When kids come they, in the beginning, may not even have a picture on the wall of their mind. What they see is all of this stuff that they can do. Here’s the shovels, let’s see what I can do, and they get over and they start to dig, they build a dam. They don’t even know the name of it. They damn the water up. The water breaks. Oh now I’ve got to figure this out. I’ve got to figure this out so I have the complete picture on the wall of my mind. I can do this. I have the power and the imagination to control this. That wonderful imaginative self cannot happen when things are set up by adults.
Things to think about
How to you keep children company? How do you keep from interfering in their play or designing their play?
Do you feel the need to comment on a child’s play either when you enjoy it or when you might be worried about it? What would it look like to stay silent?
Do you trust that children are capable of working through problems they encounter? Are they capable of working through hard stuff physically and mentally without an adult to rescue them?
What about your program can be changed to make it more accessible to the hand and the body?
Do you understand the importance of repetition is children’s play and learning? How does Bev state that in this excerpt?
What was the last thing a child did that took your breath away?
Highlights from Playful Wisdom
by Michael Mendizza featuring Bev Bos and Joseph Chilton Pearce
We can look at the entire developmental process as a slow transition from me to we, from mine to ours or us. Interesting how the less energy and attention that we invest in ‘me’, the larger, more expansive and intelligent what we no longer think of as me becomes. What the old ones call bonding and the hipsters call attachment (neither very good) come into play. Instead of conceiving of bonding as attaching two separate things, consider that the experience bonding implies actually describes one’s state of being and therefore identity. The nature and quality of the bonded relationship defines one’s identity. If that identity is me-me-me, one’s worldview is pretty small. The more attention that the me consumes, the smaller the world becomes. Joe Pearce describes how bonding is expansive, how the developmental process is one of expanding bonds, first with mother and father, the family with the living world, the neighborhood, tribe, culture, the planet, the cosmos, and ultimately spirit. At each developmental stage the center of one’s identity expands, and with it empathy and intelligence; at least that is what nature intends. The bigger the bond, the bigger the world becomes. Most, for painful reasons, get stuck. Ashley Montagu suggested that few develop beyond high school. Many get stuck earlier, resulting in toddler tantrums in a grown-up body. Love, I reasoned many years ago, is the natural, pleasure-based glue that this expansive empathy and intelligence depends on. Bonding and the pleasure it assumes is the only force strong enough to overcome the weight of self-centeredness, me-as-the-center. One can’t be stuck in me and love at the same time. Love implies transcending this puny me-identity, letting it go for something much bigger. Loving children invites this transcendent experience.
I think parents, when they come to our place, know. There’s a moment when they can go back deep inside and they say well yes, this is right, this is right for my kid. We had a father who brought a child one time and when she walked in the school she said, “Daddy, this is it!” Because sometimes some place way down deep she knew that this was the place for her. That imaginative play, I think that when kids come they, in the beginning, may not even have a picture on the wall of their mind.
What they see is all of this stuff that they can do. Here’s the shovels, let’s see what I can do, and they get over and they start to dig, they build a dam. They don’t even know the name of it. They damn the water up. The water breaks. Oh now I’ve got to figure this out. I’ve got to figure this out so I have the complete picture on the wall of my mind. I can do this. I have the power and the imagination to control this. That wonderful imaginative self cannot happen when things are just set or set up by adults. What I love that our parents in our school do is just stand there with a shovel, just in case you need a little bit bigger hole that just isn’t as deep quite as it is now.
I think what kids want most from adults, what we need to give them in those places, so that they can go deep into their brains, is company. You just want to keep them company. We have wonderful pumps at the school where kids can pump water and it turns a water wheel and nothing really happens, the water wheel turns. A little boy was pumping the water pump one day and I was sitting on a stump and I never said anything to him. I just sat there very quietly. And about 7-8 minutes later he said, “Hey, we’re doing this together aren’t we!” What he could feel was my interest. I was keeping him company. I loved what he was doing. I didn’t need to say anything trite. I didn’t need to interrupt the play. I didn’t need to add to it.
I think the thing that’s missing most of all for parents, for teachers, for almost everybody, is trust. Trust that that magnificent brain in a really rich environment can figure out what they need to do for themselves. And, when they do that and they do it over and over and over again it stays with them all of their lives. They’re going to be in some country some day, a place that they’ve never been before, and they’re going to have to do something to what, maybe save their lives or to go further, and that is going to be in their brain, it’s going to be really deep and they’re never going to forget it. It’s amazing to me how many times I have to do something with the kids and I go back and I can feel it, it’s in my childhood, because those are the things that I did as a kid. We had to figure things out for ourselves. Yesterday when I said to Sally, let’s teach the kids how to siphon, well that was something we did with pumps and things when I was a kid. We had to do that kind of stuff because we didn’t even have running water when I was growing up, so we had to do those kinds of things. You remember those things.
The one thing that I’ve said, and it’s such a, kind of a simple statement, but if hasn’t been in the hand and the body it can’t be in the brain. You’ve got to touch it. You’ve got to take it apart. You’ve got to do it yourself. Kids can’t even cut up their own food anymore. Everything is done for them. Everything is in pieces so that they don’t have to be bothered. They’ve been at school since September. They’re still doing the same thing, trying to figure that out. It’s like this grain of sand has to be understood. There’s all that sand, it’s really, really important. What frightens me is that I would go to a place where the sand pile was just a dish pan of sand and I wouldn’t weep. See that’s what I think, that you can get so hardened to this very shallow, shallow places that we’ve established for children that you forget, that you forget to cry. That you forget to be moved. Every day one when I’m at school tears come to my eyes for some reason. I think it’s very frightening if that doesn’t happen for teachers, that doesn’t happen for parents, where what their child does is so breath taking.
We have a little boy who takes a big wagon and he puts a, he had the wagon yesterday but he puts a two-seater garden chair in that wagon, which makes it really high, and then he goes around and he invites all sorts of people to climb up there and he gives them rides and he works really, really hard. It’s such a simple thing. It always reminds me of the two-decker bus in London and I always think to myself he does it every day, if I’m not moved by tears then I need to be away from this because this is the stuff that’s really important.
