As spring nudges into all the corners of the New England hill and valley streams, and the fields and playgrounds begin to dry out for planting and play again, the changing of the seasons remind me of how in education we seem to metaphorically pass through our own cyclical understandings of how to approach the season of life we call childhood.

Last week I had the pleasure to keynote a New Jersey AEYC Early Childhood Conference on the topic, “Are We In Danger of Leaving Childhood Behind?” The 300 dedicated educators who came together on a rainy Saturday morning, spoke with great concern in the day’s smaller workshop sessions about the pace of their young children’s lives, the lives of their parents and their own work and family lives. They worried about the pace and demands of early childhood curriculum, of parent demands for worksheets, and NCLB expectations in kindergarten— all things I had touched on in my keynote that morning.

But there was also a glimmer of hope, for all these teachers knew from their training, and many of them were quite young, what was right for these children developmentally, they knew in their hearts and somatically what was right for their children physically, socially and cognitively on a day-by-day basis and they were doing their best to give it to them. They seemed to me to be so strengthened by coming together and gathering courage from each other that they were doing the right thing; and perhaps also hearing that in the advocacy of the keynote helped a little too.

Now, if you pay careful attention these days, in all the corners of the educational landscape, the developmentalists, the ASCD whole-child activists, the experts advocating a more balanced approach to reading and math in the “curriculum wars”, many are beginning to gather their voices and call for a renewed focus on the child and childhood itself.

William Crain, noted developmental author, in the preface to the recent 3rd edition of my book Yardsticks wrote, “The child is more than a test score or a future worker. Every child is a full living individual with his or her own needs, interests, fears, and desires. And although educators must concern themselves with the child’s future success, the child is very much a person in the present moment. It might seem that a focus on the child’s present life is a luxury today,” he continues “when there is so much talk about preparing students for the competitive, high-tech world they will enter when they are grown. But a focus on the present is at the heart of the developmental perspective in education. In this view, children are inwardly motivated to develop different capacities at different stages, and we must give them opportunities to perfect their naturally emerging capacities at their present stage. If instead, we simply focus on the skills they will need later on, we may curtail their full development.”

With me, I urge you to look for indicators and examples that educators are speaking out and standing up in a new developmental spring. Please post what you find and pass these posts on to ASCD, NAEYC and other sites.