Why My Son Quit Science and How to Raise a Scientist

My son out exploring with his botanist grandfather.

 

We're systematically destroying our culture's love of and faith in science through the way we're teaching and parenting. When I was a kid I knew I couldn't do science, because I wasn't smart enough. Also I didn't have glasses. And when I finally did get glasses at about fourteen I'd realized that science was uncool anyway. Like my shameful glasses. Except for geeks. Geeks who were actually good at science were super-cool, and beyond my league. I could barely bring myself to speak to them, even when we were paired in biology class. Until I married one of those guys (they're almost always guys, right?) and raised some kids, one of whom, from the age of about seven, wanted nothing more than to attend university NOW to study theoretical physics. That wasn't an option for a young kid, so we unschooled our way into his adulthood, and everything about my understanding of science changed. I learned a LOT from watching how my science-passionate kid explored the world, how he was encouraged and discouraged and, ultimately, how our system fails both our kids and science. I'm going to lay it all out here, including, at the end, the list of resources I think are essential and nice-to-have for encouraging a love of science in all of us.

Dictionary.com says that science is "systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation." Look at that. Observation and experimentation are literally enshrined in the definition of science. Nowhere does that definition say "following instructions" or "memorizing facts". It definitely doesn't say "knowledge gained through performing boring pre-determined exercises where the outcome is already known". Of course, we like to call those boring, pre-determined exercises "experiments", but they're not experimental in any way, and I'm not going to pretend, here.

 

What We're Doing Wrong

Neil deGrasse Tyson points out in this fabulous lecture that kids are born scientists, and the first thing we do as they start wreaking havoc with their scientific exploration is to stop them, because the chaos is inconvenient for us. He also says "we don't have enough parents who understand or know how to value the inquisitive nature of their own kids, because they want to keep order in their households."

 

Taking the Exploration and Experimentation out of Science

Back to my son's experience, here's what happened. At nine years old, unschooling from home, he designed an interstellar space station, complete with a plan for the human population, sustainable onboard environment, and calculations to simulate gravity for that onboard environment. At thirteen, he took an admission test for an early-entrance program at the local university. He was younger than most kids there, and wasn't admitted to the program, but was encouraged to return the following year to try again. He declined. Over the next few years he became more and more adamant that the usual highschool graduation would have to be his route to studying physics, and so he pursued it, graduating a year early, and then attending a local college to beef up his collection of science and math courses. At the end of that year of study, he received his rejection notice from the university. Despite a couple of awards, excellent grades, and an honours graduation, he was rejected again from the university he'd longed to attend for most of his life. And shockingly, he was relieved!

Wait--what?! His whole family was ready to console him, and he blithely told us he didn't really want to become a scientist anymore anyway. How did this happen? Well... school happened to him. When he was a kid, science was about questions, exploration, and discovery. School made it about rote memorization and regurgitation. "Experiments" became a process of proving someone else's billion-times-already-proven theories. It was academic theatre. There was no inspiration or passion at all. He realized and explained to us that his creative exploration was more suited to a career in design.

How many of us have had our inquisitive nature killed or redirected by the school system that took the inquiry out of science? What would science be like today if we'd all been encouraged to participate? How would our social and technological evolution be different? Would we still stereotype scientists as elite, affable, or socially inept geeks with oversized glasses?

 

Stereotyping and Persecution

Why are science geeks almost always guys? Why geeks? Why glasses? Why is science uncool? These stereotypes seem to be as old as time, just like misogyny, religion, mob mentality and a thirst for power. 

 

Science is power. It means discovering new things; understanding how things work and developing methods for working with them and harnessing more power. That's why so many scientists have been persecuted. If you want to discover who's shaking things up, look for the guy on the stake, whether proverbial or real. People whose knowledge threatens to change the status quo (or unseat those in power) are silenced by whatever means necessary, from Hypatia to Galileo to many more modern scientists currently jailed, humiliated or disappeared following their work on controversial subjects.

 

But it's not only those in power who reject science. At the level of the lower classes (far from positions of power), scientific discovery heralds change, and that's pretty scary to those who walk the precarious line between starvation and survival. All the what-ifs of progress and change can be terrifying. And in the extreme, desperate people seek comfort and community in rejecting the norm, entirely, championing ideas like flat-earth and other conspiracy theories. These are people who've had their personal agency crushed by a system that told them science was for those at the top. Those uncool smart people with glasses. They were told they weren't smart enough for science. So they made their own "science." And I think not many of us wants to go down that road.

From perspectives of power and powerlessness, it's easy to see how science education for the masses has become the dry, uninspired wreck that it is in most public schools. The public school system was created over a hundred years ago to build a population of obedient, follow-the-rules workers. It was created to feed a growing consumerist society that needed cheap, dependable labour. People at the top don't want their positions of power threatened by the lower classes getting too inquisitive, and those at the bottom know that the food on their tables depends on keeping their noses down. 

 

Science Tied to Capitalism and Consumerism

The irony is that the technology developed in the rise of industrial consumerism has now displaced the need for that obedient work-force, and it's likely that the majority of jobs in the coming decades will require inquisitive, creative thinking--not obedient task-completion. This presents a way forward out of the educational quagmire we're now living in. It's time to shift the focus of education in general towards creative thinking, free exploration, and delightful discovery.

 

Besides, as the lower classes are no longer needed for the jobs now done by machines, the social pyramid is crumbling, and those on the bottom would like a new kind of geometry. So there's the question of justice. I think the only way to achieve a just society is for knowledge and discovery to be shared. Open-source technology is becoming more and more expected as the pitfalls of capitalism become undeniable; as capitalism-caused climate change makes technological advancement not just wonderful but urgently needed. And the sharing of knowledge makes global technological advancement even faster. I think the stereotypes and fear of science will fade away as our culture experiences change at an exponentially faster rate, and we become accustomed to a life centred more on agility than on stability. Then, with flexible minds, we can embrace science.

 

School Constructs: Facts vs. Questions 

Childhood is a big romp of explorative learning. Whether our kids attend a brick and mortar school, study at home as homeschoolers, or lead an unschooling lifestyle, they're exploring to learn, and learning to explore. Playing with baking ingredients, construction tools and materials, personal care products and even fire are exciting for kids because they inspire explorative play. Kids mix products and see what happens, they burn things and see what happens; they build and break and experiment and... see what happens. It's that exploration and discovery that creates learning, and even more importantly a desire to keep learning. That desire is the spark that my son lost in his journey into high school science.

 

When we, as parents or teachers, present things as already-known facts, we remove the need for our kids to explore, themselves. In doing so, we teach them that exploration is unnecessary or, at worst, unacceptable. We take all the spark out of science.

 

The most disastrous thing parents and teachers do to science is pretend that it's about facts--things that are already known. It's not! It's about questions! Sure there are answers to the questions, and thousands of years of other people's discoveries to explore, but it's the questions that are interesting; and discovering the answers... whether or not the questions or answers have ever been discovered, before. It's curiosity and the excitement of discovery that leads to science. Some questions are answered by researching other people's answers, and that's OK, but only if the initial curiosity came from the researcher. And curiosity comes from freedom to explore and experiment. As soon as we take away freedom to experiment, we take away the spark of science.

 

Pre-Determined Kits and Activities

Seriously. I can hardly even discuss this topic it makes me so frustrated. Cross wanton capitalist consumerism with the strangling of scientific exploration and you have pre-determined "science kits". Yuck. These are shiny, polished, packaged activities for which the method and outcome are already determined--usually described or illustrated right on the box. Kids look at them and know exactly what they are expected to do. And so often they know they'll face the disappointment of their teachers or parents if they veer off into actual experimentation with the components of the kit. 

 

These kits feed our consumerist desire to look like the saturated, tidy, smiling family in the photos and post something similar to our kids' Instagram accounts, but they also take the science out of "science." They're disastrous. And the instructions on how to use the components are disastrous, too. When presented with activities where the outcome is already known, we lose our desire to explore. 

So what is a well-meaning teacher or parent supposed to do? I have good news. There's a LOT we can do, and some of it even can include shiny store-bought kits. But the good ones.

My fifteen-year-old son's chaotic desktop: Collection vials, yeast experiments, and parts of various electrical and biological experiments.

How to Do Right

Free Exploration

It's hard to let go of our adult desire to guide kids' exploration, but actually that's the best work we can do, ourselves. Generations of unschoolers as well as a few democratic schools have provided ample anecdotal evidence (though I've never seen any rigorous formal inquiry into this) that kids who are allowed to explore freely, unhindered by adults' expectations and demands, end up having not only a similar academic ability to schooled children, but also a greater ability to work independently, more success finding meaningful employment, and a greater love of learning. That was enough reason for me to do the work of de-schooling myself, and making way for this kind of learning for my kids and students.

Let Them Be Bored

But how?! What do we give them to do? Well, that question--especially when backed up by little faces whining "I'm boooored" in the background of our Zoom meetings--is actually one of our greatest hurdles. The answer? We give them nothing to do. Boredom isn't a problem for us to solve. That's up to them. And when they learn to solve it for themselves, they'll have already set themselves ahead of the kids with the pre-determined science-kits.

Respect

Of course, our kids' boredom might cause too much interruption for us to carry on our own activities. Maybe we have to set our boundaries, and make sure our kids have a rich environment to explore. Partly, that means accepting danger, chaos and mess as part of our lives, and--importantly--also keeping boundaries around our own need for clean spaces. Maybe this means there's an experimenting/play/rumpus room, and a tidy, peaceful room. Maybe it means we agree as a family or class to do a big clean-up every day at a certain time, just because some of us have a need for a peaceful space. 

 

And by "we agree" I don't mean that we adults decide what will be done without consultation, or with a sham of consultation that actually amounts to coercion. I mean we discuss our needs in an equitable way that allows each of us to present our needs and our ideas for resolution. All of us have needs that can be presented and discussed as a whole, respectfully. That's how it works in a democratic school, and it can work that way in a home or school classroom, as well. Though I will admit as a teacher and parent, that it's far easier to do with with a classroom of not-my-own kids than with my own family late at night when I'm tired and grumpy and have let my guard down. Overcoming that is part of the work I have to do as a parent.

Natural Consequences

My needs aren't more important than my kids' needs just because I pay the bills or have a greater understanding of consequence. My kids have very important needs, too, and are developing their understanding of consequence through discussing our needs, together, and through having their own needs voiced and respected. Kids' sense of personal worth is reinforced through having their needs heard and considered. But what happens when we come up with solutions that fail? Natural consequences!

Natural consequences are teachers to us all. When we experiment with fire we may discover all kinds of interesting things. We may get burned. And guess what? That's science! We all experiment with our behaviour as much as we do with our physical surroundings, and through observing the consequences of our experimental behaviour (maybe a friend decided to go home early; maybe we ran out of time to make dinner; maybe our partner no longer trusts us) we make discoveries. We learn! That's science! 

My son and his friend experimenting with their homemade forge.

Materials for Scientific Exploration from Toddlerhood to Adulthood

So how can we encourage scientific exploration without those dreaded kits? More important than the specific materials we have is how we present them. 

 

Strewing

The concept of "strewing" is often talked about among homeschooling and unschooling parents, and even used in many classrooms. Generally speaking, strewing means to scatter items of potential interest around the house for kids to discover: books, games, toys, craft or construction materials, etc. This can be great or awful, depending how it's done. 

 

I've seen plenty of Instagrammable "strewing" photos in homeschool groups: A perfectly clean natural wood table with a curated selection of art supplies and a brand new "activity book" laid out with a special treat, for example. That's not an invitation to explore; it's an invitation to tell Mama what a beautiful set-up she made, and then work tidily in the book with the provided materials while enjoying the treat. A more productive way to "strew" the same activity would be to simply add the (hopefully open-ended) activity book to the heap of books already in use, and go to the kitchen to bake the treat--experimentally. Maybe the kid will find the book. Maybe they'll play Lego. Maybe they'll join the parent in the kitchen to experiment with baking, or maybe they'll lie on the floor painting their arms with flour and water they took off the counter. Maybe three years later they'll pick up the strewed book and use it in some unexpected way. We cannot possibly know or direct the learning that will come out of good strewing, and that's just as it should be. As parents and teachers we need to open our minds to the natural consequences of strewing.

Are You Still Waiting for the Materials List?

I hope by now I've made it clear that our homes are already full of wonderful explorative materials; that there is no "right way" to teach science, and that the best of all worlds is an open-minded parent or teacher and time to explore. But we do live in a material world, and I'm going to give you a shopping list, just to make us all feel more satisfied.

I'm making different lists for different age-groups, not because they're not absolutely interchangeable, but because it's a bit easier to get our heads around, and, to be honest, people in specific life-stages do gravitate towards specific things. 

 

Please keep in mind with every single one of these suggestions, that it's only useful if we maintain total freedom of use: how, when and where to use it should be totally open for experimentation. It should always be OK to mix materials in new ways. That's often where creativity and novel discovery come from! Of course, sometimes some family discussions on safety and respect for others' property are warranted.

 

Early Childhood:

• trips to the library, and an unending supply of ALL KINDS of books
  
• musical instruments and sound-makers of any and all types with no attached expectations. Some libraries lend instruments, and parents of young kids are often trading around an assortment of interesting instruments as well.
• an always-available assortment of art and craft materials (see my separate post on this)
• cardboard boxes, ramps, large paper brochures, blankets, cushions and other materials for building in the house
• shovels, rakes, buckets, and water for playing outside in the dirt, forest floor, or sand
• freedom to cook and bake in the kitchen with appropriate supervision but as much freedom as possible for experimentation--be prepared for creations to be inedible! 
• Duplo, Lego, Keva blocks, Zome, marble runs, or other similar open-ended building toys. Instead of keeping the sets together as they came, dispense of the instructions and create a mixed box for free-play.
• dolls, stuffies, and materials for house or care-giving play. "Real" tools like brooms, rags, kitchen tools and baby supplies are great for playing, too!
  
• fabrics and sewing supplies
• endless outdoor explorative play (see separate article, here)
• time spent with a diverse range of different people
  

 

Middle Years:

All of the above, plus:

• a good quality dissecting microscope (we got ours from Westlab.com)
• a good quality telescope for astronomy or wildlife viewing
  
• a little pocket jeweler's microscope that can be brought outside
• a bunch of exciting chemicals: sulfur, stump remover, matches and books by Theodore Gray (especially Mad Science and Elements)
• a fire pit
  
• materials for electrical and electronic experimentation: discarded electronics from local recycling centres to take apart, some basic breadboards, wiring, and related components; perhaps a big transformer and some guidance on related dangers
• petri dishes, measuring glasses or beakers, agar powder for growing molds and bacteria (again, with some guidance)
  
• an inexpensive waterproof camera
• access to wood and metal shops
  
• Internet access. I'm not a big fan of screen time, but it's the world our kids live in, so the sooner they're able to have unfettered access (with lots of family discussion and good role-modeling by parents) the sooner they'll be able to master it and use it safely. Some of my kids' greatest self-determined learning has been through exploring and publishing on online platforms.
  

Teens Into Adulthood:

I always wondered how my son would manage in university, without having gone to school. And although it happened that school caused him to lose interest in studying science at university, we know of quite a few unschooled kids who went on to excel in university studies, including in sciences. We also know that many accomplished modern scientists were homeschooled or unschooled, and that Elon Musk educates his many children by encouraging open exploration, as well. So by now I've abandoned my fears about university and am witnessing my son develop a nascent career in 3D rendering, using many of the resources listed, here. 

 

The trick to learning exploratively through these resources is to allow inquiry and discovery to lead our progress, instead of the expectations of others. The same can be done through university, by allowing ourselves to change course when the need or desire arises, or to use resources in ways for which they may not have been intended. 

As with strewing, the point with these activities is not to provide a pathway, but to provide a rich matrix in which our open minds can explore and grow. I unexpectedly learned to cook Pakistani foods while doing respite care! You just never know what may materialize in a rich, explorative life.

• open university courses either online or through brick and mortar schools
• university or trade programs
• interesting and unexpected jobs
• online exploration through YouTube and other platforms
• experimenting with tools (software, woodworking/metal/automotive shop, camera, etc.)
  
• clubs or discussion groups
  
• volunteerism
• homemaking/home-building
• pet care
• farming
• building relationships
  
• raising children

 

To Conclude with a Neat and Tidy Package

Back to my son. His life is nothing like I thought it would be when he was a gregarious nine-year-old trying to get to university and I was a proud but ignorant parent. But I think it's a good life. After he quit college and declared the end of his pursuit of a physics and engineering degree, he reverted back to free-form explorative learning. He taught himself to play and compose on piano, and then eventually with synth and computer. He veered into the world of 3D rendering, and after two years of intense exploration and some online courses he sourced for himself, he's now developing a career as a digital artist. His most popular pieces? Spaceships. You can take the boy out of science, but...

 

As parents and educators we want to see our children succeed, and the way we measure success is set by our own experiences. But the limitations of our own experiences are roadblocks to our children's advancement. We have to let go of our own supposed knowledge and certainly our expectations in order to allow our children to succeed on their own terms. 

 

In the bigger picture, our children are the next generation on the trajectory of humankind's evolution, and we can't predict what tools or skills they'll need on that journey. Human advancement has always followed the path of ingenuity rather than the staid and unchanging path of what-we-already-know, or who-wants-to-stay-in-power. It's always the explorers, the inventors, and the heretics who advance science. Science needs these people. The way to raise a scientist is to encourage exploration, invention, and breaking all the rules.

~~~

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I've Changed my Thinking on University Entrance and Attendance

Taliesin in his early years, trying to get some lift. Photo: Emily van Lidth de Jeude

I thought about calling this article 'Getting into University as an Unschooler', because that's what people ask me about, knowing that I parent two young adults who are currently in this stage of life. But by the time I finished writing it, I realized that I can't even recommend university anymore. Not the way it's traditionally done, anyway. University is a beautiful little corner of a much bigger, beautiful picture, and I mean to let my kids have the whole picture.

I have two different kids who have traveled through life in the same community, sharing the same upbringing, home and family, and often the same activities, but with vastly different journeys towards what our culture calls "adulthood". They're both now on the precipice of finding meaningful employment in fields that inspire them, still living at home during the pandemic, but eagerly researching the rental market since, one day soon, they plan to move out and build their independent lives. Here are their stories, followed by my current thoughts on university.

Taliesin
He's my firstborn. He was passionate about science since he opened his eyes, though it took me a few years to see it. He observed the whole world around him, figuring out how everything worked. He was passionate about making art, too, but since he was mostly drawing machines (albeit very imaginative machines), I figured science was his thing. By the time he was nine he was begging to go to university and study physics. He was fully unschooled, so we went out to our local university (UBC) and their particle accelerator for tours and to listen to lectures whenever we were able. It was wonderful to see him so engaged, but other than attending lectures, there was little to interest him, scientifically. All the kids' programs were too condescending and boring, having little to do with the science he craved so much, and the teen programs that graciously let him in before he was of age were too few and far between. And as his friends became busier with school activities, he was becoming lonely. We tried gifted homelearner social groups, but both he and I feel an aversion to the 'gifted' classification, and we weren't interested in defining ourselves that way. 

So he went to school. Taliesin did two years at our local private middle school where his uncle teaches, followed by three years at the democratic school in the city. We always approached school from an unschooling perspective, with no concern at all for grades or attendance, and always the option to take a different view of the projects than what was expected. Mostly this served him well, and he managed the shift from unschooling to school quite well. He found science classes boring, because the material is presented in such a slow, methodical manner that there was little room for him to explore his interests. He aced most of the tests because he knew the material, but he stopped pursuing science, on his own.

He still wanted to attend UBC for physics, but now understood he had to wait, and decided to go through the usual route for entrance, by graduating and applying like most others. He graduated with honours at the end of his grade eleven year, and then spent a year taking additional grade twelve and first-year science courses at college, while volunteering in his community and applying to UBC. He only applied to UBC, because that was all he had ever wanted. And at the end of this long haul that started when he was nine, and in the middle of a pandemic, he was denied entrance to what had been for many years his constant life's goal. It wasn't a big deal to me, but I think it was to him. I think it felt like failure, simply because of the competitive nature of our school system and the application. However, he tells me that by the time he received his application rejection, he was already losing interest in the program.

Taliesin moved on. He began teaching himself digital music composition and 3D rendering. He says he's just not that interested in science anymore--and it's true he's been creating art and music all his life--but what I saw as his high school career ended was a young man whose interest in science faded away as he dragged himself through the system that was meant to teach it to him. What I saw was my son's enthusiasm dwindled, his confidence shattered, and his life's goals just thrown out the window. But, because he had little else to do, he continued drawing, rendering, and composing. Within months of self-teaching from his bedroom, he had mastered rendering to such an extent that he found a volunteer job rendering a space station for a show being produced by the College of Southern Nevada's planetarium. And now, nearly a year after he dropped out of college and failed to be admitted to university, I am finally seeing a resurgence of his enthusiasm for learning. 

Rhiannon
She was born communicating. She smiled her first gigantic toothless grin at only two weeks old, as she watched her big brother walk by and followed him with her whole upper body. Stories, music, and social interactions are her lifeblood. As young children, she and her brother sat for hours looking at books together every day, but while he was tracing the mechanisms of the machines, the families, the buildings, or whatever else he could find, she was telling the stories. She was looking in the little faces of the characters and feeling their feelings. By the time she was six or so, she frequently stopped her brother from telling about science, declaring, "science boils my brain!" 

Like her brother, she was unschooled for many years, until social interactions became too infrequent, and she went to school. She attended a part-time Distributed Learning program, and then the same democratic school as Taliesin, but focused more on writing and musical theatre than anything else. Over the years she enjoyed many personal projects, including publishing magazines online, working and volunteering for local childcare centres, reviewing books for middle grade readers, and babysitting every chance she got. By the time the pandemic hit, she was nearly finished preparing her first novel for publication, and finally self-published it just this past winter.

It's funny how people often struggle with the things they excel at. Despite being a highly social person, or maybe because of it, Rhiannon's struggles have mostly been social, and the pandemic isolation has been the worst of it. Her decision to quit school entirely and register as a homeschooler, returning to a fully self-directed unschooling life was difficult for a girl who thrives on social connection. So she wrote! She's still reviewing novels on the website she built herself. She's expanding that website to include relevant articles about writing for children and teens, and she's just begun the process of publishing another magazine for middle-grade readers. She's not going to graduate from high school. She's just living.

But what about university? Well, Rhiannon still hopes to study Early Childhood Education at Capilano University, so before she quit school she made sure that would still be an option. I helped her find a contact, but other than that, this process is hers. She had a conversation with someone in the ECE department and discussed how she might apply without a highschool diploma. Capilano University doesn't really have much of a homeschooler admission policy, but they were delighted to hear that at fifteen she was already enthusiastically pursuing her goals, that she already knew enough about those goals to know exactly what her own educational values are, and that she intended to apply. They will, eventually, look over her activities and projects from the last few years and admit her according to whatever those have been. There's no guarantee, just like her brother wasn't guaranteed a spot at UBC despite an honours-standing graduation, a scholarship for his biology-related community work, and significant long-standing attendance at UBC lectures. But then, there's really never a guarantee about life, is there?

University
That brings me to what I've learned. I've learned that not only is there no guarantee of admission to university, but there's no need to worry about it, either. I've learned that university, like school or a job or a friendship, offers a lovely and important opportunity for learning, but it's not everything. 

When I was a kid, we were expected to go through the gamut of school until high school graduation, and then either get a job or access further education if our career goals required it. University has now been tacked onto that expectation as a part of the gamut. But why? What's the point? Not only do most kids not have firm career goals by the time they finish high school, but increasingly, people are having a multitude of different careers over the course of a lifetime, and accessing further education only as needed. There's little point in spending four years in training for a job that may not even exist when we finish. There's equally little point in spending all that time in school, when we can be learning and growing on the job, or while working on other pursuits.

So what's university for? A friend of mine pre-read this article and asked me to explore this a little more. Her comments made me realize that many of the skills and experiences I gained from university are now unneeded in our society in general, like outdated job-search skills, now-antiquated writing conventions, and working in a pre-social-media world. Other skills I gained, such as time-management, a sense of self and community engagement, mature social skills, real-world career-building skills, and--most importantly--independence have already been mostly acquired by my unschooled kids, simply because they spent their teen years exploring rather than schooling. During one of the many parent meetings at the democratic school both of my kids attended, the principal explained that at a democratic school kids are encouraged to do whatever they like, even when that means spending every day playing video games or sitting out on the grass chatting with their friends. She then said something to the effect of "we let them do this in their teens, instead of during their first year of university, when they're paying high tuition fees just to sit out on the lawn chatting with their friends." Right. At the time, with a couple of unschooled teens I could already see had more "adulting skills" than I did at twenty, her words hit home.

This current expectation that everyone should attend university for four years just to have a degree that allows us to apply for the next degree, or for a particular job is not a long-standing tradition. Universities used to be simply a hub for research and discovery. They still are, and in addition to that, they offer kids who haven't already had a chance to gain independence a space to do so. More excitingly, they offer a place for people to gather in pursuit of common interests, and because of this (and their ancient position as research hubs) they still hold more resources for the exploration and pursuit of those interests than other parts of the city. The only particle accelerator in this little part of the earth is at our university, for example. It's good to have a place to gather in community and pursuit of knowledge and understanding! We need that! Universities still offer this, and the greatest professors are those who show up not to impart knowledge, but to gather people together in pursuit of it, sharing their enthusiasm as they do. The best classes are not rungs on the ladder towards a degree, but those that welcome in the public and people of all experience levels to just get excited and share ideas. I hope and imagine that as humans and education continue to evolve, universities cease to be an expected part of "growing up", and continue to be, as they have been for many centuries, a hub for growth.

I love how my kids are making their way into adulthood without following the prescribed route. My son feels he needs some education in rendering, so he's just now beginning an online course. My daughter is about to begin a job running a book club for middle-grade readers. Both my kids are on the precipice of their adult lives, and finally free to jump. Maybe one day university will be an important part of my kids' lives, but I imagine it will be just one strand in a great weaving--definitely not something to spend their teen years fretting about. It turns out they can spend their teen years doing what they love and each of those other activities will be equally valuable strands in the same big weaving of their lives.

~~~

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Why Explorative Learning Matters

The Medicine Forest My Parents Gave Me: How Exploring and Knowing Our Place in the Ecosystem Builds Resilience

Once I lost my son in the forest. We were heading home through ferns taller than his three-year-old self, he carrying a harvest of licorice ferns and I carrying his baby sister and some oyster mushrooms. He followed along behind me, and when I turned around, he was gone. I called repeatedly. I retraced my steps. I gripped by baby girl to my chest and started running, panicking, and-- there he was, nestled into a sword fern, chewing on a piece of licorice fern root. He looked up blandly at my stricken face and said "I'm just havin' some licorice root." His trance-like state may have been induced by the well-known calming medicine of licorice fern, or it may have been just his joyful state of mind after a couple of hours spent wandering the forest with his mother and sister.  

My kids and I spent part of most days of their childhood out in the forest, exploring. That's what I did as a mother because it's what I knew to do from my own childhood, spent here in this same little west coast paradise. When my head hurts, I go outside. Maybe I chew an alder leaf like the wild aspirin that it is; maybe I just lift my face to the fresh air, sun or rain. When my heart hurts, I lie in the moss and let it soak up my tears. Licorice fern soothes me; so does the feeling of bark, or the creek water between my toes. When I'm hungry, I eat beans off the vine on my porch, or berries and other treats from the woods; when I'm hungry for adventure I go exploring in my medicine forest. I made up that word. Medicine Forest. It's like a permaculture food forest, but with emphasis on its healing power. My parents didn't purposely give me a medicine forest, but they did give it to me, and I'm passing it on to my children. Let me explain.

That's me with our chickens in the early 1980's, rabbit hutches on the right, and winter-covered veggie garden, behind.

I grew up in a pretty typical single family house - a modified double-wide mobile home, actually - on a five-acre piece of land that my parents purchased in 1980. This land was forest when they bought it. We used to come up here and have a picnic on the slope they hoped would one day be their building site. They let my brother and me free-range all over this place, climbing trees, damming creeks, digging great big holes and picking and using whatever plants we felt like, as they slowly cleared the land and built up what is now a developed property. We raised chickens, meat rabbits, and pigs (but only once because the experience was too heartbreaking for all of us to repeat). My parents grew food crops and allowed us to plant our own experimental gardens, while also insisting that we should help with the family food operations. My brother and I were never forced to kill or butcher animals, but because our parents nurtured our curiosity, we both knew how to clean a rabbit or chicken by the time we were twelve, and by the time we were fifteen we could cook a good family meal from the foods we'd grown or wildcrafted. We didn't even know the word wildcraft, though. We were just "picking nettles", or "finding a mushroom."

My son helping my mother pick nettles in the early 2000's.

Living in and with the forest our parents were busy turning into a home was just "life". We could pick indigenous trailing blackberries from the hillside, invasive Himalayan blackberries from the place Pappa was trying to get them out of the creek, or cultivated boysenberries from Mum's garden. Same difference. They all make good pie, if you don't eat them all before getting them home. And whether they make it home or not, your belly is full with the food, your heart is full of the joy, and your mind is full of knowing every detail of your home. That's a medicine forest. It's a place where everything is living and growing together -- humans included. It's a place you've grown so connected to that just living there heals you from the inside out.

My daughter reading in a tree she knows every inch of.

Somehow through my own teaching and parenting over the years I have come to recognize that, just like the best learning happens when we're inspired by connections to our own experience, the best living happens when we're connected to everything around us. Think of it this way: you care much more about your own backyard than someone else's. You have a lot more interest in your own little potted plant than in the weed at the edge of the pavement, or some tree in a forest far away. So somebody teaching you about a baobab tree might have a bit of a tough job keeping your interest. But what if that tree was yours? My friend went to Africa and really got to know baobab trees - and they became hers. When we connect personally with things, they matter, and mattering strengthens our neural pathways. That's great for learning, but how does this have to do with my medicine forest? Well, this place matters to me. It matters so much that I've spent about thirty years of my life exploring here, both as a child and now with my own nearly-grown children. I know exactly which part of which slope of which creek has the best clay for sculpting, and which part will still have a pool of water and some desperately-hungry trout in August. I know where the elusive white slugs live. I know how berries' flavours change with the weather and with the time of day. This deep understanding of my little wilderness is my connection, and it's why this place is my medicine.

On top of being important to my own health, my experience of exploring this place has made me resourceful and resilient. We all learn more from observing the people around us than from being taught conventionally, and I learned from watching my parents develop this land; their need to be resourceful when we had no electricity, no toilet, or no income. I learned from watching them not just survive here, but keep working even in the face of failure to find joy and wellness in whatever this land and life had to offer. The moss is not my weeping pillow because I'm an idyllic child from a book about fairies; it's my pillow because sometimes I was just plain too sad, as a child, and the moss was what I found to comfort me. My kids don't harvest nettles for brownie points or allowance; they don gloves and harvest them just because that's what we do for Easter. They get stung and they complain at me, but they also delight in testing their brawn by picking them bare-fingered or by eating them raw. They're building resilience, just like I once did. We're in this ecosystem for better and worse and every day that falls in between. Like the plants, we'll thrive or die as part of this, so we're doing our best to thrive.

My kids at fifteen and eighteen processing wild burdock root for tea.

The business of gardening and developing the physical ecosystem is nowhere near as idyllic as I imagine it sounds. There are brutal realities in nature that hurt like hell. Our crops fail, our chickens get sick and I have to put them down; sometimes we fight and resent each other's impact in the ecosystem. Sometimes money is short, time runs out, and family or world tragedy makes us doubt we can succeed. But experiencing these things, feeling them and accepting them is part of the whole picture. My medicine forest is the ecological basket that holds our family, and the love and knowledge we cultivate here, among the weeds and the crops and the chickens, the weather and the water and our own bodies living. When I leave this place, my medicine forest is carried in the knowledge of my body and mind, to nourish and grow with other ecosystems. It's a conscious choice I make to see my surroundings and live in health with them, as a part of them. 

In a monoculture garden, one invasion of a particularly voracious insect can wipe out a whole crop, with nothing remaining to re-seed. The earth itself becomes a barren place, unable to nurture new-fallen seeds without significant help from humans. In a food forest, insects may devour a plant here or there, but the diversity of the community will discourage any one plant or insect from taking over, and thus ensure that enough remains to keep the community thriving. The dead plants along with the dead insects and the droppings of all those who foraged in the forest will feed the earth, ensuring that all the fallen seeds have at least a chance to grow. In fact, the richness of the soil even means the earth will hold more water, making everything thrive more easily.

My parents have asked me how I came to know all these things, and I said "from you", because it was their willingness to let me explore that gave me the gift of knowing my ecosystem. It was their willingness to let me grow my own experimental gardens, and now to rent us a piece of their land and still let me grow my own experimental gardens that gave me the gift of my medicine forest. Sometimes they don't like the look of my unkempt yard, my son's experimental tree fort project, or the weed piles I leave laying around. But they let me and their grandchildren keep living and exploring here, because they're watching the growth of our medicine forest. And sometimes - just once in a long while - we discover things we can teach them, too. Explorative parenting is like that. It's looking at the whole family as a forest instead of one plant seeding another. Our family is like a forest of possibility, where everybody lives in community, exploring and discovering and balancing and sharing, as we all put our roots further and further down, and our branches further and further to the sky.

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Exploring to Learn About Diversity, and Why It Matters

Found: A decomposing, rat-chewed deer vertebra.

This morning my fabulous group of Wild Art kids and I lay on the forest floor with our heads in the dried leaves, looking up at the canopy of deep, dark, low-branched cedars and verdant freshly-leaved maples, their moss and fern-covered trunks reaching down to the ground beside us. The diversity of greens was shocking. Even the leaves of one maple were a very different green than those of the next. We talked about the diversity of bird sounds we could hear, the sounds of the different sorts of leaves rustling both under us and in the distance. We talked about the dark brown, cone-covered branch hung up in the cedar above us, and one of the kids waxed nearly poetic about the balance of dead and decomposing things with the fresh and living things, the balance of different shapes all around, and even the balance of humans in nature, since mostly we now find ourselves not there.

We agreed that balance is pretty important. And the more diversity we have, the more balance. Diversity and balance are essential for all communities, human and wilderness. And the understanding of this diversity is essential for engaging with the world.

This past weekend I attended a rhododendron symposium in Washington, where a majority of attendees were grey-haired, and one of the burning questions was how to engage younger people in the study and love of rhododendrons. Well, of course it's not just rhododendrons, as various people pointed out - it's wilderness in general. But rhodos are one way to look at the wilderness, and humans need to be connecting more with the wilderness. Rhododendrons, mostly recognized as those car-sized, shiny-leaved, blossom-covered shrubs often lining suburban driveways, don't exactly scream wilderness as they beckon weakly from the garden aisles of Costco and Walmart. But did you know that plants of the rhododendron genus occur in the wild on nearly every continent, from cold alpine climates to temperate lowlands to tropical forests? They grow in swamps, on rocks, on stumps and even in the tree canopy. Did you know that these shrubs can be as big as castles or as small as a football? They include species with leaves as big as serving platters, and as small as your thumbnail, blossoms of all colours and many different shapes, and some are evergreen while others are deciduous. We have a few wild species here in my own ecosystem, and one of those, Labrador Tea, is harvested from the swamps for human consumption. I drink Labrador Tea. It's delicious.

There is quite possibly some kind of rhododendron participating in your ecosystem too, just as there are likely many species of grass, trees, moss, lichen, fungi, mammals, and insects. If you go out in the woods, today, you will find diversity.

My point is this: The great diverse world of rhododendrons is one of millions of interconnected pieces of our complex world that thrives because it is complex. Each individual rhodo species or plant, in its own natural community, is an integral participant in the livelihood of everyone. The diversity of human culture is important, too. Each of us contributes in a unique way to our greater community, creating a balance that keeps us more generally prosperous. It is not enough to write this in textbooks for biology students, or to depend on a few grey-haired plant-enthusiasts to champion the diversity of each species. We all need to champion diversity in general, and to celebrate and nurture it in every part of our lives.

If we don't take our children into the wilderness and allow them to play, how will they know - I mean innately, deeply know - that diversity is essential for life? In the wilderness, diversity is what ensures the cycle of life. A rat chewed the deer vertebra in the photo above, nourishing itself with essential minerals and introducing those and others back into the available substrate when it pooped, so that tasty maple cotyledons now shoot up all over the place, are eaten by a nursing doe, passed to its offspring by lactation, and thus the minerals of that bone become part of the next generation of deer. Nobody told me this; I surmised it from a lifetime of exploring and asking questions and being engaged. You don't have to tell your children this. They don't need to read about this cycle in a text book to understand it. They need to crawl around in the underbrush of the forest and find the bones with their own grubby hands, feeling the marks made by the rat's incisors all along the edges. They need to get curious and go looking for the rest of the bones.

As the earth's biodiversity succumbs to climate and habitat destruction, there are people trying to preserve the diversity of rhododendrons for the world. These hardy explorers traverse mountain ridges and river valleys, picking their way through a still-surprising diversity of life and weather conditions, to discover wild rhodos and bring a few seeds back to raise, at home. They observe and document the diversity of life that exists where the seeds came from, and create similar diversity in urban gardens, so that one day when we stop razing the world's forests, perhaps some of this diversity will be retrievable. There are people doing similar preservation work for thousands of genuses and ecosystems all over the world. The reason the room full of grey-haired rhododendron enthusiasts is so eager to engage future generations is because they know the importance of the preservation of diversity for all species.

This is why exploration is important - because in exploring, we discover real diversity, on a scale that no textbook, biology professor, or nature documentary can show us. We know by the dirt under our fingernails that we are a part of this. In a time when the earth's biodiversity is severely threatened, we can immerse ourselves in it, engage with it and know it, literally from the ground up. Then when we get on a city bus we can look at the great diversity of people around us, the great diversity of ideas and emotions and physical attributes, smells and even microbiomes, and we can feel comfortable in knowing that these are important parts of our ecosystem, too.

No matter where we look in the world, diversity means innovation from diverse sources and evolution in many directions, and therefore more likelihood of success and survival, overall. Diversity matters in wilderness ecosystems as well as in our intestinal bacterial populations, boardrooms, classrooms, and human technological progress. Let's give our kids the opportunity to be and value and preserve that diversity.

Further Reading:
May 21 is World Cultural Diversity Day!
Rhododendron Species
The Catalogue of Life! 

Why the Best Learning Looks Like Play

My fourteen-year-old daughter is spending today doing and creating crossword puzzles, playing Sims, and rehearsing for her current role as Ginny in A Very Potter Musical. I asked her to tell me about a time she remembers play that was especially wonderful, or meaningful to her.

"What do you mean?" She asked me. "I'm always playing!"

Far from being the useful answer I hoped for that would help me frame this article, her answer helped me rewrite it. My fourteen-year-old unschooler is an accomplished writer, actor, and student, as well as one of the most diligent workers I know. She always keeps her goals and commitments in mind, runs her social and academic lives like tight ships, and yet feels like she has spent her life always playing.

My daughter is living the dream I dreamed for her, and yet the simplicity of it took me by surprise.

“This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”                           ~Alan Watts

I've been writing about the beautiful learning that my own kids and the kids I work with stumble upon while playing for a very long time, but every day I still run into my own judgments about what comprises valuable activity. This is the way with most of us, I think, who unwittingly (or otherwise) subscribe to the notion that drudgery makes us valuable. But it doesn't. It just makes us drudge.

Play is the word we use for something that we joyfully engage in. Work is often used to represent the opposite. What happens when, instead of teaching our children that hard work pays off with more time for play, we teach them that play is the way to engage with life. We teach them that they have to do some chores, and they have the power to make the chores fun. We join them in the chores because it's a happy way to engage socially. We teach them by example that we are constantly learning. We allow them to see our fascination at whatever we observe happening during the day, we talk to them openly about our wonderings and explorations and the things we've discovered by simply looking up that new word we heard or researching whether we can eat that berry growing in the park. Not only does this demonstrate a healthy way to learn through play, but it turns the job of parenting into joyful engagement... and that's play.

photo by my fabulous brother and teacher, Adrian van Lidth de Jeude, who knows the value of play

"But", says my own father, "at some point you have to stop playing and get to work." As a culture we've convinced ourselves that in order to be of value we have to struggle. I'm going to suggest we throw that away. Just chuck it out. Life has enough inherent struggles, and we're going to learn from every one of them. We don't need to set ourselves (or our children!) up for planned struggling. It doesn't make us more valuable; it just makes us less willing. Nobody went into a parenting or marital or personal crisis on purpose, and yet those crises happen and they make us who we are. They give us the passion we need to pick up and go again - only wiser.

Passion. That's what we need. There's passion in having a fun idea in the middle of the night and getting up to make it happen. There's passion to be found in discovering a new recipe or a new unsolved mystery or a new insect on the wall. There's passion to be had in taking any of the hundreds of experiences of our day and allowing it to inspire us. And that's what some of the best learning looks like: Passionate play.

Maybe it sounds pompous of me to call anything the best learning, but I'm not backing down, there. For decades, now, research has been showing the massive value of play-based learning for people of all ages but especially for children and youth. Some excellent schools have been putting it into practice for a long time, and many businesses are following suit, as companies encourage their employees to both explore their own passions and share their pursuits with the team. In these cases students and employees are encouraged to play; encouraged to explore, and the result is empowered, passionate learners. The result is better teams; better learning; better work.

I live in British Columbia, where the Ministry of Education has rejigged the provincial curriculum to focus on core competencies and other broad ideas that create opportunities for empowered, self-directed, explorative learning. It is taking a while to reach the goals of the new curriculum, but we're on our way. Maybe in twenty years we'll have a whole generation of young adults who have learned through playing all their lives, and go on to build inspired, engaging careers based on curiosity, learning, and enthusiasm. No matter what we're doing, may we always be playing.
...
Some resources for further reading:
The Conversation: Play-Based Learning for Success at School

Province of BC: Benefits of Play-Based Learning

BBC: Could subjects soon be a thing of the past in Finland?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unschooling Music

unschooling music by playing his own way

I come from music, through my mother. When I was little, music was how we lived. I knew how she was feeling by what song she was singing, or what record was in the player. We had to sing on road trips to keep her awake, and some of my earliest memories are of sitting on the floor surrounded by her and other musicians. She gave me music in everything.

So there was never any question my kids would have music. But how they had music has changed many times over the years and, like so many things, I've failed them many times along the way. Unschooling (like parenting; life) is a journey of failures and discoveries that ultimately lead to the rest of our lives. I thought I would share some of our music journey, in case it is encouraging to someone just hovering on a precipice of this crazy trip.

When my kids were little they were surrounded with music all the time, through recordings, through my constant playtime singing, through the songs I sang while I worked in the house and they were busy in another room, and through the many parties and group music events we attended with other folk musicians. Playing, dancing, or drawing in a room full of music was their happy place. This was our life and, although it isn't anymore, it was a wonderful foundation. No lessons, no expectations, just music, everywhere. We weren't even doing it for the kids - it was just our life, which meant, most importantly, that their everyday lives included watching their own parents engaging with music, and they learned how to do it. For that handful of years, I think we got it right.

There's plenty of evidence for the benefits of singing with babies. We even acknowledge the benefits of song and dance for young children, but sometime after our kids leave preschool, many of us begin to lose sight of the importance of music. As our kids get older and we become more and more concerned with their academic futures, music often becomes a skill to be taught in a regimented way, with little or no value given to the actual playing of music. After all, we say we play music; we don't work it. Music is meant to be played, and play is fun. Worse still, music sometimes becomes a leisure activity, and given little value in our school and life-plans. The older our kids get, the more music becomes either a leisure-only activity, or a structured academic pursuit. I destroyed music by allowing this to happen in my home.

My son loved violin. I mean he LOVED violin. He seemed to arrive in the world pre-programmed to desire a violin and to make beautiful sounds come out of it. So, his loving grandmother (the one who brought music into our family) bought him a violin, and also tried to teach him - with all the adoring love of a grandmother giving her own greatest love to her first grandchild. Somebody putting tape markers on his violin was the first offense - no matter how well-intentioned and lovingly it was done. The series of amazingly thoughtful and ridiculously talented and inspiring teachers he then had for violin and cello were the last straw. And I have to say - we chose teachers who truly taught to our son's wild and stringent standards of freedom and inspired genius. He adored them. He thought they were the coolest people in the world. However, he lost interest in stringed instruments.

Our daughter decided she wanted to become a singer, and took up the guitar. She took voice and guitar lessons with teachers who similarly listened to her desires and tailored their lessons to her own measured and regimented but highly alternative style. She had excellent teachers, and she learned a lot from them. But she also eventually declared her own independence, and quit her voice lessons. The thing about unschooling is, kids always have the right to quit. And mine take this very seriously.

Amazingly, although we apparently failed at providing music instruction, both of our kids still make music. My son plays accordion (the one instrument nobody tried to teach him), and has on occasion gone busking in the city. My daughter is still working on her dream of becoming a singer, performing in musicals regularly, and developing a fledgling YouTube presence. But it's not these public pursuits that give me hope. It's the quiet moments while they're working on puzzles and humming to themselves, or cleaning the kitchen while singing an extremely loud improv session, together. It's the way that when they play, music seems to work its way in. It's the way that their very best friends are happy to sit down and make music with them; that when we drive in the car, they sing. We sometimes speak in lyrics. It's not because I know these experiences are beneficial that I encourage them, it's because they make me happy. I was raised in a home where music was the expression of our lives. I hope my grandchildren will say the same thing.

Wild Clay Harvesting and Separating

Recently one of my teen groups took an interest in harvesting wild clay, and decided to try refining it.

When we dig up the clay, it's not only quite crumbly, but also full of rocks, dirt, forest detritus and sand.

So over a period of a few weeks, these teens processed some of our local clay into a lovely smooth sculpting medium, and I thought I'd share the simple method they used.

We have easily-accessible clay all over our island, appearing in creeks and gullies, and dumped in shiny blue mountains when we excavate for wells and the like. This clay came from a very small creek. The group found mostly green clay, with a few pockets of a gorgeous pale blue-grey clay that was quite pure already. They used spoons, stones, a trowel and shovels to scrape their harvest from just above the water level, and found various benefits to each. It seems that the best way to collect the clay is to scrape it gently, dragging the side of a spoon, rock, or shovel along as you might drag your hand across bed linens to smooth them. The reason for this is that any digging into the clay removes chunks of crumbly clay that are quite difficult to grind or squish into a smooth lump. Scraping not only pushes water into the top layer, but pulls off such a small wet layer at a time that the resulting clay is much softer and doesn't require grinding or squishing to render it moldable.

Much of what the group collected was in fact crumbling and needed grinding, so once they had nearly half a bucket full, they used hands, a potato masher, and a shovel to grind it up until it was a nice heavy sludge. Some rocks and twigs were already coming out of it, and they removed those right away.

Then they left the clay slop in the bucket, undisturbed, where it settled out. After a week, we returned to find the rocks settled to the bottom, the sandiest clay above that, the smoother clay slip above that, and the water on top. At this point the group poured the water off the top, and the cleanest slip (about forty or fifty pounds worth) they poured into an old pillow case and hung up over the creek to settle again, and dry.

When we returned after another week, the clay hadn't dried as much as we hoped it would in the pillow case, but had settled nicely again, a layer of heavy sandy clay on the bottom, smooth sloppy clay in the middle, and slip on top. We easily scooped the best quality clay from the top of that in the bag and divided it among us.

Most of the group chose to use their sloppy clay to paint with, but some of us brought some home, where it will dry a little more (on a cloth-covered board) until it's a good working consistency.

Although this activity was, as usual, conceived by the group, I delighted in facilitating, and in seeing so many positive learning outcomes of the process. Most obviously, group working skills were developed, but so too were skills of problem-solving, improvisation, and process development. Working hands-on promotes a deeper understanding of the nature of this ecosystem, its constituents, and its changeability. When you separate out the layers of the forest floor you become familiar with it in a way that is deeper than mere description and images can convey. History, ecology, and engineering are integrated. And of course, when you're doing this exploratively, you are engaged through the process of genuine discovery. This activity was also a great opportunity to change a material that we regularly walk over without concern through a process of very simple refinement into a material that many people purchase in plastic bags. I think this not only strengthens our connection to wilderness, but also to our own ingenuity. Together these are part of what makes us human.

Tools for Improvisational Play

Sometimes I bring tools into the wilderness for play. Sometimes the tools are conventional, like a shovel and buckets for harvesting clay, but sometimes they're strange. And invariably, it seems that the strangest tools bring out the most creativity!

Yesterday, during a free-range exploration that ended up in a creek with a wonderful sandbar, I offered the following:

• a whisk
• a pillowcase
• a tin can (opened in such a way that it had no sharp edges)
• a steak knife
• string

The whisk, knife and string, despite being initially the most enticing tools, were actually abandoned in the first few minutes. Using mostly the pillowcase and tin can, along with whatever they found in the wild, the group of six pre-teens worked collaboratively to conceive and create a very functional bridge over moving water, and to separate the sandbar into two islands.

The sandbar cleft was hard work, and they improvised fantastically, using the pillowcase (with various combinations of sand, mud and water) as a bucket, battering ram, and scraper-shovel. The can was useful for digging, prying, scooping, and throwing water.

The bridge-building was very challenging, since the flow of the creek washed out most of the sand, mud, and wood they threw in. But after much experimentation, the group succeeded in securing a large rotten log with sticks, so that the water could easily flow underneath while not disturbing the positioning of the log. They stabilized both ends of the log using bark, mud, sticks, and pillowcase-fulls of sand. After many crossings, the bridge became increasingly stable, and the kids were mightily proud of their work.

Risk-Taking Is Essential for Learning to Be Safe

Looking at bubbles in the ice and a watery landscape underneath.

For as long as I can remember, I've been hearing mumblings of concern over the increased safety-restrictions placed on our children. We like to talk about "when we were kids" and how our lives were so much freer; so much more dangerous. "And we turned out just fine." But when it comes to our own kids we're still terrified, placing ever more layers of armour on them and keeping them ever closer, ever more restricted in their movements. We read great articles about how necessary it is for our kids to explore and take risks. And then we see them heading out without a helment, freak out, chase them down, apply helmet, and tell them not to go out of our sight. Or something like that.

I'm not immune to those struggles, as a parent. But because I teach, and am thinking every day about how to engage people I work with in healthy, dangerous play, I have the opportunity to keep reminding myself why it matters to let my children take risks.

Frozen ditches!

Last week I took a couple of groups of kids out exploring ice. We talked a lot about ice safety, how to recognize dangerous areas, and how to deal with cracking ice, to avoid falling through. We looked down and estimated the thickness of the ice based on bubbles and twigs that were frozen into and floating under the ice. We also cautiously went out on all fours and bellies, exploring the ice, knowing that it wasn't likely strong enough to stand on, but learning to gauge the danger (how deep was the water under the ice? how thick was the ice? how concentrated was our weight? was it cracking?). In some places the ice did crack, and the kids had to safely navigate away from the more dangerous areas as they discovered them. They also stomped around on some shallow areas and stomped right through some of the ice, into the mud.

I feel that this dangerous play is essential learning - it enables the kids to take risks in relative safety and to learn from them. This is not only essential for wilderness activities, but also for life in general, since so much of what we learn requires risk, and it's nice to be able to mitigate the severity of the risks from a place of personal understanding. I feel this leads to greater safety, and in my experience with teaching I have definitely seen that the more cautious risks children take, the more confident they become, and the less severe their stumbles are, when they make them.

PS: Ever hear of belly hockey? The correct rink for this is a 2-inch thick layer of ice over a couple of feet of murky creek water. Grab yourself some nice sticks and a chunk of wood for a puck... and have at it!