direct experience.

Lead is a hazardous substance, especially for young children, and while the box assured us that the plastic was non-toxic, I still wonder about the fumes it released while being heated. I'm not writing about this to "sell" anyone on the idea of purchasing such a toy for their own kids, but only to share what is one of my earliest memories, which is to say, an experience that made a significant impact on me. The two-time Nobel prize winning chemist Linus Pauling tells of a similar experience with an older boy who had a small home chemistry lab, saying that he was "simply entranced" by the experiments he was able to perform. I don't have a story anywhere near as dramatic, but to this day, I love few things more than cooking over gas flames on my stove top and undertaking art projects that require a steady hand and full concentration. I have no idea what impact my childhood experience had, whether it simply revealed something that was already there or inspired me to something that might have never been otherwise discovered, but I do often think of John Sain, Mr. Sain, and the Thingmaker as I work around heat or when I'm engaged in anything that requires a slow and steady hand.

What I do know, however, is that I have a fine memory of childhood, a real experience that is as much a part of me as the finger from which Mr. Sain sucked blood. There is truth and falsehood mixed up in it, science and myth. It lives not just in my mind, but also in my body and soul, having been fixed there by the manifest danger and the full concentration it demanded.

If you think melting and casting might be something you want to try with your own preschoolers, here is a version I came up with for the kids at Woodland Park to try. It still involves real risk, concentration, and a steady hand, but without some of the unnecessary hazards.

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Why We're Here on Earth

2026-06-18T06:52:53.157-07:00

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different. ~Kurt Vonnegut

Circle time was a perfect example of its type. We spent a good 10 minutes making up painful, icky, cold, and silly things to sit on, including a discussion of what exactly constitutes potty talk, we sang a song, then we gave each other compliments (which was mostly saying "I love you"), finishing by counting all of the links in our compliment chain aloud (371, give or take). And then we were done. You know, we just farted around.

The hamster wheel doesn't come apart on it's own. Someone has to work on taking it apart, removing the wheel from its stand.

I'd been wondering why someone would be doing it every day. I now know who's been doing it.

And I also know why: he's just been farting around.

Kids have been asking why we have this giant pencil. I tell them it's for drawing and writing.

They've figured out, however, that it's just for farting around.

Sometimes we fart around by putting cowboys in Wyoming and grandpas in Ohio and Winnie the Pooh in Georgia . . .

. . . or by lining up the "big boys" . . .

. . . or combing the ponies' manes.

We fart around with our whole bodies . . .

. . . inside and out . . .

. . . or up in the trees.

It's why we're here on Earth. Don't let anybody tell you different.

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The Case Against Professionalism

2026-06-17T06:55:13.527-07:00

There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago. ~J. Robert Oppenheimer

When architect Simon Nicholson first proposed his theory of loose parts ("How Not to Cheat Children") in 1971 he asserted that the "gifted few" (professionals) got to have all the fun. They designed the buildings, created the music, wrote poems, did the science, and then the rest of us were left to just sort of live with, but never touch, change, or question their work. His big idea was to give amateurs, and especially children, the ability to do the fun part themselves by filling their spaces with "loose parts" that they were free to manipulate, connect, and transform.

It was a radical idea, one that holds the potential to turn education upside down. It was an idea in keeping with the ideas that had been emerging over the preceding 70 years from education pioneering amateurs like John Dewey and Maria Montessori right through Loris Malaguzzi and even Mister Rogers. The idea was to put the "fun part" of learning into the hands of the learners themselves, to allow children to determine their own curriculum from the loose parts of life.

Those of us who have embraced play-based learning strive to do this, but we continue to be outliers. Most "professional" educators today have acknowledged the theory, then absorbed it into their professional work, manipulating it to fit in their professional orthodoxy, and generally colonizing it with their professionalism. It is in the nature of professionalism to accept the current "environment" and only consider change that can happen within that current environment. If they stray beyond the current boundaries, they risk being deemed "unprofessional," which is the kiss of death. That's why, you can today find preschool classrooms with "loose parts" corners that are little more than a few tidy baskets of bits and bobs, just another watered-down concept that allows the profession to say, "See? We're open to new ideas."

I'm not blaming the educators: I'm blaming professionalism. Professionals have a lot to lose, amateurs and children do not. As philosopher Marshall McLuhan puts it, "The "expert" is the man who stays put."

I understand why professional educators want to be seen as professionals. If nothing else, being a "professional" often carries with it both prestige and money. That's why we fight for the recognition. I have nothing against prestige and money, but I resist, at some level, being a professional in the name of . . . well, professionalism. I strive for a professionalism that constantly questions the status quo: one that abhors staying put, that recognizes that, at its heart, learning always involves upsetting the status quo.

As adults, we become experts by learning the rules of our professional environment and that's useful, of course. It allows us to navigate the professional world efficiently, which is one of the hallmarks of professionalism. But it also tends to blind us. When we learn those lessons too well, when we get too wrapped up in the jargon and "best practices," we have a tendency to stop noticing possibilities that fall outside those rules.

This is, I think, what Oppenheimer was referring to as well. He certainly wasn't saying that children know their physics as well as the father of the atomic bomb. Rather, he's pointing out that children, as amateurs, haven't yet had their sensory perceptions boxed in by all those professional assumptions. They're inclined to ask questions a professional would never think to ask. They consider objects in ways professionals would never imagine. They see possibilities where professionals see obstacles. Even a child can see the insanity of creating an atomic bomb, while the professionals went right ahead and created a way to destroy life on earth.

Children are classic amateurs, or even dilettantes (in the best sense of that word). They're not incompetent, but rather free from the systems of conventions and agreements, the environment, that too often captures professionals. Amateurs dispense with the professional jargon that often seems designed to exclude amateurs. Amateurs retain the freedom to ask questions that professionals cannot conceive of asking because to become a professional, to be considered a professional by their peers, they have mastered the assumptions and "problems" of the world as the other experts know it. Curious amateurs are inclined to question whether they're even addressing the right problems.

We see this phenomenon all the time in education. Go to almost any online resource for educators and you'll find professionals asking professionally appropriate things like, How do we get children to learn letters sooner? Or How do we improve compliance? Or How do we measure learning more accurately? Or How do I motivate these children? Or How do we get children to listen?

Being a professional too often means losing the ability to perceive the profession's own assumptions. "Professionalism" means delivering curriculum, adhering to "best practices," aligning with standards, and achieving measurable results. That's the professional environment. Anything outside of that is, by definition, unprofessional.

Meanwhile, children are asking valid questions that fall beyond the scope of the professionally accepted ground rules; genuine questions like Why do we have to learn this at all? Why can't we think about something more interesting? Who got to decide that this crap matters? Why can't we just go outside?

In our work with children, these are the questions play-based educators ask: the amateur's questions. The children's questions. We fight to remain connected to our amateur status.

I've never done most of the "professional" things that educators in normal schools do. Instead, I create environments, I pay attention to the children, I respond to what emerges from their play, and I trust the children's competence. I listen to the questions the children are asking. Instead of being professional, I strive to remain curious, to retain the capacity to be surprised, and to be willing, at any moment, to abandon any plan when something more interesting emerges. I'm more interested in children learning to motivate themselves, to assess their own learning, and to practice life itself within the context of community.

This is what play-based learning is all about. It's what pioneering amateurs like Montessori, Malaguzzi, and Mister Rogers understood. They distrusted expertise that had, as it always does, become disconnected from direct experience. They wondered what would happen if we stopped deciding, in advance, what learning is supposed to happen, and instead let the children pursue learning that is meaningful to them.

Of course, children are not merely amateurs—they are also novices. They don't know what they don't know. It is also part of our job to keep them safe enough, to provide information that they need, and to help them figure out how to be part of a community. But we err when we make the mistake of trying to professionalize childhood. We cheat children when we forget that childhood is, and always must be, a season of life when curiosity matters more than expertise.

That's why children need play, the natural environment of amateurism. Not because play prepares them for the real world, but because it preserves ways of seeing that the rest of us too often lose. Our job is not to rush children toward professionalism. Our job is to create beautiful environments, keep them safe enough, answer their questions, and then stay out of the way as much as possible. The future doesn't belong to the experts who stay put. It belongs to those who can still discover possibilities where everyone else sees only the way things have always been done.

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To Live an Abundant Life

2026-06-16T06:53:40.185-07:00

The four and five year olds started their days on the playground. Some would take a moment to greet me, but most barely paused to shed their backpacks and jackets before plunging into their play. That might mean manning a position at the cast iron water pump, digging in the sand, swinging, racing up and down the concrete slide, hunting out a favorite loose part, or gathering with friends to plot and plan together, inviting one another with the most beautiful sentences in the human language, the one's that start with the contraction, "Let's . . ."

"Let's pretend we're pilots!"

"Let's all be baby animals!"

"Let's go over there!"

Most of the four and five year olds I've ever taught had been together in school for a couple of years already. They knew me, they knew the other kids, they knew the environment, and they knew how to derive satisfaction from playing together. They did it effortlessly and without prompting. This was life as they knew it, a formula of their own collective and ongoing distillation. Of course, they knew there would be conflict, even pain, because they had already learned from experience that the permission to learn from pleasure always includes the possibility of pain. That's perhaps the lesson of life, not this artificial pain that is imposed by schools in the name of teaching children the harsh lessons of the workplace: do what you're told even when it's mind-numbing and soul-crushing.

In our school, the children knew that they were free to pursue, both individually and together, a life in which their work was their play and vice versa.

"(M)ost individuals today are born into serfdom to Factory Earth," writes historian Peter Stearns in his book From Alienation to Addiction. "With factory industry, most people, for the first time in human history outside of some forms of slavery, could never aspire to work without direct supervision."

The adults at Woodland Park performed their ancient role of caretakers, protectors, and occasional advisors, because the goal of education as we saw it is to allow young humans to seek their one true path, the one they follow, for a day or a week or a lifetime, out of curiosity. In our way of doing it, curiosity stands in the stead of the factory floor boss.

What do you do that is as effortless and unprompted as the four and five year olds playing together at Woodland Park? What is it that you do that doesn't need to be put on a "to do" list because you will do it anyway? As adults, many of us have forgotten what it means to live in this way, looking inward and asking ourselves what would give us permission to play-work-live like these children? People often envy these young children who are, quite frankly, living a life of abundance and purpose. It still surprises me how many feel they need to put a stop to it, "for their own good." They can't just go through life doing what they want. It's the grim view of life as a factory. A place where no one has ever found abundance and purpose. As the Greek philosopher Epicurus wrote, "Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance."

But life can't just be about enjoyment! If it feels good, it must be bad. If we do it just to satisfy our curiosity, it must be a waste of time. Curiosity kills the cat. What's good must be hard and painful. Pleasure is only a dessert, something to be limited and saved for last.

The novelist Edith Wharton asks, "Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?" Why indeed.

I've spent my adult life trying to learn the lessons of humans for whom pleasure and curiosity stand as the pure goods that they are. These are the people who are living, not happy lives, but abundant ones. At the end of life, no one wishes they had worked harder. If they have any regrets it's that they didn't love and play more. Why is it that we only seem to understand this central truth at the Alpha and Omega of life, whereas during the journey in between we treat it as, at best, a hinderance and at worst a devil that must be kept down lest we . . . What? Find purpose in life before it's all over? Sounds pretty good to me.

I know why, of course. It's fear and doubt. We've been taught by years of schooling, both curricular and extracurricular, that the floor bosses know best, that we are here to serve Factory Earth, and that anything that makes our hearts sing is a secret evil. It's reinforced every time a child is reprimanded for daydreaming and not paying attention. It's taught each time children are scolded for chatting amongst themselves instead to listening to the teacher's instructions. We've been made to feel afraid of ourselves and our own desires because they have no place in the factory.

As I spent my days amidst these self-directed humans who had permission to work-play-live, I knew that they would inevitably leave Woodland Park where they would begin their training for Factory Earth. Soon enough they would come across those who would direct them "for their own good" and make them feel guilt or shame over those things that bring them joy, and pride in doing the things against which their souls rebelled. I found my joy in the moment; the now of this community of children. I will always have the satisfaction in knowing that for a time, on that playground, the four and five year olds knew they had permission to live abundantly in a world in which "Let's . . ." was the sacred a call to live together with a purpose all our own.

I can dream that one day we will come to understand that this should stand at the center of education. Until then, I'll just live it.

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Who are You?

2026-06-15T07:03:18.443-07:00

I recently heard an author being interviewed. He said that one of his high school teachers claimed that the entirety of Ancient Greek philosophy could be summed up in Socrates' instruction, "Know thyself."

So who are you?

How would you answer that question?

There isn't an easy answer. Am I what I think? What I believe? What I feel?

I often find myself mulling poet Walt Whitman's famous lines:

Did I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I think that's probably how most people feel about ourselves, which is why it's impossible to answer the question "Who are you?" We are different people in different situations, often contradicting ourselves. I am one person when I'm at a dinner party and another when I'm being interviewed. I'm not the same person when I'm at work as I am when I'm home alone. Some would say that this apparent multitude is just our singular self being viewed from different angles: that who we are in any given moment is just a matter of perspective. This answer is, of course, satisfying, although it implies that there is a central core of who we are that is unchangeable, even if it's not fully knowable.

Perhaps "Know thyself" is an impossibility. Perhaps we can only know ourselves through others.

Maybe I am the person my dog thinks I am. In that case, I'm pretty awesome.

Maybe I'm the person the guy who flipped me off in traffic thinks I am. In that case, I'm a dangerous idiot.

I know that when I leave this earth, I will become the a sum of the stories people tell about me.

Young children don't care about what I think or believe or feel. They know me for what I do. They know me not by my thoughts, but by my actions. They know me not for by my beliefs, but by my words. They know me not for my feelings, but rather by my tone, posture, and expressions. They know who I am through my responses to what they do and say. And this is also how they come to know who they are.

Humans who have been tortured by isolation, like prisoners in extended solitary confinement, report feeling unreal, invisible, and disconnected from their selves. That's because our self emerges in relationship. I know I'm funny because other people laugh. I know I'm trustworthy because other people trust me. In know I'm lovable because I am loved.

Young children already understand something that most of us spend a lifetime trying to figure out: we are what we do together.

They come to know me through my responses to them, and they come to know themselves through my responses to them. Who we are is not hidden somewhere deep inside, waiting to be discovered. We become ourselves every time we interact with another person.

Perhaps that's what it means to know thyself.

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What Are the Babies Crying About?

2026-06-12T06:36:46.982-07:00

Young parents with a crying infant know that behavior is communication, although it may take weeks or months to figure out exactly what it is their babies are communicating. Does this cry mean I'm hungry? Does that one mean I'm in pain? Frightened? Tired?

Coming to understand our new babies generally involves a lot of trial and error as we try one approach after another. If they reject the breast then we check their diaper. If they don't respond to singing we try rocking, bouncing or cooing. In other words, we try everything we can think of from burping to taking them for a drive until we hit on the proper response.

The one thing every new parent learns is that the proper response to their baby's cried request or query or demand or complaint, is to do something to change their environment or their situation within the environment. It's not our babies that need to change -- they are the one perfect thing in an imperfect world. Their crying is feedback on their experience in that imperfect world and their place in it. And in this business of being an adult caretaker, the customer is always right, so we do what we need to do to make the world, at least for a time, a bit more hospitable. Then we do it again and again until one day we decide, usually gradually, but sometimes abruptly like on the first day of school, that it's not the world, but the child that must change.

This is the beginning of what we call "education." Behavior continues to be feedback: I need more time. I need to go outside. I need to know everything about this mote I've discovered under my fingernail. That's why I'm covering my ears. That's why I'm bouncing off the walls. That's why I can't keep my eyes on you and attend to your irrelevant blather. The adults have decided that they will no longer respond to their request or query or demand or complaint by doing something to change their environment or their situation within the environment, but rather strive to change the child, to invalidate their communication with, say, scolding, bribing, shaming, and even punishing. I've known far too many children who have been kicked out of preschool because they are unable to change to suit this or that environment or curriculum or methodology.

But they need to learn to adapt, we argue, it's a life lesson. The world is the way it is. We say this even though we've all discovered that the real world simply doesn't box us up in packages of two dozen people of like age, sit us in chairs, face us forward, silence us, and compel us to attend to whatever nonsense is on the pre-planned agenda for the day. We say that we are preparing our children for reality, which is to say an unchanging world that will only accommodate requests or queries or demands or complaints within a limited range. There will be no taking you for a drive or cooing or laying you down for a nap on the top of a running clothes dryer (the thing that finally soothed our infant daughter for a time). We continue to do this even though it is demonstrably untrue that this is the way the real world works.

On the contrary, we double down on changing the child to suit this mythical "real world." If you don't keep up, if you don't shut up, we will label you. If you don't know this week's spelling words this week, you're "behind." And you remain behind even if six months later you demonstrate you know how to spell those words because the curriculum has been cranking out new spelling tests in the meantime.

It's like a train that continues to chug along even when passengers are falling off. Instead of stopping to let them hop back on it continues moving forward expecting the children, children who are screaming "Wait!" to just, somehow, catch up. And if the child won't or can't run after the train, they are labeled as deficient in some way and specialists are called in to fix the child who has all the while been clearly saying, through their behavior, This sucks for me!

In the actual world, however, there is always another train. In the actual world, unlike school, you can take a taxi or ride a bike or walk or opt to go somewhere else on an entirely different timetable. Or just choose to not go anywhere at all. The real world may have its tracks and obstacles, but ultimately it is infinitely malleable.

What if this were the core lesson of school? What if instead of being charged with shaping all children according to some artificial and arbitrary norm, we made them into places that strive to understand the children's requests or queries or demands or complaints?

Awhile back we were in New York to visit our daughter. While there, we went to see the world premier of a documentary about performance artist Taylor Mac's 2016 "24-Decade History of Popular Music", a 24-hour, one-time-only show about the American experience. The show featured dozens of costumes by the designer Machine Dazzle. During the question and answer session following the screening, an audience member asked Mac to name his favorite costume. He seemed genuinely stumped before good-naturedly refusing to answer the question, quoting author Iyania Vanzant, "Comparison is an act of violence."

Our schools are simply not designed to support each child in achieving their own unique potential, which is what our babies are always calling out for if we would only listen. Instead they are in the business of comparing, measuring, grading, and ranking with some sort of arbitrary standard or norm in mind. This is harmful and limiting not just to every child, but every human. It's violence.

What if we instead saw education as a process of trial and error, one that sought above all else to understand what each child is crying about; what they are communicating about the environment and their situation within that environment? What if, as educators, we dropped our measuring sticks, forgot our timetables, ditched our curricula, and focused instead on listening in order to properly respond to what the children are trying to communicate? Maybe then we would have an educational system that truly prepared our children to engage fully with life itself.

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International Day of Play: Protect Play, Protect Childhood

2026-06-11T06:28:20.014-07:00

Today is the third annual International Day of Play as established by the United Nations. This year's theme is Protect Play, Protect Childhood.

In their call to action, the UN through it's agency UNICEF (United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund), is calling on governments, businesses, and other stakeholders to:

Scale up services, including parenting programs, that promote play and attachment
Enable access to pre-school and learning through play for every 3-6 year old
Ensure every child has access to safe, inclusive, and well-maintained play areas

The United Nations was founded in 1945 in the aftermath of World War II with the express mission of maintaining world peace. In that same year, Loris Malaguzzi founded the first schools that today are knowns as Reggio Emilia, believing that democratic education was essential to creating a peaceful society. Maria Montessori, the creator of her Montessori approach to early childhood, explicitly saw her work as the path to lasting peace. Mister Rogers wrote, "Peace means far more than the opposite of war." He saw nurturing empathy, emotional intelligence, and human connection in children as foundational to creating a more peaceful world: he was explicit about helping children become the kinds of people who can create peace.

Our work as play-based educators has always aligned with the higher ideals that underpin the United Nations. In our world of competition, colonialism, and war, a world that I worry is on the verge of forgetting the promise of democracy, our work with young children stands in contrast, even opposition. Play is not always peaceful, but that's the point. Peace is not the absence of conflict; it is knowing how to resolve conflict without resorting to violence or force. Play teaches us the power of good faith negotiation, compromise, cooperation, and the sacredness of agreements. When children grow up in safe environments in which they have permission to pursue their instincts to play, the most important lesson they learn is how people can come together and work something out.

When we protect play we protect childhood, but we also protect and promote the promise of peace. I'm always proud of the work we do with and for children, but today is the day for all play-based educators to hold their heads high, even as we bend to the child before us. Play is the path to peace.

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Jumping Up and Down and Throwing Ourselves to the Ground

2026-06-10T06:13:25.347-07:00

Jumping up and down on the bus downtown
We are brash -- we all fall down
We take out our brains
And shake 'em all around
~Jim White, Crash Into the Sun

The way the game worked, as far as I could tell, is that an ever-changing cast of children jumped up and down, while some of them periodically threw themselves onto the ground, which was hilarious. As an adult who makes a study of children's play, I saw that it was a connecting game, one that allowed children of various ages and developmental stages who didn't know one another particularly well to get to know one another a little better.

Growing up, I often played impromptu games like this. Dad would, say, bring the family along to a company picnic and while the adults made tedious small talk, the kids would introduce themselves to one another with purposeless games. Maybe it would be rolling down a hill together or playing chase or jumping up and down and throwing ourselves to the ground. This would then, given enough time, typically transform into more sophisticated play that involved sorting ourselves out by age, gender, and temperament in which agreements were made through a process of invitation ("Let's pretend . . .") and bickering ("No, I get to go first!"). As long as we didn't interfere with the grown-up fun, as long as we avoided getting too badly hurt (physically or emotionally), our games would be allowed to evolve in this way until it was time to go home.

Without fail, I would have learned something new, even if it wasn't particularly useful. But sometimes, that new thing we discovered together -- that game, that cultural reference, that way of being in the world -- would be transformative.

In his book The Kingdom of Play, David Toomey writes:

Natural selection possess a number of specific and well-defined characteristics. It is, for instance, purposeless. It has no intention, and no objective, and as Darwin averred, it “includes no necessary and universal law of advancement or development.” It is provisional. The evolution of any organism is a response to whatever conditions are present at a given place and moment. It is open-ended. The evolution of any organism has no moment of arrival and no end point . . .

This is only one of the ways in which play and natural selection are similar. As Toomey puts it, "(I)f you could distill the process of natural selection into a single behavior, that behavior would be play. Alternatively, if you were to choose an evolutionary theory or view of nature for which play might seem to be a model, it would be natural selection."

"We're here on this Earth to fart around," wrote Kurt Vonnegut. And farting around, which is to say playing, is our natural response to the conditions in which we find ourselves. Humans, however, are forever attempting to squelch play, to forbid or at least suppress farting around. We tell our children they must get ready for the future by putting their noses to grindstones. Meanwhile the rest of the universe plays, making "the future" a place we cannot even imagine, even as we will help create it. We've collectively determined that having a clearly defined purpose is morally superior to not having a purpose. We praise those hard-chargers who unswervingly chase their goals, while dismissing the rest as muddling deadbeats. But that, in the scope of time and space, is an anomaly. It's a mean denial of the very essence of life itself, which "in the most fundamental sense, is playful."

We tend to forget that nothing is a finished product. Everything continues to purposelessly evolve at every level -- from the microscopic to the universal -- forever transforming itself; endlessly becoming something new. And it seems that the mechanism for doing that is play.

We cannot steer it. We can only take part, jumping up and down and throwing ourselves to the ground alongside those with whom we find ourselves. And, if we're doing it right, it's hilarious.

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It's Remarkable That We've Gotten it So Wrong

2026-06-09T07:16:59.100-07:00

Young children do math for fun. Most of us, however, have been taught to misunderstand mathematics. We think it has to do with numbers and equations, but that's like mistaking a map for the actual terrain. A friend with a PhD in mathematics once told me that most of what he does is discover increasingly beautiful ways to pattern, organize, sequence, and group things.

In other words, when we see a child arrange blocks in a red-blue-red-blue pattern we see a child engaged in math. When children sort objects by color or shape or some other characteristic, they are doing math. When children discover a clapping pattern or identify an animal as belonging to a smaller category called "bugs," they are engaged in math. Math is one of the fundamental ways that humans make sense of a complex world. The numbers and equations are academic abstractions that help us communicate, explore, and solve specific problems, but when we center this aspect of math in the early years we rob it of its essential connection to the human experience.

In other words, we tend to render it boring and meaningless, an academic exercise done for the purpose of grades or a teacher's approval.

Shakespeare is an other example of something profoundly beautiful that schools tend to render dull by treating it as an academic pursuit. I wasn't introduced to his work until high school where I was expected to read the script of Romeo and Juliet. I struggled through it, listened carefully to my teacher explain it, then managed to pass my test, but it was dull, dull, dull. When we complained, our teacher recommended we try reading it aloud, which helped to enliven it a bit. Finally, as a senior, a group of us were rewarded with a field trip to the Ashland Shakespearean Festival, where we were in the audience for several plays. I still struggled with it, but it was far from dull.

My daughter's experience with Shakespeare was quite different. At 8-years-old, she declared that she was going to grow up to be a Shakespearean actor, a pursuit that carried her through college. Her introduction to The Bard was through a summer camp in which the kids spent two weeks acting out scenes with an emphasis on fight choreography. She went on to spend the next several years performing in a series of Shakespearean plays through a youth program offered by the Seattle Shakespeare Company. She was never bored. Indeed, she became obsessed with the works of one of the greatest artists to ever live. I'll never forget arguing with her about something or other when she was 10. She settled matters by quoting Macbeth, a play in which she hadn't even yet performed. Shakespeare wasn't something for school or study, it had become intertwined with her life.

The works of Shakespeare, perhaps the most influential and enduring art in history, are meant for the stage. When we read them, they bore us. When we see them acted, they come alive. When we act them ourselves, we embody them. Schools, however, tend to do it backwards, just as they do with math: they start with the disembodied abstractions, then, some day, once most of the kids have long given up on Shakespeare, it's offered as an extracurricular activity that only "nerds" care about. It's as if we tried to teach art by making preschoolers start with years of tedium like horizontal line theory, only allowing them to paint a full canvas painting once they've worked their way through years of shape, color, and shading drills. Taught this way, everyone would hate painting.

But this is what normal schools do with everything. Academic instruction dehumanizes things that are essentially human. Academics instruction strips away the the natural motivations of beauty and relevance, replacing it with dry external rewards (like grades) and threats ("If you don't learn this, you'll never get into college."). It's a system that makes learning itself, perhaps the most inspiring thing any of us will ever do, into drudgery.

As a boy, I played and watched a lot of baseball, a game that features a whole lot of statistics involving averages and relatively complex calculations. Long before I got to the academic version of averages and other statistics, I understood it because I'd been motivated to make sense of all those columns of numbers of the backs of baseball cards. In the same way my daughter was fully conversant with Shakespeare long before it was presented to her as an academic pursuit. This is the direction in which learning is meant to flow. We must first experience the terrain before we can comprehend the map.

This is exactly the way play-based, or self-directed, learning works. We start with the beauty. We start with the relevance. We start with self-motivation; with life itself. We start with the full canvas painting, the patterns, the terrain, the comedy and tragedy. When learning starts with our natural curiosity about life itself, the educator's role becomes one of keeping up rather than cracking the whip.

Learning is the easiest, most natural, and joyful thing in the world. It's remarkable that we've gotten it so wrong.

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Little Boxes, All the Same

2026-06-08T05:17:14.098-07:00

We sing . . .

Little boxes on the hillside

Little boxes made of ticky tacky

Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes

All the same.

(I then pause to ask, "Are they all the same? Someone always answers, "No, they're different colors.")

(That's right!) There's a green one . . .

And a pink one . . .

And a blue one . . .

And a yellow one.

And they're all made out of ticky tacky

And they all look just the same.

And the people in their houses

All go to the university . . .

And the all get put in boxes

Little boxes, all the same.

And there's doctors, and lawyers

And business executives

And they're all made out of ticky tacky

And they all look just the same.

(Someone usually calls out, "They do all look the same! or "They're all red!")

And they all play on the golf course

And drink their martinis dry . . .

And the they all have pretty children

And the children go to school.

Then the children go to summer camp

And then to the university . . .

And they all get put in boxes . . .

And they all come out the same.

And they all go into business

Get married and raise a family . . .

And they all get put in boxes

Little boxes, all the same.

There's a green one . . .

And a pink one . . .

And a blue one . . .

And a yellow one.

And they all are made out of ticky tacky

And they all look just the same.

This is a variation on the song "Little Boxes, written and originally recorded by Malvina Reynolds, although I learned it through Pete Seeger. I like singing folk music with young children.

I don't expect the kids to understand the underlying message of this song, but I do hope that it will click for them in the future when they find themselves confronted with dilemma of little boxes, all the same. When we come to the end, someone usually wants to sing it again.

When the song is finally played out, we head out outside with our glue-paint (mostly glue with a little paint added) and made damn sure our own little boxes (empty mint tins, bottle caps, and whatever else we might pick up from the playground) are not the same. Indeed, we couldn't make them the same, even if we tried.

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Watching Ravens, Contemplating Clouds, and Picking Dandelions IS Education

2026-06-05T06:49:47.122-07:00

National Park Service

Ravens are found pretty much everywhere.

Their "success" has to do with their intelligence and adaptability, especially their capacity for working with other species.

Like humans, they are omnivores, although most of their diet is meat. They have been known to hunt smaller animals. They are also notorious nest raiders, making off with both eggs and hatchlings. But their preference is scavenging. If you live in an urban area, you see them around open dumpsters. The ravens in Seattle are well-known for frequenting parks on sunny days which is why you never leave a picnic lunch unattended.

In more recent times, ravens are thought to be nefarious pests. Their flocks are called "unkindnesses" in some places. But throughout most of history, humans have admired ravens. They feature in many mythologies as tricksters and emissaries of the gods. Their presence during a hunt was considered to be a good omen in many indigenous cultures.

And that's not mere superstition. Ravens commonly hang out around hunters, especially wolves and humans, but also bears, big cats, and other predators. Of course, they're after the spoils, but they are more active than that. They're known for calling out (caw-caw) while "pointing" (wing dips) to indicate where choice prey is hiding. When predators are successful, ravens feast alongside them.

This is an example of one of the most beautiful aspects of nature: symbiotic relationships. Bluestreak cleaner wrasse is a small fish that sets up "cleaning stations" on coral reefs where larger fish queue up for cleaning. Oxpeckers in Africa eat the ticks and other parasites from the skin of large mammals. Antbirds follow columns of army ants in tropical forests feeding on the prey that escapes them. Historian Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, makes the case that humans and wheat are in a symbiotic relationship in which the wheat provides us with food, while we, through mass farming, have made it one of the most populous grass species on the planet. In fact, he wonders who domesticated whom.

If you start thinking in this way, it's easy to see symbiosis throughout nature, at every level, involving every living thing. Hence a web of nature based on the principle of you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours. It's cooperation and mutual benefit. Without the mutual benefit, if one side takes without giving, it becomes parasitism in which either the parasite destroys the host or the host destroys the parasite.

We rightfully worry about what all those screens are doing to this generation of children. I worry about what it's doing to all of us. In the US, Gen Z and younger adults spend, on average, less than five hours a week outdoors, with many avoiding the open sky altogether. Adults aren't much better. We're quickly losing our connection to the natural world, and with it our essential symbiotic relationships. When these ties are broken we suffer physically, emotionally, and psychologically, not just as individuals, but as a species.

Screens are not the disease, but rather the symptom. The real culprit is a society that is hostile to children spending time outdoors at all, let alone in natural spaces. Our schools are largely indoor projects. Inmates in high security prisons get more time outdoors than the average American school child. Our cities, neighborhoods, parks, and playgrounds all require adult supervision, which means that most children cannot choose to be outdoors, but rather must wait for their adults to be both willing and able. The adults can't handle the "begging," so we give them screens.

Increasingly, our role in nature is shifting from that of symbiosis to parasitism. Of course, we aren't capable of destroying the world, so that means the world will have to destroy us. It's a matter of urgency and survival that we return to nature as a species and the place to start is to ditch the screens and open the doors of our preschools. As a matter of public policy, our preschoolers should be spending at least half of their school days outdoors, preferable in actual nature, but at least playgrounds that are gardens, where the stuff of nature (trees, rocks, water) replace standard-issue manufactured equipment. It must be understood that watching ravens, contemplating clouds and picking dandelions is education for the survival of our species.

Children who are hooked on nature instead of screens will "demand" their elementary schools do the same. And from there, who knows what will happen.

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Making Meaning in the Company of Others

2026-06-04T06:44:59.219-07:00

"The bad guys go in here."

He was explaining his pastel drawing to me.

"Then they go around like this."

He contorted his body to demonstrate.

"And this is the knife part." He pointed to a jagged pastel mark. "Sometimes they get stabbed, but sometimes they run away."

He and his buddies had spent the morning excitedly scribbling on both sides of architectural printouts that a parent had brought in from her office recycling bin. The drawing took far less time than the explanations. In this case, we were learning about the details of a bad guy trap.

"Then they fall off this part, into this hole. They can't get out because the sides are too slippery."

The process they had collectively developed was to declare your subject, say, a tornado, scribble frantically, sometimes using more than one color. The penultimate action was to crumple the paper into a ball before unfurling it, declaring, "This is my tornado." Then came the final step, which was a detailed explanation of what we were looking at. The boys were obviously making it up as they went along, working hard to both make sense of their scribble and entertain their friends. There were lots of knives, poop, underpants, fighting, blood, baddies, and goodies in these emergent stories.

Often there was even a question and answer aspect to the creative description. "What happens to the bad guy when he's trapped?" "Then he gets out and goes to jail."

Sometimes there were creative suggestions. "And then you put tigers in the hole!" "Yeah, and lions and snakes!"

These boys had been playing together for nearly three years. They had grown up together in our school, but this was the first time I'd seen them sit down en masse to make art. Usually, they were racing about in costumes or playing out their games with blocks. If any one of them had stopped by to make art, they had done so solo, as a way to take a break from their usual intensity.

But today, these boys had come together to create worlds. From the randomness of scribbles and crumples, they were constructing meaning by combining what already knew with their imaginations and connections with others, making sense from senselessness. This is what the human mind has evolved to do: make meaning in the company of others.

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Fight As If You're Right and Listen As If You're Wrong

2026-06-03T06:38:25.761-07:00

Socrates is arguably the most famous teacher of all time, at least in Western culture. His Socratic Method is a type of argumentative dialog between individuals, usually a student and teacher, that involves asking and answering ever more probing and confrontational questions. Ideally, the goal of these "arguments" is not to persuade or to "win" but rather to move the conversation ever closer to truth or wisdom or knowledge.

Perhaps the most inspiring thing about Socrates as a philosopher and teacher was his consistent assertion that despite his reputation as "the wisest man in Athens" he himself knew nothing. His wisdom did not consist of certainty, but rather in questioning, which is to say to look at all things, even the most sacred, from all sides, and to know that there was always another perspective he had not considered.

Modern schooling tends to take the opposite approach, at least when it comes to the early years in which knowledge is viewed as a collection of correct answers that the children must be able to repeat on command. Children who challenge the "authorized gods" (as Socrates put it), who question, who argue, are viewed as problems. They might be humored for a bit, but ultimately, if they don't conform, they are punished with poor grades, low test scores, and sometimes, if they persist in arguing, worse.

Intellectually, most of us agree with Socrates: "(T)he life that is unexamined is not worth living." But among the very first and most important lessons we teach our children in standard schools -- if they are to be "successful" -- is to not question the correct answers. And by no means are you to argue.

The result of decades of this kind of schooling is that few of us know how to argue productively. Almost everyone I know confesses to being "conflict averse." Arguments make them uncomfortable. It's no wonder because arguing these days, especially over politics, but really anything of importance, tends to be fraught, so much so that many of us have given it up altogether. After all, we all know, going in, that we’re very unlikely to change anyone’s mind, so why risk the vitriol, anger, and even the threats of violence that seem to lie just under the surface.

The thing is, study after study shows that if the goal is to learn something new, to make better decisions, or to be innovative, then the best way to make that happen is for people to fight over ideas. As Stanford business school professor Robert Sutton says, if learning or creativity is the goal, then “People would fight as if they are right, and listen as if they are wrong.” In other words, winning or persuading has nothing to do with this kind of argument. And while the latest science demonstrates the power of intellectual conflict, Socrates and his famous method has been with us for centuries.

As a preschool teacher, I want the children I teach to know that it's not just their right, but their responsibility to question the authorized gods. I want them to know that the most important thing they can do is to ask questions, especially inconvenient ones. I want them to know that their questions deserve thoughtful, honest answers, even if that answer is "I don't know." And the only way this happens is for me to give up on the idea of correct answers.

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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!