There are teachers who still believe deeply in public education and feel worn down by it at the same time. You can love the work, care deeply about students, believe in the purpose of public schools, and still find yourself frustrated by the systems surrounding all of it. A policy can make sense from a distance and feel completely different when you’re looking at the child in front of you. A routine can keep a classroom moving and still leave you wondering whether everyone in the room is being served well. I think a lot of teachers know that feeling.
I don’t think frustration means you’ve stopped believing in the work. Sometimes it comes from knowing what school can look like when things are going well. You’ve seen a student who barely spoke begin contributing because they finally felt safe enough to do it. You’ve watched a difficult conversation settle because someone slowed down and listened before deciding what happened. You’ve changed a routine after realizing it was making life easier for the adults but harder for a few students. You’ve held a firm boundary without making a child feel small.
Those moments are easy to overlook because they rarely look dramatic from the outside. They happen between lessons, after recess, during a hallway conversation, or in the few minutes before everyone heads home. But they tell us a great deal about the kind of school we’re creating. Good teaching has never been only about getting through the day with everyone following directions. It also lives in the judgment teachers use when the plan meets an actual group of children.
Teachers make decisions inside competing pressures all day long. Curriculum needs to move. Students need support. The classroom has to be safe enough for everyone to learn. Time is limited, needs are different, families have questions, policies exist, and some days you’re trying to hold all of that together before lunch. That is why I’m cautious when conversations about changing education turn into another list of things teachers need to do.
The work can begin much smaller than that. Sometimes it means explaining a decision even when the answer is still no. Sometimes it means noticing that the same student is being corrected repeatedly and asking whether they actually understand the expectation. After a conflict, it might mean moving beyond “Who started it?” and asking what happened, who was affected, and what needs to happen next. It can also mean recognizing that a student can disagree with an adult without that disagreement automatically becoming disrespect.
None of this removes structure from a classroom. Students need clear expectations, adults who can lead, and boundaries that protect the community. The difference is in how that structure is experienced. A boundary feels different when a child understands what it is protecting. Accountability feels different when dignity survives the conversation. Student voice becomes more useful when students understand that having a voice also means listening, considering other people, and living with decisions that won’t always go their way.
I know many teachers are already doing this work. They’re asking whether a routine is actually helping students learn. They’re listening when a child tells them something isn’t working. They’re trying to separate the student from the behaviour in the language they use, and they’re repairing relationships after hard moments instead of assuming a consequence automatically fixed everything. Most of the time, they aren’t giving that work a special name. They’re simply making thoughtful decisions because they know the children in front of them.
I also know how tiring that can be. There are educators who are tired of watching good people work inside systems that make good work harder. They’re tired of another initiative arriving without anything else being taken away. They’re tired of being expected to respond to individual children inside structures designed around sameness. They know what a student needs and don’t always have the time, staffing, flexibility, or support to provide it.
If that is where you are, I don’t think you need another person telling you to work harder. And I don’t think questioning the system makes you less committed to public education. For me, questioning it is part of taking the promise of public education seriously.
Public schools can bring children from different families, identities, abilities, cultures, languages, and experiences into a shared community. They can give young people a place to learn how to live with other people, work through disagreement, take responsibility, use their voice, and contribute to something larger than themselves. Teachers create so much of that experience every day. Protecting what is good about public education also requires us to be willing to question the structures that get in the way of it.
None of us is going to redesign public education during a Tuesday afternoon lesson. But there are choices available in the room we’re already standing in. We can ask a better question. We can explain the boundary. We can make room for another voice. We can revisit an expectation that isn’t working. We can repair something when we get it wrong.
Those choices won’t solve every problem in public education. They can, however, help us keep building schools that serve the students inside them a little better.
So if you love teaching and sometimes feel worn down by the system around it, you’re not alone in that tension. If you’re still asking hard questions, still noticing the student who isn’t being reached, and still trying to protect what’s good while pushing for something better, there are a lot of us standing in that same place.
I’m glad you’re here.
We spend a lot of time talking about whether young children are ready for school. Can they recognize their letters? Can they count? Can they listen to a story, follow a routine, put on their coat, manage a transition, sit when they need to sit?
Those are reasonable questions. But after more than twenty years working in schools, including time as a kindergarten teacher, I think they can also make us overlook some of the most important learning happening in early childhood spaces.
Young children are learning how to live with other people.
That sounds simple until you spend a morning in a kindergarten room. Someone has the truck somebody else wanted. Three children have very different ideas about the game they're creating. Someone wants a hug and someone else absolutely does not. A child wants to join a group that isn't sure it wants another person. Someone thinks something is unfair. Someone has been hurt. Someone needs space but doesn't yet know how to ask for it.
This is where Early Childhood Educators do an extraordinary amount of foundational human work.
The work can be easy to underestimate because so much of it happens through small interactions. An ECE helping a child say, “Stop, I don't like that,” isn't simply resolving the issue in front of them. They're helping that child develop language for a boundary. When they help another child hear that boundary and respond to it, they're working with both children on what it means to share space with another human being.
When they help children work out who gets to play, what fair might look like, how to disagree, or what to do after someone has been hurt, they are building capacities we will continue asking those children to use for the rest of their lives.
Long before we expect people to collaborate with colleagues, advocate for themselves, participate in communities, navigate disagreement, respect consent, repair relationships, or listen to perspectives that differ from their own, they begin practising those things in much smaller ways.
Often while wearing a snowsuit.
My own thinking about the Web of Rights began in a kindergarten classroom. I was interested in whether very young children could meaningfully understand the idea of rights. What I discovered was that the language needed to be developmentally appropriate, but the thinking itself didn't have to be simplistic.
Children already had a strong understanding of identity. They knew they could have a favourite colour that was different from mine. They knew they could love a game their friend didn't enjoy. They understood that another person couldn't simply decide those things for them.
Once we started there, the conversations became much more interesting.
If I have a right to play, what happens when the way I want to play makes somebody else feel unsafe? If I don't like being touched, how do I tell someone? If two people want different things, does somebody always have to lose?
These are early childhood questions, but they're also community questions.
One of the examples I've used for years involves three children trying to play together. One loves wrestling. Another wants to wrestle too but is smaller and sometimes feels uncomfortable with how rough the play becomes. The third wants to be involved but doesn't like being touched.
An adult can solve that problem quickly by saying, “No wrestling.”
Sometimes, for immediate safety, that may even be necessary. But once everyone is safe, there is a much richer educational opportunity available.
The children can talk about what each person needs. Perhaps two children wrestle while the third becomes the referee. Perhaps they establish a stop word. Perhaps they decide what kinds of contact are okay. Perhaps tomorrow somebody changes their mind and the agreement needs to change too.
Now the children aren't simply being managed through a conflict. They're learning how to negotiate one. They're practising boundaries, listening, adapting, perspective-taking, safety, participation, and shared responsibility. That kind of structured negotiation sits at the heart of the Web of Rights.
This is also why the language we give young children is so important.
We often tell children to “be nice” or “make a good choice,” but those phrases ask a great deal from a child without always giving them much to work with. A child needs language they can actually use: “I need some space.” “I'm still using that.” “Can I play when you're finished?” “Stop. I don't like that.” “I want to tell you what happened.” “Can we find another way?”
Those sentences are simple because they need to be. They give children another option besides yelling, pushing, withdrawing, grabbing, or waiting for an adult to solve the problem for them.
Over time, something deeper begins to develop. A child who can name a boundary is practising self-advocacy. A child who learns to respond to somebody else's boundary is beginning to understand responsibility to another person. A child who experiences repair after conflict begins to learn that getting something wrong doesn't have to end a relationship. A child who discovers that fairness sometimes requires different responses for different people is developing a more complex understanding of community.
These are not abilities that suddenly arrive in adulthood. We build them.
That is why I sometimes struggle with the way we talk about “school readiness.” When early childhood education is framed primarily as preparation for the academic years ahead, we risk shrinking the work.
ECEs aren't simply getting children ready for Grade 1.
They're helping children learn how to participate in a community.
They're helping children experience fairness before they have sophisticated language for equity. They're helping children understand consent through everyday boundaries. They're helping children discover that their voice is important while learning that the other people in the room have voices too. They're showing children that having a right doesn't mean getting everything you want, because your rights exist alongside everyone else's.
Much of this happens through play, conversation, observation, relationships, and hundreds of ordinary interactions that will never appear on a standardized assessment.
But consider what we eventually ask of the adults those children will become.
We want people who can disagree without dehumanizing each other. We want people who can listen, communicate boundaries, advocate for themselves, consider another person's perspective, participate without dominating, repair harm, and understand that living in community comes with responsibilities to the people around them.
For many children, early learning settings are among their first sustained experiences of a community beyond their family. Different personalities, identities, needs, preferences, bodies, boundaries, and ways of communicating all have to coexist in the same room.
That's not a warm-up for human life.
That is human life, at a smaller scale.
When I think about the work of ECEs through that lens, I don't see people preparing children for the “real” learning that comes later. I see educators working at the foundation, helping children develop the language and capacities that every classroom, workplace, family, neighbourhood, and democratic community will eventually ask them to use.
If we want future communities filled with people who know how to use their voices while respecting the rights of others, who can disagree and repair, who can protect boundaries and still find ways to belong together, we need to take seriously the places where that learning begins.
Early childhood education is foundational human work.
I recently came across a post from a well-followed principal that sparked a wave of disagreement and discomfort. In it, he compared classrooms to churches, movie theatres, and courtrooms. His argument was simple: if people can remain quiet in these spaces, then classrooms should be quiet as well. Talking over the teacher, he suggested, should be met with consequences such as detention, a seat change, or a call home.
At first glance, this seems reasonable. I agree that classrooms should be respectful spaces. When someone is speaking, whether that someone is a teacher or a student, others should be listening. Respect matters. Learning environments work best when people feel heard, not drowned out.
But the comparison itself is deeply flawed. Comparing classrooms to churches, movie theatres, and courts is not only misleading. It reveals a troubling overreliance on compliance as a model for learning. It’s not apples to oranges; it’s apples to rocket ships. These spaces operate on fundamentally different assumptions, motivations, and power structures.
Let’s start with courtrooms.
People are quiet in court because the compliance model is absolute and intimidating. It is enforced through authority, hierarchy, and fear of consequence. Speak out of turn and you are removed, fined, or worse. Silence in this context is not engagement. It’s survival. While order is necessary in legal proceedings, this is not an environment designed for curiosity, risk-taking, or learning.
The question educators must ask is this: do we really want classrooms where students are silent because they are afraid to speak? Where participation is stifled by fear rather than encouraged through trust?
Next, consider churches.
Most people who attend church choose to be there. Choice matters. As a child, church was rarely a voluntary experience for me, and I suspect I wasn’t alone. I remember zoning out through sermons that felt endless and abstract, only to be handed a colouring page to get me through the boredom. Eventually, once the adults decided we’d reached the collective boredom threshold, the children were invited to the front for a story more attuned to their age, before being sent off to Sunday school.
That last part is telling. Even in an institution built on tradition and reverence, adults acknowledge that children can’t be expected to sit quietly and passively for extended periods of time. Engagement requires adaptation. It requires understanding your audience. If churches, with centuries of precedent behind them, recognize this, why do we expect more compliance from students in classrooms?
Then there’s the movie theatre.
Recently, I attended what may have been the worst movie I’ve ever seen. I won’t name it. I was dragged along by a friend who dropped the name of an actor I like as bait. The theatre seated around 200 people. Maybe a dozen showed up.
I knew the social contract going in: sit quietly, react at appropriate moments, don’t disrupt others. But within ten minutes, regret set in. I questioned my decision to attend, and briefly, my friendship (not really Dino). Should I leave? That felt rude. So instead, I leaned over and whispered commentary to my friend. At times, that whisper slipped into audible disbelief: “Are you serious?” “What is this?” I wasn’t alone. Others did the same. One couple walked out entirely.
Here’s the key difference: everyone in that theatre chose to be there. And still, silence was conditional on engagement. Now imagine filling the remaining 188 seats by gathering people off the street and forcing them inside. Sit down. Be quiet. You must watch this. The chaos would be inevitable.
That’s the reality of school.
Students don’t choose to attend. They bring with them different needs, interests, energies, and stressors. Expecting universal, constant silence ignores both human nature and everything we know about learning.
The problem with framing classroom management solely around quiet is that it confuses compliance with learning. Silence can look like engagement, but it often masks disengagement, confusion, resentment, or apathy. When students are trained to “sit there and be quiet,” (like the way corporal punishment intended) we may get order, but we lose voice, agency, and critical thought. This is what corporal punishment sought to achieve.
This matters beyond school walls. In an increasingly oligarchic society, silence has been modeled and rewarded for generations. Don’t question. Don’t interrupt. Don’t challenge. Just comply. Education should be the place where that cycle is disrupted, not reinforced.
Which brings us to the real question: not why classrooms need to be quiet, but when.
There are moments when silence is appropriate, when someone is sharing, when dignity requires attention, when reflection is needed. But learning is also noisy. It’s collaborative. It’s messy. It’s built through discussion, debate, and shared meaning-making.
If we want students who can think, speak, challenge, and contribute, then we must design classrooms that value more than quiet. Respect does not require constant silence. And learning certainly doesn’t thrive on fear.
The goal isn’t quieter classrooms.
It’s more meaningful ones.
If this resonates with you, the next step is not to abandon structure. It is to build a better kind of structure. The free Web of Rights Starter Guide introduces a practical way to move classroom conversations from compliance toward safety, dignity, voice, and shared responsibility.
Download the free Web of Rights Starter Guide and begin with one classroom conversation this week.
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