They Don't Hate Education, Just School

Did you know that that there is no credible research, data or study that demonstrates a connection between high grades/high test scores and future success, let alone happiness? None. Try it. Go to your favorite search engine and type in any combination of words that might find this kind of information ("high grades," "happiness," "success," "data," "research," "evidence," etc.). You will find nothing supporting the "common knowledge" that academic success is connected to our children attaining the things we most want for them: happiness and success. You will, however, find thousands of links to evidence that there is no connection between traditional school success and life success, and that, in fact, focusing on grades and test scores is often the surest way to make a child unhappy and unsuccessful.

Okay, so we all know there is no overarching definition for important things like happiness or success, that we all must come to our own determination of what that means, right? You can use money, of course, and a lot of people like to use that as a kind of universal marker of success in life, although any thoughtful person, while not necessarily opposed to money, has a hard time equating money with happiness or even success. That said, there is some evidence out there that the further one goes in our educational system the higher one's income, but it's not connected to good grades or test scores, just to completing a course of study and holding a certain degree. And money still won't buy you love.

Our parent educators often start each school year by asking parents to think about their "goals" for their kids; what do they wish for their child in the coming 9 months. "Happiness" is on everyone's list. This is preschool, so no one ever includes "success," but probably the second most common hope is that one's child "learns to love school," which, I think, most of us see as laying the groundwork for future academic success.

For the most part, children learn to love preschool, at least the way we do it at Woodland Park with our play-based curriculum. Children get to freely explore and experiment with their physical and social world, which is exactly how humans are designed to learn -- at any age. There are no lessons they must learn, nor tests they must pass. Simply by playing with their world, interacting with the other people, following their own inclinations and interests, they learn everything they need to know. And they love it because who doesn't love freedom?

Most go on to love kindergarten as well, where things might be bit more locked down, but there's still ample time to play. However, as time goes on many love it less and less.

I recently got to spend time with a couple of my former students, alone, out of earshot of anyone. One is now a middle schooler and the other is entering third grade. They both informed me that they "hate school," the older girl going on to elaborate exactly what it is she hates about school: "Our math class is 50 minutes long. The teacher spends the first 30 minutes talking about our homework from last night, then 20 minutes assigning our homework for the next night. Then class is over." She attends what is considered to be the top public middle school in the city. Her younger brother was more succinct, "We don't get to do anything we want to do, just stuff we don't want to do."

Children don't like school because they love freedom. We are biologically driven to learn, but we are not biologically driven to learn on command. We are not biologically driven to stuff our brains with things about which we have no curiosity. Yet that's what school is for most children: going to a place in which they have few if any choices, where everything is done according to rules and schedules in which they have no say, and then being judged by a system of grades and tests that have no connection to the rest of their lives.

And we somehow expect this to lead to happiness and success. We don't need education reform. We need to re-think schools entirely. We need to stop teaching children and let the children teach themselves. They don't hate education, they just hate school.

(While spending my morning trying the internet searches I described in the first paragraph, I came across Peter Gray's blog on the Psychology Today website. Gray is a research professor of psychology at Boston College, a specialist in developmental and evolutionary psychology, and author of an introductory textbook, Psychology. I spent a lot of time going through his archives, which is why this Sunday morning post is later than normal. In additional to the one I linked to above, here are a couple more you might like to see: "The Human Nature of Teaching III: When Is Teaching an Act of Aggression?", "Children Educate Themselves II: We All Know That’s True for Little Kids," "Children Educate Themselves IV: Lessons from Sudbury Valley.")

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"We Don't Starve To Prepare For A Famine"

On Wednesday, I wrote about the most common non-education question people have had for me as an American when I've travelled outside the country. Perhaps the most common education-related question is some version of, "How do children from play-based preschools fare when they transition to traditional public schools?"

I also answer that question several times a year here at Woodland Park. People worry that their child, accustomed to the freedom to choose, to explore, to experiment, to play as her passions and interests guide her, will struggle when faced with the prospect of being told what to do while sitting at a desk, facing forward, taking tests, and filling out worksheets.

Of course, many of our families seek out "alternative schools," ones that offer a play-based, or inquiry-based, or project-based, or child-lead curriculum. We are lucky here in Seattle to be home to several such schools, including even a couple very good cooperative primary schools (here and here) where many of our former students matriculate. But the truth is that most families opt for our public schools.

One of the wonderful aspects of teaching in a cooperative school in which teachers form such close bonds with parents is that many of them stay in touch, sometimes for years after their child has moved on. Over my dozen years of sending children off to public schools, a couple of them have indeed struggled, but that seems pretty much par for the course; some children will always have problems with change whatever their educational background. In the overwhelming majority of cases, however, our alumni children thrive in kindergarten and beyond, often returning to tell me that "kindergarten is better than preschool," which is exactly as it ought to be.

One thing working in our favor is that, around here at least, the kindergarten teachers, for the most part, do understand that they are dealing with 5-year-olds: they are unimpressed by early reading, they know young children need to move their bodies, and they do what they can to make school ready for the kids, rather than expecting the kids to be ready for school. I have been told by a number of public school kindergarten teachers that, at most, they hope their incoming students can write their own name, count to 10, and cut with scissors. I've never met a child without learning disabilities who doesn't have that sorted out by five, and most are well beyond this.

But more to the point, the experience of a play-based curriculum, one that honors children as complete human beings, fully capable of embracing their own education in their own way, produces children who are highly flexible and adaptable, who have a joyful approach toward school, who know intrinsically what they need in order to learn, and understand, therefore, how they ought to be treated in order to make that happen.

One of the few instances of Woodland Park grads who "hated" kindergarten were a boy and girl who wound up in class together. They told me, "Mrs. B-- is mean. She's always bossing us around and yelling at us. She doesn't know how to be a teacher." It didn't surprise me when this teacher was fired. I'm sure there were other complaints about her because the bar for dismissing a tenured teacher is, as it should be, quite high, but I'm incredibly proud of these kids who would not put up with what they saw as abusive, incompetent behavior. I just saw the boy yesterday and he's now a second grader who told me he "likes school," but says he could "love it" with just a few alterations which he gladly detailed for me on his fingers. Children who are introduced to school through a play-based education know what real learning looks like, and, I would assert, tend to know that they have both a right and responsibility, when faced with things that doesn't serve this, to try to affect change. They view teachers not as superiors, but as their educational partners, which is, after all, the proper stance of a student toward his teacher. Good teachers know this and thankfully most of the kindergarten teachers I've met around here are good teachers.

All I have, of course, are anecdotes that come from my informal "study" of how our kids do in the wider world of education, but from where I sit, they certainly do no worse, and often better, than kids who have already been drilled-and-killed in "academic" preschools. I used to think it was my job to get kids ready for a less-than-ideal educational future, but no longer. Play is the best way to get ready for anything life has to offer.

Yesterday, reader Dawn sent me an email, which read, in part:

Many years ago, I was wondering how to prepare kindergarteners who were accustomed to Project Approach for the transition to public school. I fretted that we may be doing harm by not getting them "ready" for this very different style of school . . . Sydney Guerwitz Clemons wisely told me: "We don't starve to prepare for a famine, Dawn. We fatten them up to the best of our ability and hope they survive."

Exactly. I will be using this line the next time someone asks me the question, which will probably be tomorrow.

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The Myth Of Bootstraps

Sixteen years ago my wife and I considered ourselves the kind of people who would have a wine cellar. We were motivated in no small part by the fact that we'd just purchased a home with your classic cool, dark basement, ignoring the fact that I don't drink wine and she sticks almost exclusively to a few brands of chardonnay. Since there were already shelves built into the space, I ran out and purchased a classic Ikea do-it-yourself "system," which we filled, over years, with bottles of wine people gave us as gifts and that we would likely never drink.

Fortunately, I work in a profession in which nothing need ever go to waste, so when we moved out of that house, the wine rack parts found their way to the preschool where they now serves as a building set.

The system is simple: hexagonal prisms that are about a foot long with each end drilled with four holes into which wooden pegs fit. They can be inserted by hand, but we like to use rubber mallets at the work bench. 

They're an imperfect system, especially when using the mallets. If you hit too hard, your entire structure might collapse like a house of cards. The same goes for if you don't brace the whole thing against the work bench, which makes it a perfect thing for tinkering around, especially with an adult there to lend a hand. This can be a frustrating system to work with, I know, I've cobbled them together before and repaired them frequently over the years. Few preschool-aged children are able to manage it without an adult hand here or there. In fact, I've come to realize that it's the kind of challenge that is almost rigged for young children to fail unless they have a helping hand.

Alfie Kohn has an excellent piece up over at Huffington Post about the myth that children today are too coddled and that they "benefit from plenty of bracing experiences with frustration and failure." 

Research certainly doesn't support the idea that failure or disappointment is constructive in itself. A "BGUTI" (better get used to it) rationale -- the assumption that children are best prepared for unpleasant experiences that may come later by being exposed to a lot of unpleasantness while they're young -- makes no sense from a psychological perspective. We may want kids to rebound from failure, but that doesn't mean it's usually going to happen -- or that the experience of failure makes that desired outcome more likely . . . In fact, studies find that when kids fail, they tend to construct an image of themselves as incompetent and even helpless, which leads to more failure. (They also come to prefer easier tasks and lose interest in whatever they're doing.)

When children come to our workbench, indeed when they freely chose to approach any activity in our school, the emphasis is on "tinkering," not success or failure, not reward (good grade) or punishment (bad grade), not product but process. When a child is challenged by the process of fitting two pieces together, the adult's role isn't to keep their "eye on the prize," but rather to "notice" or narrate the process in which the child is engaging. The goal of struggle is not to overcome, but to gather data:

Jerome Bruner said this: We want students to "experience success and failure not as reward and punishment but as information."

Most children get to a point when working with this impromptu building set when they need help to do what they want, an extra hand to hold something, a few words of strategic counsel. This isn't, of course, an invitation for the adult to take over, nor a sign of having been coddled, but rather a natural human response to a situation that is too many or too much for them. When a child asks for help with this building set, it is a request to provide support for their exploration. Often the request for help is very clear and specific, "Will you hold this for me?" an acknowledgment that she knows exactly what she thinks she needs to get to where she wants to go. Other times it's less clear, perhaps a groan of frustration or an "I can't do it!" In this case, we engage in a discussion about the nature of the challenge, my "help" coming in the form of helping the child simply formulate his request for help. Often that alone allows a child to see his way through to a solution. Sometimes I find I need to make suggestions (e.g., "If someone held that part, you might be able to do it.") or simply make statements of fact (e.g., "If you hit right here, the peg will go in the hole.")  

I have no formula to tell adults when and how to provide help. It always comes down to the child and the situation. Sometimes, as my friend and parent educator Janet Lansbury suggests, it's totally appropriate to say, "I won't help you, but I won't let you get hurt," but learning how to ask for help, learning to know when to ask for help, is as vital to "success" (however you define it) as anything else one needs to learn.

Part of what Kohn is writing about in his piece is what I call "The Myth of Boot Straps." It's a common theme that runs throughout public debate these days, one that implies that everyone can just pull themselves up by their own boot straps if only they apply themselves, stick to it, work harder. It's part of the mythology of the "self made man"; that it's a sign of weakness to ask for help.

What people have forgotten in this neo-Calvinist ideology is that "to pull one's self up by one's bootstraps" is a metaphor for an impossible task. It's an absurdity. Everyone needs help. If you're stuck in the mud, no amount of pulling at your own bootstraps is going to get you out. Learning when and how to ask for help is a vital life skill, because mythology aside, no one does it on his own.

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The Albatross Flight Trainer

Niki Buchan and I had a day off in Auckland, New Zealand last week, so we took a walk down to the harbor area where we came across a piece of public art called "Albatross Trainer" by artist Greer Twiss.  I'll admit to not reading the "artist's statement" which was on a nearby plaque because, quite frankly, as an artist myself, I tend to believe that the artist has already made his statement with his artwork. Figuring out what it's all about is up to the rest of us.

This piece made me sad, to be honest, seeing a great bird strapped to a flight trainer like this, as if mankind, in our hubris, thinks we can somehow improve upon nature's plans for teaching an albatross to fly. I mean, we need flight trainers for human pilots because, of course, we were not all born to fly, but to suggest a bird needs this kind of help is a kind of tragic ridiculousness, something we see far too often when it comes to young children. I couldn't help but think of a comment Niki had made earlier in the day: "People in offices keep writing curricula and the kids keep learning the way they always have -- by playing."

It's crazy, all these folks trying to sell us on products or methods or systems designed to "help" children do things like stand or sit or walk or talk or read or count, things they do as naturally as an albatross flies. I mean, there are literally dozens of types "walk trainers" out there for our babies. Really? There are devices designed to help babies sit up before their muscles are even close to being ready. Is this really a problem? Is there an epidemic of babies not learning to walk or sit up by themselves? Of course not; every normal baby already learns these things without any help from any kind of "trainer" other than, you know, the world in which they find themselves living. By the same token, do we really need "cute" apps to teach children "counting and language skills," which is a direct quote from just about every spam email I receive these days? Do we honesty believe we can improve upon talking with children and giving them time and space to play, which is the way nature has always taught foundational counting and language skills? I guarantee there will never be an app that can do a better job than that. Do we need written programs for what and how we expect young children to learn, devised by people who clearly have no how idea how they themselves learned the important things they know? Of course not. People in offices keep writing curricula and the kids keep learning the way they always have -- by playing.

We spend billions of dollars on these things every year, these albatross flight trainers, to which we strap the wings of children. 

Beside this grounded albatross, the artist has mounted a half dozen others on steel poles, awkwardly flying overhead, if you can all it flying. There is none of the grace or magic in these hobbled sea birds than there is in an actual bird in flight, although I suppose, if you squint and forget what it ought to look like, you can say, "Hey, look! They're flying!" much in the way parents enthuse that Junior learned his A-B-C's or shapes or colors from an iPhone. You can call it learning, I suppose, but it comes at an enormous cost both in dollars and opportunity, as well as, tragically, freedom.

Children are born not only ready to learn, but knowing how and what to learn. They may well, if they know nothing else, be made to willingly put their wings to a trainer, if only to please their task-master because they do seek to please, but it's only when we finally take them off that a child can really learn to fly.

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Letters And Numbers Everywhere

Even before a child has spent a second in our classroom, their parents have heard me at least twice warn them, "We do not push letters or numbers at Woodland Park." In fact, I usually emphatically say that I will not intentionally bring letters or numbers into the classroom unless the children themselves compel me to it.

Of course, my point is that we make no overt efforts to teach them to read, or even identify their letters or numbers for that matter, we'll let their kindergarten teachers deal with that, but it's an impossible promise to keep. For one thing, most of the 2-year-olds come in already knowing that ubiquitous A-B-C song and they obsessively count everything, so there's that.

But making it even more difficult to keep my word is our school's commitment to reusing and recycling. Those darn things all have letters and numbers on them and the kids are forever pointing them out, saying things like, "That's my letter! G!" or "That's the number 2!" Arg! What do I look like, your kindergarten teacher?

If you look carefully, and children do, you'll see letters and numbers everywhere. The kids even ask me sometimes what the words mean as if they're somehow driven to figure out the strange symbolic codes of their fellow human beings.

Naturally, I blame society for its obsession with labeling everything, printing Diet Coke . . . or Miracle-Gro . . . 

. . . or Brown Cow . . . 

. . . or whatever on our upcycled "toys."

Heck, the parents even label their kids with words and numbers.

I suppose I could deal with it if the world would limit itself to these external labels, but really, shouldn't the insides of machines be safe havens? You might have to look closely, but they've managed to sneak a 4-9-5 in there, thinking the kids wouldn't notice. Shame on them!

You would think that gardens, at least, would be a place to escape these words and numbers, but no.

They even sneak words onto the garden spades!

I often come across articles about how to make a preschool classroom into a "literacy rich environment." Where are the articles about how to banish literacy? That's what I'd like to know. Every time I turn around, there they are, letters and numbers and words all chock-a-block with meaning.

And kids interacting with them, fiddling around, unlocking their secret abstract meanings in the course of their play.

I want to do it the pedagogically correct way as a preschool teacher, leaving these things out of the classroom until the kids are developmentally ready for them, but it's too many and too much for me. The minimum they could do is avoid putting letters and numbers on things that children find exciting or interesting.

Believe me, the undersides of these vintage Matchbox cars are riddled with

vital information about their makes and models that kids 

are always trying to decipher -- truly aggravating!

Yeah sure, sometimes we need to use a few letters for things like documenting our classroom rules . . .

. . . or recording thoughts for posterity . . .

And, yes, newspaper with all its thousands of tiny words and numbers really is the best, least expensive paper mache material.

And the burlap from discarded coffee bags is useful in all kinds of contexts.

All of these things, naturally, kind of throw letters and numbers into the faces of the kids, but I'm hoping these types of utilitarian accidents of literacy education are more than compensated for by my rigorous efforts on other fronts, although I despair.

They appear like magic.

They hide and turn themselves upside down.

They manage to inject themselves onto those fragile brains from every angle and during every moment of the day. Printed, typeset, handwritten, uppercase, lowercase, they're all there all the time.

I do my best to make our school a letter and number-free zone, but I'm just one man.

Why can't they just stay in books where they belong?

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!

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