Teacher Tom

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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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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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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"Comparison is the Thief of Joy"

2026-06-02T07:11:50.114-07:00

I recently met a parent "in the wild," who, when she learned what I do for a living, began telling me why her son is perfectly normal. In other words, she, like many parents, had some doubts about it.

"Normal" is not a useful concept when it comes to human beings, and most especially young children. In recent decades, we've attempted replace it with the word "typical" -- as in neurotypical -- but in the minds of nervous parents I'm not sure there's much difference between the two.

Theodore Roosevelt once said, "Comparison is the thief of joy." Normal and typical are terms of comparison that run so deep in modern education that it can be hard to conceive of institutionalized learning without them. We grade and rank children, we expect them to meet or exceed arbitrary "standards" and "developmental milestones," we fret about reading above or below "grade level." Not so long ago, our youngest citizens weren't victims of these ham-fisted comparisons until well into elementary school, but today they are being analyzed and assessed from the moment they're born, always having hoops placed before them to prove they are "normal."

No wonder our children are so depressed, stressed, fragile, and joyless. The process of normalization in normal schools is crushing. It plays out as a relentless focus on each child's deficits, which means a search for ways in which they do not fully measure up. Oh sure, we celebrate those who exceed the standards, but when children are extraordinary in any way that the system does not measure, their unique traits are deemed to be challenging behaviors. Their extraordinariness is evidence of an inability to focus. Or a waste of time. They are then tutored, punished, pathologized, and even drugged in order to bring them in line with normal.

I've never met a normal or typical child. They are all extraordinary. This is not an empty platitude. I've spent my professional career refusing to engage in the violence of comparison. This is often frustrating to parents who have been brainwashed into worrying about how their kid measure up to normal, but when I'm asked to assess any child, I only talk about their superpowers. I talk about what spurs their curiosity and what sparks their joy. I delight in their quirks, eccentricities, and passions. This is my job: to figure out what gives them joy, then to do whatever I can to make it possible for them to be joyful.

The flaw in a school system (or child rearing) based on normal is that the focus on deficits presumes there is some process or method by which we can somehow get all the kids to measure up, to toe the line, to be like everybody else. It defines "extraordinary" in a very narrow and, frankly, arbitrary range, which, of course, leaves most kids out.

Play-based preschool is the only educational method I know that fully embraces the extraordinary in every child. It should never be about comparison, but rather the joy of learning what it means for each child to come fully alive.

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16 Books That Transformed My Work With Young Children

2026-06-01T06:52:54.459-07:00

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one. ~George R.R. Martin.

What will you do with your summer? It's what our teachers always asked us as the school year wound down. As professional educators, many of us get to ask ourselves the same question.

My answer then, as it is now, is read.

Indeed, if I have one piece of advice for early childhood educators it's to read more books. Whole books. Education and development books, of course, but more importantly, books on any topic or by any person that sparks your interest.

Unfortunately, our time is limited. Much of the reading we do as educators tends toward "professional reading" -- curriculum materials, lesson plans, assessment tools, policy documents. Sometimes we might take a look at the latest book on play-based learning. Most of us have a stack of books that we "need to" get to. But the bottomline is that this is all just functional reading, reading to solve problems and produce results, like how to manage behavior, how to meet standards, and how to deliver content.

When this forms the bulk of our reading, it tends to narrow our vision . . . not to mention exhaust us because we are reading for a purpose, as opposed to reading for pleasure. It keeps us circling around the same assumptions, the same language, the same ways of seeing children. We can too easily get trapped in a bubble of ECE orthodoxy. As John Dewey reminds us, education is not preparation for anything; education is life itself. And books give us life . . . a thousand lives.

If our role is to create environments in which children are free to follow their own curiosity and teach themselves, then our most important tool isn’t a strategy or a script. It’s our capacity to see. The wider and more deeply we see the world, the more perspectives we possess, the more possibilities we’re able to offer. That kind of vision won’t come from staying inside the field of education. It comes from reading broadly—books that stretch our sense of perception, that challenge what we think we know about human nature, that invite us into relationships with the more-than-human world, and that immerse us in imagination, ambiguity, and even humor.

When we read this way, we can’t help but become more reflective and less certain, more curious and less controlling. We’re better able to recognize the invitations children are constantly offering us, and less likely to fall into the trap of unsolicited instruction. In short, we become better at creating environments where real learning can happen.

I have put together a list of books that have done that for me.

None of the books on my list are “how-to” guides for teaching, but they all made me a better play-based preschool teacher. This is not a list of my favorite books. It is, rather, a list of books that I return to again and again in my work as an educator. Seven of the books are fiction, including a pair of picture books. The other nine are non-fiction, books about history and science mostly, although there are two essay collections on the list. I don’t think of myself as a particularly avid science fiction reader, but there are three books on this list that fit (loosely) the category. Maybe that’s because these authors show us a vision of the future, and at the end of the day, that's what we do: build the future through our work with our youngest citizens.

These are all books that have expanded how I understand people, knowledge, and the world itself. And that, in turn, has transformed how I show up with children.

If you're interested in checking out my list of 16 Books that Transformed My Work With Young Children, along with the reasons I included them, download by clicking here.

I'm not saying you should or will feel the same way. In fact, I found putting together this list such an enlightening exercise that I can heartily recommend that you make your own list of books that transformed your work with young children. I found it an interesting filter through which to consider the thousand lives I've lived. Many of the books I consider to be among the greatest ever written are not included. Most of my favorites didn't make the cut. But every book on this list -- these 16 lives -- made a direct and last impact on my work as an early childhood educator.

What will you do with your summer? How about living a few more lives?

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The Agreements We Make With One Another

2026-05-29T06:51:49.051-07:00

There was no reason for me to be close, so I kept my distance. There was no reason for me to be a part of their game, so I remained invisible.

It probably began days, if not weeks, before I understood it was a game, but it came to my attention in the form of a girl filling a plastic witch's cauldron with things she had scavenged from around the playground.

A friend said some words to her. Maybe he asked, "Can I play with you?" but it was more likely something along the lines of "What are you doing?" which is typically a better playground question if the goal is to be invited in. They began filling the cauldron together, discussing each item, coming to agreements over what went into the mix and what was cast aside according to some system known only to them.

A decision was made to add water to the cauldron. By now it was heavy with the debris they had meticulously collected. But not too heavy because it only took one of them to carry it over to the cast iron hand pump. While the girl held the cauldron, her friend began filling a smaller bucket, which he then poured over their collection. As they worked together, another child joined them. After a discussion that may or may not have included the phrase, "I've got an idea," they agreed to forego the unnecessary step of the bucket and slide the cauldron itself under the flow of water.

Agreement, however it is arrived at, stands at the center of our preschool, as it does in life itself. Conflict, all conflict, emerges from the inability to agree. These children were not playing a game; they were living.

The children took turns pumping until the cauldron was full, or at least as full as they collectively agreed it needed to be. Now it was too heavy for a single carrier, so they circled around the cauldron and lifted it together. Walking with it was a complicated matter: they had to agree about where they were going, at what speed, and who would have to walk backwards or sideways. Maybe it was still too heavy. They staggered a bit under its weight before another friend joined them, dashing in to slide his arms under cauldron. When another playmate tried to squeeze her body in amongst them, it became clear that they could lift it, but not effectively carry the heavy thing, even when they all worked together.

They agreed they would need to put it down, which they did, carefully, not spilling more than a drop or two.

As they discussed their next steps, someone said, clearly enough for me to hear it, "I've got an idea! Let's use the wagon!" This was met with approval, with the exception of one girl, the girl who had tried to squeeze in. She objected. "I'm using it." I'd previously noted her idly pulling the wagon, alone, watching the cauldron situation from afar. She had abandoned it briefly to help.

"Please!" the other children begged. "We just need it for a second." The girl stood with her back to the group, apparently considering what to do. It wasn't long before she relented, "Okay, but I want it back when you're done." Another agreement.

Now the challenge was how to get the wagon to the cauldron. It was on the other side of the row of tree rounds that line the upper level of the sand pit. One child attempted to lift it, but when the others didn't join his effort, he gave it up in favor of what the group decided was a "better idea," which was to pull it around to the side. It appeared to be the work of a single child, so the others stood around watching as he wheeled the wagon the long way around. He struggled, however, when it came to the steep part of the slope, so other children, spontaneously, pushed from behind.

Then, the wagon in place, a small miracle happened. The girl who had started it all, easily lifted the heavy cauldron all on her own, placing into the bed of the wagon. As it turns out, it could have been carried by a single child, but they had collectively agreed that together was better, even if that made things more complicated, perhaps even more difficult. The agreement, not the project, was clearly the important thing.

The project, this project of life itself, continued to play out for some time as the wagon, propelled over difficult terrain made its way in stops and starts around the space, eventually winding up back where the whole thing had started. The cauldron hadn't, after all, mattered. The debris and water it held didn't matter. Whether it was a witch's brew or a soup didn't matter. Indeed, even where they were going with it didn't matter. All that mattered, all that ever matters really, in the end, are the agreements we make with one another.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Who Wouldn't Want to Be Part of That?

2026-05-28T07:07:56.575-07:00

Growing up, all things being equal, when given the choice, we would opt for being outside over inside. For many years as an educator I informally polled the children in my care, asking where they would prefer to be. Very rarely did anyone choose to be inside when outside was an option. I would likewise ask if they would rather play video games or play with their friends. Most chose friends, although one boy, after giving it some thought, replied, "I'd rather play video games outside with my friends." He rejected the binary choice, yet still, even with video games involved, he wanted to be closer to nature.

We tend to forget that nature is not a finished product, but rather a process that is ongoing. As mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it, "Nature is never complete. It is always passing beyond itself. This is the creative advance of nature."

Studies consistently show that most humans, most of the time, are more cognitively alive while free from the confines of ceilings and walls. We think more clearly, more creatively, and it's probably not an accident that we also tend to feel less anxious when our horizons are expansive. Perhaps that's because we too are a part of the creative advance of nature.

Our scientific tradition often place humans, and particularly our conscious minds, outside of nature. They tell us that things we can't see, like atoms and electromagnetic fields, are real, whereas things we actually experience, like colors and the passage of time, are just fabrications of our minds. Whitehead and others refer to this as the bifurcation of nature. But as any child knows, we are not separate from nature; rather we are fully intertwined with it. We are nature as much as any leaf or bird or geological process.

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, "(S)cience is rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer." But "We make a grave error, if we try to separate individual well-being from the health of the whole."

When I'm amidst young children at play, especially outdoors, it's impossible to not see that they are doing nothing less than fully engaging with Mother Nature's process, filling their role, not as individual agents, but rather as integrated aspects of the full expression of nature's creative process. It's not a great leap to see this creative process as all of nature engaged in play. And who wouldn't want to be part of that?

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Consciously Constructing Memories to Be Empowering Rather Than Traumatizing

2026-05-27T07:20:34.846-07:00

Yesterday afternoon was gorgeous -- sunny, warm, with a gusty breeze. My wife Jennifer and I had just voted so I decided to cycle to city hall where they have a ballot drop box in the lobby.

On my way home, I took a familiar route, riding a well-paved bike track that runs between a public golf course on one side and a large, well-used city park on the other. I was the only cyclist along this segment. I was accelerating. I was taking in the scenery, breathing deeply, letting my mind wander a bit. I thought I heard someone say, "Watch out!" I turned my eyes toward the voice and saw a man wearing a yellow shirt and sun hat standing some distance off in the sports field to my left. Visions of a soccer ball, or perhaps golf ball, flashed briefly through my head. But seeing nothing to warrant alarm, I refocused forward just in time to see a thin string across my path at handle bar level.

The next thing I knew that thin string was cutting into my forearms and biceps.

The next few seconds passed like minutes. In that condensed moment, I recognized that a kite had come to earth, its string caught in the top of the fence on one side, while the wind filled the downed kite making the line taut right across my path. I watched the string dig into my skin. I knew I needed to stop, but with my arms pinned by the string I struggled to get my hands to my brake levers. Meanwhile, the pain of this extreme rope burn was cutting right through any endorphins I might have been producing. I imagined I saw friction smoke coming from the wounds. I wondered if it would cut to the bone. I contemplated throwing myself off onto the pavement. I considered what I would do if the string somehow slid up my arms to my neck.

From the perspective of someone watching, this all probably happened within three or four seconds, but this morning I'm recalling it as something that happened in an immeasurable space of time. I fought through the string to get to my brakes, let the bike fall to the ground, and pulled the string out of the gashes on both arms.

In the meantime, I'd figured out that that the man in yellow was the kite flyer. There was a fence and a good 100 feet separating us. I yelled at him. This was his fault. I was in pain and I wanted him to know he was to blame. I wanted him to pay for it. I'm pretty sure I didn't swear, but I might have. He said he was sorry. It bothered me that he remained where he was, though in hindsight I realize that he was winding up his string as fast as he could. What else could he do?

He offered to call an ambulance. He offered to call the police so I could file a report. My wounds were deep, narrow gashes in my skin. The one on my right forearm was bleeding slightly. They looked ghastly, they hurt like the dickens, but for all that had happened they appeared, thankfully, superficial. By now, my yelling had lost its energy. I said that it seemed like an overreaction to call 911, plus I didn't want to spend the rest of my day talking to authorities. But what if it was worse than it appeared? He gave me his name (Tony) and phone number. He could have been lying, but I didn't think so. He seemed genuinely upset. Indeed, at one point he pulled his sunglasses from his eyes and said, "I want you to see my eyes so you know I'm sincere. I deeply apologize." I regret that I didn't immediately accept his apology.

I few minutes into all this, a young man showed up in a golf cart. I think he might have been an employee of the golf course. He said he'd seen it happen, that my wounds looked terrible, and that I should file a police report. After he drove away, I returned to Tony to say that maybe I would file a police report. Tony agreed and even offered to call. But when I considered what I was going to say to the officer, I waved him off.

I mean, what would I say? Here was a guy flying a kite in a field. It had fallen to the ground in just a manner and at just a time that it coincided with me, another guy engaged in an innocent hobby. What else could he have done? What else could I have done? This was an accident in the purest sense of the word.

I rode the rest of the way home, washed the wounds, and slathered them in Neosporin. I told Jennifer the story. We went around a couple of times about calling my doctor or going to urgent care, but the pain had receded, and I had other things to do. I noticed one of my neighbors outside tossing a tennis ball for her dog. I know her to be both compassionate and wise, so I went out to tell my story to her. She imagined that I might be feeling traumatized and offered to fetch me some big bandages. We wondered together about calling the police, but what was there to report? As we spoke a couple of other neighbors came by. I again told my story and we stood around joking about the stories I might fabricate about the scars I was sure to have.

I went back inside and texted Tony. I wrote:

Hey Tony. This is Tom, the cyclist who got caught in your kite string. I've washed up and applied Neosporin. I'm sorry I yelled at you. I think it's going to be okay, but I'll let you know if it's anything more than superficial. Flying kites is probably the most wholesome hobby anyone can have. Don't let this stop you!

Within seconds my phone rang. It was Tony. By now a couple hours had passed. He told me that he was sick to his stomach, that he had been running over and over in his head what he could have done differently. He thought that maybe he should have shouted, "Stop!" instead of just "Watch out!" He told me he was going to buy a pocket knife so that he could cut the string if something like that ever happened again. He apologized once more and this time I accepted it.

I'm writing about this here for a couple reasons. The first is that I'm currently reading a book called Why We Remember by memory researcher Charan Ranganath, in which he explains what we know about how memories are constructed. Things like this can be stored as trauma, but it's not necessary. I am consciously attempting to process this experience as life-affirming and humanity-affirming. Yes, I was hurt, but I'm emerging stronger, and I will have scars to prove it. When we suffer things like this, our minds tend to flash back on specific moments. In this case, I keep seeing the string burning into my skin. Each time I see it in my mind's eye, I turn my actual eyes to the long, thin scabs that are forming on my arms, then think about the unique story I will have to tell each time someone asks about my scars. This is also the story I'm telling myself, consciously constructing the memory in a way that will be empowering rather than traumatizing: a story about "survival" (in the broadest sense of the word), but also compassion and forgiveness. I mean, in the long run, poor Tony is the one who is likely to be the most traumatized. I meant it when I said I wanted him to keep flying his kite.

The second reason I'm writing about this is here is to point out that as important adults in the lives of young children, we can play a significant role in how they construct and store the memories they are making every day. When we support them in telling their own stories about their challenging experiences, we are giving them the opportunity to create memories that tell an autobiography of resilience and survival. People are always saying stupid things like "There are no accidents," but they're flat out wrong. There are accidents. The emergent now is always an accident. Bad things happen in our lives no matter how wholesomely we live them. At the end of the day, it's the stories we construct about them that determine how they ultimately impact our lives.

Meanwhile, I've awoken the find that my wounds are slightly better this morning, itchy and sore, but well on their way to being part of the legend of me. Later today, I'll reach out to Tony to let him know how I'm doing.

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"We Need Help!"

2026-05-26T06:35:51.433-07:00

I help children when they need my help, but most of the time when they ask, it isn't my help they need, but rather help in general, help that could be just as easily provided by other children.

When a kid asks me, for instance, to push them on the swing, I call out, factually, "Audrey wants someone to push her on the swing!" and wait. Sometimes I have to announce it a second time, but invariably, before I've said it a third time, someone has come to the conclusion that they will be the ones to help Audrey.

If a child asks me to, say, lift a heavy car tire on top of a tree stump, I might respond, again factually, "There are a lot of strong kids around who could probably help you." And on most days it only takes one or two requests to find someone willing and able to help.

Asking for help is a vital life skill. When my wife was starting out in business she often worried that asking for help would cause her male co-workers to think her incompetent, so she would try to do everything on her own. One day, however, in a pinch, she broke down and asked her boss for help. It was an epiphany. Not only did he lean in, providing the help she needed, but as she later said, "He thought I was brilliant because I'd asked him for help." To this day, one of her mantras is, "Most people want to help you, but you have to ask them."

She's right. I've had to train myself to not instantly come to the aid of a child who asks because my natural inclination is to just leap to it. But I've come to see that too often what that means is that I wind up doing it for the children when one of the main goals of any education is for children to learn to do things for themselves. And that includes asking peers, rather than adults, for help. Again, I have to use my judgement, sometimes they need adult help, but most of the time, the kids can do it for themselves, including helping one another.

A couple of girls wanted to stack our large wooden boxes to create "bunk beds." They're heavy things, awkward for small bodies to hoist. Most children need help to lift them. They managed stacking the first box on their own, but then realized that was their limit without help. I was sitting right there, but being children experienced in how our school works, they began calling out, "We need help! Everybody, we need help!"

And sure enough help arrived to assist them in wrangling a third box on top.

When they began working on a fourth box, however, I expected they would turn to me. Honestly, I was nervous about the idea of stacking them four high. I knew that their plan was to climb to the top to "sleep" and an unsecured tower like that could easily fall with children clambering all over it. I was prepared to issue my adult cautions, but they took on the challenge of a fourth box without even turning toward me. I stepped a little closer to be prepared for a rescue if necessary. It wasn't easy to get that fourth box up there. Indeed, thought it impossible, but four of them working together did it. (I then unobtrusively nudged the boxes into alignment to satisfy my concerns about stability as they curled their bodies into those empty bunks.)

"Look what we did, Teacher Tom! We made bunk beds!"

I answered, "You asked for help and your friends helped you."

She replied, "They did." Then she corrected herself, "We did!"

******

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

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All Work and No Play

2026-05-25T06:15:19.531-07:00

I spent an evening at a Memorial Day weekend barbecue in the company of several people I had never met before. We asked one another "What do you do?" which is our culture's short form for "What to you do for work?" Boiled down, it's the question, "How do you go about acquiring food, clothing, and shelter?"

This dawned on me when one of my new acquaintances answered, "I don't do anything. I'm retired, just living off the fat of the land."

Of course, this man spends his days doing something. As we chatted, he mentioned grandchildren, golf, and gardening, he talked of travel and hiking. All of these things meet my definition of "doing," yet in his mind, in our collective mind, he's an idle man. In this, he is very much like most of the children I've known.

Indeed, this may well be the most decisive dividing line between children and adults. Kids just don't take work all that seriously, whereas for most of us grown-ups it's the center of our lives. Even if we love our jobs, we envy the kids their freedom, meanwhile we grind our teeth and wring our hands when they show any sign of being lazy, which is to say being unproductive. We gripe that today's youth feel "entitled," that they don't seem to understand that they must work for their food, clothing, and shelter. We worry that our children are directionless, that they lack grit, or that they are more interested in their friends than their school work. These are all concerns, I would assert, related to answering the question "What do you do?"

Of course, in most cases it's illegal for children to contract to do proper work so we assign them chores -- some parents even pay their kids for completing them -- or we re-define school as a work place with grades as the paycheck. It's not the same, and the kids know it, because at the end of the day, they can't exchange their grades for their basic necessities. They see our re-framing for what it is: a flat-out lie. The consequence for not getting your chores or school work done is, at worst, punishment, whereas actual productive work, the kind of thing we say when someone asks us adults what we do, is life or death stuff.

Years ago, I went through a phase where I consciously avoided mentioning my profession when someone asked, "What do you do? I would say, "I read books" or "I like to cook," and my fellow adults would almost always follow up by asking, "Are you retired?"

It seems so natural to define ourselves by our work that we forget that for most humans throughout most of our history, work, the process through which we acquire the necessities of life, held a relatively insignificant place in the scheme of things. Marshall Sahlins' highly influential 1968 essay "The Original Affluent Society" made the point that despite claims to the contrary, technological advancement does not liberate us from work. Indeed, the story of modern man is one of spending more and more of our waking hours working. What we today call hunter-gatherers spent, typically, no more than two to four hours a day acquiring material necessities. Even Medieval serfs worked fewer hours in a day than we do and had far more holidays. One could argue that nearly every technological, political, or social development over the course of the past several centuries has resulted in us consuming more of our life in order to acquire food, clothing, and shelter.

I'm a big fan of food, clothing, and shelter, but if that's what it's all about, if that's all I "do," then what's the point? This is why we envy children. Life, as we've created it, is increasingly all work and no play. This is also why we worry that our youth won't have the grit or maturity required of our all-work-all-the-time society. What if they are so entitled that they think they get to continue playing?

This is all, however, just a story we tell ourselves. As David Graeber and David Wengrow write in their book The Dawn of Everything: "By framing the stages of human development largely around the ways people went about acquiring food, men like Adam Smith . . . inevitably put work -- previously considered a somewhat plebeian concern -- centre stage. There was a simple reason for this. It allowed them to claim that their own societies were self-evidently superior, a claim that -- at the time -- would have been much harder to defend had they used any criterion other than productive labor."

This is the story of colonization. Everywhere Europeans went, they found people who placed art, community, relationships, and play at the center of their lives rather than work. Instead of learning from them, we labeled them as backwards and lazy and sought to correct these flaws. In many ways, this is exactly what we do today with childhood, colonizing it with our grim story about work. We tell them, meanly, that school is their job, that learning is a matter of toil, that they can only play when they have done their work. But as we all know, the work is never done. For most children, when we open the door to school, we close the window of play, allowing it to only re-open again decades later, at life's sunset, the only time when it is acceptable to do "nothing" with our lives.

"What do you do?" We tend to relegate the question to holiday barbecues, but really, isn't it the question for every day. Isn't this the question we should be asking ourselves as we awake each morning? What will I do with my life today? There are valid answers other than work. We see it every day at preschool.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 16 years. I've recently gone back through the nearly 5000 blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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

Self-Directed Learners Live in a State of Alert Awareness

2026-05-22T06:19:00.253-07:00

Psychologist and author of the book Changing Our Minds, Naomi Fisher, once told me that her three-year-old son took an early interest in numbers. One day as they walked together through their neighborhood, he noticed the house addresses. "Did you know," he asked his mother, "that there are lonely numbers and friendly numbers?" He had, she said, "discovered odd and even numbers."

I doubt there is an educator on earth who would "teach" this mathematical concept in these terms. Indeed, most school curricula don't introduce the idea until first or second grade when children are twice Naomi's son's age, and even then it's typically done using the dry convention of numerals and ciphering, rather than the rich, relevant metaphor of lonely and friendly numbers on a street of houses.

As a preschool teacher, I've known hundreds of children who discover mathematical, scientific, literacy and other concepts well before they're "supposed" to. Parents have been taught by our educational system to treat this as a matter for pride in their obvious genius, to jump on it, to get them enrolled in advanced enrichment programs. The truth, however, is that sometimes their youthful proclivities foretell an abiding passion, as was the case with Dr. Fisher's son, but generally their epiphanies are indicators of nothing more than a typically curious child taking note of their world.

As a teacher in a cooperative school, my entire classroom career has been spent in the company of both children and their parents, and often even grandparents. I recall having a conversation with one of these grandparents who was visiting for a week. She wanted me to know that her grandson's obvious brilliance was the product of his mother's genes, who had, she assured me, been a genius child. She also let me know that she loved her daughter, but was disappointed that she had "wasted" her genius on such commonalities as stay-at-home motherhood. If she had anything to do with it, she was not going to allow the same thing happen to her grandson Max, which is why she was saving up to pay for expensive private schools. She also let me know, kindly but firmly, that she disapproved of our play-based curriculum. Perhaps it was good enough for the rest of these more common kids, but her grandson, she assured me with a wry nod, needed something more.

It was both sad and touching, mainly because I knew the mother (her daughter) and she was fully onboard with her son spending his childhood at play. In fact, she was considering avoiding school altogether, opting instead for a self-directed version of homeschooling called unschooling. "Max has already taught himself to read," she shrugged. "He's shown me that he's his own best teacher."

Not every child is a literacy or mathematics prodigy, of course, but they all, if allowed to be their own teachers, are driven to discovery. I've rarely met a parent who was not, rightly, blown away by their preschooler's capacity to learn in this way. "Children who don't go to school," explains Dr. Fisher, "live in a state of alert awareness because they're not expecting to be told what to do and not expecting to be evaluated." It frees them up, she says, to look for patterns and make connections. A child who has not yet been taught the dubious lesson that they need adult instruction and approval for their learning instead comes to rely upon their own curiosity, which is what play-based, or self-directed, learning is all about.

In his book The Search After Truth, rationalist philosopher Nicholas Malebranche writes, "The mind does not pay equal attention to everything it perceives. For it applies itself infinitely more to those things that affect it, that modify it, and that penetrate it, than to those that are present to it but do not affect it." This is the idea behind not just self-directed learning, but learning in general up until the relatively recent advent of what we today call school. "Schools are the new bit," says Dr. Fisher. "Sadly, society thinks that self-directed learning has to end at seven."

Yes, Max had taught himself to read, but his driving interest during his grandmother's time with us was working with his buddies to construct devious traps. They would spend their days snickering and scheming, using scrapes of wood, fabric, old mesh produce bags, and whatever came to hand to create contraptions that they were certain would ensnare a classmate or two. His grandmother was appalled, whisper-begging me to guide them into more useful endeavors. Then one day, a trap made of rope was sprung on his grandmother, who found her ankles tied together as she tried to traverse the playground. As the boys cackled, I helped extricate his grandmother who was laughing along with them. I couldn't help remarking, "Pretty genius, huh?"

It wasn't likely that Max would grow up to be a professional trap maker, but that's beside the point. He is, however, currently pursuing a theater degree with the same joyful passion with which he explored traps. The beauty of play-based learning is that it is always relevant to the learner and that is what's important if are goal is live a life of alert awareness.

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When I've Earned the Respect of a Child

2026-05-21T06:45:30.314-07:00

There are a lot of adults who believe that the problem with today's youth is that they lack respect. It's a complaint about youth that can likewise be found in ancient Egyptian and Babylonian texts.

I want to be respected, not just by the children in my care, but by their parents, and by pretty much everyone else in the world. If I'm respected, it means that I'm behaving in ways others find worthy of respect. It means that I'm admired or esteemed for my abilities or qualities. It means that I make a valued contribution to the lives of others.

I don't expect to be respected by virtue of any arbitrary status that may be attached to me. My age alone is no reason to respect me. Staying alive for a certain number of years may be noteworthy, but that doesn't mean I deserve a level of respect beyond that which all humans deserve. There are those that insist on respect for "the office," meaning that an individual must be shown respect simply because they are the President or the parent or the teacher. But if their contribution isn't valued, if they don't behave in ways that causes us to admire or esteem them, then they are not owed respect. We owe them courtesy, of course. Everyone deserves courtesy.

Many mistake fear for respect. I've heard people say they "respected" their parent because when they behaved badly they got spanked. That's not respect, that's fear. Fear is an entirely different thing. Cowering is not respect. It's not respect if it is demanded or commanded or compelled. That's force; the threat of pain or punishment. That's simply an exercise in power. "Respect" earned through fear has no value to anyone.

Indeed respect is wholly inaccessible through fear. When we fear someone, we do what they say to avoid pain. Fear compels, but respect is earned. Respect is the result of behaving in ways that cause others to admire and esteem us. The respect of others tells us that we are valued. As an early childhood educator, I don't have an inherent right to respect. Indeed, one of the things that I enjoy most about working with young children is that they are simply too honest to feign respect. You know when you've earned the respect of a toddler. You know it when they come to you with their questions, joys, hurts, and epiphanies.

There is nothing more affirming than when I've earned the respect of a child.

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Taking Delight in the Experience of Exploring a Mystery

2026-05-20T07:19:36.466-07:00

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either. ~Joseph Wood Krutch

The daughter of a friend, a girl with whom I used to roll down grassy hills, is in graduate school, putting the finishing touches on her studies in earth systems science (ESS). She spends much of her time in nature doing research. She does not spend her days fussing over atoms or genes. She refers to computational models, but doesn't see them as anything other than starting points or perhaps maps that may indicate reality, but are not reality. As she once told me, nature is far too complex to be "captured" by math.

ESS is a new kind of science, one that takes a huge step back from the Western tradition of attempting to understand reality by disassembling it. It's not an offshoot of physics, biology, chemistry, or social science, but rather a coming together of all of them. Instead of reducing everything to their component parts, the science of complex systems embraces complexity as its highest principle. In many ways it is a return to the science of indigenous peoples from around the world who start with the interconnectedness of life.

A few days ago, I wrote a post in which I stated that "research rarely persuades anyone of anything." I pointed out that in the world of early years research, the evidence overwhelmingly favors play-based preschools and keeping our youngest citizens away from handheld screen-based devices, yet our system continues to push academics into our preschools and parents keep handing their babies iPhones. This is science denialism.

The term "science denialism" is tossed around a great deal these days. It's used on both sides of the political divide to paint their opponents as cult-like and irrational. We accuse one another of cherry-picking data to suit our pre-conceived narratives about the world. And we're not wrong: that's exactly what most of us do. Humans have not evolved to seek accuracy or truth, but rather survival, and one of the strategies our species uses is to tell stories, both to ourselves and one another, that enhance our chances.

That tree we see, if we believe reductionist science, is a product of photons that reflect off a collection of atoms and our minds put it together to tell a story that allows us to avoid harming ourselves by hitting our head on its branches. Or a story that allows us to identify whether or not we can count on it for sustenance, shade, or refuge. Indeed, as cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman argues in his book The Case Against Reality, what we see is almost certainly not what is actually there. 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."

Yet still, I see a tree, which is a complex system that connects the soil to the sky. I breathe the oxygen it produces. It breathes the carbon dioxide that I produce. This means that I am part of the system that is this tree and it is included in the system that is this human. Interconnectedness is what our lived experience tells us about the world. It's what formed the basis of most indigenous science prior to being colonized by Western science. There is no doubt that the science of reductionism has created powerful "tools" for us to understand nature, but often at the expense of lived experience.

We are not separate from "nature," we are in the midst of it. Western science depends on objectivity, but there is no objective place from which to consider reality. All data sets include the biases of the observers' perspective. When we break it all down into atoms and waves and formula derived in computer models or laboratory settings, we ultimately render it meaningless and functionless. And math? Well, as Nancy Cartwright puts it in her book How the Laws of Physics Lie, "(M)athematical physical laws don't describe reality; they describe idealized objects in models."

No wonder science denialism is on the rise. It's a form of sales resistance. We've been sold "science" -- Western science -- as a collection of "facts," that only the ignorant would dispute. Yet our lived experience disputes it every second of every day. Reductionist science tells us that time is not part of reality, but tell that to the man who's just missed his train. It tells us that colors are products of our minds, not reality, but tell that to the woman who mistakes a tiger for a zebra. It tells us that hot and cold are psychological phenomena, but tell that to the person who is shivering.

In their book The Blind Spot, a physicist and a pair of philosophers (Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson), warn about how science is "sold" to society:

It may take the form of science documentaries telling people they are nothing more than their so-called genetic programming (genes aren’t programs, and they require the existence of whole organisms embedded in their ecosystems to be expressed). It may be breathless science news articles that claim future generations will upload themselves into computers (your selfhood or personhood isn’t a computational data structure). It may be public lectures or op-eds that claim physics has now answered the question of why there is something rather than nothing (this is not the kind of question science can answer) . . . When Blind Spot ideas are presented to the public as facts that only the naive and uneducated would dispute, it is likely to exacerbate opposition to science in public policy debates.

As early childhood educators we are currently being "sold" the lie that "earlier is better." Policymakers and parents, wielding "data" collected by pseudo-scientific testing, are trying to get us to buy into the mathematics-driven story of bottoms-in-seats, drill-and-kill direct instruction. They sell it with fear-mongering and snake oil about poor children "falling behind." Meanwhile, our lived experience of this approach is the reality of miserable, anxious children whose development is stunted because they never learn to play. They are taught that learning is hard and they are incompetent; that their curiosity is a distraction, that their bodies must remain still, and their voices silent. When we object, they accuse us of being naive and uneducated, of standing in the way of "progress." They show us their metaphorical maps and try to convince us that it is the real terrain, even as we live, every day, in the actual world and witness with our own eyes the harm they are inflicting on children.

A while back I wrote about meeting a man who believes the earth is flat. The conversation reminded me of the aggravating round-and-round debates I have with those who are convinced that children need worksheets and homework. As frustrating as science denialism is, however, I find myself wondering if its rise isn't simply as aspect of the system trying to correct.

The Blind Spot authors write:

(B)est practices in the domain of science and society include becoming aware of how the story of science is told to the public. Without doubt that story is about the profound capacity of the human imagination and our ability to prevail over ignorance and bias. But if the story is told as one of transcending the human, then it becomes an essentially religious narrative about the search for perfect knowledge beyond our finitude. Instead of saying that science is a means for rising above the great, strange mystery of being human in the vast wide world, a better story is that science takes us deeper into that mystery, revealing new ways to experience it, delight in it, and, most of all, value it.

Taking delight in the experience of exploring a mystery. This is what makes humans come alive. This is what a proper education is all about.

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The Hulk

2026-05-19T07:09:39.864-07:00

"I'm The Hulk!"

His parents hadn't taken their three-year-old to see the movie, but the marketing had nevertheless penetrated into his awareness, capturing his imagination, which clearly interpreted The Hulk as an image of power worthy of emulation. Or rather, in this boy's case, embodiment.

"I'm The Hulk!" he would declare as he swaggered through the classroom door each morning, flexing, his legs spread wide, taking up as much room as his tiny body could fill. He insisted on being called, "The Hulk," not Hulk, not The Incredible Hulk or the Green Goliath, and definitely not the name his parents had given him. Most of the time, The Hulk did the same kinds of things the other kids were doing, albeit punctuated by bodybuilder stances and the regular declaration, "I'm The Hulk!"

This was very early in my teaching career and this boy happened to be the brother of my own daughter's best friend, so I knew this boy quite well, having spent countless hours at his house, dining with him, vacationing with him, and even trick-or-treating with him. Interestingly, he hadn't dressed as The Hulk for Halloween. Similarly, he didn't insist on being called The Hulk in any circumstance other than while at school. His bedroom was full of green merchandise, including a giant pillow fist that made the sound of breaking glass when you punched something with it, but pretending to be The Hulk was apparently reserved for school.

It's estimated that the average adult spends almost half of their waking thoughts reliving memories or planning for the future, with the rest, presumedly, dedicated to the present. I'm unaware of any such estimates regarding three-year-olds, but from what I've observed, and based on the simple fact that they have fewer memories to reflect upon, and less experience upon which to base their anticipation for tomorrow, much more of their conscious thinking time would, by the process of elimination, have to be spent on the present. And for a child like this one, a large chunk of his time in the present, especially in school, was spent pretending.

As researchers and professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California, Berkley, Alison Gopnik writes in her book The Gardener and the Carpenter, "By far the most important and interesting problem for young children is figuring out what's going on in other people's minds. Theory of mind, as it's called, is the ability to figure out the desires, perceptions, emotions, and beliefs of other people. It's quite possibly the most important kind of learning people ever do . . . (T)he period from eighteen moths to five years is the great watershed for developing theory of mind . . . Children who pretend more have a distinct advantage in understanding other people."

I often think of this boy who embodied The Hulk. Certainly, he was exploring how it might feel to be a large, physically powerful entity, something that he objectively was not. Sometimes the other children would be frightened of The Hulk, cowering or even crying. When that happened he usually dropped the act for a time, seemingly confused, often insisting softly, "I'm not really The Hulk." Sometimes he would say the tagline, "Hulk smash!" but he was rarely actually violent. Indeed, when the other children would wrestle, he'd stand nearby, flexing, but would decline to actually engage. He loved few things more, however, than another child who would go face-to-face with him, being, counter-factually fierce and powerful and strong.

"Thinking counterfactually in this way is a tremendously useful skill for adult human beings," writes Gopnik. "It's what we mean when we talk about the power of imagination and creativity. Counterfactual thinking is crucial for learning about the world. In order to learn we need to believe that what we think now could be wrong, and to imagine how the world might be different . . . In order to change the world, we need to imagine that the world could be different, and then actually set about making it that way. In fact, just about everything in the room I'm sitting in -- the woven fabrics, the carpentered chairs, not to mention the electric lights and computers -- is wildly fictional from the perspective of a Pleistocene forager. Our world started out as a counterfactual imaginary vision in an ancestor's mind. One way of thinking about pretend play is that it gives children a safe space to practice higher-order mental skills, just as rough-and-tumble gives baby rats a safe space to practice fighting and hunting, and exploratory play gives baby crows a safe space to practice using sticks."

The Hulk is a young man now. Despite his experience pretending to be The Hulk, he didn't grow into a large, green, be-muscled adult. I know that he tried out football in high school, but found it too much for him. He does, however, write and perform music, fierce powerful music that gets people up on their feet. The kind of music one might imagine The Hulk would make.

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Can We At Least Agree to Stop Sucking the Joy Out of Their Lives?

2026-05-18T06:13:02.947-07:00

I was sitting on a bench near a playground merry-go-round watching our three and four-year-olds play. A pair of boys decided they wanted a spin. They mounted the apparatus, then one of them turned to me, "Teacher Tom, you push us."

I answered, "Sorry, I'm busy sitting here. You'll have to find someone else."

As the first boy tried pleading with me, the second said, "I'll get my brother to push us. He likes doing the things I like," and jogged off in the direction of where their classmates where playing. He called out to them, "Who will push us?" They ignored him so he returned to the merry-go-round. As he mounted it, he gave it a little push with his foot and the two boys began turning slowly.

As the momentum began to die, a couple of girls found their way to the merry-go-round. Without being asked, they decided they were going to push it "fast." The boys were delighted. Working together, the girls managed to get it up to speed, then the two of them jumped on as well. More children began to arrive in twos and threes, many pushed before jumping on. One of the original boys, leaning into it, head tipped back, began to chant, "Oh yeah, it's spin time! Oh yeah, it's spin time!"

The children began jumping off and on as they spun. Many of them fell to the ground upon dismount, most doing so intentionally. Occasionally, one of them would be trampled as they lay there in the path of the pushers. Some of them cried out in objection, while others squealed with delight. It was the kind of wild, breathless fun for which these machines were designed, even if adult imposed rules too often forbid it.

They were learning something, because we are always learning something when we play. I could write a list here of all the things I imagine they were learning, or exploring, or discovering. I could put those guesses into a report of some sort. Indeed, if I were so inclined I would have already filed dozens of reports on the children playing together on the merry-go-round going back to September. I could then take all those reports and compare them to today's report and use this data to pretend that I know what they have been learning over the course of months. I reckon I could even devise some sort of pre and post-test that would allow me to compare the children's progress, identify those who are behind and assign those poor kids some merry-go-round homework so they could catch up with the others. Perhaps some would need tutors or the support of specialists. I might even decide to rank the children on various measures that I have identified as important about merry-go-round play, assigning each of them grades based on my assessment of where they fall on an arbitrary scale of learning I'd devised based on data that I and others have collected over generations. I could then use this data I've amassed to devise a merry-go-round curriculum, one that allows me to "teach" children how to play on a merry-go-round, imagine myself an expert, seeing to it that all the children became merry-go-round proficient . . .

This is ludicrous, of course. I could do all of that and not only would I be no closer to knowing what these children were learning, I would have wasted vast amounts of time that I could have otherwise spent doing something more productive, like scratching my ass. No one can ever know what another person is learning. Each of those children on the merry-go-round are learning something different, something unique, something that applies only to them and their lives, and even the person doing the learning often doesn't know what they've learned, and no amount of testing, grading, or data collection will change that.

This is the great fraud of our educational system, this hubristic notion that adults can somehow measure learning, yet for generations we have put children through the processing plants we call schools, marching them into the test score coal mines, subjecting them to our experiments like lab rats. It's led to a grotesque narrowing and standardization of what we call education based not on learning, but on what we can most easily measure.

I am comfortable knowing that children are learning because they are playing, and that's enough. Indeed, I have no choice because to believe otherwise, is to buy into the lie that anyone can possibly know what these children are learning. It would mean that I must take part in sucking the joy from their lives and I will not knowingly be a party to that.

"Oh yeah, it's spin time!" That's all I need to know.

******

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Does Modern Schooling Create Mass Mediocrity From the Raw Material of Genius?

2026-05-15T06:39:56.264-07:00

On the short list of history's geniuses, most of us would include Leonardo da Vinci. He is perhaps the most famous polymath to ever live -- a painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, engineer, technologist, and mathematician of the highest order. He is the embodiment of the High Renaissance. Today, he is best known for his painting the Mona Lisa, a masterpiece that to this day defines what a masterpiece is all about. But his other existing works like The Last Supper are every bit as sublime not to mention the volumes of notebooks he left behind detailing everything from helicopters and nautical innovations to adding machines, anatomical studies, and optical discoveries.

I think it's safe to say that most of us would be pretty proud if our kid grew up to be the new da Vinci, right? I mean, he represents the pinnacle of the much ballyhooed STEM (or STEAM) schooling that we hear so much about. Although, to be honest, Leonardo himself never went to school. He was a "studio boy" in an artist's workshop, eventually becoming an apprentice. It's unknown whether he chose that particular career path or if he just fell into it by way of relieving his lower-class single mother of the burden of his upkeep.

All told, the great genius da Vinci produced fewer than 25 paintings, most of which were unfinished and still in his possession upon his death. The Mona Lisa remained one of those unfinished works, even after some 15 years of fiddling with it. Of the works he actually "finished" most only saw the light of day in his lifetime because his patrons threatened to stop funding him. Indeed, he spent much of his life dodging debtors. His notebooks full of innovations, inventions, and discoveries were exactly that, notebooks in which he doodled his ideas, never intended for the public eye. It's likely that he would today have been diagnosed with ADHD, so scattered and varied were his interests and activities.

What a deadbeat! At least if judged by today's productivity standards, da Vinci was a classic failure-to-launch dreamer, full of high falutin ideas, but obviously without the grit or rigor to pull himself up by his own bootstraps or whatever. Just imagine what he could have accomplished had he only been more motivated.

It's a sucker's game, of course, to play 'what if' with history, but what if Leonardo had had the benefits of modern schooling?

I think it's safe to say that he would not have be Leonard da Vinci. Certainly, he might have found a vocation that kept the debtors off his back. Maybe he would have become a painter with his own commercial studio, cranking out above average allegorical motifs and portraits to decorate the hallways and mantles of the wealthy, perhaps even developing a line of budget paintings for more humble households. Or maybe he would have joined the military or become an engineer or an architect or a botanist, all vocations for which he showed an aptitude. But I think it's safe to say that he would not have become the great genius Leonardo. His teachers would have seen to that. He might have been more productive, but it's quite clear that fiddling, perfecting, and doodling were the methods behind his unique and world-changing genius.

Without that, he would not have been the wonderfully fallible Leonardo da Vinci, but rather just another promising young man who made a decent living.

It's tempting to say, Oh, but that's just Leonardo the genius. He's the exception. Most kids left to their fiddling, perfecting, and doodling would just waste their time on video games. Maybe. It's also possible that our educational system that focuses on productivity and paying the bills as the key measures of success has created mass mediocrity from the raw material of genius.

What if that other iconic genius Albert Einstein was right: "Every child is born a genius." What if the real trick of education is to not waste it on productivity and paying the bills?

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"The Greatest of Savage Tribes"

2026-05-14T07:18:14.244-07:00

"The world-wide fraternity of children is the greatest of savage tribes, and the only one which shows no signs of dying out."

I came across this quote in a book published in 1965, which quoted it from another book written in 1959. It's attributed to a person named Douglas Newton, who may be the same author Wilfred Douglas Newton who was publishing during the early part of the last century. In other words, I really don't know who wrote it, but it rings true, even if my modern sensitivities make me cringe at the term "savage tribes."

For most of my career, I've considered young children to be the last of the unspoiled humans, the people who are the closest to the origins of our species. I've been privileged to spend much of my adult life in a position to observe these natural humans who still have not learned many of the lessons of "civilization." I've strived to create natural habitats in which they can thrive without absorbing the dubious lessons of modern life; specifically those of glorified competition and the elevation of the individual over the community. Even before we understood the harm handheld devices were causing us, I eschewed screen-based technology in the classroom out of fear it would add unnecessary artificiality to this natural "fraternity." Over the course of decades I've seen that no matter how much society changes, no matter what the rest of us take for natural and normal, no matter how convinced we've become of the slurs casually hurled at children from adult bigots, these young children remain our last hope to stay connected to our "natural" state.

I remember the first time that a young child turned to a camera to make a face the way people do on social media. I remember meeting a five-year-old whose parents had been preparing her for an Ivy League future from birth. They literally moved to Seattle specifically to attend my school because they had become concerned that she didn't know how to play -- or "do anything" according to her father -- without adult direction. Douglas Newton was certain that this "savage tribe" would never "die out," but I don't know. We're doing our damnedest to kill it off.

Yesterday, during an online talk on play based learning, educators commented using the "chat" function while I spoke. At least a dozen spontaneously complained, "Children don't know how to play any more." It's not the first time I've heard that.

Of course, I know that young children still know how to play. I know these children. I hear of these children. Fellow educators share delightful stories of children's play with me all the time, but the colonization of childhood is clearly well underway. Just as European colonizers sought to forcibly "convert" those "savage tribes" to the ways of Christianity, capitalism, and Western science, we are currently seeking to do the same to our youngest citizens.

It begins with the casual way we allow one another to display their hatred of children. Comedians and other wags regularly declare, "I hate children." We let our friends say, "I won't eat in a restaurant that allows kids." We don't bat an eye when chauvinists call children "feral," "dirty," or "ignorant." If these things are said about any other category of human we readily identify it as bigotry, but when it comes to children, it's perfectly fine to refer to them as "disrespectful," "uncivilized," or "savage." This is how colonization always begins.

It's not an accident that William Golding's shockingly misanthropic and child-hating work of fiction, The Lord of the Flies, is currently being revived in blockbuster movie style. I can't tell you how often naysayers have evoked this novel to disparage my work with children. They say, "Ever heard of Lord of the Flies?" as if that settles the debate. I guarantee, every play based early childhood educator will hear this during the coming year. (In the real world, young boys did find themselves trapped on a deserted island and the results were much more hopeful.)

The next step after "othering" children, is to "correct" them. In this case we replace their natural inclination to learn through play with the tedium of worksheets, rote learning, and testing . . . "for their own good." And they must do this indoors. Just as generations of indigenous people have been made to behave and believe in abeyance to the colonizer's standards, our young children are undergoing the same process. They will never be fully civilized, of course, but at least we will have "saved their souls." I worry that we have already reached the point that we will need to turn to anthropologists to unearth what we have lost. And indeed, if young children really don't know how to play, we are lost, both morally and as a species.

I recently worked with teens and young adults who were unable to share any stories of risk taking from their younger days. In fact, one young woman told me that she doubted that my own stories of youthful risk-taking were true. I recently spoke with a young mother who said, "I'm a parent in 2026. My child never does anything without me except go to school." We've all heard the stories of the police being called because children were allowed to play in their own yards. These are all anecdotal, but by the time the actual data catches up, I'm concerned it will be too late.

It's not too late, but without action it's coming fast. We already have the first generation of fully colonized children having their own babies. When the stories of our own youth are dismissed by the current generation as not credible, we are in danger of never knowing first hand what it means to be fully or authentically human.

Our play based preschools must be havens, protected preserves of childhood. They are the last place we find natural humans. I hope this Douglas Newton fellow is right, that this world-wide fraternity of children will never die out, but they are endangered. We must all fight to protect them and it starts right now by taking a stand where we live, to stand up and say, "Let them play."

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"I Don't Know About That"

2026-05-13T05:57:56.620-07:00

One of the hard truths I've learned over the past three decades is that research rarely persuades anyone of anything. If it did, we would have universal play based preschools. The data in favor of play in the early years is overwhelming. This clinical report from the American Association of Pediatrics (first published in 2018 and reaffirmed last year) is as definitive as science gets, citing nearly 150 peer reviewed studies.

I've provided this report to dozens of doubtful parents and educators over the years, many of whom have come back with an "I don't know about that" objection that let's me know that they are not persuaded.

Continuing to push academic-style instruction down into the early years is a direct cause of mental illness in young children. Period. Play, and lots of it, is the antidote. That's what we know even if far to many people still "don't know about that."

The same thing appears to be happening with screen-based technology, and specifically smartphones. The data is overwhelming: we should be keeping young children away from them the same way we keep them away from alcohol and loaded firearms. Harm is being done. Jonathan Haidt's well-researched book The Anxious Generation is only two years old and in the intervening two years, the evidence of the harm these devices are doing to our young people is has grown exponentially.

I get it. Smartphones are an easy way for parents and other adults to occupy a bothersome child, especially in a world in which "go play outside" can get you arrested for child endangerment. We obviously need more safe places for children to play outdoors in the kind of unsupervised way past generations did, but do we really need to stick phones in front of kids in restaurants, on airplanes, while driving in the car? I recently went to a movie in a theater and sat next to a pair of elementary-aged girls who spent most of the two hours on their phones. I just read a social media post from a teacher who says that when she releases her two-year-olds to their parents at the end of a school day most of them are immediately given their parent's phone.

This is neglect. Children need to interact with real people. They need to have conversations with their loved ones. They need to be free to engage with the real world around them. That's what the research is telling us even if "I don't know about that."

But what is far more outrageous is what our schools are doing. Based on what we know about the harm that screen-based technology causes our young children, it is child abuse to provide these devices in schools. That's right -- abuse. There is no evidence that children learn better from screens than from human beings, books, or other more traditional methods. A recent Wall Street Journal investigation (the actual article requires a subscription, but this link provides a decent summary) found that students in US schools are using their school-issued devices during class time to view massive amounts of questionable content, including tens of thousands of YouTube videos a month. One child was found to have watched 200 in a single morning.

Of course, those who will not be persuaded by evidence simply argue that it's the teacher's fault, that they must do a better job of controlling the kids, because heaven forbid they have to give up those damned screens. The screens make the children quiet and passive, which is why parents resort to them. Studies consistently show that the use of screen devices in schools does not lead to improved learning, and many find they reduce learning. In other words, these devices are not only harmful to mental health (which should be enough), but also to educational prospects.

It's time for parents to start suing schools.

In March of this year, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta (the parent company of Facebook) to pay $375 million after finding the company liable for concealing what it knew about child sexual exploitation and endangering children on its platforms. In that same month a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and YouTube to pay $6 million in damages to a young woman (and her mother) who sued based on the addictive nature of their products. If our schools are going to allow that kind of harmful crap into our schools, then they should be held liable for the damages. It's no different than feeding the kids poisoned lunches. We know for both a scientific and now legal fact that our children are being harmed.

And still, those who will not be persuaded will strive to keep the screens, while controlling the children and the content. Why? They're unpersuadable. They are not interested in what's best for children, but rather what's best for them. "I don't know about that" has become the go-to defense of the indefensible.

And now we come to the nub. Why are screens so good for these educators? Because they have massive classes and expensive curricula they have to get through. The class size is because our elected leaders refuse to adequately fund education. And the damned out-of-the-box curricula from for-profit companies demand that teachers march the kids through it without any regard for the individual children in their care, meaning that a few get it, while most are either bored or confused. Screens "solve" both problems: they create passive children and deliver cookie-cutter lessons. Who cares about learning when you have a well-managed classroom and digital evidence that you "delivered" the content. Frankly, I don't blame kids for watching YouTube videos instead.

Research rarely persuades anyone about anything, but fear-mongering does. Fear-mongering over "falling behind" and "school readiness" is why we have the academic push down into our preschools. Science tells us that the healthiest, most educational thing we can do for young children is to let them play in a screen-free environment, but that, apparently, isn't a persuasive message. I've tried now for decades to be positively persuasive here on the blog. I don't want to fear-monger, but maybe, for the sake of our children, it's time to start.

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Bookends for Living a Meaningful and Moral Life

2026-05-12T07:09:00.000-07:00

In her novel Middlemarch, George Eliot writes, "The young ones have always a claim on the old to help them forward." She also rhetorically asks, "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?"

As bookends for living a meaningful and moral life, you could do worse.

We all begin as helpless newborns, completely dependent upon the adults who have brought us into the world. Without them, we roll over and die, and so too the future of our species. From an evolutionary perspective, of course, we need our offspring to not just survive, but to also thrive, which is why caring for children must be the chief project of every civilization.

On Mother's Day, The White House launched an initiative to encourage certain of us to have more babies. They say there is a population crisis. They seem to think women just need more positive motherhood vibes.

In the rest of nature when birthrates drop it's because the world has become inhospitable for babies. It's a response to the individual and collective assessment of their offspring's prospects. When species are under stress, they often shift their energy away from reproduction toward survival. In many species breeding is skipped or delayed, or fertility may decline due to hormonal suppression. Mammals may stop ovulating, birds may not lay eggs, embryos are reabsorbed. We know that under extreme conditions like famines, war, or chronic stress, humans are known to shut down reproduction. When survival is uncertain, reproduction generally becomes more conservative.

There are exceptions. Some species, like insects and rodents produce more offspring when conditions are unpredictable, employing a kind of "boom-or-bust" strategy. That seems to be this administration's approach. They're obviously banking on "rah-rah" patriotism and motherhood to encourage more babies, instead of doing those things that might create a more hopeful future like childcare, nutritional assistance, tax credits, parental leave, healthcare, and climate action.

Instead, they're aggressively working to take away abortion rights, contraception, and bodily autonomy, all of which are attempts to deny women the right to choose what is best for both themselves, their prospective offspring, and the species' future.

Families increasingly find themselves under financial stress, which in our world is a genuine threat to survival. It means that basics like food, shelter, and healthcare are beyond the reach of too many. It only makes sense to avoid having more babies. Economists are forecasting, for the first time in modern history, that today's young will live less prosperous lives than the generations before them, not to mention the fact that we live in a world that is increasingly hostile to children and families. Under these conditions, the choice to not reproduce is a valid one.

"More babies" should never be our goal, but in a world in which free women have the right to choose, increasing birthrates are a leading indicator of a hopeful future. A declining birthrate should sound alarm bells, not about reproduction, but about the world we are creating.

"The young ones have always a claim on the old to help them forward." "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?" It's between these simple ideas that we create a future in which humans thrive.

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Living in a World of Rainbows

2026-05-11T06:09:00.000-07:00

Children are always making rainbows. They draw rainbows with pencils and markers, color them with crayons, and paint them on easels. As I've travelled the world, visiting preschools from Greece to China, from New Zealand to Iceland, I find rainbows adorning the walls and bulletin boards, happy arcs of color, often with a self-portrait of the artist, or even the artist's whole family, standing under them, smiling.

We've all seen them, and often. It's tempting to wonder why they do it, although it's entirely unnecessary to know. The fact that children everywhere make rainbows, I think, is enough.

And they don't just make them with "art" materials. Every day, someone will call out, "I've made a rainbow tower!" or explain "This is a rainbow in a box."

In nature, rainbows are somewhat rare, only appearing when the conditions are just right, only lasting for a short time, and only visible from certain angles, but at preschool they are everywhere, in everything, making our world brighter.

Sometimes when children talk of rainbows, they are referring to the classic shape, but more often than not they are talking of all those colors, side by side, beautifully, joyfully, a concept that is incomplete with even one of them missing.

We spend most of our time working on projects together and sometimes we need to decide upon a color. Our process always starts with someone proposing their favorite which is followed by another color and another. We list them all, usually intending to then vote for which one it will be, but invariably when it comes time to select just one, the children always opt for rainbow, the consensus choice, the one that includes us all.

It's tempting to wonder why they do it, why children surround themselves with rainbows, but do we really need to wonder? I think we already know why.

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When We Know the Full Story

2026-05-08T06:08:00.000-07:00

As a boy, my brother and I owned a game called Rebound. It's a tabletop version of shuffle board that one plays using small plastic disks with ball bearings in the center, rolling them to bounce off a pair of rubber bands before they scoot into the scoring zone. It has survived to find a second life in our classroom. Despite hundreds of children having played with it over the years not only has it remained intact, but we still have all 16 of the small game pieces.

I suppose some might consider it a kind of miracle that nothing has been lost or broken, but it's not magic. Whenever I make the game available to the kids, I tell it's story, the one about how it's my old toy, how my brother and I used to play with it, how it is 40 years old, and special to me. I ask them to treat it gently and to try to not lose the pieces. They then play with it, sometimes rowdily, sometimes until all the pieces are on the floor, but at the end of the day, for going on two decades now, all the pieces have always been there.

One time, I forgot to tell the story of the game. Within minutes, I heard the sound of the Rebound board crashing to the floor. Fortunately, it didn't break, and I used it as an opportunity to inform a few of the kids of its background. Not long later, however, I discovered that several of the game pieces were missing. We looked everywhere for them, but no luck. I began to suspect that one of the children had snatched a fistful to use elsewhere in the classroom, not maliciously, but rather in the spirit of loose parts. I imagined I'd find them later, perhaps years later, in a container somewhere or squirreled away in a nook. Still, I was feeling a bit melancholy, even as I attempted to be philosophical. After all, I wasn't going to get to keep those things forever.

We still didn't find the pieces when we tidied up, so when we re-gathered on the checkerboard rug to de-brief before going outside, I told the game's story, hoping that one of them would recall what he or she had done with the lost pieces. I strived to tell the story in a matter-of-fact manner without suggesting any sort of suspicion or blame. I just wanted them to know that I missed those pieces and why. The children listened, several offered theories about where the lost ones might be, some offered to make me some new ones, but none offered any clues to the mystery.

Several minutes later, however, as we gathered in the mud room to gear up for the weather, one girl presented me with the lost pieces, saying, "Here they are." She had indeed squirreled them away, not in the classroom, but in her own cubby, intending, I suppose, to take them home as treasures. She had admired them, had wanted them, had secured them for herself. Children often take things home in their jacket pockets, small things, usually of little value like bottle caps or florist marbles. I'm sure she had considered these game pieces in that light, small, plentiful, insignificant things that no one would miss. When she heard my story, however, she readily returned them, knowing that they meant more to me than they ever would to her.

People often describe young children as selfish, forever putting their own needs and desires above those of others, but it's not, on balance, true. Usually, what we label as self-centered is really just a result of them not knowing (or not being developmentally capable of understanding) the full story, which is, I think, probably true of most humans most of the time.

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The Role of Memory and Imagination in Learning Through Play

2026-05-07T07:04:00.000-07:00

For several days in a row, the girl had positioned the ends of a plank of wood on car tires to make a balance beam upon which she played. She didn't object when other children wanted to try out her invention. Indeed, she welcomed them, giving tips and otherwise sharing the expertise she had developed over the course of her days of trial-and-error experimenting.

One day, a group of boy stacked three tires one atop another then abandoned it to do other robust things. The girl contemplated the tower of tires for a moment before moving one end of her plank to the top of the stack, while leaving the other end on a single tire. Then, using the skills and knowledge she had been developing over the course of the preceding days, she attempted to balance up the incline.

We can never know what is going on inside the head of another person, but it seemed as if she had asked herself, "What if I put one end on that stack of tires?" She had built this scenario based upon what she already knew about planks and tires: she knew something, then used her imagination to expand her knowledge.

We see young children do this all the time. They bring what they know from home into our home center where they play "What if . . . ?" games with housekeeping. They bring what they already know about shape and color to the art table where they play "What if . . .?" with new media and materials. They begin with what they've learned about relationships inside their family, then play "What if . . .?" with the people they find at preschool.

According to those who study brain function, the systems used for memory and imagining heavily overlap, especially in and around the hippocampus. In fact, research suggests that the cognitive process of remembering is almost identical to the process of imagining. In both cases, the brain is constructing a story: one about what did happen -- or, more accurately, what is likely to have happened -- and the other about what might happen. This fascinating insight helps explain why our memories tend to be so faulty. It also suggests that the purpose of memory isn't so much accuracy as it is to provide us with stories that make sense of the present.

When the girl was practicing with her balance beam, she was gathering information, which her brain stored in memory for future reference. She then used exactly the same parts of her brain to recall the pertinent information (as opposed to accurate information, although it might have been that) to construct a "What if . . . ?" scenario that she then carried out. This process creates new memories to serve as raw material for future imaginative play.

In other words, memory isn't just storage, as our test-taking school culture would have it, but rather a process of construction. When children engage in imaginative play, they practice assembling bits of experience into coherent stories, which is precisely what effective learning requires: connecting new information to prior knowledge. Imagination lets us simulate possibilities ("What if . . . ?"), which obviously stands at the heart of problem-solving and transfer of knowledge, the hallmarks of learning. The more vividly and meaningfully something is imagined, the more pathways the brain uses to encode it, and in contrast to the practice of rote memorization, imaginative play tends to carry emotional weight (joy, tension, curiosity) which strengthens memory formation.

In other words, imaginative experiences like those we see when children are free to play expand the brain systems required for future learning. So often schooling in our culture takes the form of direct instruction (lectures, worksheets, text books, testing) in the misguided notion that memory (or remembering) is simply a process of data recall. The constructive nature of memory is ignored entirely, which explains why so much of what we "learned" in school is lost within days of having passed the test. When children play, they imagine, and when we imagine we construct our own learning: they are, in truth, practicing how learning itself actually works.

The girl discovered that walking up her new, steep ramp was difficult, but that she could make it to the top by crawling or scooting, but she continued experimenting. After a time, the boys returned to discover what the girl had constructed from the beginnings of their own construction. And together, they asked, "What if . . . ?" An explosion of imagination that carried on for days.

Memory gives children something to think with. Imagination is how they learn to think with it.

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Heartbreak is Part of Both Friendship and Freedom

2026-05-06T07:17:49.832-07:00

I came across an interesting tidbit of language information the other day. The English word free comes from the same root as friend. Indeed, it appears that the original root word meant "friend," so, in a linguistic sense at least, free is a product or aspect of friend.

Anyone who has read here for any length of time, knows that I've never focused on academic things in my work with children. If it must be part of a child's life, that can come later, but during these early years, my primary concern beyond safety is creating a loving environment in which children know they are free to engage as their curiosity compels them. That is to say, play. And among the most compelling playthings are the other children who present the prospect of friendship.

Every parent wants their child to have friends, or at least one friend. Our prejudice tends to be in favor of children who are natural friend makers, kids who have the charisma and confidence to throw themselves into the fray. Observational research finds, however, that even these "master friend makers," these most popular of children, are rebuffed at least 30 percent of the time when they seek to enter into play with other children. Which is to say that all of us have extensive experience with social rejection, and is why, I think, we feel it so strongly when we see children struggle with friendship.

I have a few tips I share with children about friendship, which I try to offer in calm moments.

If you hurt people, they probably won't want to be your friend.

If you ask, "Can I play with you?" most kids will tell you, "No." If instead you say, 'I'm going to play with you,' they'll usually say, 'Okay.' But the best way to start playing with another kid is to just start playing with them.

I'm not sure if I've ever helped a child with this advice, even if I've seen the truth of both tips over and over. The kids who can just drop to their knees and get engaged without harming anyone are always the ones with the most playmates. That said, my own daughter Josephine, when she was four, insisted, "But I have to ask them if they want to play with me!" It broke her heart, and mine, when her preferred playmates rebuffed her again and again, but taking my advice was just a bridge too far.

I don't suppose anyone really knows how the word free emerged from an original word for friend, but I wonder if it had something to do with the concept of being free to make commitments to others, which is the essence of friendship. In these first forays into friendship, being a playmate is enough. Two or more children have freely entered into informal, often unspoken, and ever-evolving agreements with one another while engaging in a mutually satisfying activity or project.

As adults, we see friendship as something deeper, but this is where it begins. And part of this early learning about friendship is also learning that we are free to de-commit. On the playground, the commitment usually ends when the game at hand comes to a natural end or evolves into something else. Sometimes it ends as a kind of emotional eruption when one or more of them cross a boundary. Whatever the case, the old commitments are unmade and the moment of friendship is over. Ideally, feelings are not hurt, but often they are.

Friendship is something we enter into freely, but the flip-side is that we are also free to leave. Of course, as adults, we have much more experience with the complexities and layers of friendship, but in preschool friendship looks a lot like the ideals of classic anarchy, with everyone free to befriend, de-friend, and make new agreements with everyone else.

One of my best teachers when it came to early-years friendships was a girl named Katrina, a 3-year-old swimming lesson friend of Josephine's who then became a kindergarten classmate. One day I was driving the girls somewhere. Josephine was upset about a fellow classmate who had been "mean" to her. Katrina replied, "She's mean to me too. When she's nice to me, I play with her. When she's mean, I don't." Katrina's words have become a mantra in our family. Her straight-forward, simple statement fully embraces friendship, freedom, and boundaries. It includes the promise of friendship, the reality of challenges, and the expectation of reconciliation. Most of all, I admired the calm, matter-of-factness of how she said it.

We don't get to choose our family, but we do get to choose our friends, and the only way we learn to do this is by practicing. Through this we come to know that heartbreak is a part of both friendship and freedom, and that we protect ourselves with boundaries. And most of us, if we are lucky, will get to practice friendship every day of our lives.

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The "Science of Learning"

2026-05-05T06:26:00.000-07:00

Anthony James

Our theories of education generally rely upon the idea that learning is built upon learning; that we start with simpler things, foundational things, then, like with a building we construct learning brick upon brick.

I'm sure that learning happens in that way some of the time for some of us, but there is very little empirical evidence that this is how it works for most people most of the time. Indeed, despite marketing assertions to the contrary, there really is no "science of learning." Or rather, we are far from any kind of consensus on how humans learn. Any school that claims to be following the science doesn't understand science.

Science is an ongoing process, one that starts with a question to which there is not yet a satisfactory answer. We then form a hypothesis, test that hypothesis, draw conclusions, then send it all out into the world for others to test for themselves. There is no such thing as settled science. Sometimes, on some questions, there is a scientific consensus (for instance, around human impact of climate change or the overarching Theory of Evolution), and it behooves us to heed that consensus, but even that is subject to new theories.

That said, there is nothing even close to consensus around how humans learn and anyone who claims there is some sort of cookie cutter or system or step-by-step approach or scientific way of teaching or learning is a salesperson. Perhaps a well-intended salesperson, but a salesperson nevertheless.

I read extensively about things like the human brain, consciousness, cognitive psychology, physics, history, nature, and philosophy. I also read a lot of fiction and a little poetry. Not long ago, I met the head of neuroscience at a major university, who personally knew many of the authors of the books I've read. When I tried to engage him in conversation, he told me that much, if not most, of what we read about brain theory in books written for laypeople is already at least a decade out of date because the "science moves so fast."

I love that I can following along with the scientific process book after book, albeit a decade or more behind the professionals.

I read widely because often an idea from philosophy or poetry or physics or history will clarify or amplify or completely contradict what this or that other brilliant mind is proposing in a different area of study. I find myself drawn to scientific writers like Carlo Rovelli, one of the world's leading physicists, who can write, for instance, a book about white holes (the theoretical destiny of black holes) while weaving pertinent lines from Dante's Devine Comedy throughout the text. Not long ago, I read a book called Devine Fury: A History of Genius by historian Darrin McMahon in which he tells the story of how our definition of genius has evolved over the eons. It's an ongoing story that if we survive long enough to keep telling, will likely, one day, make future humans wonder what we ever saw in that misguided Einstein fellow.

The great wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote in his masterpiece A Sand County Almanac, "Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another." It's an idea that echoes Socrates' perfectly valid concern about the intellectual blindness that was sure to result from the introduction of the phonetic alphabet.

Nobel Prize winning author Doris Lessing wrote, "That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way." It's an idea that foretold the current theory that the vast majority of our thinking takes place beneath the level of our consciousness.

Many cognitive scientists, echoing the philosophical theories of Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, see long-term memory as the powerhouse of the brain, asserting that expansion of our long-term memory leads to an enlargement of our intelligence. Others point out that our memories tend to be wildly inaccurate and that, indeed, the more often we call upon a specific memory the more likely we are to alter it, often profoundly. This is why eye-witness court testimony can be quite unreliable or why when you meet an old friend after a long separation, you so often remember shared moments so differently.

Educators like Ivan Illich and John Holt assert that learning is "the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful activity" and that "(l)earning is the product of the activity of learners."

Neuroscientist Patrick House says that in the end we might well find that there are as many kinds of minds, as many kinds of consciousness, as there are humans. This would mean that the so-called "science of learning" is unique to each of us, and even that would likely change over time or be dependent upon what exactly is being learned. He writes, "Every brain has vastly more stores than all modern AIs and machines combined. Biology is messy at the level of its atomic and molecular happenings, but contained in all that messiness is a staggering amount of ways to be."

Technology is defined as the application of scientific principles for practical purposes. When someone asserts that their method or technique represents the "science of learning" what they are really saying is that they've invented something that helps some people, some of the time to learn certain things. This does not mean that it is the best way to learn something, just that they have a technology for sale that takes advantage of some narrow, and perhaps temporary, discovery of science. If it were truly the science of learning, it could not be packaged up and sold as a product because it would have to be updated and modified at the pace of not just brain science, but all other human disciplines as well.

At the end of the day, I'm a play-based educator because that is the lesson I've learned so far from science and history and fiction and philosophy. When we play, when we pursue our curiosity, when we ask our own questions and then go about answering them, we are engaging directly the great mystery of existence, playing with ideas for their season, following tunnels to see where they lead, finding ourselves in strange, uncomfortable places, then wiggling out of them again. A life of learning is the scientific process, lived by each individual amongst a universe of individuals who are engaged in their own scientific process.

As for the technologies of learning, engage them as you see fit. Play with them. Maybe you'll learn something from them, but know that there was a time when smoke signals, then the telegraph, was the most up-to-date form of communication. Play with them, learn from them, but never allow yourself to be trapped by them: they are technologies, after all, designed for profit, intended to make natural resources of everyone and everything they touch.

As the late, great folk singer and philosopher Utah Phillips said to a class of graduating university students, "They're about to tell you you're America's greatest natural resource . . . Run for the hills!" That's what I find myself wanting to do whenever I hear the phrase "the science of learning."

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Experiencing Reality Just as the Rest of Nature Does

2026-05-04T07:35:41.112-07:00

As a boy, the closer it got to Christmas, the slower the days would pass. We would say, "I can't wait!" barely able to contain the anticipation, but wait we did, finally awaking on the day of magic and presents.

My wife Jennifer and I recently spent a weekend in a place that is a two-and-a-half hour drive from our home. The 2.5 hours getting there seemed interminable, while the trip home, despite taking the exact same time on our clocks, just flew by.

Clock time and lived time are two different things. In his novel The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann writes of the difference between time lived upright and active (vertical time) as opposed to time lived simply lying about (horizontal time). When we're fully engaged in life, lived time tends to pass in the blink of an eye, yet upon reflection it, when we consider all that we've done, that same time feels long. On the other hand, life lived in the horizontal (like spending months in bed in a sanatorium as Mann's character Hans Castorp does in the novel) the days pass slowly, while in hindsight, they are a blur into almost no duration at all.

This feeling of duration is the lived experience of time. Clock time is different. For one thing, it's divided up into hours, minutes, and seconds. Scientists sometimes measure time in nanoseconds (one billionth of a second), but no matter how small the unit, the clock still creates the illusion that time passes in ticks and tocks rather than, as it we experience it, as a flow. Lived time is not granular. It's continuous, the past blending and shaping the present emerging moment. As philosopher Henri Bergson sees it, when we experience time as long or short, this felt difference is duration. Duration is tied to awareness. It's how reality unfolds for each individual, not how it's measured externally.

By now, most of us have heard the astounding news that the overwhelming majority of physicists are convinced that time is not a fundamental aspect of reality. The math tells them that there is no good reason why time should flow from past to future the way we experience it. They tell us that our experience of time is a psychological phenomenon rather than something real.

When we observe children at play, we are the ones watching the clock while the children are immersed in duration, an ever-emerging present in which time stretches, compresses, and flows. Nature does not create measuring tools, like clocks, only humans do; nature does not read measuring tools, only humans do. Clock time is an attempt to stand outside of the flow of lived time in order to measure it objectively. This is, of course, an absurdity: it presupposes the possibility of measuring time and reading measurements of time from the perspective of no where. This is an impossibility because we are always, inevitably, viewing reality from within reality, and that requires a perspective from somewhere.

And from within reality, time is experienced as duration.

Young children might look at the clock in imitation of our adult habits, but it has nothing to do with reality. They have not yet learned to perceive time as units to be managed, but rather they know it as a flow, thick with memory, imagination, and meaning. This is exactly what we witness in their play, time stretching, looping, and disappearing. This is why clock-based schedules are so difficult for so many young children. They have not learned the to obey this arbitrary measuring tool. It's why clean up time always comes too soon or lunchtime comes too late.

We adults, of course, live in a timetable world, one that is regulated by the myth of time as being comprised of discrete, consistent, replicable units. It's an illusion that our children will one day have to adopt, but just as preschoolers are typically not developmentally ready for literacy or math instruction, they are likewise not capable of stepping outside their lived experience of time as duration. This is why I urge early childhood educators to abandon clock-based schedules in favor of duration-based routines.

One of the joys of working with young children is this opportunity to spend our days living inside time's emergent now, something that can't be measured, only experienced. When we allow young children to lead us there, we are finally experiencing reality just as the rest of nature does. That's a gift young children give us.

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