Not-Play. Once you get to the end of this book and if you feel inspired to try the approach outlined in its pages, I’m convinced that you’ll never hear those six words again.
Happy reading and happy playing, Greg :)
Chapter 1 The Child at the Centre of the Universe
‘A broken heart is a brilliant start ... ’ – The Mary Onettes
The world of education is an amazing and rewarding world to be in, but there is a sense among many that work within it that there is something not quite right, that all is not well. Every teacher and educator has a concept of what education is and what it isn’t. Many would want to change education, many have tried, few have succeeded. Education policy is something that seems to be inflicted on teachers in the twenty-first century – it doesn’t feel collaborative and it often feels that no one is listening to common sense.
When I told my father that I was going to train to be a primary teacher, his first words, as someone who had spent his entire life as a teacher and latterly as a teacher-trainer, were: ‘Don’t – it’s not what you think it is ...’ And how right he was. I seemed to have entered a universe where stress, pressure, constant change, moving of goalposts, learning walks, display monitoring, data collections and performance management have slowly wrung out the pleasures that made teaching a career to be proud of.
‘From revolution to revelation ...’ – My October Symphony, Pet Shop Boys
Trying to fix something is never straightforward. Sometimes the answer lies outside our normal day-to-day experiences or it needs someone to point us in the right direction. Last year, before going on a family holiday in Cornwall, I recognised that I was in a phase of my life that I knew I needed to change. The problem was that I didn’t know where to turn. I would go on long dog walks and wrestle in my brain, sit by the fire with a bottle of red and ponder or throw myself into social situations just to distract my brain. And then, almost out of the blue a good friend mentioned a book in passing that she had heard about and how it might be worth a read. That book was The Rhythm of Life by Matthew Kelly (not he of Stars in Their Eyes fame) and over the course of the family holiday within the space of four days, having read it cover to cover, my whole life changed (Kelly M [2002] The Rhythm Of Life, Crowborough: Beacon Publishing).
I realised that I was enduring an internal struggle with my life and its significance. I was toiling in an education system that seemed detached and beyond my control. I knew that I wanted to change this somehow but couldn’t find the internal dialogue to begin this process. But there, staring back at me from The Rhythm of Life lay the answer:
Lasting happiness and fulfilment are not the by-products of doing and having ... Who you become is infinitely more important than what you do or what you have. The meaning and purpose of life is for you to become the best-version-of-yourself ...
(p. 29)
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end in life.
(Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 30)
And, perhaps most tellingly of all, his view of education:
We teach more and more about less and less. We don’t draw out the individual. We impose upon the individual – systems and structures. We don’t reverence individuality, we don’t treasure it, we stifle it ... we don’t educate, we formulate. We abandon the individual in his or her need and uniqueness and ‘impose’ the same upon all.
(p. 105)
And so therein lies the challenge: if we know or even suspect that there needs to be a change, why don’t we become the change we want to see? How can we, as educators, become the best-version-of-ourselves – not just in our own selves but also within our classrooms, our interactions with colleagues and in the positive energy giving that we can bring every day with us through the school gates? And that is the change that I want to become.
I want to change our view of Early Years and our very practice
I want to change, not just through this book but through my life, my example, through my dialogues with parents and colleagues. Some may see me as a bald-headed beardy man in his mid-40s on some crusade, but if my voice is joined by your voice and your voice is joined by another, and so on and on, can we not begin to orchestrate change that we want to see and truly become the teachers that we want to be? And maybe that’s a dilly-daydream, but wouldn’t it be better to die trying than just roll over and accept a system and structure that deep down in our hearts we know to be broken and no longer fit for purpose?
I Am the Cosmos, I Am the Wind – Chris Bell, Big Star
Increasingly, or so it would seem, mainstream education is fast becoming something that is done to a child – an act of imposition: we teach, children learn. The adult imparts their wisdom, their light, their understanding so that the child can receive and fill themselves up from top to toe. It’s as though children are empty pots on a factory floor advancing along a chain at various stages being topped up along the way. And this is how a modern-day education system would want you to think – to buy into a system that enables grading and measuring, that produces data that in turn allows it to grade a school, which in turn enables it to grade itself. It’s like the brainchild of an Orwellian dystopia which, left unchallenged, will continue to use education as a self-serving entity. It puts the individual child out of the frame at the expense of focusing on itself.
Shamefully, perhaps, this data-led measured-based approach is bleeding into Early Years and not only creating a system that seems to look past the child-as-the-child, but ultimately misses the very obvious point that when we work with young children we are dealing with people not numbers, with development not progress, and with what should be joy not mechanical learning by rote. Our leaders appear to be fixated with the ‘success’ of Far East education systems that enable measurability to the nth degree, ignoring our children’s need for energy, their true creativity, their real sense of who they are.
Now, this book isn’t going to be a call to arms or a rallying cry to rush the Houses of Parliament, a baying crowd with pitchforks waving, flags fluttering in the breeze. It is, however, going to show you that there is a way to work within the system that will give you the outcomes that, as an adult, you are expected to achieve, while at the same time giving your children wonderful and enriching experiences that will both enable them and nurture their own ‘soulness’. And if you discover the success of this approach, why not then tell someone else, who will tell someone else, and so on? Lo and behold, we have our revelation and a revolution.
What is required for this approach to be successful?
A simple word: faith. Faith in yourself, faith in your innate sense of what education really should be and, most importantly, faith in children.
Perhaps it would help if we focused on arguably one of Europe’s finest educational minds, Loris Malaguzzi, to enable us to switch our focus from outcome-driven and on to a child-driven pedagogy. Malaguzzi was a man who had real faith in young children – he saw them as citizens, as people who participated, who had thoughts, actions, dreams, imagination, all of which lie beyond the interpretation of the adult world. Emerging as a society from the aftermath of the Second World War, he began to set about defining an approach that would create a society that valued children and their education. He had a vision that children could be enabled to realise and express their
