Play, Not Work, Sets Us Free

"Adolescence" was invented in the mid-1800's by the warlike Prussian nation. They had just suffered a humiliating military defeat at the hands of Napoleon and felt their downfall was due, at least in part, to their soldiers not being obedient enough. Some had even run away at the prospect of dying for their nation.

Part of their plan to create a more loyal and malleable population was the invention of schools. As Tyson Yunkaporta writes in his book Sand Talk, the idea was to slow the "transition from childhood to adulthood, so that it would take years rather than, for example, the months it takes in Indigenous rites of passage." The goal was to "create a permanent state of childlike compliance in adults," so they designed schools around the same methods used to break horses and other domestic animals: separating the young from their parents, confining them in enclosed spaces, limiting access to their natural habitat, and using rewards and punishments to force compliance with meaningless tasks. This Prussian method of compliance-based schooling was a boon for both for the military as well as the economy, which is why it became the foundation for most of what passes for education in the industrialized world today.

Shockingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the Prussian slogan for their educational system was Arbiet macht frei (Work sets you free), which was infamously employed a century later at the gates of Nazi concentration camps.

We tell children they can grow up to be anything they want to be. We say it even though we know it's a lie. Most of us do not get to be whatever we want to be. We say it, however, because others have said it to us. We say it because we don't want to crush their little spirits with the truth that work is in their future. We say it because it the is one of the mantras we use to inspire them to keep their noses to the grindstone. Oh sure, we allow them to play at being artists, dancers, princesses, and athletes, but only while they are very young. Soon enough, and in some cases even during their preschool years, we begin to pressure them, both subtly and not-so-subtly to at least prepare a "fall back plan," like accounting or computer science. 

I imagine there are some readers here who are thinking, "But, Teacher Tom, you can be anything you want to be. You only have to work hard enough and never give up." How is that different than Arbiet macht frei?

It wasn't that long ago that US Secretary of Education Migual Cardona sent a message from an official social media account: "Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow's global workforce." People try to tell me that today's schools are nothing like the old Prussian model, but even our top education policymaker seems to disagree. We are here, it seems, to serve the economy, not the other way around. Arbiet macht frei?

Yunkaporta points out that the word "work" does not even exist in many Indigenous languages. Indeed, the "work" his people did do prior to colonization was confined to a couple hours a day and was comprised of things many of us now do as a break from work like gardening, cooking, hunting, hiking, camping, tinkering, and fishing. They spent the rest of their time building relationships, making art, dancing, playing games (almost always cooperative), telling stories, and making music. Indeed, they spent their time doing the very things that our youngest children do when left alone to be whatever they want to be -- not when they grow up, but right now. Play, not work, sets us free.

In many ways, "You can be anything you want" is just the contemporary version of Arbiet macht frei. In many ways, our complaints about children being distracted, not staying on task, and only wanting to play video games all day, are the very complaints the colonizers had about Indigenous people they encountered around the globe. And just as we did with those populations, we are doing to our children, generation after generation. No wonder societal change is nearly impossible. No wonder the rich keep getting richer. No wonder inequality of one kind just morphs into inequality of another. We are taught that a life of work will somehow set us free, when all it really does is sustain the economy.

You might ask: But what can we do about it? After all, this is the way it is. Certainly, we can't tell our children to just stop working. Believe me, I get that. I've spent well over two decades trying to get people to see that there is a better, more democratic, more equitable, and more human way to do school; that play, not work, is the secret to a population of critical thinkers instead of obedient drones. And I'm not the only one. Yet it doesn't seem we've moved the needle very much, except perhaps in some small corners where play is nurtured and protected like an endangered species. 

And that's what we can do. The Prussian model seeks to create a population for whom work, no matter how mind-numbing or back-breaking, is the only hope. That's why they try to inspire us with the promise of a freedom that will never come. When we keep play alive in our own lives, in the lives of our children, even if it is just in the nooks and crannies, we are creating real hope for freedom. If you are reading this, you are probably one of those people keeping play alive. In this world, play is the one thing that can give us genuine hope. It is the only path to freedom. And that is why play is the greatest threat to the status quo.

It's play, not work, that will set us free.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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.

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!

Last Minute Gift Ideas!

We've been bombarded with "last minute" gift idea promotions since at least mid-November, but now, finally, the last minute is truly upon us. As a public service I offer Teacher Tom's last minute gift ideas for children, most of which won't even require a trip to a mall or an Amazon delivery.

Mesh produce bags.

Things that rot.

A place to leave things to rot . . .

. . . and worms to live there.

Sticks.

An old typewriter.

Concrete.

Dominoes.

Tape.

Sand.

Blocks.

Hammers.

Drills.

Boxes and balls.

Nuts, bolts, wrenches and screwdrivers . . .

. . . rubber bands . . .

. . . and put them all together.

Glue guns.

Cars.

Dolls . . .

. . . who need bandages.

Shipping pallets.

Rocks.

Water, gutters, tubes and shovels.

Paint.

Yarn.

Step ladders . . .

. . . and homemade ladders.

Tree parts.

Ropes.

Buckets.

Plants.

Junk . . .

 . . . and jewels.

Happy holidays!

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 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.

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!

What if the Goal of Education Was to Support Each Child in the Project of Coming Alive?

For the past week, I've been promoting the Fall 2024 cohort of my 6-week foundational course, Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning. Well, that's coming to an end. You have until midnight tonight to register (see below) . . . My greatest wish for every child who has ever come my way -- and every adult for that matter -- is that they find their purpose in life. What if we understood this to be the goal of education: to support each child in the project of coming alive?

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Only Happy Ending

Last week on my social media pages, I asked for readers to describe the summer breaks of their childhood.

It's a question I've asked adults in various forms over the course of the last couple decades, sometimes asking it as "What are your fondest memories of childhood? or "Describe a beautiful moment from your childhood." Sometimes I've even asked it as "What from your own childhood do you wish the children in your life could experience."

"We were feral children," replied one commenter, going on to describe summers during which she would ride her bike "much farther" than her mother allowed, going to shops, getting to know the neighbors, exploring a "haunted house," mucking about in drainage ditches, and generally getting up to mischief.

"Our only instructions were to stay out of trouble and be home before the street lights came on," wrote another. "We drank out of garden hoses and used library, park & rec bathrooms or even peed under a tree!"

And yet another wrote, "(I) spent my summers in the woods of Maine with a large group of cousins. We were allowed to be in the house when it rained and when we ate. The rest of the time we were outside."

Nearly every response involved being outside, unsupervised by adults, with other children, and sweeps of time during which to play. Bicycles featured prominently. Aside from that, the only toys that came up with any frequency were dolls and balls. And almost everyone who went into any detail mentioned doing things of which the adults would have disapproved, often involving risk . . . Outdoors, unsupervised, in the company of other children, with lots of time, few toys, and risk: this is the stuff of our beautiful childhood moments, our summers.

Yes, there were a number of broken bones and other injuries mentioned, even "crimes" (breaking into an abandoned -- "haunted" -- house). A few people said that they were expected to work during the summer months, either to supplement the family income or because their parents felt that summer jobs built character and fostered independence. Many described going elsewhere, spending weeks or months with relatives on farms, at the shore, in the woods, or other "wild places." Others fondly recall reading "lots of books" of their own choosing, making things with their own hands, and growing and eating vegetables and fruits that they then ate right from the garden.

Many responders took the opportunity to bemoan the plight of today's children who have virtually no opportunity for unsupervised play, let alone outdoors, who are heavily scheduled,  and who have never experienced going up and down the street knocking on doors to see who else could come out to play. We blame the economy. We blame screens. We blame fear -- of injury, liability, and crime. Several readers would let their children roam more freely, but are afraid that the authorities will crack down on them. More fear.

At the same time, there is a mountain of evidence that what children need more than anything else -- for their mental, physical, and intellectual health -- is exactly what our summer memories revealed: lots of unstructured time, outdoors, with other children, and yes, risk. These are not just "beautiful" experiences we are recalling, but rather formative ones. This is where we learned resilience and independence, where we developed confidence, and how we came to respect what parent educator and Teacher Tom's Podcast guest Maggie Dent calls "natural consequences." It is simply not an accident that today's children are facing, simultaneously, both a mental and physical health crisis. Childhood anxiety, depression, and obesity are the "natural consequences" of this accidental experiment we are performing on a whole generation. The lessons learned by these kinds of formative experiences are passivity, dependence, insecurity, and a general disconnect from the real world of cause-and-effect.

In a nutshell, we've gone from a world in which adults said, "You're driving me crazy, go outside," to one in which they say, "You're driving me crazy, go watch a show."

I'm encouraged by the number of responders who said they were doing everything they could to provide their own children with at least modicum of independence and risk. It's still possible, even if it isn't the same.

Next week, we will be opening registration for the 2024 cohort for my 6-week course, Teacher Tom's Risky Play, which could have just as easily been called Teacher Tom's Summer Play. In this course, we explore how to negotiate the modern world, its fears and challenges, and still provide the children in our lives with the kind of formative experiences they need for mind, body, and soul. This is for educators and parents. When we offered this course last year, several groups took it together as a way to spark conversations in their community (school, neighborhood) about why and how more risk and independence is good for kids, even if it does mean an uptick in mischief.

Author Ray Bradbury is mostly known as a writer of science fiction, but his book Dandelion Wine is one of the most realistic, even if fictionalized, memoirs I've ever read. It takes place during an idyllic, small town summer in the 1950's, centering around independent children living in their world. The adults are present, sometimes important, but mostly on the periphery. It's amber-ized, of course, nostalgic in the way memories become as we reach a certain age, but Bradbury parts the curtain to glimpses of danger, even horror, failure, disappointment, and sorrow, which are all part of the beautiful whole of childhood. It's an evocation of the kind of authentic childhood in which resilience, confidence, compassion, and heartbreak, not mere endless, joyful days, are the result.

As we Americans head into our Independence Day celebrations, I'll leave you with words from Bradbury's protagonist Douglas giving the advice of his experience to his younger brother: "You just won't admit you like crying too. You cry just so long and everything's fine. And there's your happy ending. And you're ready to go back out and walk around with folks again." This is the lesson of resilience that cannot be learned without the freedom to take risks, experience failure, then figuring out how to get back up to walk around with folks again. At the end of the day, that is the only happy ending.

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 In my 6-week course Teacher Tom's Risky Play, we will take a deep-dive into what means to trust children, to stand back, and explore what tools we need to keep children safe while also setting them free to become the kind of resilient people the world needs. This course is about us as adults as much as the children. We will begin registration for the 2024 cohort for this course in the coming days. To learn more and to get on the waitlist, click here.

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