The long-term effects of the things we do to children in schools is a notoriously difficult thing to capture in research. Generally speaking, however, we as a society have concluded, based on our collective behavior and with little evidence, that more academic training at earlier ages is the way to go. We assume that if we want kids to be good at school (a dubious goal at best) then we must give them lots of practice in preschool, which has lead in recent decades to two-year-olds being expected to sit at desks to be the targets of formal literacy and mathematics training. It has lead ..read more

Several years ago, I had an aisle seat on a flight from Perth to Sydney in Australia. To my right, in the center and window seats, sat two sisters, 7 and 9, whose parents were in the row in front of us. I'd offered to exchange seats with one of the adults, but they, to my delight, waved me off. I might be the only airline passenger who hopes to be seated next to kids, even fussy babies, and in this case the girls were electric with their excitement. They told me they had never been to Sydney before. They were only staying for a day, then jetting on to a resort somewhere in the South P ..read more

When we moved into our new home, I found a stack of notepads in a kitchen drawer. The former owners must have been card players, bridge players I'm guessing, because the notepads feature a fan of playing cards along the upper edge of each page. For the past year and a half I've been using this paper for making our grocery lists. The note pad sits on my counter all day long with a pen that bears the logo of the Triangle Tavern in Seattle where a waiter once suggested I order their chicken Caesar, but to ask for the spicy chicken and extra parmesan. Every time I pick up that pen to write ..read more

There is a new nature preserve near my home. I was told by a naturalist working on the project that it will one day be "a world class" place that will attract people from around the globe. Right now, however, it's just a former golf course that's being allowed (with assistance) to revert to something like its former state.  The same hopeful naturalist told me that he estimates that 80 percent of the current flora is invasive. "We'll never get rid of all of it," he shrugged, "but if we can get it down to 20 percent I'll be happy." He didn't hazard a guess about the percentage of ..read more

In this world of trends, I'm probably already too late, but I've been reading about the so-called TikTok protests being staged by students across the UK. In schools around the nation, teenaged students are, en mass, engaging in flipping their desks, shaking fences, walking out, and refusing to enter the school building. They're called TikTok protests because they're being organized through the social media platform. Ostensibly, these protests are about locked toilet doors. High school toilets, of course, have a storied reputation as a place to get away with stuff. The hit song "Smoki ..read more

The two of them, a boy and a girl, built a wall. They had the entire checker board rug to themselves, they had all the baby wipe box blocks to themselves, and they decided together to build a wall to, in their words, "keep the others out." The goal was to build it so high that "no one could get over" and for quite some time no one even tried. They used all the blocks and had all that space. A classmate finally came to examine the wall. "It's a wall to keep people out," they said, "You can step over it and come in." When that first friend accidentally kicked part of the wall do ..read more

It recently occurred to me that I've done the Hokey Pokey on four continents. Impressive, no? This may not make me the world's leading expert on the classic song and dance, nor does it necessarily mean that I believe that that's what it's all about, but it does give me, shall we say, authority to speak to its variations. In the UK and Australia they call it the Hokey Cokey. In some places, I've even heard it as Hokey Tokey. An Icelandic friend informed me that they learned it as Boogie Woogie.  The basic idea of the song and dance tends to hold true across borders, with everyon ..read more

There was a tree on the playground with an angled trunk. Every now and then, the kids would challenge themselves by climbing up it. There are no branches on this trunk, no reliable hand-holds, so they never made it very far before reaching the limit of their courage. Some of them would stop themselves only inches off the ground, essentially standing on an exposed root. Yet all of them, almost without exception, would call out, "Look at me!" in celebration of their act of courage.  Socrates, Plato, Aristotle the rest of the founding philosophers of Western culture were deeply conc ..read more

One of the great "lies" in all of literature is William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies. For those unfamiliar with it (and I can hardly believe there are many over the age of about 35) it's the story of a group of British school boys who find themselves castaways, without adults, on a tropical island. Their efforts to form a society, however, fall apart as they succumb to their essential evil natures becoming brutish murderers, saved when adults in the form of the British navy arrive, drawn by the smoke from a fire the boys have set that is consuming the island. I'm not sayi ..read more

"You're going to be okay," her mother cooed, but the girl wasn't so sure. She clung to mommy's knees, watching the room uncertainly. This wasn't her first time at school. This three-year-old had been coming for a couple months, but today was the day her mother wasn't staying with her. In a cooperative preschool, parents are welcome, even encouraged, to attend alongside their children whenever and for as long as they, as a family, choose. This was the day that mom had an appointment she couldn't miss. They had been discussing it for weeks, including me, the teacher, in their preparat ..read more