In Praise of Pirates

Dear Nursery Families,

Over the last 2 weeks I have been impressed by the growing richness and complexity of the social and imaginative play of our five children in class.  There are moments when all 5 children are involved, working towards the same end.  Sometimes this goal is a martial one (pirates building a ship, ready for a raid), sometimes a constructive one (building a truck or space ship). 

With increasing frequency parallel and unrelated scenarios can blossom in the classroom.  There can now be pirates and a mom tending to her babies, both scenarios can be engaged and in the flow, and the pirates need not raid the mom and the babies.

This potential politeness of pirates puts my peregrinating thoughts on prose I penned a few years ago.  I reprise it below.

Falling Cradles, Pirates, and Sewing up the Wolf's Belly

Beginning but Not Necessarily Polite Thoughts on Different Ways of Taking Metaphor

Rock-a-bye baby in the treetop.

When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.

When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,

And down will come baby, cradle and all.

Over the years, some parents have expressed concern/distaste with the above lullaby.  Who wants to sing about babies falling from trees?  While as a teacher, I can recommend reading Rahima Baldwin or others to receive a more spiritual interpretation of the song (it describes our descent from the spiritual world to the earthly world.  It comforts us with the notion that some of our spiritual trappings--cradle and all--come down to earth with us to accompany us in life.  The enduring popularity of this otherwise tragic lullaby testifies to the beyond-realistic power of it), if the song still bothers you as a parent, don't sing it to your child.  At the same time, I ask that parents hold open the possibility that the lullaby can be nurturing in a classroom setting if the teacher's image or metaphor behind is one of healing and nurturing.

For years, it bothered me when children pretended to be pirates.  Sometimes it was because their play was so media-driven (this still bothers me, as it should bother you), but also because it felt to me that children were learning to pretend to be pirates before pretending to be sailors, a bit like children learning "Jingle Bells, Batman Smells, Robin Laid an Egg" before learning the more traditional lyrics to the song (this still bothers me and I plan to lecture/write about this more next year in a talk entitled "A Black Fly in Your Chardonnay: The Importance of Being Earnest With Young Children").  "Why can't children find satisfaction in being sailors?" I thought.  Recently I attended an exhibit on "Real Pirates" at the Field museum in Chicago which changed my thinking a lot.  There I learned (and I am not an expert) of how atrocious the owners of ships and their captains were to the common sailor--who were poorly treated and often unpaid at the end.  The "good" official ships of European countries were heavily involved in the slave trade.  These ships also had unclear rules dictated from above with harsh punishments.  Racism prevailed.  On pirate ships, in contrast, democracies and a clear code of conduct emerged.  Pirates voted in their ruling members of the ship.  They drew up codes of conduct together.  The captain of a pirate ship received only twice as much pay as the lowest paid member of the ship (just about everybody got paid the same).  Pirates freed slaves and welcomed freed slaves into their ranks.  Their crews came from many countries and spoke many languages.  While it seems like my goal here is to apologize for piracy (not my intent; I know real pirates still exist and threaten lives at sea; one could, of course, begin the difficult conversation of asking if  current governments have changed from sufficiently from the Imperialist slave traders of the past, but again, this is another conversation), my realization is far less profound and more personal.  This experience has subtly but powerfully altered the way I might respond to pirate play by children, ways I might extend the play with simple phrases, ways I might foster social inclusion, ("Did you know pirates welcomed anyone on their ship who wanted to help?" "Did you know pirate captains were sure to share the treasure with everyone on the ship?"), and ways I might live comfortably and effectively with this sort of play in the classroom.

I often write and speak about the metaphor of teaching or parenting as being a confident captain.  Winds, seas, and storms may delay us from our course, and we must accept this.  Crews (our children) may mutiny.  At the same time, we still seek our course with strength and flexibility.  We want our crew to have faith in us--so we are both confident (our children know we are in charge) and observant (our children see that we see them and are trying to meet their needs even as we are in charge).  In the exhibit on pirates, I learned that when pirates took over a ship (which they often did without needing to shed any blood or fire any cannons), they gathered the crew of the captured ship and asked them if their captain was a good leader or not.  If the crew said their captain was a despot or bad leader, the captain was killed.  If they said the captain was a confident and good leader, the pirates rewarded that captain with treasure and a ship of his own (pirates often travelled with a number of ships, so they had one to give away).  Now as I teach or parent, I feel very comfortable asking the hypothetical question, if pirates took over and asked my class or my own children whether I was a good captain or not, would I be killed or rewarded with a ship of my own?  I could imagine other teachers or parents would find it very unsavory to chart the course of their classroom or family life with the image that their life or death depends on it, and I would never recommend this to someone else.  But it does work for me, and I take it with equanimity, not fear.

"The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids" is one of my favorite stories for older nursery or young kindergarten classes.  I knew the deceitful wolf could be very disturbing to parents and some children, but I was surprised at a parent meeting to learn that the old goat's use of scissors to cut open the wolf's belly and needle and thread to sew it up again (once her kids had filled it with heavy stones) came across as very violent, even sadistic.  Now I see that of course it does (or can).  To me it had always seemed a symbolic and healthy balance to some children's (more often boys though not exclusively) tendency to get stuck in gun and sword play--an interest in engaging in the world offensively and only from a distance.  Only guns and weapons seem to have power for children stuck in this developmental phase.  Here, I thought, is a story that symbolically suggests the power in the tools we might associate with a grandmother or kindergarten teacher or brave little tailor--scissors, needle, thread.  My point is not to beat swords into plowshares and then bash our enemies on the head with our plowshares, but rather to open the possibility that power--rather than something to be afraid of--can come from many aspects and archetypes and from within many aspects ourselves.  My reading of this particular fairy tale is highly symbolic and very free from the tangible, and many children receive it that way.  I am not demanding that parents interpret the story in the way that I do, just opening the possibility that we can see the same rhyme, song, or tale very differently and make different choices about it.