A number of
forces have converged to make us, as a national community, fearful and
distrustful. The consequences have negatively affected on our children, both
socially and educationally. We now make them fearful in our own image, and that
degrades their learning.
In the aftermath
of 9/11 the Bush administration ramped up national fears, which gave the
federal government relatively free reign to suppress citizens’ rights to
privacy and to engage in two costly, as yet unpaid for, and unnecessary wars,
which in turn fomented an uptick in the opposition’s virulent radicalism. Conservative
state governments have followed suit. Our national culture of fear serves
radical conservative interests and helps keep them in power. We have not heeded
FDR’s timeless warning that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Fear suppresses our humanity.
But fear has
been abetted by loss of trustful community through other means, such as the
absence of parental adults at home. As the income/wealth gap has widened, more
families require income generated by all adults to sustain themselves, leaving
neighborhoods empty and unsafe for children on their own. Neighbors often no
longer know one another, and the notion of a “parental village,” in which all
parents look out for all children, has fallen away with the decline of a
meaningful, universal sense of community.
Finally, another
key factor has been the push to “improve” education by ever-earlier emphasis on
“academics,” a failure to recognize that play, for the young, is real learning.
In a Scholastic Instructor article
titled “What Happened to Kindergarten?” the author quotes a kindergarten
teacher who says, “While young students’ reading and math scores are soaring,
there is little assessment of the effect of the intensified academic focus on
kids’ motivation to learn, creativity, motor skills, social skills, or
self-esteem. The risk is children who are already burned out on school by the
time they reach third grade,” says Stoudt, the kindergarten teacher. “Play is
how children learn. There should be more of it in the upper grades, not less in
the lower.”
I was fortunate
to grow up in the 1950s and 1960s at a time when childhood could best be
characterized as free-range. As a sixth-grader living in a U.S. military
community in Germany, I was fortunate to live near a forest that offered
unlimited possibilities. It was crisscrossed with paths and traversed by a
raised Roman road that passed near the ruins of a small Roman bath and a wooden
Roman watchtower recreated by the local residents. One memorable day some of my
fellow sixth-graders and I set out to explore these woods. Our method of
navigation was to pause whenever paths crossed. One of us would then take out a
pocket knife (something no sixth-grade boy would be without), open it, and toss
it into the air. Whichever way it pointed on landing was the direction we took.
Hours later we
emerged from the woods near another village, from whence we made our way back
home using the German road signs to guide us. Incidentally, none of us spoke
German, but it didn’t matter. We were adventurous kids, confident in ourselves
and our burgeoning ability to navigate the world and have fun doing so. Our
parents supported this freedom. On such adventures we discovered things about
the world around us but also about ourselves. We were learning free-range,
gaining independence that would make us socially and intellectually strong.
Today, we rob
our children of these kinds of learning adventures. Sixth-graders with knives?
What if they cut themselves or stabbed another person? And bringing a pocket
knife to school? Out of the question! Fear. Four or five twelve-year-old boys
roaming unfamiliar woods in a foreign country? What if they get lost? What if
someone takes them or hurts them? Fear. Sixth-graders walking from one foreign
village to another, not even knowing the language? And out of touch? No cell
phones? No way to check in for hours at a time? What if…? Fear.
I am reminded of
a character in Frank Herbert’s novel, Dune,
who says, “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total
obliteration.” So long as we allow ourselves to operate as a society based in a
culture of fear, that fear will obliterate childhood learning that is natural,
open, and leads to fulfillment in adulthood. We desperately need to recreate
the free-range childhood—for the sake of our children, for the sake of our
national future.
