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The Current Transcript for September 3, 2019

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: I want everybody to know there are no circumstances in which I will ask Brussels to delay. We're leaving on the 31dy of October. No ifs or buts.

LAURA LYNCH: Boris Johnson's brinksmanship is once again thrusting the United Kingdom into a confrontation over Brexit. The British prime minister declaring he's ready to go to the polls if anyone in Parliament dare stand in his way. That's first up. After that from politics to play time.

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VOICE 1: We're painting a boat.

VOICE 2: Play is always pushing the boundaries. What happens if I have four paint brushes? If I use four, can I hold those in my hand or not? That's learning.

VOICE 3: You have one, two, three, four, five.

LL: Forget the tests the homework, the rigours of the modern day classroom, instead get messy with the paint. Get outside. Get dirty. Have fun. Advocates of play-based learning say that's the way to ensure youngsters become capable adults. Maybe a lesson in there for the politicians. And in an hour, he wanted to save his country and the world from the horrors of the Nazi regime, so he became a spy inside Auschwitz. I'm Laura Lynch and this is The Current

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Brexit decision was 'based upon lies,' says voter who wants another referendum

Guests: Ian Dunt, Richard Bourchier, John May

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VOICE: We will not accept any attempt to go back on our promises or scrub that referendum and armed and fortified with that conviction, I believe we will get a deal at that crucial summit in October. A deal that parliament will certainly be able to scrutinise.

LL: With a chorus of demonstrators in the background, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a plea yesterday to the British people and to other MPs. He's arguing that Britain is in a strong negotiating position in Brexit talks and that there's no need to delay the October 30 first deadline for leaving the EU. The speech was in response to a bill that's expected to be tabled today, which would force a three month delay of the Brexit deadline. It has the support of the Labour Party and some anti-Brexit Conservative MPs. But Prime Minister Johnson has said he will not delay Brexit and could call a snap election if the bill passes.

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VOICE: Let our negotiators get on with their work without that sword of Damocles over their necks and without an election. I don't want an election. You don't want an election. Let's get on with the people's agenda.

LL: Ian Dunt is the editor of politics.co.uk and the author of Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? He is in London. Hello.

IAN DUNT: Hello.

LL: How would you describe the mood in Britain today?

IAN DUNT: I can't tell you about Britain, but I can tell you about Westminster where Parliament is based. And it is I mean look this place isn't like a laugh a minute at the best of times, but it is gravely serious today because really both sides know it's going to come down to what happens tonight. I mean tonight really does seem to be the crucial moment about whether this long sort of three year battle between remain and Brexit will actually sort of tilt one way or the other and the parliamentary gains are quite complicated. Everyone's furiously taking care of them, but ultimately it looks like it is going to come down to tonight.

LL: There have been so many crucial moments over the last few years. Describe for us what makes this one that much more important.

IAN DUNT: So MPs need some kind of mechanism in order to stop no deal no deal happens automatically on October the 31st. As soon as Britain signed off on leaving the EU it triggered a legal mechanism where the clock just ticks remorselessly down. Under Theresa May they managed to force her really to extend it wants to extend it twice, but when Boris Johnson became prime minister he came in defining himself through a kind of machismo really sort of you know I will be the hardest Brexit you can imagine no matter what happens we will leave on that day. He's put clocks counting down to the day across the desks of government. It's very, very full on stuff. This is the moment where he finds out whether he can deliver on that because employees who've been treated even in his own party with a lot of aggression over the last few days are really sort of kamikaze effort been saying no you know we demands have some control over this process. And tonight is the night where they're going to see if they've got the numbers to do that.

LL: And what they what are they trying to do?

IAN DUNT: So usually in British politics the government passes legislation. That's the standard way that things operate. They have done something rather remarkable. Behind all of this there is a bigger constitutional battle between the Executive and Parliament, between the government and MPs. They have taken control or looked like they are going to take control of the order paper and then start passing their own legislation. So legislation that has nothing to do with the government it is essentially a sort of a very British rebellion really is the government. In that legislation they're not saying you have to extend, what they're saying is if you get to the end of October without a deal and you don't have parliamentary support for no deal, then you have to extend and they're recommending he extends until the end of January 2020. There's then a series of convoluted mechanisms where again Parliament decides how it would operate, but really at the heart of it is that they're saying look we don't trust you. Nothing that you're saying makes any sense to us. We are going to take control of this process.

LL: Now as I said, the people who are opposing Johnson at this moment includes not only Labour MP, but also conservatives. I'm sure everybody's watching the lobbies of Parliament and counting heads. What does it look like right now in terms of the support for the bill?

IAN DUNT: It looks like we have at least 12 sort of Tory rebels, who are prepared to go, who are prepared to go the whole way really. Now the whole way is a very long way by the way because Downing Street government put out a message over the weekend said, if you vote against us, we will throw you out the party. And now he's come out and said we're going to have a general election. So essentially what he's threatening them with is within weeks they would really no longer have a political career. Now some of these guys have been the Conservative Party for 40 years. You know this is their whole life.

LL: So it's a matter of choosing country.

IAN DUNT: So the stakes are very very high for them. It looks at least 12 of them and it looks at probably more. I'd predict maybe 16, 17 will rebelled against the government.

LL: Is that enough?

IAN DUNT: That should be enough. A lot of it comes down to Labour MPs. The opposition Labour Party has a few very few let's say six or seven sort of pro Brexit politicians. Now they previously were quite happy to vote with Theresa May, the previous prime minister, but Boris Johnson is a much more divisive, very, very toxic figure on the left. They may find it harder to vote with him but if they do, they could neutralize the Tory rebellion. My assessment though is about 70 per cent likely that the rebels will win, the parliamentary legislation will pass.

LL: So that means the UK is heading for another election?

IAN DUNT: Eventually yes. However, Boris Johnson is in danger of getting checkmated here. He thought that you know if this happened, he would make this threat for an election. However he doesn't actually have the power to call an election anymore. British Prime Ministers used to have that power, but a few years ago, about eight years ago, something called the Fixed Terms Parliament Act passed. And that actually requires him to put forward a motion and for two thirds of the Commons to sign up to it. Now he thought fine, you know Labour opposition parties wish to be in government. That is what they want. So they will inevitably vote for it. Actually Labour is taking a more strategic view and thinking when actually we might not vote for that, we might just hang back, make sure we pass this legislation and we will hold an election at a time of our choosing. So it's sort of 4D chess with very very high economic and constitutional stakes that's being played out over the next sort of eight to ten hours.

LL: And then besides everything that's happening in Parliament, there are legal challenges to what Boris Johnson wants to.

IAN DUNT: Yes. It's an incredibly complicated story. So this is about three different legal challenges and these are all on Boris Johnson's attempt, which really triggered all of this to cancel Parliament. He has the right basically to put parliament into prorogation, which is essentially when you reset it for a new sort of legislative period. Now that's typically very uncontroversial when it usually happens for a week, ten days, maybe a maximum of two weeks. Well he has done is try to use that system in order to basically cancel parliament for the majority of the time remaining before no deal Brexit day. And he's done that quite explicitly. He was quite clear that that was the intention. Now that has outraged constitutional lawyers. It's outraged historians. It's outraged parliamentarians. It's outraged liberals and they have now taken it to court. There's three court cases one of them today is now throwing up the sort of internal memos sent around the administration, when they were deciding whether to do this. When those cases started people thought ahh they're probably not going to work. Now actually I'd say the majority opinion is one of those court cases could stop him from being able to cancel Parliament altogether. He's fighting you know battles on various fronts.

LL: Claiming that this is an abuse of process by the Prime Minister?

IAN DUNT: Yeah exactly. That essentially you know what he has done here is to pretend that it's a traditional parliamentary reset, as you would have for a new legislative agenda, but is in fact an attempt to sort of dismantle the core part of the British constitution that allows for democratic input in the political process.

LL: Ian, in his speech yesterday, the Prime Minister made the case that Britain is in a strong Brexit negotiating position now. Is he right?

IAN DUNT: No he isn't. It goes a bit further than that. This is the sort of thing that Theresa May used to say. You know everything's fine, we're doing very well and the answer was actually they weren't. But actually with him it's a bit more pernicious, in that it's not actually clear that there is a negotiating process at all. The Europeans say that when the Brits come to talk to them, they have no content whatsoever to the main issue of the negotiation, which is a reform of the Irish backstop, this insurance policy for Brexit. And it seems as if what they're doing and in fact there was a leak this morning to suggest exactly that, is that going through with the theatre of negotiations whereas in fact the intention is to run down the clock towards no deal. The government statements on this are quite contradictory, that it's quite hard to establish a coherent narrative out of it. Probably the attempt is to be so mercurial that no one can really know what it is that they plan to do, but the effect at the moment, even on quite mainstream journalists, quite mainstream politicians, is to think well we can't actually trust anything that you're saying to us. So then when you make promises about well don't worry I'll try and do this or you shouldn't vote against us, actually those promises aren't believed. So it feels a bit, I mean things could very easily change today, but it feels a bit like the walls are starting to close in on Boris Johnson so early on in his administration and the manner in which he's conducted himself in office.

LL: Alright Ian, thank you very much for the primer. Ian Dunt is the editor of politics.co.uk and the author of Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? He is in London, England. Well Boris Johnson's latest moves have angered some, but pleased others. Richard Bourchier is a chartered surveyor who has voted Conservative in every election since he was eligible to vote, but no longer. He has given up his membership following the Prime Minister's decision to prorogue Parliament and he joins us from my studio in London, England. On the other side of this question is John May. He's a conservative voter who participated enthusiastically in the Leave campaign ahead of the 2016 referendum. And we've reached him in Sardinia, Italy. Good morning to you both.

RICHARD BOURCHIER: Good morning Laura.

JOHN MAY: Good morning Laura. Thank you for inviting me to join you.

LL: Richard, let's start with you. What was it that moved you to protest outside Westminster this past weekend?

RICHARD BOURCHIER: It's basically lying. Borris Johnson is nothing, is more than a liar basically. He does everything for his own political interests and not for the interests of the country.

LL: What's your issue with Boris Johnson's move to suspend Parliament?

RICHARD BOURCHIER: Again it's him trying to take power away from the UK Parliament. The whole ethos of Brexit was the supremacy of the UK parliament. And yet here he is trying to take away the powers of the parliaments and put it in the executive and it's against what he's saying. You know he only a few weeks ago he said he didn't like, I can never say it, probing the Parliament. And yet what's he doing? He's gone back on his word. He's basically nothing more than a liar.

LL: Okay. Well John, what do you make of Boris Johnson's decision to suspend Parliament?

JOHN MAY: Well I think you just heard from Richard and from your commentator that what's been going on has got everyone in SW1 into a febrile state of hysteria. This is not a constitutional outrage. Let's be clear, so your listeners understand, this is a last ditch desperate attempt by those who've been opposed to Brexit ever since the referendum result to try and stop it happening. And the device they're using is to kick the Brexit can down the road once again. They don't like the fact that we have now got a prime minister who's made it very clear that after three years it is time we actually delivered on the referendum result and equally playing the constitutional card that he has available to him to try and achieve that. People should be under no illusions that after three years of attempting to stop Brexit or this move by Boris Johnson's government in effect is achieving over the next short while to the 31st of October he's going to deprive the parliamentarians in Westminster from some three days of debating something that they have failed over the last three years to come up with some coherent and vote winning strategies to prevent Brexit happening.

LL: But John, some might say that while there was a referendum and people voted for Brexit for leaving the EU, they didn't vote for a no deal Brexit. What do you say to that?

JOHN MAY: Well I think that's tosh to be honest because the referendum was the biggest democratic exercise we had in our history. More than 33 million people turned out to vote. The result was close, but it was very clear. We voted to leave. It was a very simple choice, leave or remain. Since then our MPs whether they were there, may not have been elected in the 2017 election, which Theresa May called had been tying themselves in knots with many of them back to the main trying to say that, despite what we said in the referendum, despite what when we voted overwhelmingly to trigger Article 50, which said we would leave the EU in two years time, we now are saying if we can't leave without a deal then we should not leave. Now neither the referendum or Article 50 or at any time since then had there been a vote which had been carried which has been conditional on reaching a deal. Any businessman would know that if he go into the negotiation and the other side believes that you have to do a deal, which they will agree to, then you are having the ground completely pulled from underneath your negotiating position. And this is all these MPs are trying to do at the moment.

LL: Richard, let's go back to you. What do you think of that idea that the vote, the referendum was passed and the Prime Minister should be given the power to do what he needs to do to deliver?

RICHARD BOURCHIER: But again, it's all based upon lies and the mess the country is in is because of Boris Johnson primarily. Throughout the referendum he lied and he's lying again now. We can't go over the precipice just because of a close vote three years ago when the country didn't know what it was voting for.

LL: How did you vote in the referendum?

RICHARD BOURCHIER: I voted to remain. At the beginning of the process I could have voted to leave, but after great consideration I voted to remain. And I steadfast in that view.

LL: But don't you have to respect what the voters said?

RICHARD BOURCHIER: Yes to what some extent, but it's quite clear that the Brexit parts of the vote, they lied throughout. It's quite clear. And we faced this momentous decision based upon lies. Now that we're in this position and Parliament can't resolve it then it should go back to another vote.

LL: Alright. John what are your thoughts on no deal Brexit?

JOHN MAY: Well I'm sorry to have to say to Richard that if the best argument he can come up with to say that he wants to overturn the democratic decision, which is the biggest one this country, our country has ever taken, is that all those 17.4 million people willing to buy liars where the 16.2 million people who voted to remain knew exactly what they were doing and I'm afraid it's a very empty argument. We hear it all too often when people like me who also I think like Richard will not so completely clear when we looked at this issue as to how we would come out, looked at it, considered it, I'm afraid in terms of outrage, I find it insulting that there are people who are continuing to hold the fact that the people who voted to leave the UK and who still have that view because there is no evidence that opinions have changed in the UK did it because they were stupid or misled. One of the main reasons we didn't vote to leave was because we were sick and tired of being told by people that they knew better when it came to Europe.

LL: But what I want you to take on for me now John is what is the strength of the UK's negotiating position? We know Theresa May come running up against a wall.

JOHN MAY: Well we've been running up against the wall partly because unfortunately Theresa May and I'm a conservative voter as well, Theresa May was trying to please all sides of the argument, completing none of them. She was trying to find something that would be acceptable to the EU and at the same time she was trying to, if you like keep two sides of the country, not just the Conservative Party appeased to some extent and she ended up leading the UK off a political cul de sac from which there was no escape. Now the EU quite understandably, I don't blame them, actually said that the withdrawal agreement which has been in the context of Canada, there is a very important trade agreement between Canada and the U.S. it's a a vitally important trade link, but how would Canada and your listeners feel if in fact all the laws and regulations relating to trade were going to be made by a Trump administration in Washington and they would have no say over it unless administration agreed that they could leave? That is the reality of what we would call agreement set to the UK people, which is why it was rejected.

LL: I'm not sure it's comparable considering that we aren't talking about borders that are open between nations, but John I want to go back to you. It's now more than three years since the Brexit referendum that set all of this in motion and I wanted to ask you what you think the discord has done to the soul of your country.

JOHN MAY: Well a country, democracy can sometimes lead to a divided view. It often does. That does not give the minority in that democratic exercise, no matter how they are, the right to overrule the majority.

LL: OK I want to ask Richard this too because we're running out of time. I'm sorry.

JOHN MAY: To get out and then we can rebuild confidence and trust.

LL: Richard what do you think this has done to the country?

RICHARD BOURCHIER: Oh it's polarized it. And if John believes that there's a majority for a no deal Brexit then have a referendum, which isn't what the country voted for at the first referendum. We now know a lot more, it's a huge decision therefore put it to the country again.

LL: Gentlemen I am sure we'll be talking about this again. I thank you both for your time.

RICHARD BOURCHIER: Thank you.

JOHN MAY: Thank you.

LL: John May is a Brexit campaigner and supporter. We reached him in Sardinia, Italy. Richard Bourchier has left the Conservative Party after voting Tory all of his life. He was in London. The CBC News is coming up next. Then.

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VOICE: What if we made school a child's favourite place because if we did that children would have much better learning and I think better futures.

LL: School, a child's favourite place? You heard right. We will talk to authors of a new book who say it's not only possible, but already being done in parts of the world. In fact, one of the researchers was so curious about the success of Finland's schools, he moved his whole family there to study it more closely. What he found was playtime. A lot of playtime. I'm Laura Lynch and I will be with you here on The Current as interim host for the next couple of months through the federal election campaign. A permanent host will be announced later this fall.

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'That 15-minute dose of freedom and sunlight and joy': How more time playing improves children's learning

Guests: Pasi Sahlberg, William Doyle

LL: Hello I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

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LL: He risked his health, his sanity and his life to try to save the world from the horrors of Auschwitz. On this 80th anniversary of the start of World War II, we'll learn about the Polish man who volunteered to be captured and sent to the death camp in order to fight the Nazis from the inside. But first, a story that's playing out in classrooms across the country on this first day of school for many across Canada.

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VOICE 1: We're painting a boat.

VOICE 2: We're going to make a boat, so we can go in the boat. But it's just a pretend boat.

LL: Well the boats might be pretend, but painting them is still serious business for these kids. One of them is clutching a whole handful of brushes, using them all at once.

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VOICE 1: I'm going to, I'm doing three.

VOICE 2: No you're not. You have one, two, three, four, five.

LL: At another table, kids are dressed up as doctors. Seriously examining their patients, which are actually plastic whales. They're all at a YMCA child care centre in Toronto, where our producer Alison Masemann went for a visit. And while it might look like they're just playing, there's an argument to be made that they're learning to. Laurie Huggins co-authored the organization's play-based learning curriculum.

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VOICE 1: We believe that play is a natural way children learn. We see play as the occupation of children and the educators are critical in the learning part of it because I think you heard today, you know they're painting a boat, but they know that they're using three paintbrushes. They know that they're using green or orange or yellow. They're able to tell you that, but it's all immersed in their play.

VOICE 2: The doctor has this.

VOICE 1: That's a stethoscope, right?

VOICE 2: It's for tracking their hearts.

VOICE 3: We're checking, we're checking the whales.

VOICE 1: Oh you're checking the whales to see if they're OK?

VOICE 3: Yeah.

VOICE 1: Play is always pushing the boundaries. You know what happens if I have four paint brushes? If I use four, can I hold those in my hand or not? That's learning, and it's taking a bit of a risk. I might drop those paint brushes, but that's OK.

VOICE 4: I'm just going to go to kindergarten. So it's almost one more day.

VOICE 1: You have one more day and then you go to kindergarten?

VOICE 5: I have two more days and then I'm going to kindergarten.

LL: Across Canada, play-based learning is a foundation of the kindergarten curriculum as well. It's as kids get older that the focus starts to shift away from that, but a new book argues play shouldn't be limited to younger students. It's called Let The Children Play: How More Play Will Save Our Schools and Help Children Thrive. The two authors of the book join me now. Pasi Sahlberg is a Finnish educator and a professor of education policy at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, which is where we reached him. And William Doyle is a writer and researcher and former advisor to the Finnish Ministry of Education. And he is in New York City. Hello to you both.

WILLIAM DOYLE: Hello.

PASI SAHLBERG: Hello from Down Under.

VOICE 1: Pasi Sahlberg, we heard those children playing in pre-school, which probably strikes most people as pretty sensible, natural. What is the argument for why kids of all ages should be getting more play in school?

PASI SAHLBERG: Well a couple of things: One thing is of course that we are more and more expecting children, teenagers and even older older ones in the universities and colleges to learn what some people call "21st century skills" and play is the cheapest and easiest way to help people to learn. communication, Problem Solving, negotiation, empathy all those things in a kind of a fun fun way than the other one is that we we are seeing the decline in children's particularly mental health around the world certainly here in Australia and the United States and even Finland and play is that is the thing that helps help them to cope and deal with the stress that often comes with the school.

LL: William Doyle, how do you define play in an educational context?

WILLIAM DOYLE: We we defined play as periods of intellectual and physical freedom, both indoors and outdoors that we believe it is our duty as parents and as educators to deliver to children regularly through the school day and through the school week. Now of course children need to learn to be diligent and disciplined and engaged in sometimes direct instruction. But as Parsi said the most efficient way to deliver learning is to speak to children in their own language and play is the learning language of children. Now the United States is a cautionary tale in the elimination of play in school. There it's going away. Recess is going away play and passion projects and experimentation and discovery and failure. Failure is a critical part of learning the freedom to fail is another it should be another foundation of education we are doing away with that in the United States and it is not working and we are starting to rediscover play and guess what it works.

LL: OK well Pasi, let's go back to you. Give me an example. What would play based learning look like in a high school science class?

PASI SAHLBERG: Yeah that's a good question. I used to be as a high school science and math teacher for many years in back in Finland. For example giving children a simple scientific experiments to design. I used to do many of my colleagues as well and I know that many Canadian science teachers do that, that they can use their imagination to be a scientist. For example try to figure out how much liquid there is in different kinds of fruits. Take orange for example and ask them to think about how to do that, how to design an experiment. That's where they've kind of a playful thinking and playful behaviours come into the picture. Compare that to the more mechanistic way of of doing that where you have a textbook or worksheets where where you know all the steps are provided for students to do.

LL: William Doyle you eventually became so interested in this idea. You actually moved with your family to Finland. What was the draw?

WILLIAM DOYLE: Well thanks to this guy, Pasi Sahlberg, I read his book and I was so intrigued by the idea of a of a national school system that does things largely the opposite of the American public school system. And my son was 7-years-old at the time and I thought well this is an interesting opportunity to explore the world's best school system, according to some many qualitative rankings. So I moved my family to rural Finland, on the Russian border no less, to a university town and immersed myself in their teacher training and primary school systems. And I discovered that Pasi is actually correct and it's not just because Finn that Finnish people are Finnish or culturally quirky it's because Finland organizes its schools and supports its school system much differently than we are in the United States for example. It selects and trains and respects teachers like elite professionals, number one. Number two, it funds schools fairly and it gives children 15 minutes of recess every single hour of every day of their childhood through up till high school, which is a bizarre bizarre idea to Americans who are kind of demolishing recess figuring well we want children to learn more and they can play at home or on the weekend. And it turns out that that 15 minute dose of freedom and sunlight and Joy makes children learn more efficiently when they go back into school. I saw it with my own son and I saw it with hundreds of you know with thousands of Finnish children.

LL: What did your son think of it?

WILLIAM DOYLE: Well he loved it. He was surprised that there was homework because the cliché is that Finland has no homework. And that's not true at all. They have relatively less than other developed countries. I think the thing he loved most. One day we were walking in the woods. It was you know freezing cold. It's dark because Finland gets pretty dark and he said this the lights of the schoolhouse came within view and he he said you know every kid should have a school like this. And in fact his first day of school he was emotional and crying because he had to leave the school. And I thought what a wonderful objective. What if we made school a place a child's favourite place?

LL: Pasi, you're from Finland. If we were to observe a Finnish school day, what would stand out?

PASI SAHLBERG: I think what William is saying about the recess that you would probably see much more free time for children than you would see in many other parts of the world and certainly you would see much more trust in children's own ability to control their own behaviours and figure out what to do. The second one would be probably very kind of informal atmosphere and relations between children and adults so is it like a home home like environment. And thirdly, school days are probably shorter. They are certainly shorter than here in Australia or in the United States and probably shorter than in Canada.

LL: But how good is the education that Finnish students are getting?

PASI SAHLBERG: I would probably ask rather, how different is the education that Finnish children are getting? Getting better or worse education is very difficult to judge, because we are currently, what the OECD for example is measuring is only reading and mathematics and science and of course we can compare those results. But education is much more than that. Certainly in places like Canada and Finland, where we are looking at much more things like children's well-being and health and happiness as outcomes of school education. But if there is any secret of Finnish success, of Finnish education, I think it's exactly this, that you can you can accomplish and achieve good results in these few measured academic areas by doing less formal teaching and learning, if you make the school environment a place where as William was saying that the kids feel good and safe and they are trusted and they have time to play.

LL: William, China's one place where you might not expect this kind of thing to take off because we so often hear about this rigid high pressure education system, but there is something called Anji play what's that?

WILLIAM DOYLE: I immersed myself in the cutting edge Chinese pre-school and kindergarten model. I went to rural China for this book and I lived inside their system. It is a shocking experience to Chinese people who go into these schools. This is a play based outdoor learning environment with risk and falling down and joy and mud and building things with loose parts like tyres and planks and boards running around and children organizing themselves. It's not Lord of the Flies. It's actually the opposite because teachers are on the sidelines to keep things safe. But you build an environment where children can as Pasi said can be children and enjoy the the sheer beauty of being a child and they learn things at the same time. I was with a 27 year old Chinese man from the neighbourhood who had never been inside one of these new play based anji play schools and he started to cry on a bench and I said Why are you crying. And he said through a translator he said because I never dreamed such a thing like this would be possible in China of all places. This is like heaven for children. It's 100 schools now, it's going province wide and this is the province where Xi Jinping hails from. So it's a very visible, extraordinary experiment in human freedom and this experiment is occurring in playgrounds that fly the hammer and sickle flag. How's that for a sight to behold?

LL: Surprising. Now another place that values play and learning is Glasgow in Scotland and it's been using a program called Active Play where kids spend more time than usual outside. They're doing a combination of semi structured activities and free play. Here's one of the teachers Ms. Sinclair from the program's website describing the benefits she sees for her seven-year-old students.

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VOICE: It really helps their listening skills. I mean getting them for line up at the start of the year was a nightmare. I mean their independence was really really minimal at the start of the year, but now they're able to line up. Their listening skills have improved so much, even in the classroom , sitting and listening to stories for example. They are so much calmer. I don't think they do these kinds of things at home.

LL: William how conclusive is the research about the benefits of this kind of approach?

WILLIAM DOYLE: There is very good research. Of course it's hard to isolate children for their lifetime and measure life outcomes and deny play to children. But when you piece together all the good research that's been done lately you come to some striking conclusions. One is that physical activity like recess and free play outdoors, delivers direct brain benefits biochemically to the child's ability to focus, concentrate and and behave well., there's also other forms of play benefit physical developmen,t social development, and cognitive development, and emotional development. All of these things are benefited by intellectual and physical periods of freedom indoors and outdoors. It's a remarkable kind of a basket of benefits.

LL: Well yeah Pasi. I'm wondering if this is so wonderful, why isn't it happening everywhere?

PASI SAHLBERG: I think one one thing is really that you know if you look at the education policies that this this stems not teachers, but the politicians and education systems have been putting forward during the last 15-20 years, there has been really a clear movement towards more in class instruction more focus on the basic knowledge and skill was the standardized testing that we describe widely in the book has become more and more common around the world and parents and many schools have made to believe that you know this this is the key to success the better you do in the tests and the more you more you the better you perform in a school that the better life you will get. And it has pushed many parents to insist that their children spend more time with the homework and after school classes and all kinds of summer camp. And weekend courses where they practiced and practice over and over again these things that aren't that then testing. So I think basically we have been taking a wrong turn in education in many parts of the world and that's why I think the research and evidence that we show in the book is so important.

LL: Alright I want you to hear from a Canadian educator. Shelley Stagg-Petersen is a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies and education at the University of Toronto. She's working on a play-based learning project in northern communities and here's what she says about how some parents respond to the idea.

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VOICE: Play is a four letter word. It has the connotation in many circles that it's the opposite of work and the idea is that when you're in school you work. Parents that we surveyed in northern Alberta initially said, well the children play at home and they work at school. But then when we started listing some things that children might be doing in school that we considered to be play, parents said well sure, those are the kinds of things we want our children to be doing. Things that are more creative and open ended, things that align with children's interests, allow them to pursue in greater depth topics, concepts that they're interested in, ways to interact and learn from other children. So if we define play in that way and not in the societal dominant message of play being something where children are just doing their own thing then there's not the same kind of resistance to moving play into higher grades.

LL: Now you're both parents Pasi. What do you say to parents who think that play in school is a four letter word?

PASI SAHLBERG: The first thing I would say that read our book because this is exactly why we wanted to to read this book what she was saying about what people, parents and many other people say about play is exactly what we hear in many other places. It's a very common statement here in Australia as well that when children play they're not really doing anything useful and it's a waste of time. We wrote this book for all those parents who kind of wonder what's the difference between learning through play and you know doing doing play for fun that doesn't really benefit it for anybody. I think we really need to you know help or maybe even educate people and parents to think about play in a different way in the school and outside of the school.

LL: William what about digital play? Is technology affecting the way children play? Would a child sitting under a tree with a smartphone be your idea of a good break?

WILLIAM DOYLE: That's a great question. See now you're in very controversial territory. The research on smartphones is new. It is controversial. In the hierarchy of play, we would put so-called digital play relatively low on the category of benefits. We think it's much more important to give children intellectual and freedom and choice and physical freedom and choice and to get them outdoors. If possible running around with their friends and collaborating on building and falling down and having fun through the day, but there are obvious benefits to technology. There is a backlash in many research areas over maybe paper is better. Maybe we should go to more of a post digital early learning environment where there are not so many screens in school. That's an ongoing debate, but again we argue for the more physical and analog forms of play.

LL: Pasi I want to get you to recount an interesting conversation you had with someone at a conference in the United States who had just met your 2 year-old-son. Tell us about that.

PASI SAHLBERG: You know this happened when William moved to Finland and I moved with my family to New England in the United States and I was sitting in a conference, my wife was with this 2-year-old in a beautiful sunny August day walking walking outside with a psychologist who was not in a conference, but he was company of somebody who was there and you know our son is a kind of a lively living little creature who wants to run around and enjoy grass and and sunshine and water and trees and stones and those things. So when they came back from the from the walk the psychologist came to me and asked me very seriously whether I realize that my son has ADHD and he's a two-year-old and he's been designed that way to be you know to be curious and interested in and the response was, but he could he cannot stand still. He cannot sit down when the adults are talking. And that's a kind of an indication of of a very different culture and you know my response to to the psychologist was that we have ADHD also in Finland, but we just have a different name, we call it childhood and it normally goes away when people are turn 18 or 20. Some people have this same same disease even a little bit later, a little bit older.

LL: And so you say it's childhood, but you also you admit though this theory is controversial, but there is a theory that connects the rising rates of ADHD to the absence of play-based learning.

WILLIAM DOYLE: Some researchers are convinced that the rise of ADHD is not only a result of better reporting and more knowledge, but it's also some estimates have up to 50 percent of ADHD as being mis diagnosed and some researchers believe that Ada that these missed diagnoses are occurring especially in school associated with testing periods and stress put upon children, when their natural urges to move and to play are thwarted, by not giving children what they may need, completely biologically, to learn and behave well mean mainly breaks through the day. And this is pediatricians saying this, not just Bill and Pasi. By doing that we're exacerbating, especially with boys who have a more need to move we're actually doing something horribly wrong in our schools the more we do this. And poor children in inner cities are often the victims of that the most. It's actually a culture of forced physical restraint in many of our schools and that's wrong.

LL: OK Pasi, last word to you. Can you briefly give parents some idea of what they can do to embrace this idea of play in and even outside of school.

PASI SAHLBERG: I think one good piece of advice in the countries, places like Canada and Australia and Finland, the United States is for parents to switch off their smartphones and iPads for a while and go take the children and go out and play. I think that's something that will benefit not only children themselves, but also adults when they can stay away a little bit from this often toxic environments that the digital media and entertainment provides them. Canada is a wonderful country. You have a thing that we have in Finland called ice hockey and you can do that, you can do ithat in the winter time and you have beautiful long summers when there's a lot of time to play. But you know there's no kind of a better way to get back to the roots of the importance of play than just go and do it. You know this is one of those doctors orders that we also write in the book that this is what the children's medical doctors are now ordering parents to do, take your kids outside and play with them.

LL: Well. I thank both of you for for the deep thinking and hard work you've put into the subject of play.

WILLIAM DOYLE: Thank you.

PASI SAHLBERG: Thank you very much for your interest.

LL: Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle are co-authors of Let The Children Play: How More Play Will Save Our Schools and Help Children Thrive.

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LL: Coming up in our next half hour, a Polish man goes inside a notorious Nazi death camp voluntarily in a daring mission to warn the world of the horrors happening inside. We'll find out why in a couple of minutes. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One and Sirius XM.

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The spy inside Auschwitz: How a volunteer went inside the death camp to fight Nazis

Guests: Jack Fairweather

LL: I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

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VOICE: These are today's main events. Germany has invaded Poland and has bombed many times.

LL: September 1st, 1939, an urgent report is broadcast on the BBC. Nazi Germany is invading Poland.

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VOICE: The German Supreme Command announced at half past 11:00 this morning that German troops had crossed all the frontiers. That the German air force had gone into action and that the German navy had taken charge of the Baltic. According to the Poles, it was at about six o'clock this morning that the first full scale attacks began.

LL: Soon after France and Britain declare war and so begins World War II. Witold Pelecki was a Polish officer when the Nazis swarmed across the border. His story of courage is told in Jack Fairweather's new book, The Volunteer: One Man, An Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz. Jack Fairweather joins me from Colchester, Vermont. Hello.

JACK FAIRWEATHER: Hi Laura.

LL: Tell me first of all a bit about Witold Pelecki. What was his background?

JACK FAIRWEATHER: He was a gentleman farmer living in Eastern Poland a reserve officer in the Polish cavalry a Catholic father of two. And but for World War II,beginning he may have lived out his life quite peacefully farming in the flatlands without ever becoming the hero that he was to become.

LL: Yes and then that began with the secret army that he joined after the Germans invaded Poland. Tell me about that.

JACK FAIRWEATHER: So he, his unit he wrote on on horseback to go and confront the Germans as they came across the border and like a lot of the Polish military was utterly devastated by this new blitzkrieg tactic. He travelled then to Warsaw realizing that the war was lost and that they would have to begin this resistance effort against the Germans. So he began to sell with some of his colleagues in devastated Warsaw working out how and in what way to resist the Germans.

LL: And so this was an underground intelligence cell.

JACK FAIRWEATHER: it was an intelligence cell. They were very weak and desperate in the beginning and Witold's job in the in the underground was to recruit, bring people together and start to sort of gather intelligence about the Nazis plans, which were unfolding rapidly before them. Hitler had a vision for Poland which was to eliminate all of its elite and professional classes and term poles into slave labour in the Reich essentially and ultimately to clear poles and clear Jews living in the country out of the land and make it open for German settlement. So these unprecedented genocidal plans Pelecki and his group were trying to work out as they as they began.

LL: And Auschwitz began in operation and the cell realized that they needed help there to try to get our information. Witold was asked to get himself sent to Auschwitz. Why?

JACK FAIRWEATHER: This new concentration camp that opened just on the border between the German Reich and Poland had become a collecting point for a lot of Polish prisoners that were being dragged off the streets and sent there and there were reports of unspeakable barbarity percolating back to Warsaw and the underground saw as its mission at that point. And bear in mind France had just been swept aside. It was the Battle of Britain was raging when Irish it's opened in the summer of 1940. The Polish Underground were very determined to try and keep focus on Poland on the suffering of poles to make sure that resources and indeed eventually perhaps action could be taken in the name of Poland. And they saw at Auschwitz as this important load for the suppression of Poland. But they needed to find out more. So they turned to Witold and said would you do this mission? And he didn't leap at the opportunity. The book is called The Volunteer, but he wasn't putting his hand up you know in class saying choose me. He sat on this information the underground had was aware when the Germans carried out big round ups in Warsaw to send people to outfits and be told actually missed the the first one as he dwelt on his decision. But by the time the second round up was planned he told the underground, yes I'm ready. He had his final meeting with his family without telling them his operation. He took on an alias to try and protect them and then he packed his knapsack and headed to the neighbourhood where the roundup was planned for the next day.

VOICE: Alright, so set the scene for me on the day he was arrested.

JACK FAIRWEATHER: So it's the early hours of September the 19th at 4:00 a.m. Pelecki's already dressed as the rumble of German trucks approach their shouts gunshots from the streets outside the building caretaker runs up the steps and bangs on the door and says get out, get out, while you still can. Pelecki says thank you for the information, I'm fine. And then he turns around. He's staying in an apartment with his sister-in-law and a nephew and the boy is standing up wide eyed in bed and he's dropped his teddy bear on the ground and Witold reaches up hands it to the boy. One of those gestures that for me really spoke to the extraordinary ability of Witold to reach out to others in these moments of great tension, just when you think he would be completely sort of focussed on his own dilemma. Nope, he had time to think about that boy. Then the door burst open. There were the Germans. Pelecki's already putting on his coat and stepped into captivity and he was taken with every other military aged man on that street in that district by truck to a train station and then loaded a few days later into cattle cars bound for our Auschwitz.

LL: What were the conditions like at the camp when he arrived?

JACK FAIRWEATHER: While Pelecki describes them as the moment he left life, the world as he knew it and stepped into a whole new dimension of suffering and pain that he could not have imagined existed. The door of the cattle carts were yanked open. They prisoners were dragged outside beaten. Ten men were shot summarily in front of Wtiold right there and then when they were forced through the gates to be then stripped, shaved and given numbers instead of names and they became essentially objects of the SS to work to death in brutal labour exercises around the camp. On starvation rations, constantly preyed upon by German prisoners who had functionary roles in the camp and encouraged to inform on one another and they began to die very quickly.

LL: And let's just remind everyone that we're talking about Auschwitz at this point had yet to become the death camps, especially for the Jews. This is at the beginning when they were focussing on Poles and trying to kill them, wear them down, abuse them. What were there, was there any organized resistance among the prisoners before he got there?

JACK FAIRWEATHER: That's a great point. Just to emphasize that when the war began 80 years ago the the Nazi leadership did not have a plan for exterminating Europe's Jews. It was something that they had reached through a series of incremental steps, series of atrocities and brutal experiments. And one of the key testing areas was in fact outfits. It began as a concentration camp for Polish citizens. So that meant Catholics and Jews and ethnic Germans anyone they rounded up and deemed subject to incarceration was likely to be sent to Auschwitz when when vetoed arrived at the camp there was no organized resistance. The prisoners as you can imagine from that arrival were just shattered demoralized disoriented. Indeed Pelecki himself was you know very very confused. He describes in his subsequent reports just this sort of numbing shock of arriving in Auschwitz and it took really all of his strength to find the courage to begin recruiting to begin the resistance.

LL: Exactly because you think he gets there and he would just sort of fall apart, but instead he knows he has a tasks and he knows he has to actually get recruits. So what was the most dangerous thing he faced in trying to organize the resistance?

JACK FAIRWEATHER: Well the prisoners were starving to death. The German capos who ran the camp were giving bread to informants. There were whispers there was denunciations all around him. It was a very frightening place to be and in some ways I think one of the most extraordinary moments is just some of that first recruiting he did, when he had no idea how he would be treated by the other prisoners. And indeed some of the prisoners were completely bowled over by his approach. One of the texts that I unearthed described an early recruitment and the prisoner looked up looked at Witold and said are you nuts? We are a state to fight against the Germans look at us we're like starving and got covered in bruises. But he realized in that moment that Pelecki had trusted him not just with the secret of the underground but also actually in some ways with the secret of his life. And that was a really powerful tool in the camp for the underground. This trust that Pelecki showed in the people around him. It gave people a sense that something greater than themselves could survive in the camp and throughout the two and a half years that Witold found himself in Auschwitz, he was almost never betrayed. And that's because these bonds that he forged his amazing ability to judge the right prisoners to to recruit men that there were no denunciations in his group and that allowed him to build this underground piece by piece expand in size and scope and ambition and rarely start fighting back against the Nazis.

LL: And so what did the Resistance cell do in Auschwitz?

JACK FAIRWEATHER: Well the first thing I discovered in my research was really blew me away and it was the first message that Pelecki sent out of the camp and occasionly a few, escape was as you can imagine, incredibly difficult and if there was any attempt the camp SS would punish all the other prisoners. So that was something that Witold decided to to avoid. Occasionally a prisoner was released and he gave him an oral message and he couldn't write anything down of course and the oral message was then taken by this prisoner to Warsaw,smuggled all the way across occupied Europe by a series of couriers and finally reached the desk of the RAF command in London. And the message that Pelecki gave was, I mean it sort of gives me goose bumps when I first read it. It was: PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, BOMB THIS CAMP. Even if it means we will be killed in the operation because what is happening here is so terrible, it needs to end. And it was a pretty powerful message and this was the first message sent in October 1940. And I think it really opens up one of those great what might have beens in the war. You know what would have happened had the allies bombed Auschwitz then?

LL: Yeah. And of course they did not. Was it indifference? Was it anti-Semitism later on?

JACK FAIRWEATHER: Later on I think there was for sure anti-Semitism when it came to the Jewish mass murder. There was a great text by a Dutch theologian who worked with rescue efforts during the war and he recognized that there was anti-Semitism among some of the allied officials, but he actually put the failure to take action down to another reason and that was the failure to be able to imagine the scale of the horror in Auschwitz, which was so great it it, just pushed people away. And for me that struck a real truth because it's something I myself have felt before beginning this book. You know I had of course known about the Holocaust like we all do and had really struggled to comprehend it, to engage with it. And that was what I found so incredible about Witold Pilecki is that he was this guy who came to the camp with this whole different outlook on the experience. He was going to be a protagonist. He was going to record. He was going to be a guide to what was happening in the camp. And I found his story really shown this unexpected shocking light right through the history of the camp that allowed me to engage with the horror because you see it through his eyes as someone trying to make sense of it and to take action and to stop it. And that was a really powerful tool for me to to explore this material, one which I hope your listeners will have in reading the book.

LL: It really is quite extraordinary. If we can go back to the kinds of things that were done while he was in charge of this resistance. There's one incredible story about this form of biological warfare that the cell used to kill Nazis and their collaborators in the camp. What did they do?

JACK FAIRWEATHER: Yeah. So just think about that question. How do you kill an SS officer in Auschwitz? It's quite mind boggling. And Pelecki, one of the great things about him that I hope really comes through in the book is just what a problem solver he was. How creative and innovative and just downright sort of sneaky in combating the SS. Of course they couldn't just shoot an SS officer in the head or strangle one in his sleep without leading to you know reprisals against the other prisoners. They had to kill the SS without seeming to kill them and they hit upon this quite ingenious technique. In early 1942 there was a typhus epidemic in the camp and typhus was this terrible disease spread by lice through their faeces and the bites that they made. And that was how they thought to kill the SS. They would take vials of infected lice that they knew had typhus and sprinkle them onto the coats of SS men in their coat rooms and elsewhere when they weren't looking.

LL: He survived and by I mean survived, his time in Auschwitz, he himself got typhus at one point and came through that, but he finally decided he had to get out. How did he finally leave Auschwitz?

JACK FAIRWEATHER: Well he was, he'd begun to arrange a few escapes for his men as the scale of the crimes increased and he realized that the risk was worth it. But with each escape that made it harder to think up a new ruse. One of his men had escaped dressed as an SS officer in a stolen car from the commandant's carriage and driven out with a couple of other prisoners dressed as SS men. They'd just driven out of the camp. Really one of the most amazing escapes in I think concentration camp history. Pelecki had to come up with something equally audacious and that was to get a transfer to a bakery where some of the prisoners worked as bakers with a civilian team. And he had to forge the key and some various spanners to open the door secretly while the guards weren't watching.

LL: And they made the copies by using dough.

JACK FAIRWEATHER: By using dough. I know it's just unbelievable ingenuity and they forced the door, had to sprint 200 yards with the guards shooting at them and then had this hundred mile journey across Nazi occupied Poland to reach a safe house. And it was an extraordinary journey. It was actually one that I felt compelled to do myself. So on the research I really wanted to try and follow in Pelecki's footsteps wherever possible, just to try and answer that question when his reports or his later writings don't give us the answer, how do you do this? And so I staged an escape from the location where the bakery was outside the camp, the same night the same time 2 a.m. as Pelecki. Same time of year and then tried to work out where it was that he had crossed the river and where it was that he spent his first few hours of freedom in a forest nearby and then made my way. He gives a few names of the villages where he stopped, so I stayed in those villages. And had this you know actually rather amazing experience of finding families. These elderly ladies who and men who said oh yeah I remember Pelecki's escape. He was in this village. I was a kid, there was a knock on the door, whenever it was, 3am and there were these, there was Pelecki and the two other prisoners he escaped with. And my family took them in and fed them and you know there they were 80 years later, taking me in, giving me tea and biscuits and telling their stories, which you know in many cases they hadn't told before. And it was really, I was very touched to find this sort of living memory still you know, not just these little snatches of landscape that you could identify, but actual you know the voices of people telling me what Pelecki told them.

LL: But he did write about it. He continued to write and later as he I guess recovered from war, he opened up a bit more about it, which is why you have some of his writings today. But Poland eventually becomes a Soviet satellite state at the end of the war and what so Pelecki, you know what, he's not giving up. He goes back. What did he do after the Communists took control of the government?

JACK FAIRWEATHER: Well there was a you know he literally didn't have a home to go back to because that farm in eastern Poland had been incorporated into the new Socialist Republic of Belarussia. It was Poles were being ethnically cleansed from that region by Soviet forces. It was this very you know fraught and dangerous time. Huge food shortages and massive political repression and of course Pelecki was right back in Warsaw on a new mission. This time to chronicle communist crimes against the people.

LL: Eventually though he was found, he was arrested. What happened to him after his arrest?

JACK FAIRWEATHER: He was brutally interrogated and tortured over a six month period that ultimately ended with his trial in early 1948 and he was executed a few weeks later.

LL: I'm wondering how is Witold Pelecki remembered in Poland today?

JACK FAIRWEATHER: His memory, his writings his reports from the camp were all locked away in the communist archives and there they remained until the fall of the Iron Curtain and the emergence of a free and democratic Poland. And it took until the early 90s for his papers to be released and I would say over the 10-20 years since then, he has become a major national figure in Poland. There's schools named after him. There's a real sense of pride and recognition of what Pelecki did and my hope is obviously with this book to share that story and have him recognized in Canada, in the States, in the UK, as this figure who is really to my mind a great international war hero who we should all be celebrating and be inspired by.

LL: The Polish government though has made it illegal to say that some Poles were complicit in the mass murder of Jews and I'm wondering what the story of Witold Pelecki tells us about the role of German occupied Poland in the Holocaust.

JACK FAIRWEATHER: In Poland, for decades after the war, the focus on Auschwitz was it only as a concentration camp for Poles, where indeed 70,000 plus Poles were murdered and the Nazi occupation of Poland as a whole. Killed three million or more Poles. And so they were very focussed on this subject of Polish suffering. Of course in the West and the outside world, Auschwitz you know represents Jewish suffering. And I mean it seems crazy, but there is this sort of tension between how Poles remember the camp and how others remember the camp. And you know Pelecki's story I think has this extraordinary way of bridging that gap. You know here was this Polish patriots who went to the camp when it was four Polish nationals and who then went on to witness its transformation into a death camp for Europe's Jews. And you know I think he brings together these different perspectives on Auschwitz, these different perspectives on Poland's role during World War II that I think can help help show the valour of so many Poles in resisting the Nazis.

LL: Thank you so much for bringing the story of Witold Pelecki to English language readers. He may be known in Poland, but people are just going to get to know him here and it's a great read. Thank you.

JACK FAIRWEATHER: Thank you Laura.

LL: Jack Fairweather is the author of The Volunteer: One man, An Underground Army and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz. He was in Colchester, Vermont. That is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q Tom Power talk to Salman Rushdie about his latest novel Quichotte, which reframes the classic story of Don Quixote. And just a note, both Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood have just been named as finalists for the Booker Prize. And we will have an interview on The Current with Margaret Atwood on her new novel, The Testaments. Listen for Margaret Atwood next week on The Current. Well as kids across the country pick out their first day of school outfit, some good news. I'm told the athleisure trend is still going strong. Leggings and sweatpants are still fashionable choices for kids who want to play and look great doing it. This sounds like an ad. That's a relatively new trend. So let's take a little nostalgic trip back in time to end the show today. 46 years to be exact and a news report that aired in 1973, all about back to school shopping. I'm Laura Lynch. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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[1973 commercial for back to school shopping]

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Sept. 3, 2019 episode transcript

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