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Interview with George Scarlett

I'm George Scarlett. I was born in Baltimore Maryland, the last day of the year 1944. I grew up in Baltimore. Spent the first 18 years of my life there. Moved to New Haven Connecticut, where I went to college. And worked at Yale, and spent a year after college working at New Haven in the psychology department. Moved to Wooster Massachusetts, and was in two graduate schools at the same time. A little bit strange but it worked. I was in a Developmental psychology at Clark University, and theology program at the Episcopal divinity school. Then I moved on and worked for a center for autistic children and ran a camp for emotionally troubled children in the summer in New Hampshire and residential summer camp. And then I joined the Harvard project zero research team, headed by Howard Gardener, this was the late 1970s. And then I taught at several places including Assumption College and Brandies University. Then in 1990 I joined the faculty here at Elliot Pearson Child Development. It actually started when I was 12 or 13. When I was 13 I knew that my life would be committed to children in some ways. And there were two different sides of me, one was I was just fascinated with the qualitative different ways that children think, and that was at age 13. I was also interested in ways of helping troubled children. So as an adolescent, I actually took it upon myself to read on my own Peugeot, and Gazelle, and the people that were famous at the time. I didn't understand what they were saying, but I was trying, so I was actually studying child development, child psychology on my own informally as an adolescent. This was 1950 so Peugeot was not really that known in this country, so when I went to college I actually knew more about Peugeot than my instructors did then. Which was a strange experience. And then during my adolescence, also I was taking part time jobs one in secret, on the weekends working in residential homes for troubled children so I was basically testing, what a strong interest and strong commitment to children meant, and I still am testing that. So it wasn't that I said I want a PH.D in child development at age 13, in those days all my family was came from a business background, in the 1950's It's hard to get back there, but people either went to medical school or law school, or were running away from life if they went to graduate school. So I used to tell people when I decided I was going to graduate school that I was "Running away form life." and that cleared the air. It wasn't like now days that it makes sense to people that you went to a PhD program. So for a long time I was weighing PhD versus M.D. I've taken many of the premed courses. But my real live was child psychology, and I was always gong back to my main mentor, which was Jean Peugeot. And I actually chose to go to Yale, which is the only place I applied to because the Gazelle institute was near Yale, and I thought may be, just may be somebody at Yale knew something about children. And so, when I went there, I went there to meet people who knew about children. So children has been for me, the organizing principal of my work life since I was a child. How that has played out has always been A question mark was always a matter of experimenting, and I think I've always had an ambivalence about a purely scientific approach to studying children or a purely this or that. There's always been a kind of spiritual dimension about working with children. So spirituality has been part of my life since I was a kid, and having gone to seminary. I now teach courses on spiritual development, I write a lot for social scientists about spiritual development. People are now interested in that, which is interesting. I've been interested in that all my life, but it's only in the last 5 or 6 years that social scientists have become interested in that topic. I think what has happened over the years I have found ways to express my interest in children in different way that are match my abilities and match my interests, and I'm interested in lots of different things. For example, I've always been interested in baseball. So I got the opportunity to write a book on coaching baseball with members of the Tufts varsity baseball team. I'm giving that just as an example is that to be interested in children is not the same thing as to have you identity worked out. In my case it seemed to retard my commitments, when I was in a doctoral program at Clark, I would get up every day and say, "Should I really be here?", you know, "Is this really me?" So I've been working that out and I discovered Elliot Pearson in 1976. Which is an interdisciplinary community, and it seemed like a made in heaven combination for me at least, that I could come to a place where everybody was what I call a "kids person" absolutely devoted to children. Expressing it in different ways, some as teachers, some as educators, some as psychologists, some as public policy people. It's a playground in ideas and in commitments. So. It was perfect for me, not necessarily perfect for everybody, the subject of children is not a discipline, it's a cross-discipline, it's a multidiscipline, so many different ways to look at children and to support children. It's rare to find a community that does just that looks at children and tryst to support children in so many different ways so that's just an overview of how I got to Elliot Pearson, and why. It's been a journey in identity of how, what does it mean to be interested in and committed to children. How that's played out in my life, and I feel, what I feel very fortunate is not just to be in a community like this but to have known and worked with some extraordinary individuals. Ed Ziegler, who was the co-director, cofounder of Head Start, is an example. Howard Gardener who has done so much in our thinking about cognitive and intellectual development. Leo Connor, who started the interest in Autistic children. Inesh Garis who did ground breaking work in combining Piaget and psychology within insistent. I feel very privileged to have known these incredibly productive and thoughtful people. One experience what kind of turning point I had what I though t was a book completed, one of my areas of interest is behavior management, because I'm interested in control in sharing control and giving up as much control as we can to children in thoughtful ways, control that they can handle. And so I've always been interested in helping people who tend to over control to find meaningful ways to give up control. I thought I had written a good book on behavior management, it was a book for teachers. And I written what I though were all the chapters that needed to be written and I arrived at Elliot Pearson and started talking to teachers and I had realized I had written half or less than half of what the book should be. It was a whole another piece, that classroom teachers understand how you set up a classroom to prevent a behavior problems, how you develop adjust a caring communities where the children buy into the governance of the classroom as a way to prevent behavior problems. How you do so many things that define really great teaching that have to do with prevention of problem behavior. So it took me another 2 or 3 years and asking teachers to write chapters for this book which took a much more holistic a much more environmental view of widened the list of topics. Relevant to control and relevant to behavior management I think that was a turning point and the deep respect that I had, I consulted, I had a lot of consultation around troubled kids with early childhood educators, but I never really confronted the architectural perspective of the classroom teacher, or the community perspective. How do you grow a community from an aggregate of kids from the beginning of September to those kids whether they are 5,6,7 whatever age they are, by the end of the school year they are acting as a true community. And I remember sitting down with a master teacher here and asking her to write a chapter on curriculum and behavior management. Thinking that the only thing about curriculum curriculum is as do with reading and writing and arithmetic and all that, and behavior management and control issues are something separate. And I though I was asking the question, "How do you create a curriculum so interesting that it would capture kids interest and they would behave themselves. And she kept saying different things, and I couldn't understand what she was saying, and then finally I got it. That curriculum to her meant developing this just and fair community. It wasn't something separate. So I watched her teach, and one day the class fell apart and she said to them, "We've all fallen apart, what are we going to do?" One kid said, "Send us all to timeout." and she explained why she couldn't do that, there wouldn't be any class. Another kid said, "Well, Hire more teachers." And she said, "Now we don't have the money for that." And finally she got them to generate rules to govern themselves. And I got it, I got it. This was not something in addition to the curriculum, this was the curriculum. These are all turning points in the way I think. I still have the training as a developmental psychologist. I still have a clinical training as well. A clinical perspective, but I also have this wonderful educational perspective, which makes the group as a whole and the developing of the group into caring communities. As central focus. It's not a downside to me, but I suppose it's a downside to other people, it keeps me at a fairly I say superficial level. As I go from one field to another. But what I do offer, I'll give an example, I'm no theologian, but I've read theology, and there are some great great theologians that have some really great ideas about spiritual development, and then I go back to my main field, which is psychology and social sciences, and I find that what they often are measuring wonderfully sophisticated measurement studies, empirical studies but they haven't gotten the basic definitional conceptual foundation right, so their not measuring the right things, the whole study is limited because it doesn't have the right starting point. So I think what I've been able to do is to help people that are incredibly talented and smart by informing them in what's going on in another discipline. Not in a terribly sophisticated way, but it's more like I'm introducing them to something they wouldn't ordinarily have been introduced to. So even in my interest in baseball, and writing about explaining, complex motor skills to nine-year-olds, is what coaching baseball little league is all about. Just this morning I'm thinking about the concept of character development and social scientists talking about the problems of conceptualizing what character is. And what character development is, and how you support character development. And I find that my experience of thinking about skill development in baseball is actually relevant because some of the issues that people are trying to figure out in the social sciences in studying character development are identical issues, and I think the concept of muscle memory in sports where you practice something so well that it becomes habitual these are the kinds of issues that being raised in the field of character development. There are analogies that help they don't tie things into neat bows or go into do the jobs of getting into the depth, but I think help me and they help others to think a little bit differently to just be sure that you are studying the right thing that you are framing problems in the right way, that your not a prisoner of a limited point of view form the start, you've got a broad enough and solid starting point. So, that I'm interested in that and I'm interested in helping students to think broadly too in that way. I'm interested in what people do, I'm interested in methods, or tactics, whatever you call those things you actually do with children. And I think, Everyone who is teaching others or consulting has to be very practical and offer advice about what to do. But my I My main interests is to explain how what you do follows from the way you think about a subject, whether you're a theoretician in a professional sense, or whether you or a parent or a teacher who is thinking about practice but to necessarily thinking about theory. One always has big ideas that are what generates what you do with kids on the spot. So the teacher That I referred to earlier who was getting kids to problems solve about how to govern themselves, was a teacher that put a lot of emphasis on children being beginnings problems solvers, and needing to become problems solvers. And so problem solver was an organizing thought for the particular things that she used to do with children. You wouldn't understand the cleverness of all of her methods. I could than pass along to teachers, to other teachers just the clever methods, but what I'm most interested in passing along is the way this teacher and other teachers have big ideas that allow them to generate methods on the spot with a particular kid in a creative kind of way. Very interested in showing that the big ideas often are good for a certain number of kids, but not for all kids. And all cultures, and as you go from one culture to another, or one group of kids to another, sometimes you have to change your big idea to make your methods work. For example when you go and work with certain groups of kids and you've been working in classrooms where kids respect you as a teacher. Because you are a teacher and you go into certain groups of kids from different cultures they don't respect you because you of your title. They respect you because, if you are a strong person your personhood. And so an organizing ideas has to be, I have to be the kind of good strong caring person to them for anything good to happen and that's a different organizing idea than other children who you can worry about stimulating their ability to problem solve without worrying to much about demonstrating that you are a strong good person. Because you are the teacher, and they accept that. I'm most interested in showing people the connection between big ideas and what you should be doing, thinking about or generating. In the example of children's play, a big idea for me always that I share is that you follow kids passions, and that in play, children should be in charge. That's their area of control. It's not the content, if their interested in Barbies, if they are interested in war play, what ever they are interested is fine, the big issue is whether they are interested in anything. You follow their passions, it's explaining to people why that's important, how that's important, how the evidence for how that plays out in very good ways if you support their passions. There are lots of different methods for supporting them, and I am happy to share them, but unless they get the frame they get the frame of the situation it's not going to sustain them, their going to miss the forest through the trees. Or whatever the expression is. The fancy term is constructivist philosophy of education. I don't think it's too fancy for all of us to use, and the fundamental observation is that learners, we are all learners, how ever young or old we are, to a certain extent we need to be actively experimentally we need to be actively involved, actively trying out hinges, in order for us to construct, reconstruct reality. So a teacher is not doing that, when the teacher takes his or her expertise and tries to implant that in a passive student. A teacher is teaching at a high-level if a teacher can guide that person to try out ideas to interactive, to be active exploring not wandering around just coming up with new ideas, but through guided interactions to come to the same kinds of ideas may be that have been around for thousands of years. But the ideas, the good ideas, that have been around for thousands of years, students need to reconstruct for themselves, this is at the hallmark of Piaget in psychology, it is now at the center of American educational philosophy, but it carries over into all areas, this need for people to actively reconstruct what may not be new ideas, but and probably aren't new ideas, but they still have to be active participants in the construction of those ideas, that's why it's called constructivist, because you have to construct the ideas. I don't know what the lecture's big idea was this morning, but there are plenty of big ideas in every subject that teacher need to involve students in constructing. I've got to guess a lot because I'm an amateur when it comes to knowing actually what is gong on in Bulgaria, certainly what's typical of Bulgarian classrooms what's typical of the kind of problems teacher face, what are the systemic issues, I guess you could raise the question, is it really important to be knowledgeable about those? I'm sure it's relevant, I'm sure I would be better at responding to your question if I knew a lot, and one always runs the risk of being egocentric I by saying it doesn't matter, because I know something works, and let me tell you what works. But there is a part of me that thinks that good ideas are transportable, so what I was just talking about involving kids in every level in puzzling and in thinking and in problem solving and in building and in creating. I don't think this is an idea that is good just for a few kids, in a few cultures, in a few countries, or an idea that is goo just when everything is hunky-dory and fine, I think it's an idea that can be grown and embodied in something good, in someplace that is struggling that it becomes a good virus, and let me give an analogy. Because I am free associating One thing I've discovered about young artists in art school is that having no money, they will often have to live in a poor neighborhood in the city. And when they do they start to do something with their own apartment, they do something outside on the street that is really nice, and something that is ugly is suddenly turns into something beautiful and then the neighbors notice, and then the who'll block starts to get cleaned up, and before too long the neighborhood looks so great that the rent's go up and the artists have to move because the can't afford their apartments so they move to a different poor place and it starts all over again, and I call them positive viruses. They move around and they clean up the inner cities, if they are allowed too. I think there's that possibility no matter how much there are problems in a country, or areas in a country. If you move into a neighborhood and you do things beautifully that people take notice and they can value that and imitate that and slowly and gradually thing get cleaned up, more beautiful or better, or whatever you can be a positive virus, as a way to change. You don't have to solve all problems and then bring in a new program; I hope not, that's too difficult. I'm guess I am a writer. I'm a writer of a certain kind and that is drawn to creative nonfiction and that watchword in creative non-fiction is "show don't tell". My tendency is to say tat if in a difficult situation, if change is going tot happen it's not going to come through telling, it's going to come through showing and not just coming with a movie and showing, but showing that a good school can be developed, and sustained, and a community can be developed around that school that cares about that school, and one can show how it should be done. And people will want to imitate, people will want and they will ask questions, "How do we do that?" the guidance can mean that, but it's through showing not telling. I think that would be the way to go. Not to have an expert from one culture come over and tell others, first of all we've got our own problems and the problems that we have often reflect our inability to do our culture well, our problem in a society that is used to 200 years of a certain meaning of democracy we do very well in giving kids a voice but we don't do well in the art of being firm when the kids When the are mis behaving or un cooperative many parents in this country don't know how to say "NO", they don't know how to be firm in a way that is not punitive, but it curves kids, it gets kids to stop misbehaving, and move on we are not very skilled at that in other cultures that are more authoritarian that are the meaning of democracy is different where it's assumed that parents have a lot more control they can show care and at be authoritarian, they do it better, often times I'm showing an example of who the problems in Bulgaria that may be problems in not doing the Bulgarian culture very well, there are. I'm sure there are wonderful strong sets of values and traditions in Bulgaria, as there are in this country that define a Bulgarian way, a Bulgarian ideal. If you ask Bulgarians what their ideal child is, what their ideal adult is, what their ideal man and woman is and what their ideal community is. I'm pretty sure you're gong to find some nice things, some very nice things said. And they will be differed from what the average American will say. The problems are in doing your culture well. I don't know enough about Bulgarian culture to know what those ideals are, to know the goals of parents are, what the hopes of politicians are, the hopes of the average person are for the country. Doing the culture well, I mean... I'll give the example of the American ideal. Community is everybody has a voice. It doesn't matter what your race religion or age, everyone should have a voice, even the youngest kids. I think that's at the heart of the American constitution, let's have everybody having a voice, if that's your ideal how do you avoid chaos. Ok you give kids a voice, but since kids can't keep themselves safe, a kids don't know a lot that they should know, parents obviously and teachers obviously have to manage the dilemma of giving them a voice but at the same time representing the common good. So you have this tension between the individual good and the common good. And Americans often panders to their kids. They are not very... What I said... They are not very good at saying, "No." "Stop." I think when an American says that it feels wrong, but it's not wrong if when they say "No"or "Stop" they are not exercising individual authority, it's the person who knows better representing what's good for the child and what's good for the group, what's good for the family, so the teacher is representing the common good. That's an American dilemma to manage, it's quintessentially. As I understand it, in a Japanese early childhood center culture where you have this harmony, group harmony as being so important, and you have teachers saying, "Don't talk to me, talk to your group members, work it out on your own." I would imagine that there are dilemmas there too. I don't know the dilemmas that are peculiar to Bulgaria. A long time ago I was impressed that the best we can do is to manage dilemmas and that the teachers and parents that don't continually feel confused slightly, don't continually feel slightly in adequate, don't continually... they're actually doing the best job. Because they are trying to manage dilemmas like what's good in the short term verses the long term what's good for the individual versus the group. This value verses that value, the best we can do is to feel caught on the horns of the dilemmas, not on the horns but in the middle managing these dilemmas, it's the parents that are completely permissive, because they think that's good for kids' self esteem, they are very sure about that aren’t managing that. Or the other, those that are hitting kids and are too authoritarian, and strict, and they say, "Well if I don't do that their kid will grow up this way or that way." They aren't managing a dilemma; they feel that each method has ambiguity in it. So I don't know what goes on in the average classroom in Bulgaria, but if teachers are too sure, that's a problem. If they unsure... That's tough. You're talking about diversity, embracing diversity of going from rejecting diversity to to valuing it, to saying that it's not just a democratic community, but also a just caring and diverse community. That is the ideal. I think that is a universal, it's not just a... Maybe it's because I'm an American, I don't think, it's moral. What's moral goes beyond convention. There is a nice distinction between conventions so on the one hand and moral values on the other, so it's not a cultural. And I think the embracing of diversity is a moral issue, I think having grown up in pre integration times, my childhood was largely in the 1950's, so I experienced first hand racial segregation I experienced first hand a society that id not embrace diversity. That's always been a struggle in this country. So you may find a utopia here, but it's not but it's comes at a price, wars and struggles. It's hard. It begins with people actually meeting with each other and understanding each other. You can't just respect somebody else and not know them, and not understand them, and not get to know them. One of the things. I understand the children's school try to do, and on campuses here, are trying to change the history books so that there are black people represented in American history, and Chinese people. Same as in religion, there is a big press to understand Islam. and so If you gave the skinheads a quiz on whom do they know that's gay, and how have they gotten to know, and what does gay mean? They would flunk the quiz. But it's hard, obviously, but it beings with this embracing, finding diversity. just wonders us, valuing it. And there plenty of struggles that go on It's small but everyone's go their handful. When you have a child in the children's school whose a typical child and a child with severe disabilities, hits your kid, the hitting is part of the disability, it's hard to embrace diversity, and the director has to interpret that, and say, "No we are not going to expel that child with a disability or problem, we are going to deal with it, we are going to remain a diverse community." And you can always take your child elsewhere, but that's not who we are. There's got to be a commitment to it. There is a commitment there but it's hard, you can show in diverse neighborhoods there are more problems. It's more complicated. To understand the children's school you have to understand the community the community approach to education. They're trying to create and maintain a particular kind of community. The unit is not the child, for the teacher and the child, or the curriculum the teacher and the child. The unit is a larger unit; it's the whole school, as a community that that includes the parents, the teachers, the children. That you can't wander on there and see community community is a term for the whole. You can miss it easily. I think, the second big idea is the constructivist idea. Involving kids in puzzling, kneeling down, or crouching down to engage in dialogs with kids to get them to think and reflect. and what have you. By the way, the community means the just, caring, diverse, and productive community. So that everything is going right it's like a busy bee hive it's not a silent quite classrooms, there's a hum going on. The bees are busy together. The second one is the constructivist and progressive education. I think, the children's school is like John Dewey's philosophy enacted. So to understand the children's school one has to appreciate in a progressive education philosophy. The children's school I knew has been influenced a lot by Reggio Amelia, I'm not expert on Reggio Amelia but there are concepts and terms and thins done there, now. The documentation is a big deal there, that's not as big of an idea as community and constructivism, but to understand the school I think, you'd do well by understanding that it has been recently influenced some of that ideas in Reggio, such as documentation, getting kids and teachers to document their projects as part of the learning experience. For a long time we had a beloved professor here, you saw and met last night. Sylvia Feinberg, she was the head of early childhood education, and her specialty was arts and in the service of child development, in support of child development. And I hope, I don't know, weather that tradition, is as alive or not, but it's still there, I would hope you're able to see some emphasis on the arts, that is not art education but it's children engaged in art materials and producing art as a way to support their overall development. So I'm giving non-educator's perspectives, so I'm not getting down to the details that a professional educator could give you. But those are, I don't think there are other big ideas. But maybe I think it would be successful visit if you got a sense of the school and these broad ideas, that I talking about of constructivism, of community building, all these ways of framing how they frame, if you could get into their minds and how they frame the school. Not just in an abstract way, but you see that, if you can really see that what they're doing, and how they are doing it is a manifestation of these big ways of framing and become more interested in reproducing in using that framework to talk about and plan for the new school, may be you do that already, may be you came maybe you arrived and you don't need that as a goal, but you ought to be able to put description to that, ok the school is all about constructivist education and I saw this that and that shows what the school means by constructivist education. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect To go away with examples of the school's philosophy of taking community building as important, the school's philosophy of embracing diversity, of the school's philosophy of of engaging children in interaction in a constructivist education, you ought to be able to describe things that manifest those that express those big ideas.

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