Sixteen Capabilities
I think most people would agree that it’s time for a new investment in the commons – not spending, investment. If we do invest, the most massive returns on investment arise from thoughtfully crafted provisions for the care and education of young children. This is especially true when children gain three years of rich life experiences before common school age.
Sixteen Capabilities is a way to think about those rich life experiences based upon what we know and usually never address: human strengths and capabilities gained by children in that three year period. They are truly amazing years in each person’s life. I invite you to look freshly upon education and care of three-, four-, and five-year-olds, stepping back from the historical inequities we often see today.
Sixteen Capabilities is a way to build provisions the people want, starting this time from the ground up, not the top down, by people gathering to discuss capabilities lists in face-to-face discussions with each other. The community gathers—young families, high schoolers, teachers, and community members—think about building a better world by discussing the qualities of healthy human beings and what we really want for all our children.
As SOLIDARITY PHILANTHROPY’s Executive Summary states:
Children We Admire
The question for communities to consider would be “What capabilities would we to like to see in six- and seven-year-old children at the close of their early childhood years?”
If we think about seven-year-old children we have known or encountered in our lives who struck us as marvelous people (e.g., eager, able, confident, joyous, and energetic), what were the children like? What was it about them that caught your attention?
Over many years I asked my early childhood education students those questions. Here is the summary list I collected. Have you ever met six-year-olds like this?
Sixteen Capabilities
- Participate as a member of an interdependent community
- Care for themselves, the others, and the community
- Treat others with love and compassion
- Cooperate with other children to accomplish group goals
- Celebrate group accomplishment
- Laugh and play with a tangible sense of joy
- Express human emotions in language and art
- Pursue new understandings and abilities
- Initiate new ideas and invent solutions to problems
- Stick at difficult tasks or come back to them later in order to succeed
- Run, hit, catch, throw, kick and tumble
- Sing and dance with exuberance
- Paint, draw, sculpt, and construct objects of beauty
- Care for common spaces and materials toward cleanliness and order
- Greet guests with courtesy and charm
- Act in stewardship for the environment and one’s own health and well-being
Imagine
Imagine the experiences a child with these capabilities must have had.
Imagine their moms.
Imagine their experiences outside the family.
Imagine how adults in their lives treated them.
Imagine a World where the center of community life is contributing to the conditions for these Sixteen Capabilities to flourish—for all children—simply because they are under age six.
Imagine living in such a community where you contributed time and taxes to make sure this could happen in every person’s childhood.
Imagine how those capabilities would pay forward in the years beyond seven — what First Grade would be like, what middle school would be like, what neighborhoods would be like — if all of the children who entered common school came in with these participatory capabilities.
Build upwards, from local effort
We don’t have to convince people to make life better for their own children and the village’s children. They care. They live around them. They know a healthy human when they see one.
If we trust communities to think as a group, invest public resources wisely, and evolve what they want over time, we might just achieve a more just and equal world. That wouldn’t be simply hope; we would have a way to contribute to that world, directly, in our neighborhoods.
If a community shared a dream and linked to communities with similar lists, immediately we would be talking about education for children in an entirely different way.
The spaces for them and opportunities they need would have
- no reliance on method
- no economic judgments or means testing
- no racial, cultural, or gender bias
- no external constraints, oversight, or fear
- no developmental milestones
- no disparagement of parents and families, or anyone, for that matter
- no isolation of educators
- no secrets
- no exclusions
Instead of thinking about the Two-Sixers in the current ways, we would begin with agreement upon the result we desire. We would share in a story of growth, nurturance, and evolutionary excellence. In this dream, we build spaces to cultivate the best in each other through how we provide for young children, where a contribution from any person, young or old, would not be judged by status or power but by the difference it makes to the universal attainment of vital human powers before age seven.
Envision a Better Future
I suggest we commence a wide-ranging series of conversations in a wide range of communities about the capabilities they would like every child to acquire by the time they are six years old. If we choose join forces toward reinvestment, restitution, and revolution, we build upon a foundation of our natural strengths and common aspirations. Foremost among them is an altruistic desire to raise children in a way that improves their lives.
This decade is the turning point. Our climate and ecology depends on enabling human beings to have the wherewithal to save the planet. We start by talking about helping children build the future of humanity.
And we give a name to the age group we invest in: Two-Sixers, is one idea. These years of life are not ‘pre-‘ anything. These years build socially capable, strong, and stable human beings who then take on the world with health and agency.
Emerge from the Wreckage
Out of the Wreckage, by George Monbiot says it this way:
The old world, which once looked stable, even immutable, is collapsing. A new era has begun, loaded with hazard if we fail to respond, charged with promise if we seize the moment. Whether the systems that emerge from this rupture are better or worse than the current dispensation depends on our ability to tell a new story that learns from the past, places us in the present and guides the future.
In seeking to develop a restorative political story around which we can gather and mobilize, we should first identify the values and principles we want to champion. This is because the stories we tell propagate the beliefs around which they are built.
He titles the new story The Politics of Belonging.
By coming together to revive community life, we, the heroes of this story, can break the vicious circle. Through invoking the two great healing forces — togetherness and belonging — we can rediscover the central facts of our humanity: our altruism and mutual aid.
Obstacles and default positions
Soon the day will come when the demand will force us to build anew. What will happen?
Will we hear the wealthy and privileged call for minor fixes or tweaks or will we hear all of humanity call for starting anew based in what we know in our hearts and in our care?
Will a new way forward significantly alter the traditional structures of oppression and coercion?
Will the new way pursue moral and ethical choices?
Will we defer to authorities or will we listen to and learn from the children?
This example, Sixteen Capabilities, begins with what we want the outcome to be: not what they know, but who they are as people.
Our connections. Our experience. Our wisdom.
The challenge of constructing agreement about what each community desires for their children gives people a common connection and a focus for cooperative action.
The one guide is to phrase outcome statement, in terms of what the children do—as daily life actions rather than ideals of knowledge. Capabilities: the power to do something, to cause an effect.
Since capabilities occur naturally without the need for testing, we can simply share our delight in what our Two-Sixers have done today.
Stories of what other children do validates what is improving and points to experiences that might be helpful for this child we know and love.
No theory or method need guide the emergence of a capability; it arises from the unique child, invented by them.
The only ‘right’ is what a community can see in each child, through eyes of its own compassionate care, guided by documentation and energized by delight.
Link to other places to evolve the work
Over years of sharing with other communities interested in the Two-Six years, a list like Sixteen Capabilities challenges the continuous evolution of opportunities guided by what a community values. It would take several years of patience and constant support. Humans make mistakes and have to have the chance to fix mistakes in order learn what seems successful for the children they know and love. That’s living. That’s growing new capabilities, just like what we want our children to do, too.
Instances of the Sixteen Capabilities are visible and collectable in folders and files from two to age six. These folders provide an opportunity for formal and informal discussions locally, regionally, and internationally.
It’s not volunteer work. The evolution depends upon investments with profound returns. Resources must be available that ensure participants are paid for their time and reimbursed for their expenses in order to have cross-community sharing, which naturally lead towards more ideal opportunities to grow spaces and provide care in ways that maximize everyone’s welfare, lives, and liberties.
We could think of the Two-Six age as having an extended womb of well-being, continuing beyond the immediate family into the local community of children and a few well-known adults. It would be a time to fully become confident, connected, and capable before taking on the wider world.
Bravely Begin Now
We gather a group of us to explore examining the capabilities we want for our young children—what any community anywhere regardless of their history or economic circumstance would desire.
We begin with the beneficence of a few very wealthy donors willing to fund at least three years of discussions documented in video programs seeding discussions in other places and funding face-to-face meetings to further the work. We start with the documentation so others can understand and see it in action.
Expand
Eventually we have to have broad public support that can build from the intensity of current dissatisfaction and failures. Today we are able to see how capitalistic systems across the world have built coercive systems to maintain continuity of power. We can see how resources have been misspent to make the wealthy more wealthy and the exploited more exploited. A recognition of these facts, along with the courage to say these things aloud, will enable us to find the resources we need for this positive action for the Two-Sixers.
Build from Natural Strength, not fear
People around the world are demonstrating to demand change, which is most assuredly coming, yet it is difficult to imagine what replacement systems would create a just and equal world. Although the way forward remains unclear, we have these certainties:
- we have our natural human strengths of altruism and compassion;
- we have a basic human wisdom that naturally enables us to tell when something is right or better;
- we have our love for our children and constant desire generation after generation to make life better for our children;
- we see in grandparent’s eyes an unconditional love for the unique potential of each child in the miracle of birth;
- we know we need to invest in ethical choices that cause no harm and brings the greatest good to the most people.
Fund a Startup
I am asking us to begin today to go into communities we know have not been heard and listen to them discuss their Two-Six children. We can invite them to build, in concert with their community, a list, say sixteen items long, as a statement of possibility upon which they can reflect upon how to enhance the experiences for the children they know and love to fully actualize their genetic gifts.
Document for others to see
We share these with each other and use them as a basis for community action for their Two-Sixes. As the climate heats and economies collapse major changes may happen quickly. When that time comes, it would be essential for those who care about children have a plan worked out, ready to implement, with proven effectiveness. People would have to see evidence of the benefit for an investment in revising the way we treat young children in the most important years of their lives.
…dismantle and re-imagine…
Invest, not spend
With financial support for involvement and provisions for accessible spaces, all human beings could, for the first time in human history, make choices for their own children with clear, evolving values. The Values We Share page discusses the essential seven values upon which to evaluate the work: belonging, participation, well-being, joy, reciprocity, wholeness, and trust.
This truly revolutionary possibility could begin major investment in resources for Two-Sixer children in order to repair out world. So many problems we have in societies across the world, poverty, mental health, aggression, exploitation, corruption, and ignorance, are addressed directly by establishing local communities of care in a liberating and honoring way with a common focus on making life better for everyone on the planet.
Democratic Action Builds Democratic Institutions
Co-construct Understanding
By looking at the cluster of performances we hope to see in children prior to common school, communities can work out the specific opportunities necessary, each in their own way. In addition to providing significant financial support for cooperatively creating their own spaces and opportunities support would continue over time, including free opportunities for regional meetings and conferences. Local creativity is enabled and through sharing documentation in order to evolve toward an aesthetic ideal.
Build what works
Inherited systems won’t work. A revolutionary, world-wide approach to early childhood:
must establish common agreement on goals right from the beginning
plans for guaranteed sustained financial support and willingness to trust processes for fixing mistakes and making revisions for at least a generation of evolution
will fight back if an approach were imposed
ensures participation will be intrinsically and extrinsically motivating for the people involved
resonates with the cultures and history of people wherever they live
shows immediate benefits for families and children
devotes resources to support participation, and
generates a sense of agency and joy.
Connect Worldwide
Examples and documentaries could communicate this simple, trusting, culturally honoring new pathway to address critical needs through capable children. We certainly have world-wide communication. We are gaining a better understanding of the natural altruism and compassion of human children when treated well from birth. We have seen the social benefit of cooperative, democratic potential that exists in neighborhoods. These pieces would be in place to enable every child in the world to have an early life enabling them to be the best they can be, if we start immediately.
We can create widely agreed-upon goals to unite us, in an open and honoring way, in a revolution in the way we raise and educate young children.
Grow as seeds: the Agricultural Model
I suggest Sixteen Capabilities as healthy veggies for a healthy childhood. Just as we don’t “make” carrots grow, we don’t “make” children or their communities of care grow. They grow as they do. That’s why the name KinderGarten precisely fit.
We tend to the growing environment to become better farmers over time as we learn from experience and from extension services. Regenerative systems evolve with richer conditions improving year after year. We metaphorically provide the sun, water and nutrients and keep the toxins away. Measure for success are visible in lists like the Sixteen Capabilities.
Just as we can hold and taste carrots to determine genetic fruition, we gather performance events selected by our commitment and participation in evolving aspirations and correcting shortcomings for provisions for the early years of human beings. We see. We know, as no one else does.
Widen Awareness
People can see it if we show them.
We draw attention to what we DO want, revising the ways we have thought about common provisions for children we know and love; staying aspirational and positive is a basic ground rule. Joy brings natural wisdom and compassion forward.
This is why this approach through agreement of capabilities at ages six or seven ensures we sustain trust in a positive evolution over time. We naturally seek a rich childhood for our children and each other’s children though participation—doing something concrete and possible to offer new opportunities and ensure a sense of belonging for everyone. This is simply doing good work.
If we offer a clear, common goal, and seek support for the resources we need, we can build with common investments. We can do this. We can gather with our friends to begin the discussion of a new way forward for our children, now, expecially at this time of disruption.
Keep it Simple
Here is the list again, so you can see how concrete it is, more actionable than lofty aspirations.
Each is an observable action. Each can be photographed, videotaped, or described.
Records can be kept and reviewed. Events illustrated capability can reside in a portfolio gathered from ages 1 to 6, where the major takeaway is each human being is a unique treasure becoming, ideally, exactly who they are.
Prior to Common School Age, Children Can
- Participate as a member of an interdependent community
- Care for themselves, the others, and the community
- Treat others with love and compassion
- Cooperate with other children to accomplish group goals
- Celebrate group accomplishment
- Laugh and play with a tangible sense of joy
- Express human emotions in language and art
- Pursue new understandings and abilities
- Initiate new ideas and invent solutions to problems
- Stick at difficult tasks or come back to them later in order to succeed
- Run, hit, catch, throw, kick and tumble
- Sing and dance with exuberance
- Paint, draw, sculpt, and construct objects of beauty
- Care for common spaces and materials toward cleanliness and order
- Greet guests with courtesy and charm
- Act in stewardship for the environment and one’s own health and well-being.
Some Thoughts to Add
A world full of places and histories surely would generate different lists, which can serve as their beginning and be honored, no matter what list emerges. The work of creating a local list becomes a community challenge to seek perspectives of everyone and discussions to find acceptable, temporary agreement. Enough to invite the community to act.
This example list of Sixteen Capabilities arose from discussions in my classes in early eduction at North Seattle College, one city in one country. I asked students in a course on early childhood curriculum to think of two children they knew, one boy and one girl, age 5 or 6, who seemed to really have their act together. I called them hot kids.
Participants wrote down the hot kids names, then had 5 to 10 minutes to write about what it was that brought these particular children to mind.
What did they do that made them so memorable?
They then shared what they wrote with others in a small discussion group. They seemed eager to describe them, too.
After some time, I led them in compiling a list of capabilities and accomplishments on the board, which we edited and clarified together. The list here combines the work of about 300 people of many cultures and backgrounds who were able to come to my college to study.
I offer this Sixteen Capabilities list as an example of what can happen when we look at the end point of the early childhood years before continuing to study what we want to do in a school.
Starting with the end
By starting with the end possibility we can avoid many of the structural constraints that narrow our vision. First let us find a common focus and later analyze the conditions we offer children.
Each community’s discussion, construction, and initial actions, when documented, serves as a resource for other communities to review before constructing their own lists. A video of discussions that happened in several unique places would show everyone that there is no ‘right’ answer. Long term values arise out of many unique approaches and show how disagreement and dialogue inherent in democratic discussions can be structured to actually make a difference to children and society.
Imagine a community, outside of the mainstream, constructed a list of sixteen items. No matter what was on the list, a change happened.
- Those who participated in the discussion had their experience validated and had a chance to be heard.
- The list has a life as a starting agreement on what they want to see their children—the ones they know and love—be able to do.
- When a list is stated as capabilities, it becomes possible to find and share instances of those events in children’s lives.
- Each example, shared with others, stimulates further discussion and refinement.
- With nothing set in stone, the content and validity is built from watching and listening to children—the source for a common understanding.
- Gradually, over a period of five or six years through discussions within and between communities, an energized intention for the early years of childhood would begin to become a clear intention.
Action research takes time to work. We would have to expect messy disagreement and begin with low turnout. Support for participation in stipends and transportation would have to continue over a number of years of semi-chaos. Like all signifiant change, it would evolve in conditions of trust.
Trust those that care
The audiences who care document events in the daily life of a child, such as spontaneously providing what another child needs or arranging stones in some intentional way. If organized by categories, like the Sixteen Capabilities, a collection of photos and descriptions can create a picture of each unique child from infancy. The collection would be a treasure. As families and friends share the events, usually with enthusiasm and awe, they come to understand how children are so very different and how they benefit from certain kinds of opportunities.
They would be motivated to expand and invest in the most beneficial experiences and support the professionalization of expertise in those that care for them. The audiences that care about their own children become motivated to keep evolving better ways for the next waves of children. They are not subservient; they are the source of wisdom, energy, and creativity.
In most places in the world we have the opposite. Communities are not trusted; they are prevented from managing their own resources and cooperating with other communities to share and discuss the ends and the means. Too often they find themselves coerced by the strings attached to money.
External Audiences
A perverse externally mandated assessment, imposed, not by research but by neoliberal dogma, forces educators around the world to meet imposed criteria that few read or care about. That dominant discourse distorts the aims of early education as “readiness” for common school—a short, acceptable justification for imposing constraints upon the resource poor. Strings attached to the public’s own treasury force acquiescence to centralized control, ensure educators remain poor, and “train them” so they have few choices. These policies, which seem widely accepted and are visibly anti-democratic, serve to maintain white supremacy.
If we truly value acquiring wisdom by careful assessment, we have to first answer the most essential questions: Who is the audience? In what form do we communicate the results? Who will use the information? Who are the decision makers who can tell if something needs fixing? Who then makes the changes?
Is that the legislators? Is it the parent-student-teacher association? Is it the local golf club? We can’t make decisions about forms and methods of assessment without first deciding who cares, who makes meaning, and who corrects where necessary.
Internal Audiences
We all know who cares about what is happening for young children.
The people who care—who can make meaning of the information and who can do something about it—are the child, the family, and the educators.
The child cares about themself, obviously. The child’s family cares. The educators care, and the staff and administration care. Therefore, all assessment of provisions for children and childhood ought to be directed to these audiences in a form they understand. These are internal audiences. These audiences are the only people who can evaluate the worthiness of the information and the only people who can alter and improve those provisions.
Shift How We Talk and Think
When we describe our intentions for early education, I invite you to speak out about these Sixteen Capabilities and to ensure the evaluators are the children, the families, and the staff who know the children. A new political discourse becomes revolutionary discourse when it derives from trust and love of children and families.
We must keep the focus clearly on the child through the eyes of the audiences who care.
We must enable participation from all who care.
We must establish methods that are logical, transparent, and somewhat indefinite.
We must invest in the opportunities we decide are best right now, based on an evolving understanding of the common good.
In trying to define and practice a more centered way of thinking about pedagogy and provisions for Two-Sixers, I always feel like I am speaking into darkness. There appears to be a mysterious disconnect between the people who love and care for children and those in charge of deciding and administering public resources for early education. I understand that all public education funding is political, and surely, provisions for social justice for children and families is political, but my colleagues and students complain to me of a stone wall of a distorted discourse that hides what most people actually believe is humane, compassionate, just, and beneficial for all. It feels like a dark force is present that no one addresses; something is blocking out the stars we know are there.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of the economic, social, and happiness benefits that accrue from an investment early childhood education and despite the research describing 13-fold returns, a public investment in young children and young families happens rarely, and when it does, it has always been chained by tight controls.
In the dominant discourse of policy for young children, educators and families are not allowed to generate what they think would be best; instead they must comply.
- The common language suggests teachers and care-givers are deficient.
- The education offered to them is usually called “training” as if pedagogy consisted of standard procedures that need proper implementation.
- Families are poor, broken, helpless, and ignorant.
- Corporate foundations are beneficent in offering models and demonstrations, at best, that magically need to be “scaled up.”
- News and special features pluck our heartstrings with stories of foundation beneficence and volunteerism, “a thousand points of light.”
- Meanwhile, the disaster for most children living in exploited and underemployed families goes on.
Our Responsibility
We must act together, this year, out of our deep moral convictions, with deep love, but also with deep truth. We must reconsider the dearth of resources and lack of attention to the young children in poor and low-wealth circumstances.
Why are educators and care-givers (who know the children and dedicate themselves to them) not given a decent return for doing what they care about, know about, and brings benefits for everyone? Most people who work in settings for young children live in poverty without a voice in making our political system invest in human beings where and when it matters the most.
Long-term Results
I can imagine we all agreed we want all children to demonstrate these Sixteen Capabilities, and we took action to evolve spaces and opportunities for each to emerge. We could then watch the children we love grow in the unpredictable way they do. Of course, days are not smooth; days are filled with tears and disappointment as well as joy. School is a place for mistakes to happen and get worked through. Eventually, after years of practice, those children move into common school with all Sixteen Capabilities well underway. What then would life be like?
Can you imagine being a Kindergarten educator and having all of your September children enter with these Sixteen Capabilities? You would have a dream class. There would be no behavior problems. These children would be responsive to adult leadership, have a disposition to care for each other, and expect to learn. You could get right to work, listening to the children’s interests and finding out what aspect of the world they wanted to explore. If the interest were spiders, rocks or a broken bone, children would be eager to examine, write about, read about, draw, create poetry, music, scientific displays, research, count, and mathematically represent.
The community of the classroom would expect to share a love of learning and being together and far exceed the academic standards and curriculum prescriptions anyone could imagine.
The experience of full participation in a culture of a learning community is true “readiness” for school, because all the children view themselves as capable and competent and members of a community.
The Sixteen Capabilities are durable. Next year the 1st grade teacher would inherit those same children, eager and happy to be at school. It is up to everyone who considers himself or herself a contributor to the early experience of children to examine and demand what we really want. If we have broad, international agreement, we can be ready for the transformation ahead.
We Have to Start Now
I invite you to send friends the link to this page, take a copy with you to meetings, and maybe even post a copy on the wall. If the Sixteen Capabilities were a common understanding, educators could reflect upon the qualities of life they lived each day as they cared for each child and the child’s family over time. Everyone could look at children around the world as ours, with common intentions energizing and evolving over time. It’s simply natural and human to see our children though our love, together.
All children can achieve these Sixteen Capabilities. If they do, they can transform our society, reduce poverty, and make our towns, forests, cities, homes and climate better for life.