Free-Range Childhood

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.

Palliative Security

The Bush Administration’s overreaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, continues to ripple across our increasingly violent and fearful society. The United States leads the world in gun ownership and gun violence. Powerful, largely rightwing forces within our society are determined to keep it that way. It should surprise no one that the election of a black, liberal President saw a corresponding rise in gun purchases.

Those who see gun ownership as a God-given—or at least Constitution-given—right dismiss the alarming statistics: more than 30,000 gun deaths a year (about three every hour), some 70,000-plus non-fatal gunshot wounds a year. They fail to see a problem in the fact that during the 20-year Vietnam War period, between 1955 and 1975, more than 58,000 U.S. service members were killed, slightly less than the number of U.S. civilian gun deaths in any two-year period.

In recent weeks I have visited a number of public schools in Indiana. Most, especially in the wake of the elementary school shootings in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, are instituting new security measures, such as locked entrance doors with cameras. One school I visited had begun locking all interior doors: offices, classrooms, library, and so on. Observers, whether school staff or visitors, were issued a master key to allow them to enter classrooms without interrupting the lesson by knocking for admittance.

Children and educators increasingly work in prison-like conditions in many schools. Ironically, the security measures are largely palliative, designed to provide the illusion of safety rather than true security.

In that school with all the locked doors, every door featured a large glass window. The locked library was behind a wall of glass. The camera-equipped entrance doors to the school: all glass. Any would-be armed assailant determined to enter the school or any room within it could do so with relative ease. Such security measures affect only the law-abiding, not those with criminal intent.

I’m reminded of the wag who commented, “One guy in a plane tries to set his shoe on fire and now millions of passengers every day have to take off their shoes to get through airport security.”

This is not to minimize the devastation that one deranged gunman brought to a small community in Connecticut. But exceptionality should not be used as an excuse for universality. Teachers are routinely taught not to punish the entire class for the transgression of one or two students. Yielding to unreasonable fears and spending money that could be used for teaching and learning on unnecessary and ineffective security apparatus for schools is sad and worrying. Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 admonition that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” is piquant. Fear is seldom a motivator for good. Roosevelt was talking about the Great Depression, of course, not gun-toting killers. But the sentiment is transferable.

In the same inaugural address Roosevelt also, in the same context, said, “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.” I would suggest that the dark realities of the present moment are not would-be assailants lurking near schools, ready to invade classrooms and gun down children and teachers. Such incidents are exceptions, dreadful, tragic exceptions. The dark realities are our unreasoning fears, which pierce the hearts and minds of parents, educators, and most damagingly, children.

Locked glass doors won’t keep out a determined killer but do send a dangerous and damaging message to children, namely that they live in an uncertain world, a world in which they need to be constantly afraid. What kind of educational message is that?