CHAPTER THREE

Natural Born Artists

The Creative Powers of Childhood

Four-and-a-half-year-old Trevor was one of my most memorable preschoolers. He always kept a vivid monologue going as he drew the pictures he liked to give as presents to his teachers and classmates. At the easel, Trevor would slather his arms in yellow paint, like a pair of kitchen gloves that stopped just before the elbow, and his artistic style was a big garish crime scene of color on a page.

One day, I observed Trevor as he pressed a chubby red crayon rhythmically into a piece of white construction paper, endlessly circling his page until the blank canvas was full. There was no identifiable form to his creation—none of the classic developmental stages of figurative drawing I would expect from a child of his age: neckless mommies with triangle dresses and giant eyelashes or baby siblings with snowballs for feet. Only a swath of saturated red color.

Trevor had so little control of his crayon that the paper ripped in places from his intense pressure. He stopped calmly to repair the torn corners with a stapler. “These are bones and tendons,” he breezily informed me as he pointed to the little metal slashes. By any objective standard, Trevor’s fine motor skills were delayed, and some teachers might have flagged his emotional intensity, too. But I just smiled. I’d been recording his behavior and conversation for a while, and I had all the reassurance I needed that he was just fine.

Before I’d taught preschool, Trevor’s creations might have worried me a bit. I knew from my graduate work in child development that, by age four, children are supposed to be making simple, representative drawings. Sometimes, Trevor would carefully annotate his pictures with a dense forest of scribbles around the perimeter of the splat. He was a verbally precocious child who worked with purpose and energy. While Trevor rarely bothered to write letters of the alphabet properly, which most of his peers embraced eagerly as a marker of being a big kid, he was interested in writing in his own way and he’d happily decipher his “words” if you asked.

When I asked Trevor to tell me about the blood-red disaster scene on the page, this is what he described:

Trevor: This is Tyrannosaurus Rex meat and you better watch out ’cause it’s not a-stinct! [sic] Yeah . . . it’s real blood! These are the bones and the tendons. And the T. rex is a meat eater and he’s kind of the BAD guy and he’s going to chase everyone ’cuz I’m always fighting the T-Rex in my room and it’s got a big head with teeth that got dug up by a . . . a . . . scientist who’s gonna give me and my brother some bones and some tools to uh . . . uh . . . like you have to go really slowly and R-E-A-L-L-Y careful with the tools so you don’t um . . . cut the tooth off and then it’s gonna bleed all over everywhere, well, actually there’s not so much blood in the ground anymore when you are digging, but they become, like, fossils, that are like rocks, and, um, but they’re really really old dead bodies stuck in there! And we saw it in a museum. Mommy showed me the um . . . the guy who . . . um . . . um . . . he is like the guy who . . . well, I’m not exactly sure . . .

Me: It sounds like you’re talking about a scientist who learns about dinosaurs and digs up their bones? That’s called a paleon-tolo-gist.

Trevor: Yeah! That’s what I mean. He’s a paleontologist and that’s what I’m going to do before I hunt all the T. rexes and scare my little brother with the dinosaurs I got under my bed. I got the meat eaters and the ones that don’t eat meat like the apatosaurus and the brachiosaurus and the one that looks like . . . um . . . like a (laughs loudly) . . . like a chicken! Wait I don’t know if that’s a carnivore one. I have to check in my dinosaur books. Snakes and reptiles and stuff are meat eaters too. My daddy found a big black snake called a corn snake at my house and it is living in the stone wall near our house and Daddy is a really, really big man so he was going to catch it and put it in a bag and maybe cut it in half with a big knife or a big axe or something and then the corn snake bit Daddy on the ankle last night really really bad on his ankle bone and there was blood everywhere through the bones and I was screaming I was so scared so Mommy called the ambulance drivers to get Daddy.

Me: Trevor, that sounds very scary. I’m not sure if you are telling me a pretend story right now about the snake or if this part of the story is real.

Trevor: Yeah, yeah! It’s real. For real! And the snakes eat everything like you know corn and rats and frogs and they’re gonna have this HUGE battle with the T. rex and my brother is going to laugh so hard at the snakes and the T. rexes fighting but I’m gonna really scare him when I get home.

Look at the incredible trove of information Trevor has given us about his thinking process from one simple, open-ended prompt. I was able to see from his enthusiasm that Trevor has spent a lot of time pondering dinosaurs, which tells a teacher he can focus, develop a fund of knowledge, and delve into topics over a period of days or weeks, all important skills for academic success. Trevor is able to categorize things by different attributes, understanding the difference between meat eaters and non-meat eaters and recognizing that there is something a little off (and thus funny) about a dinosaur that looks like a chicken. He also understands more general taxonomy, i.e., that snakes are distantly related to dinosaurs. This ability to discriminate and categorize is an important precursor to mathematical learning and other analytic tasks. We can see signs of Trevor’s well-developed vocabulary and oral fluency, as well, in his use of the words “ankle bone,” “apatosaurus,” “scientist,” “corn snake,” and “carnivore,” but it’s also apparent that he makes age-appropriate syntactical and grammatical errors. (An astute teacher might file this transcription as a sample to compare to language development later in the year.)

I noticed that Trevor was able to repeat back without error the word prompt of “paleontologist,” suggesting good phonological awareness, the ability to hear small units of sound, which is an important building block for reading. I was also struck by his vivid and imaginative use of language and the way he moved seamlessly between fantasy and real life, bookending corn snake facts with wildly implausible drama about the ambulance and snake-dinosaur showdown. This tells me that Trevor might need some help distinguishing fantasy and reality, or he may be basically cognizant of the difference but not sure how to navigate the in-between space, where many young children this age like to reside. A teacher can do a lot to guide a child through the continuum of real and pretend.

Trevor’s working memory is apparent in the way he draws on previous knowledge and experience, such as the word “a-stinct” (extinct) to prove the veracity of his story, or when he recalls his trip to the museum where he learned about paleontology. A teacher can see that he is an active participant in his learning and already has a good grounding in common knowledge. But he also has some misconceptions—typical for his age—such as bleeding “through the bones” and so on. Trevor also incorporates his parents into his real and pretend stories, suggesting a securely attached child.

An exchange like this one provides an opportunity to check in with the parents about his fantasy life and also to share some of his impressive cognitive skills with them—something all parents enjoy. It might also be useful to hear about Trevor’s brother, whom he seems eager to tease and impress. Trevor’s talk is full of injury and fighting, which could be age-appropriate blood-and-guts talk or might signal anxiety about something specific like a doctor’s visit or recent nightmares. Checking with family members can be fruitful. The teacher can watch his play and help him find good outlets for his exciting interests.

I’ve only scratched the surface of what we can learn about a child from this kind of observational activity, but the main point I want to convey is how much we can learn about children’s capacities, not deficits, when we allow them to engage authentically with their environment and the people in it. Now I want to back up and describe what we so often fail to learn about preschool children.

WHAT CAN YOU LEARN FROM A TURKEY?

Iconic American kindergarten “craft”

ERIKA CHRISTAKIS

If American adults remember anything about preschool or kindergarten, they likely recall making a construction-paper turkey from a tracing of their hand, with the child’s thumb forming the turkey’s head and four fingers representing the feathers. The teacher usually hands out various decorations to glue on the brown paper: feathers dyed in unnatural oranges and yellows, maybe a few googly eyes, a selection of Thanksgiving-colored crayons. A subversive child might try for a more abstract approach, with purple or turquoise plumage, but often the turkey makers’ efforts are restricted to a limited array of colors and textures that allow little room for budding Picassos or, heaven forbid, a careful study of what a turkey actually looks like.

The purpose of the project is breathtakingly simple and literally uniform, which may explain its bizarre cultural power. Everybody has made a Thanksgiving turkey! It’s such an iconic experience of American early childhood education that new generations of parents are still reflexively posting their children’s turkeys on the refrigerator fueled by a rosy nostalgia for their own carefree days. There’s a comforting consistency in this wholesome activity.

There are, however, a few problems with making construction-paper turkeys. The turkey exercise, and so many others like it, reflects a limited view of children’s creativity derived from an adult-imposed agenda (often based on the school calendar and adult conceptions of adorableness) rather than a teacher’s knowledge of what her individual students are capable of thinking and doing at a particular developmental stage.

In recent years, there’s been a lot of talk at early childhood education conferences and in professional journals about the “how” of children’s artwork. “It’s the process, not the product,” goes the mantra, and many teachers (as well as the National Association for the Education of Young Children, the nation’s most important advocacy organization for early childhood education) have made the shift from product to process an organizing principle of sound pedagogy. In other words, teachers no longer care so much about the precise location where a child glues the pipe cleaner antennae on his egg carton caterpillar, as long as he’s making his own artistic choices and has expressed himself freely in doing so. It’s the process by which the child made his egg carton caterpillar that really matters.

Sounds good, right? Unfortunately, and increasingly, the “process not product” zealots are beginning to resemble Internet trolls who gleefully undermine new scientific discoveries with a knee-jerk “correlation is not causation.” It may be an important phrase, in the main, but the reflexive embrace of process can obscure some bigger truths. Oftentimes, the traditional copycat crafts are replaced with only a veneer of freedom and creativity, and the phrase begins to feel like an excuse for teaching the same old boring Thanksgiving turkey activity, but without even the pretense of old-fashioned quality control or skill acquisition.

The creativity feels paper-thin. Consider it this way: if you were asked to make a flimsy flower from a Styrofoam ball and a few pink foam petals that had been cut out by your teacher, wouldn’t you at least want help to make sure you didn’t embarrass yourself by deviating from the paint-by-number instructions? Kids are not dupes. They know perfectly well when their product doesn’t look as good as the others, and the pretense of process not product in such a narrowly defined scenario—what survey researchers call a forced choice—just makes a lot of young children feel ashamed or irritated.

The problem with our catchy phrase is that process not product doesn’t go nearly far enough. It’s encouraging that we no longer force every child to produce in lockstep the exact same construction-paper Thanksgiving turkey. Even the dreariest early childhood programs have generally moved beyond pure mimicry as a pedagogic strategy, and one of the basic evaluation criteria for preschool pedagogy is the absence of a model of what each art product is supposed to look like. This ethos has even spread to countries—such as China—that have historically relied on pure imitation as a teaching strategy but are looking, increasingly, to give creativity a pedagogic boost in the early years.¹

We are offering children more choices now and we’re acknowledging, at least in theory, that children develop at different paces and have different strengths and weakness, even different tastes. Abigail may have better fine motor control than Maya, so her turkey is going to look a little more polished. Caleb has a thing for glue sticks; Ronan has a short attention span and wants to get over to the block corner as soon as possible. We’re doing a better job recognizing differences and accommodating them, and that’s terrific news. To a point.

What remains unexamined, however, is what exactly children and their teachers are learning from the construction-paper turkey activity, and why we are doing it at all.

Before you consign the turkeys to the trash bin, think about this: there is a reason teachers like them. The turkey exercise can tell teachers a lot of basic information about concrete skills, which is a big reason we return to these kinds of activities over and over again. Sometimes a teacher simply has to ensure that everyone’s pincer grasp has been assessed, and this can be very hard to do in a busy classroom without highly structured activities. But we don’t necessarily need to make a tracing of a hand dressed up as a bird to check those skills.

The turkey activity can also tell us a little about attention span; the ability to remain seated, to follow directions, to share materials at a crowded table; and other so-called noncognitive skills (a ridiculous misnomer) that are so essential to later academic success. But, again, there are many more telling ways to assess those preacademic skills in settings like outdoor and dramatic play, and even during snack and rest time. Even observing a child decide where to play can reveal volumes about her ability to plan, self-regulate, and communicate.

A teacher misses a lot of developmental feedback by implementing the turkey exercise and others like it, the most important of which may be the social and emotional quality of the child’s experience. Studies show that we’re unlikely to hear, during turkey time, the kind of really rich, expressive language that emerges when children are engaged in creative work, building a fort or playing house.² We have very little sense of these young souls who are doggedly making turkeys. In particular, the quality of their relationships (with their teachers and their peers) remains opaque to us beyond, perhaps, a notation that Margot chose to sit with Kumar, or Aiden can’t stop grabbing crayons from Jackson. This disconnection from an authentic social, as well as cognitive, experience is a huge design flaw in these curricula because high-quality relationships are the best indicator of quality child care, and early learning is so overwhelmingly social in nature.³

The relationship deficit of such a curriculum hit me recently on a cold, bright March morning when I stepped into an office in Windsor, Vermont, where a toddler’s mother pointed to a bug-eyed groundhog, made from brown construction paper, staring down at us from above her desk. It was a cartoonish, adult version of an animal, not something a toddler could have conceived or executed, and I wondered what this observance of Groundhog Day could possibly mean to a two-year-old child whose primitive fine motor control clearly played no part in the construction of the creature’s perfectly circular head and squared-off teeth.

At the same time that this little girl was assembling her ready-made groundhog parts, I could see an iconic sign of New England’s impending spring all up and down the narrow dirt roads: aluminum buckets hanging from the sugar maple trees, gathering the clear sap for its magical transformation to pancake syrup and candy. Vermont families have marked the change of seasons like this for centuries, but nothing of that vivid cultural color could be found in the teacher-constructed groundhog on the wall, who was, in his own inert way, also announcing winter’s passing.

Whether it’s turkeys or rodents, there is so rarely a sense of a real child, in a real place, attached to any of the institutional paraphernalia affixed, with pride, on people’s walls. Perhaps the Vermont mother might have learned more about her daughter’s curiosity from seeing a photo of her little girl figuring out how to push snow into one of those maple sap buckets. But to appreciate this aspect of her daughter’s development, the mother might have needed someone to tell her that it was a valid enterprise. And that recognition requires some adjustment of our values about early learning.

THE MATTER-OVER-MIND PROBLEM

The limitations of simplistic activities like the Thanksgiving turkey or the groundhog come down to this: they privilege matter over mind. Those exercises still presume that the child’s goal is to make something, rather than to make meaning. Some children can see through this vacuous agenda; they’re usually the ones engineering an elaborate suspension bridge out of blocks or tracking the eye movements of the class snake, but those children sometimes get grief for opting out, and it’s really only because their productive work is less tangible, and less visible, than the things we can stick on the wall or pop into a backpack. Even children who prefer using three-dimensional media such as clay over drawing get less credit for their efforts.

My alarm bells always go off when I see a teacher nagging a refractory child in mid-play (and that teacher was often myself) to “come over and do your collage.” Come do your art project, we say, yet the child has made it clear by his actions that he doesn’t want to do an art project. I’m not suggesting teachers shouldn’t sometimes prod young children to step outside their comfort zone or oblige them to do something they don’t want to do. But, at the end of the day, who really cares if every little child makes a pinch pot or a glittery snow scene? If a child is engaged in purposeful activity—and bear in mind, we’re talking about three- and four- and five-year-olds!—does it really matter what kind of purposeful activity it is?

And if we really do care so much about the pinch pots, then why do we privilege volume over quality? Even within the extremely narrow confines of a factory production model of early education, our standards are slipping. It takes time and care to make something nice, but we tend to praise the children who are fast in their execution, not necessarily thoughtful. Snappy output is highly valued in the preschool classroom because we assume that young children have minuscule attention spans, an assertion given the lie by anyone who’s ever had to drag an unwilling child out of a freezing cold bathtub. In the preschool universe, it’s always time to whisk stuff away in preparation for whatever new task is coming down the pike in fivemoreminutes. Until you’ve seen a teacher in action, you really can’t imagine how many times a day the disinfecting spray makes an appearance to prepare a surface for the next new thing.

This compulsive focus on production gives children the unfortunate message that they are just drones on an assembly line, working in a factory lacking any kind of quality control, and where they are free to make defective widgets. I find myself sympathizing with Tiger Mom Amy Chua, who infamously sent back her daughter’s Mother’s Day card for a revision on the grounds that the first draft was garbage.⁴ If her daughter attended an average American preschool, it likely was garbage. We don’t do young children any favors by pretending that sloppiness and inattention are proxies for a rich pedagogic philosophy.

The matter-over-mind problem is painful for adults, too. I sometimes felt like Lucy Ricardo, flailing on the assembly line in the famous I Love Lucy episode at the candy factory, frantically stuffing chocolates in her hat, her mouth, and down her shirt as they moved fast and furiously along the conveyor belt. I prided myself on being able to facilitate creative thinking in others but, unusually for a preschool teacher, I had very few artistic or spatial skills. Cutting two pieces of string of equal length required intense concentration, and while I had the good fortune to be able to summon reinforcements if I needed help, I never got over that deflating sense of incompetence about my classroom production line.

Compounding matters, at Lincoln Nursery School in Massachusetts, where I taught, the teachers at the time compiled elaborate portfolios with a representative sampling of the children’s work throughout the year, to be delivered as a gift to the parents on the last day of school, a looming catastrophe for a person of my aesthetic ineptitude. The problem was that the families loved the portfolios (which we teachers bristled to hear referred to as mere “scrapbooks,” a term that seemed to lack gravitas), but they also wanted us to send regular infusions of stuff home with their child (and what parent wouldn’t?) rather than wait until the end of the year. Compounding matters yet further, plenty of children had no interest in making anything that could fit on either a portfolio page or a refrigerator, so it became a test of wills between me, the parents, and the child, and I often found myself in the debased position of deftly snatching kids’ artwork out of their soft little hands to squirrel away for my own dark ends.

Fortunately, the director of my preschool, Nancy Fincke, recognized the folly of my foolish behavior and encouraged me to adopt a saner approach to children’s self-expression. She and some of my more experienced colleagues had visited the famous preschools of Reggio Emilia in Italy, and they soon mastered the Reggio-inspired practice of documenting the learning behind children’s playful exploration in real time, for all to see, and not merely in the pages of a book.⁵

Children like to reflect on themselves and are quite capable of what is known as metacognition, or thinking about thinking, so classroom documentation (in the form of photos, captions, transcriptions of children’s questions, and sketches the children themselves have drawn) is a useful way for adults to help children develop insights about themselves, what they are doing, and, crucially, what they are capable of doing next. Different preschools do this reflective work in different ways. One famous curriculum, called HighScope, uses a process called Plan-Do-Review to get young children thinking more purposefully about their actions. A program called Tools of the Mind has children organize their thinking by drawing “play plans” before starting their play.

When done with care, this reflective learning cycle makes learning visible for parents, too, and can help them to relax and feel confident in their children’s development. Carla Horwitz, Yale faculty member and former director of the Calvin Hill Day Care Center, has always placed written descriptions of key developmental processes around the classroom so that families can understand the meaning behind simple pursuits:

When I paint, I am learning about shape, line, and color. I’m learning to express my thoughts in two dimensions. I’m learning fine motor control from holding a paintbrush and applying the right amount of pressure to the paper. I’m learning to be calm and focused while others play and work around me.

But sometimes the efforts to make children’s learning visible can also become fetishized, and all the planning and documenting and reflecting—rather than guiding learning—can become another factory widget in the preschool assembly line. I’ve noticed that even the simple act of photographing a child can place a barrier between the teacher and the child. (It’s a little analogous to feeling you haven’t experienced the Grand Canyon unless you’ve Instagrammed it, too.) Teachers in most American programs barely have time for a bathroom break, much less adequate time in the day to document and reflect on children’s learning together with their colleagues, so documentation can quickly become a chore that takes teachers away from their children. It runs the risk of becoming an end point (which begins to look a lot like the scrapbook problem) and not as a vehicle for building relationships with and between children or for reflective understanding.

On the other hand, when teachers make learning visible, it’s much harder to hide behind a curriculum devoid of real meaning. One might ask, logically, what meaning children derive from a hand tracing of an animal that surely has little resonance for most kids. One common argument is that Thanksgiving is an important part of our national culture, and, in that case, what is the teacher supposed to do come November but trace children’s hands? I’m sympathetic to this argument, and in any case many teachers and families are stuck with curriculum they didn’t choose, but there is so much more a preschooler can do with a Thanksgiving-turkey theme.

The effective preschool teachers I’ve known would take up the turkey challenge by inviting a farmer to the classroom or taking the children on an excursion to see how real turkeys eat. Why not examine turkey feathers under a microscope? Ask the children to compare the size and texture of turkey and chicken eggs, or maybe a whole array of different eggs from birds and other egg-laying animals. Maybe someone would like to make an omelet in class. Is there a child with an egg allergy? Maybe he could share his experience of being allergic to eggs and eating egg substitutes. Do those come from turkeys, too? Or how about a turkey-themed play center—but not full of commercial decorations set up by the teachers for the children, which we see in so many classrooms, but a simple space for children to explore farmer tools and a real bale of hay. And someone will probably want to figure out where the hay comes from, and then we’re really off to the races.

BUT I LOVE CRAFTS . . .

An intelligent approach to artmaking is very uncommon in American early education, but there are some model preschool programs that teach crafts with intelligence and discernment. The renowned Waldorf schools, for example, teach very young children remarkably sophisticated handiwork skills, such as knitting and working with felt, as an integral part of a deeply imaginative and story-driven curriculum. The crafts form part of an educational philosophy, in other words, with objectives that go beyond being cute. The problem is that the complex, intentional craftmaking found in Waldorf schools and their ilk is so far removed from the insipid turkeys and groundhogs in most American preschool classrooms that it might as well have been made by children from another planet. It’s a misnomer even to call the groundhog a craft, a word that connotes a cultural expression of artistry, effort, and skill.

It’s time to question the continued hold of what I would call counterfeit crafts over our preschool curriculum (or is it our national psyche?). Their sham output serves dull and simplistic goals. But one reason preschool teachers still genuflect to the construction-paper-turkey god is that it takes very little time to finish such a product (unlike learning a proper craft, such as knitting), especially when the teacher has done much of the preparation work. It’s also easy, with counterfeit crafts, to compare one child’s work to another, which you can’t do as easily when children are doing their own creative work that would result in varying outcomes. Teachers feed into this competitive comparing-and-contrasting mentality when they display children’s work en masse on a bulletin board, almost goading the viewer to rank the yield. Although preschool accreditors frown on this practice of lining up kids’ work in lockstep, we still see it everywhere.

Yet another reason for the persistence of phony crafts is that parents, as we’ve seen, like to receive gifts from their children, and it’s hard to overestimate just how hard early childhood teachers work to please parents. Just as Sesame Street intentionally throws in some adult-level jokes to enhance parent-child bonding, early childhood programs have to toe a careful line to keep up the family involvement. Teachers know that they are judged—as most Americans are—by what they produce. It’s a lot easier to say “Here’s the construction paper jack-o’-lantern we made today” than “I’ve noticed that Michael is really excited by what happens when he mixes blue and yellow paint.”

It takes a skilled and confident teacher to do the latter, particularly when there are few opportunities to convey this kind of feedback, and when our official measurement scales of children’s progress don’t typically reflect such learning.

YOUR CHILD IS NOT A REFRIGERATOR MAGNET

My life changed when I met such a person, Marie Randazzo, at the University of Chicago Lab School. When our oldest son started nursery school, Marie sent home a note to the parents explaining, as kindly as possible, that if we parents failed to recognize evidence of real learning in a child who had spent the day immersed in stories and blocks or trying to make a Styrofoam boat stay afloat in the water table, well, that was going to be our problem, not our child’s. With a teacher’s studied diplomacy, she let us know that she wasn’t going to compromise anything as important as a richly engaging early childhood curriculum for the benefit of a few anxious and highly competitive parents.

Like me.

It took some adjustment. Sebastian would come home with a backpack full of bottle caps, or a wad of string, or a stack of index cards covered in paper clips. I knew he loved preschool and was very busy; Marie’s warm and descriptive newsletters attested to that; but I had very little objective evidence that he wasn’t staring at a piece of carpet fluff all day. I couldn’t help wondering if my kid was on the right pedagogic track. Mainly, I wanted pictures for my refrigerator!

In fact, our son’s work showed artistic flair. But most of his artwork fell well outside my then-narrow image of preschool creativity. For example, he was a natural performance artist, adding to his pieces over time, working nonlinearly, ignoring the boundary between art and, well, everything else. (One morning, we awoke to find that he’d used duct tape to attach a raw egg and his grandfather’s gold watch to one of his pictures.) He’d spend days and days working on the same project, painting so intensely that the paper would turn to pulp and have to be scraped off the easel.

It seemed as if weeks had gone by before we would finally see something remotely frameable to send to Grandma, and it was usually a large piece of torn paper festooned with indecipherable runes and layer upon layer of masking tape. He went through so many rolls of masking tape that I went on sheepish runs to office supply stores to replace the school’s stock. My husband and I had probably watched too many viewings of The Shining, but we nervously joked that one day we’d discover a mummified masterpiece on which our little Jack Nicholson had scrawled the same creepy word in masking tape ten thousand times. His beautiful installations filled me with equal measures of pride and anxiety.

Marie took all of this in stride. Her response to our son’s singular preoccupation was to take the whole class across campus to see a new exhibit at the university art museum featuring sculptures made from—wait for it—masking tape.

She kept reminding me that it wasn’t really all about masking tape; our child was making meaning. I trusted her, and I had to admit he seemed over the moon with his creations. I once asked Marie why Sebastian was carrying a bag of scrap-paper scribblings around with him everywhere, even to the bathroom and to his bed at night, and she replied simply that the bag of papers was obviously very important to him. End of story. I felt a glimmer of recognition that he was his own guy, with his own take on the world: I didn’t really need an explanation. “Scribbles are the babbling of written language,” she told me another time. “Just like a baby babbles before he learns to speak, Sebastian has to scribble before he can write.”

This revelation brought tears to my eyes as I considered my small son’s deep cognitive inner life. I began to see my little boy as a powerful, intelligent, and mysterious person with aspirations and skills about which I understood very little. His preschool education, it turned out, really didn’t have anything to do with my refrigerator door. And it was this recognition that led me to want to be an early childhood teacher myself.

Yes, but . . .

By now, you may be hearing a little skeptical voice mewing like a cat in your head, wondering how this kind of curriculum actually plays out in real life. If we’re not allowed to be hung up on traditional knickknacks anymore, are we just talking about letting the inmates run the asylum? Flexible standards? Total anarchy? The phrase “child centered” sends people running for the hills, conjuring images of the open classrooms of the early 1970s, where kids loafed in bean bag chairs all day and tried to teach themselves to read.

But that whiff of adult indolence we attach to child-centered curricula generally has to do with their poor execution, not the bankruptcy of the ideas themselves. A high-quality, meaning-based curriculum reflects a well-organized and intentional learning environment; it is nothing close to a free-for-all, and the teacher is squarely in charge—much more so, I would argue, than in a classroom where the teacher is merely following somebody else’s script. Simply put, child centered doesn’t mean child run, and warm and responsive early childhood settings are not the opposite of intellectually oriented ones.

A lot of people are, unfortunately, attached to the notion that responding to children’s perspectives is somehow whimsical or lightweight. Respected educator E. D. Hirsch, for example, explains that “a feature of an academic preschool is the carefully planned coherence of cognitive learnings that is imparted from one day to the next. Children stay on a topic for several days.”⁶ His own preschool curriculum, called the Core Knowledge Preschool Sequence, offers a tightly prescribed arrangement of “core knowledge,” including particular vocabulary words and familiar nursery rhymes that preschoolers need in order to build a strong knowledge base for subsequent critical thinking. Hirsch was for some time a voice in the wilderness, advancing the notion of a shared cultural knowledge base from which all American children could draw to become careful thinkers. This strikes me as reasonable, especially for elementary school and older children. But he seems to imply that the notion of “cognitive coherence” and the ability to stay on topic are the province of “academic” preschool environments, and that they are inherently superior to more playful or less tightly scripted ones.

I want to push back on this very simplistic conflation of an academic with a pro-learning environment. In fact, an academic curriculum can be a highly uneducational one. And, as we’ve seen, there is nothing inherently haphazard about structuring the early learning environment so that children can acquire sophisticated skills through expression of their ideas and concerns. Recall our phrase “the environment is the curriculum.” When the preschool classroom environment is carefully constructed to serve as the laboratory for learning, young children learn what we set out to teach them, but they also learn—and this is critical—the whole wealth of things we haven’t set out to teach them explicitly. In today’s world of exponentially expanding facts, this flexibility is essential. To be fair, Hirsch’s academic core knowledge curriculum doesn’t necessarily exclude the possibility of capitalizing on spontaneous learning opportunities—a child who notices a worm wriggling its way on the ground after a heavy rain, for example. And Hirsch acknowledges that rich oral language development is the sine qua non of preschool education, an assertion with which I heartily agree. He further cautions that the Preschool Sequence doesn’t perforce “prescribe any single pedagogy or method” and that “it is important not to equate the precision and specificity of the Preschool Sequence goals with an approach that relies exclusively on rote learning, isolated drills, workbooks or ditto sheets.”⁷ But this limp disclaimer to forgo “ditto sheets” (in the twenty-first century!) suggests to me a static and rather narrow understanding of intellectual vigor as applied to the three-year-old’s brimming mind. I have more confidence in the cognitive capacity of these small creatures.

HOW TO GET UN-BORED

The key to unleashing that capacity depends, in part, on a better decoding of children’s cognitive and emotional cues. One of the most common misfires involves boredom. It’s a paradox that bored children often need to engage more deeply in an activity, not less. But teachers have increasingly been turned into carnival barkers, drumming up business for the various choices or centers around the room, and sometimes can’t find the time to help children struggle with something long enough to become un-bored.

When I first had a classroom of my own, I consulted my friend Marie about how to teach children to use clay. The teachers I respected extolled the virtues of including real clay, in addition to Play-Doh, as a medium for sculpting and fine motor play despite, or because of, its messier, more demanding qualities. I suspected it could unleash a lot of pent-up creativity, but I wasn’t sure how to introduce it to the children. Marie strongly urged me to restrict the children to an examination of the texture and properties of clay first, before allowing them to mold it into objects. It sounded like a sensible idea, but I blanched when she offhandedly mentioned that this initial exploratory activity would take “at least a week, maybe two.” Actually, I didn’t just blanch. “A week?!” I yelped. “Are you $#@*%*& kidding me?!”

I was convinced this initial exploratory phase couldn’t possibly hold the children’s interest for more than a day—for more than ten minutes, if I was honest with myself—and I never gave the children a chance to prove me wrong. Unfortunately, I allowed my own anxiety and lack of trust to get in the way of deep learning.

My skeptical attitude is all too common in preschool classrooms, where most young children are allowed to use art materials perfunctorily, if they are even lucky enough to have access to high-quality materials. But imagine what happens when a teacher treats a substance like real clay deliberately, showing the children how to attach two pieces of clay together by making a wet substance called “slip.” She could show them how to hold the cutting and shaping tools and how to put the clay away and keep it covered so it won’t dry out, inviting the children to understand its properties and how they change under different conditions, experimenting with more or less water, more or less pressure—all before even thinking about making something out of it. This process takes time and requires confidence in the teacher and the child.

The purpose of this exercise is not to teach children how to make clay alligators and coffee mugs. The purpose is to teach children a predictable cognitive sequence they can apply when they encounter anything new: Observe, question, explore, reflect. Repeat. The children learn to respect their materials, not just to dive into them. They learn—without having seen it before—that clay is a material they can use to represent something else, a key developmental challenge of the early years. They discover that working with clay is no different than any other cognitive process the teacher has introduced. The teacher introduces clay in the same way that she would help a child to retell a story in the correct order, or coach a child to measure the length of a piece of paper or to estimate which tower of blocks is bigger.

Unfortunately, a lot of American preschool teachers bristle at Marie’s thoughtful, stepwise approach, which they see, rather ironically, as overly controlling. In the name of creativity, they would rather give children a simplistic project that allows the child to do his own thing—a sunflower made from a paper plate and premixed orange paint—than give the child the space and time to experiment with how to mix colors, how to use different brush strokes, or perhaps how to examine an actual sunflower to see what colors it contains.

The irony never ceases to amaze me: educators are willing to provide direct instruction in almost every imaginable arena except teaching children how to use art tools, the one set of tools that all preliterate children should know how to use but might actually have trouble figuring out on their own. We hide our lack of leadership behind the guise of fostering self-expression when, in reality, we haven’t given preschoolers the tools and space to express themselves! Adults grossly underestimate how frustrated children are when they don’t know how to enact their ideas, and are assumed not to care. And this irony reveals a much broader truth: our inability to appreciate children’s frustration comes again, I believe, from our problem of mismatched expectations. Kids are smarter than we realize, but they need the right kind of guidance to express and build on that intelligence. It’s a level of support that neither permissive adults nor authoritarian ones seem able to muster adequately.

Fortunately, there are some amazing models we can learn from that illustrate the powerful role teachers play in supporting children’s learning.

PAINTING LIKE A CHILD

Italy has been a gift to young children. Over a hundred years ago, Maria Montessori conceived of children in a new way, as intellectually capable and deserving of a carefully prepared, enriching environment.⁸ Later in the twentieth century, the preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, have shown educators around the world the power of human relationships to shape learning. Teaching in the Reggio way looks very different than in a typical American preschool, and one of the most visible differences is found in the quality and depth of children’s artistic expression.⁹

In Reggio-inspired schools, art is a vehicle for inquiry, not the end itself, and artistic expression is seen as the language (actually, the “hundred languages”) of childhood. In the small hands of children, sculpting, painting, weaving, drawing, constructing, molding, and gluing become tools of expression, no less important than a person’s larynx or a piece of paper or a computer keyboard, for young children to communicate their big dreams, hopes, and fears.

Anyone who doubts the expressive power of children’s art hasn’t seen examples of children’s concentration camp art from World War II or the drawings young children all across America made in the wake of 9/11, using the everyday tools of childhood play—crayons, paint, and blocks—to give voice to things that are unvoiceable.

Only the coldest heart could be unmoved by raw, unfiltered cries of self-expression of this sort. Yet early childhood classrooms are, increasingly, following in the misguided footsteps of their elementary and high school siblings by shunting art, along with music and physical recreation, to the sidelines of the curriculum. This is dangerous expediency. Every child is an artist, Picasso reminds us. “The problem,” he observed, “is how to remain an artist when we grow up.”

I’m not arguing for more art for art’s sake, on the grounds that the arts are essential ingredients of a well-rounded education. I happen to agree with that goal, but it’s not exactly my goal here. My objective is, in some ways, more fundamental: to help more people understand that, for children who have not yet learned to read and write, artistic expression isn’t a subject area whose worthiness for study could be debated. Rather, it is a learning domain, like critical thinking or number sense. The great theorist of childhood Len Vygotsky once said that play is “not an activity but a source of development,” and the same surely can be said of art.

PEDAGOGIC OPPORTUNISM

Reggio-inspired pedagogy has for many years been an aspiration for a lot of self-described quality preschool programs, and we may have even reached the point where “doing” Reggio is no longer the appealing (and fashionable) novelty it once was. Unfortunately, despite the popularity, a lot of the ethos behind the Reggio way has been lost in translation. It was always an awkward fit with our competitive, product-driven American culture. It’s easy to get distracted by the elegant aesthetics of the Italian preschools and miss the underlying philosophy that produced them, a philosophy made radically clear in its explicit embrace of the fundamental rights of the child.

Reggio-inspired pedagogies (and related ones, such as Waldorf and Montessori) also carry a regrettable tinge of elitism, which is, in my view, unearned. There is nothing inherently elitist about carefully guided teaching that is rooted in knowledge of, and respect for, the young child. But it’s undeniably intellectually challenging to teach in such a sophisticated manner, and it is virtually impossible without a deep well of administrative and collegial support. Robert Pianta, dean of the school of education at the University of Virginia, describes the unique complexity of good early childhood teaching:

Effective teaching in early childhood education, not unlike in the elementary grades, requires skillful combinations of explicit instruction, sensitive and warm interactions, responsive feedback, and verbal engagement and stimulation. . . . But unlike for older children, effective teachers of young children must intentionally and strategically weave instruction into activities that give children choices to explore and play . . . and are embedded in natural settings that are comfortable and predictable. The best early childhood teachers are opportunists—they know child development and exploit interest and interactions to promote it, some of which may involve structured lessons and much of which may not.¹⁰

It’s not so easy to be a pedagogic opportunist! It requires a high degree of personal competence and a teaching environment that supports opportunities for, well, opportunism. As the New York Times noted in the heady run-up to an unprecedented launch of universal pre-K programs in New York City in the fall of 2014, “Teachers in the kind of classrooms that the administration aspires to build need more than patience and certificates. They need worldliness and quick intellectual reflexes.”¹¹ It’s unclear what worldliness and quick intellectual reflexes are supposed to mean, but I suspect this is a nicer way of saying they need to be smart. It’s unlikely that droves of premeds and aspiring lawyers will suddenly beat the doors down to gain access to low-paying, low-status jobs involving young children. We’ll return to the topic of teacher quality and compensation in Chapter Ten. On the other hand, quick intellectual reflexes notwithstanding, we shouldn’t underestimate the pedagogic power of deeply loving care.

So how can parents and teachers begin to wean themselves of their fix for matter over mind? We can communicate to our children that their friendships and thoughts are more important than trinkets generated for our own amusement. I can’t overestimate the importance of articulating this message with our actions as well as our words, and the very first step is for parents to stop asking children what they made at school each day! The next step is to communicate to the school administration that you explicitly value signs of learning that are sometimes less visible in the classroom.

This involves not blithely accepting the claims in the daycare center’s Web site and looking, up close, for evidence of the elements of a classroom’s climate that we know, reliably, support early learning. At the top of my list are: close, affectionate interactions between caregivers and children, including frequent laughter and hugs; plenty of natural, spontaneous conversational language between children and teachers; opportunities to learn socially, from peers, and not primarily from didactic (DI) teaching moments; a teaching staff that speaks confidently about young children and can link curriculum to developmental milestones and the realities of children’s lives rather than to testaments about how fun and cute a given activity might appear to be; classroom materials that invite open-ended, not closed, forms of play and exploration; and classroom schedules that give children adequate time to do all the things we know they are capable of.

Parents should ask whether the preschool’s mission statement aligns with what children are actually doing, day in and day out. And if it doesn’t match up, they need to ask questions until they understand the goals of the curriculum, and whether there is any flexibility in how they are implemented. If they look, they will find allies in organizations such as the National Association for the Education of Young Children, which publishes troves of information about so-called developmentally appropriate practice (DAP), a lot of which is simply ignored by programs that should know better but—for all kinds of reasons—slip up and revert to the path of least resistance. (Before we get judgmental, how many of us eat all our vegetables and get 270 minutes of cardio every week?) In fact, virtually all state learning standards are theoretically compatible with the kind of developmentally appropriate practice we care about, but educators feel so embattled by bureaucratic and other pressures that they tend to retreat to simpler cookie-cutter methods. Parents should learn to be respectful advocates when things don’t make sense. There’s no harm in asking why, exactly, the class can’t have more time to build a block castle or spend more time outdoors. If the answer is that block building doesn’t fit in the schedule or that it’s too cold to go outside (a classic seasonal dodge in the upper half of the United States!), it’s fair to ask what is driving that overburdened or anti-intellectual preschool curriculum in the first place. Is it matter, or is it mind?

Perhaps circumstances could change if parents offered their help. Sometimes teachers balk at more creative or open-ended activities because they need help implementing them. When broader change is not possible, small steps are effective. Early education specialist Judy Cuthbertson, who codirects the Seedlings Educators Collaborative in New Haven, advises teachers to devote one day per week to flexible curriculum design. She recommends Wednesdays for such experimentation, so that the flexible day doesn’t become something merely tacked on at the end of the week as a kind of reward, like recess. Her approach works like this: the teacher follows the regular (i.e., scripted) curriculum on Monday and Tuesday, then takes a pause on Wednesday, when children can try something off topic. Anything is possible in this scenario: kids can spend all morning in free play or outdoors or on a short field trip. They can revisit a thematic unit they had previously enjoyed or sit curled up on the floor listening to picture books for two hours, if that’s what they want. More ambitious teachers can seize a percolating idea and begin plans for a new project that has little or nothing to do with the prescribed curriculum.

If the free-range curriculum is a success, the teacher can tailor the program for the remainder of the week to build on whatever went well on Wednesday. On the other hand, if Wednesday’s activities weren’t successful or simply don’t need to be extended further, the teacher can go back to business as usual, with the children having had a chance to go off script with no harm, no foul. Early childhood policy expert Walter Gilliam likens this flexible approach to those Choose Your Own Adventure books from the 1990s, in which the young reader becomes the protagonist and makes choices about where the story will go.

This sort of spontaneous, child-focused teaching practice is possible when teachers and parents function as allies, willing to experiment together and share their failures as well as successes. In fact, building a relationship with a child’s teacher is probably the very best way to strengthen a child’s learning experience because it enhances the probability that the teacher will come to know the child as an individual. As a teacher, the parents I was most likely to connect with were the ones who didn’t accuse me from a distance but who joined with me in tackling issues of mutual concern. Parents have a better chance of making inroads if they come to the discussion from a position of knowledge and sympathy. It’s a shame that parents are often unfamiliar with the school’s learning standards because parents have a lot of power to influence pedagogy if they exercise that authority with diplomacy and tact.

HOME FREE

Even in situations where families feel trapped in suboptimal childcare situations that can’t be changed, or when they have to focus their advocacy on more pressing issues of basic safety, it’s essential to remember that there are no limits to how they interact with their child away from preschool. Studies show that even the best teachers have a relatively small impact on children’s outcomes compared to genetic, familial, and environmental influences.¹² The transfer of early learning from home to institution has had incalculable benefits for the American workforce, and especially for professional women, but this massive social shift has left many parents feeling incompetent and overly dependent on so-called experts (such as this one) to guide them. Fear, inertia, and overconfidence in outside expertise has led parents to diminish, and even abrogate, their own abilities as a child’s first, best teacher.

There’s a marvelous illustration of a parent’s power to offset the drudgery of school in To Kill a Mockingbird, when Scout Finch’s beloved father, Atticus, teaches her the meaning of the word “compromise” after her first-grade teacher has scolded her for learning to read the wrong way. Atticus calmly suggests they carry on reading at home exactly as they’ve always done while the teacher will do the same at school.

I recently stumbled on a forty-year-old book of advice for parents on how to make the most of a child’s school experience, and I think it’s worth quoting at some length. The author, a child psychiatrist, noted:

Children used to start school when they got there—in first grade, at five or six. They had already mastered innumerable skills and acquired an encyclopedic amount of information. But nobody set out, systematically, to teach them. Children learned words, number concepts, rhyme, and plain facts from games; from skip-rope and ball-bouncing jingles; from Mother Goose and folk songs. They knew something about how babies are born and African geography from visits to the zoo with their parents. They learned about cars, machines, cows, horses, barns, tractors, crops, and seasons from their toys and from leisurely chatter on car trips. They put the bus fare in the box and began to understand about money. They counted bananas or picked out the right soap powder from the shopping cart and began to understand counting and the equivalent of reading readiness. Play with pots and pans, empty cartons, spools, bottle tops and lids, taught them about sizes and shapes . . . a parent, answering a child’s questions, or showing him how to fit the pans together on the shelf, wasn’t purposely instructing him. If you asked the parent what he was doing, he’d say: “playing.” “Entertaining. Long drives are hard for kids.” “Explaining.” “Amusing myself watching Timmy’s head work.” Now it’s different. Some parents start thinking about their children’s formal education before they are born. . . . Parents get the scary news that failure to provide [emotional environment and proper stimulation] in carefully prescribed quantities, at the right time, may lead to permanent damage.¹³

The author’s worries, in 1974, seem awfully quaint by today’s standards. Even greater numbers of children lack opportunities today for the hiding-in-plain-sight style of learning the author describes so vividly, and it’s not only the most disadvantaged children who are missing the chance to learn the equivalent of reading readiness by hanging out with adults in the grocery store. Unfortunately, we’re trying to compensate for this major cultural change in child rearing in exactly the wrong way.

Have we grown embarrassed by these homegrown experiences because they no longer fit our contemporary adult lives? My feeling is that we should be able to have our cake and eat it, too. If they are hard to find in sufficient frequency at home, because parents are at work, there’s no reason on earth these naturally occurring teachable moments can’t then be found more often in preschool.

If we are unwilling to make such a course correction, we’ll continue to impose a stultified version of elementary school on children as young as three and four years old so they can be ready to learn on our narrowly defined terms. Fueled by the matter-over-mind mentality, those terms are, unsurprisingly, a woefully ineffective replacement for the natural, creative learning that is so central to optimal child development. Renowned cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik notes that “very young children learn best from their everyday experiences of people and things,” but that environment, she explains critically, “can’t be mass manufactured or provided on the cheap.”¹⁴