Re-seeding – giving back – Touch The Future

When you look really carefully at all those eleven conditions and you think about them individually and you put a bracket around them, the only place that they all exist every single day is in play. If you remember, if you go back a little bit to when you played, that’s where you belong. You had friends. You learned kind of the pecking order of things. There’s a deep feeling of being a part of a community when you’re playing.

Things to think about

What will you give back to the Earth at the end of your days?
Do you have a mixed age group in your school?
How do you give children power in your school? Or in what ways do you not take it away?

Highlights from Playful Wisdom
by Michael Mendizza featuring Bev Bos and Joseph Chilton Pearce

Principals continued

9. Tell stories and more stories.

Imagination is more important than knowledge and the only way to grow and expand developing imagination is with stories, words that create pictures in the child’s mind. Animated pictures on a screen suck all the descriptive words, the imagination-building nutrients, out of the experience, bypassing the symbolic and metaphoric centers of the brain, which are infinitely more complex than the visual center. When asked how to produce the greatest scientists in the world, Einstein remarked, “Tell them fairytales.” Calculus is the mathematical study of change, in the same way that geometry is the study of shape. Both are abstract languages. The foundation for entering into and playing with abstract symbols and metaphors is narrative story—not Disney or DreamWorks.

10. Limit screen time, including social media and v-games the first decade.

What? You must think I’m crazy. Study after study dating back to television and the advertised early learning advantages of Sesame Street and Baby Einstein revealed that the children who spent the most time with media developed the least. Experiences up to ages ten and eleven determine to a large extent the capacities developed for one’s lifetime. In terms of real development, the 5,000 to 8,000 hours the average child spends with screens can be viewed as one experience—with a device. Forget all the “content” they are supposed to be “learning.” Children only retain 3 to 5 percent of all the content we feed them in school. Why do you think computers are any different? And all that screen time displaces the full spectrum other experiences offer—running, climbing trees, building things and singing, feeling the grass, watching the clouds, discovering that children are nature. The other real harm is the way that interacting with technology increases narcissism, compulsive attention to one’s social image rather than developing altruistic feelings of empathy and compassion. The foundations for this are set during the very early years. Shoot the TV and don’t give your children mobile-mini-computer babysitters, which means, yes, you have to be interesting, imaginative, creative and engaging. After eleven, let them have the technology.

A word that I’ve coined kind of, I don’t know if it’s a real word, but receding. I think anybody who is on this planet has to think a little bit or at some point in their life realize that they have something to give back. That the next generation, what are you doing? It has nothing to do with having children. It has to do with giving back to the Earth. Maybe your issue is organic food. Maybe your issue is litter. Whatever it is, there’s clean water, whatever it is, there has to be a place where you have some kind of interest in making the world a little different. Now when you look really carefully at all those eleven conditions and you think about them individually and you put a bracket around them, the only place that they all exist every single day is in play. If you remember, if you go back a little bit to when you played, that’s where you belong. You had friends. You learned kind of the pecking order of things. There’s a deep feeling of being a part of a community when you’re playing. Risk, all of us did things that our mothers don’t know and our fathers didn’t know, and that element was always there. Support, older kids helping younger kids. One of the things that concerns me really deeply is when people say oh I have the three year old, when you went outside as a kid you didn’t say where are the three year olds? I can only play with the three year olds. It’s this cross age thing; older kids helping younger kids. Well that’s where that notion of support comes. Passion. Gosh I can remember playing so hard as a child that I would be just dripping wet and exhausted and just fall into the seat at the dinner table, scarcely able to eat, but that wonderful issue of passion. And then power. Power over how far you could ride, how deep you can dig. When you see children who are always using guns as an issue of power, what I know is that those kids don’t play and play hard enough because there’s tremendous power in play. The power of the hose. The power of the shovel. The power of the paint brush. The power of music. The power of being a whirling dervish are using that body. There’s tremendous, tremendous power in play. That’s one of the most important ones because it’s such an issue for everybody. But if you look at all those conditions there’s only one place where they exist every day and that’s in play. And what I believe too is that children don’t play hard. Hard as in putting all their energy, their brains, their bodies into this, they’re not going to be able to work as they get older. They’re always tired because they haven’t developed that body that can do that. So I think it’s really, really important.