Thomas Hobson

There are those who insist, "But competition is part of human nature," that's not what anthropologists who study hunter-gatherer societies tell us. If one considers human existence as a 12-hour clock, we were hunter-gatherers for 11 hours and 59 minutes, and it was in these kinds of societies in which we have evolved to thrive. No, it wasn't until very recently in evolutionary terms, when the agricultural revolution introduced the notion of "ownership," that competition became normalized, and it runs counter how humans have evolved to interact with one another on a day-to-day basis. Perhaps there is a place for competition in our wider society (although from where I sit, it is largely corrosive) but there is no place for it in eduction.

Of course, I understand that "We don't hit people" is spoken in the spirit of aspiration, in the sense that we hope to one day be a place where no one hits anyone, but since we almost always say it in the immediate aftermath of someone indeed being hit, it's simply not true that "we don't hit people" and everyone knows it. And because of the way the children make their own rules at Woodland Park , I can even say, "We all agreed, no hitting," perhaps the most powerful true statement I can make in that circumstance because it includes the unity of "we" with the virtue of truth. It might sound like a little thing this trading out one set of words for another, and in a way it is, but the foundation upon which we build the future is always made of little things, one atop the other. It might sound like a little thing this trading out one set of words for another, and in a way it is, but the foundation upon which we build the future is always made of little things, one atop the other.

This doesn't mean the kids at our school don't sometimes pretend to be cooking up a pot of mud stew or mud cake or mud pasta. " The adults might set up what they think are cool provocations, but after that, it belongs to the children: that's what I've learned, often painstakingly, over the course of many, many "failures."Over there in the right hand column of this blog, you'll see a header labeled "Teacher Tom's Topics" and under that you'll find a link to posts tagged with "Little World." In a nutshell, our journey began with "loose parts" that were not so loose and ended with the children having taught us how to let go to the point that we rarely use the term "loose parts" any longer, going instead with the more accurate moniker "junk."Indeed, going back over the decade of writing on this blog, there are more than a few posts, especially from those early years, that today make me cringe. Often, children will begin by playing with our mud kitchens or Little World's in the way we envisioned, but they quickly learn, through their play, all they can from the artificial limitations we've set and must to move on, which is why they dismantle our creations for their own, better, purposes, the next steps in their own journeys.

I reckon I could even devise some sort of pre and post-test that would allow me to compare the children's progress, identify those who are behind and assign those poor kids some merry-go-round homework so they could catch up with the others. I might even decide to rank the children on various measures that I have identified as important about merry-go-round play, assigning each of them grades based on my assessment of where they fall on an arbitrary scale of learning I'd devised based on data that I and others have collected over generations. I could then use this data I've amassed to devised a merry-go-round curriculum, one that allows me to "teach" children how to play on a merry-go-round, imagine myself an expert, seeing to it that these children are merry-go-round proficient . . Each of those children on the merry-go-round are learning something different, something unique, something that applies only to them and their lives, and even the person doing the learning