Leadership Lost and Found

To The Moonwhistle Kids:

Today is National Siblings Day. I know you have real siblings you adore, and I hope you get to see them today. When you were little you had a gang that was almost like siblings. You spent many hours together each week, and I had the unbelievable privilege of sharing that time with you. There’s something else about that time that I would like to share with you.

Did you know that  Moonwhistle was an educational experiment? Almost everything about our school was experimental. I’ll give you some examples.

1.              Most preschools run on a prescribed schedule. They have “free play” time and story time, music time, arts & crafts time, etc. At Moonwhistle we looked at it differently. It’s true that a predictable rhythm to the day is helpful to children. But primary care itself demands plenty of structure: snack time, diaper changing, lunch, naps, going to the park. I felt that your day was already full of structure, and that the rest of the time you should be free to choose. So while we certainly initiated lots of activities, you were not required to attend: not for reading or play dough or anything. We were staffed at a 1/3 adult/child ratio so that you could move around the space freely, and we could treat your play with the same regard as our planned activities.

2.              One of the most challenging experiments for me was an effort to provide gender neutrality in our school. At least once a year I would stack all our books according to whether the protagonist was male or female. The male stack was always higher than the female, though we tried very hard to even it up. It was the 1990s, and writers seemed convinced that any character doing anything interesting had to be male (with some exceptions, of course). I was shocked to discover that even when the protagonist was an animal, it was male (unless it had a brood of babies). Almost every Christmas I visited Toys R Us and wrote to the parents about the toys I saw there. For boys there were two aisles of what I referred to as “violence dolls,” (aka “action figures”). The girls’ aisle looked like it had been sprayed in Pepto Bismol, and most of the toys there were fashion dolls. In addition to this, nearly all toys for active play, like building sets, carpentry tools, balls and sports gear, showed pictures of boys on the packaging, never girls. I advised your parents against the extreme gender-indoctrination choices, suggested that all children need trucks, balls, and active play, and recommended that parents remove all the packaging that had gender messages and just throw it away. Meanwhile, back at the great room, we worked every day to create one wonderful childhood experience for all children, not two separate ones. And I wrote about it constantly for the parents in my newsletter, Whistle Me Moon. Once we all started paying attention, everyone was shocked at how much gender indoctrination there was all around us. People routinely, even today, say to boys, “Oh, you don’t like girls now, but wait til you’re 16, you’ll see, hahaha,” and constantly talk to girls about their clothing, hair, or prettiness. At Moonwhistle we pushed back. At our school, boys were consoled when they cried, not shamed. And everybody learned to handle a ball. I could go on and on with examples, but I’ll stop. Let’s just say we tried really hard to protect you from gender indoctrination in all its forms. Once I spoke about this at a large gathering at the Waldorf School and, even there, found no support. My remarks were answered by a woman who claimed that her daughter was born craving pink, that her sons chewed their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into the shape of guns, and that it was all completely hardwired, get over it. Just so you know, we proved this woman wrong day after day.

3.              We had an unusual approach to the arts. In most preschools, art is introduced by doing projects where the teacher shows a model, say a snowman, and the children are taught to replicate the result step by step. At Moonwhistle, it was different. First, there were no such adult-conceived projects. Secondly, art materials were not sequestered and brought out at special times. We set up the great room with art supplies available all the time, within your reach. And we concentrated on teaching you the handling skills so you could create your own designs. You learned to cut, paste, tape, staple, punch paper, tie, wire, draw, paint, and sculpt. But also, to move with music. To converse through musical instruments! Instead of television, you watched the Nutcracker and Tales of Beatrix Potter ballets. You enjoyed three different types of literature: story books in the great room, chapter books and poetry in the nap room, and live storytelling at mealtime. Maybe you remember something called the “Knollwood Farm Stories.” You became obsessed with the Nutcracker Suite and could sing the whole thing (I swear) front to back, and sometimes did so from the top of the slide at Douglass Park. And, while we never taught you to dance a single step, you spun and leapt and interpreted music with abandon. Something you should know: there was a nonprofit organization in San Francisco called SCRAP, which stood for Scroungers Center for Recycled Art Parts. I shopped there almost every week and came home with some crazy shit. Our school was full of wonderful and endless supplies of paper, boxes, fabrics, elastic, buttons, clay, and innumerable indescribable oddments, which you routinely transformed into play props and objets d’art. Once when I came home with a box of white postcards, expecting that you would like the size and would decorate the plain white backs, instead, somebody decided to cut on a line that separated the text messages on the front, then turn the narrow piece sideways and staple it, then decorate with a face and clothing. It sure looked like a nutcracker, but you guys called it a robot, and you made hundreds of them. It went on for weeks until the whole great room was strung with robots every which-way. I could recite many more examples of individual and group art making that took my breath away. Overall, we deemphasized standardized representational art and messed around with materials on their own terms, often then finding representational images in the accidental result. Example: melted crayon art. Celebrating your abstract art as much as representational, we created a personal art wall for each child in the school. Other ways of dealing a blow to “correctness” were games where we would take turns tossing a chain on the floor, then walk around it and every person would try to “see” an image in the random shape that appeared. Staff and I would model drawing by starting with a scribble on paper. When you would say, “What are you drawing?” we would say, “I don’t know yet,” then turn the paper this way and that and let the you suggest something, and develop the drawing in that direction. Anything to break with the usual course of expectation and disappointment that learning to draw can engender.

4.              The “I’m Okay Corner.” There’s a passage in Whistle Me Moon where I introduced this idea to the parents. Instead of punishing kids for inconvenient behaviors, or sequestering you in a “time out,” I wanted to try looking at it differently. If you were acting out in some way, then you were uncomfortable and needed support of some kind. So we created a corner with soft seating, a mirror (btw, it’s really hard to cry in front of a mirror; you end up laughing), and lots of luscious art. You didn’t go there alone, but with an adult. You could talk about what had happened and how you felt, or you could just chill. If it was a dispute, all parties could go to the I’m OK Corner together and work it through, with help from the adult as needed. We thought it worked pretty well. After a few years, I realized that when other teachers asked me how I handled discipline, I didn’t know what to say. Hated to say, “My kids never do anything bad,” but really you didn’t! There were disputes, as in any group, but you learned to handle them so well that you often counseled neighborhood children who were fighting at the park, and parents would come up and ask me “where did you get these children?” I always thought that was hilarious.

Well, those were the main areas of experimental thinking at Moonwhistle. Then there was the overarching influence of Joseph Chilton Pearce, a writer who also influenced the Waldorf School, where some of you landed after Moonwhistle. Pearce wrote a great deal about brain development in early childhood. He didn’t approve of day care and thought young children belonged at home with their mothers. But after reading a small booklet I sent him about our school, he said to me, “Some people are doing it right.”

My thinking was that, in the real world, parents are going to work, and children are going to be in group care, period. So my question was HOW GOOD CAN GROUP CARE BE FOR BRAIN DEVELOPMENT? From Pearce I learned that babies are born preprogrammed for only one thing: brain development. We can support it, or we can mess it up. And how we support it is this: support play. What children do when we get out of the way is … (wait for it) … play. Well, we call it that. It’s brain development, and it works this way, specifically: they make pictures in their heads. That’s what’s really going on. A simple spoon becomes a bird, becomes a pay loader, becomes a teeter tauter, and something physical happens in the brain. Axons and dendrites shoot out and create synapses in the cerebral cortex, forming “wiring” that wasn’t there before. Literally. Play is imaging, and imaging is brain development. The question I asked myself, and asked my staff to ask themselves every day was, does this activity, this material, this story, this use of time cause children to make images in their heads? Or not.

Here’s an example of how that breaks down:

Watching television does not. How can you make images in your head if someone else is filling your head with images and speech?

Playing in the woods or in a mud puddle (yes!) does. Everything kids touch in nature triggers their imaginations. It’s crazy.

And so forth. It became a mantra for me. Our “toy” collection veered in the direction of INEXPLICIT. Large collections of unit blocks, Tinker Toys, play dough “tools,” water play things, dress-up “materials,” child-like rag dolls, artistically diverse hand puppets, everywhere surprising gizmos, what-nots, and thingamabobs. Plus story, song, and lots of love.

SO. That said, I’m hoping once again to learn from you. Or, at the very least, I wanted to tell you, now that you are adults, a little about what was going on when you were in my care as little people. And if you should be willing, I would like to hear from you about the things I’ve said here. Maybe you have memories of some of it. Maybe something about this information rings a bell or explains something you’ve wondered about. Maybe you felt you were different in some ways from other children, and there are clues in what I’ve told you about your first several years. Remember that Moonwhistle was open for 50 hours a week, and some of you were there almost that much. So whatever we were doing would have shaped you to some degree, though I hope we mostly got out of your way and let you develop naturally. At least that was the goal.

If I hear from many of you, I may put something together in writing. (Wish I could visit you all and make a video, but that's not very practical.)  Let’s see what happens.

Meanwhile, Happy Siblings Day, and remember me & Bull to your wonderful, forward-thinking parents!

Love always and forever,

Lee Lee

P.S. Love from Bull, too. He had all our backs, still has mine. J