I grew up eating sugar cookies. Tender and gently domed, with a thin cap of sugar and one chewy raisin poked into the top, they were lovely.

There’s nothing fancy about them. There’s no browned butter, flecks of citrus, or toasted nuts. No flakes of coconut, swirls of cinnamon, or puddles of chocolate. No icings or liquors or fancy sugars or syrups. There’s no sandwiching, cutting, or fancy rolling. In fact, you might say these cookies are boring. Or, you might say, they are cookies in their most simplified state of cookieness.

Making them, I feel Amish, or at the very least, stolidly Mennonite. I imagine that in those homes, this is the cookie that is always on hand, ready to be packed into a basket for a sick neighbor or doled out to hungry, stub-toed children and visiting ministers. They’re not over-rich so they won’t ruin an appetite, and they’re so basic that there’s nothing to get upset at them for.

‘Course, if you want to get fancy with them, you can brush them with a very thin vanilla glaze and sprinkle with colored sugar. My mom used to do this and it made us kids happy. Colored sugar has that effect on children.

Shirley’s Sugar Cookies
From my mom’s recipe file.

2 sticks butter
1½ cups sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 3/4 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
raisins and sugar, for garnish

Cream together the butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs and vanilla. Alternately mix in the dry ingredients with the milk. Cover the dough with plastic and chill for a couple hours.

Spoon the dough onto greased cookie sheets. Sprinkle the cookies with sugar, about a quarter teaspoon per cookie, and bake at 375 degrees until puffy, golden brown around the edges, and no longer wet in the middle. To test them, gently press the top of a cookie with your finger. If it springs back, it’s done. Do not over bake the cookies.

Poke a raisin into the top of each cookie. Nudge it down in pretty far; otherwise, it will fall out/off during handling. Allow the cookies to rest on the tray for a couple minutes to set up. Transfer them to a cooling rack.

Variation: Glazed Sugar Cookies
Omit the raisin and sugar garnish. Mix some confectioner’s sugar with enough milk to make a thin glaze, and add a couple drops of vanilla. Thinly spread the glaze on the cooled cookies. Immediately after glazing (it will dry quickly, so move fast), sprinkle liberally with colored sugar.

This same time, years previous: the basics, more on trash, the reason why, through my daughter’s eyes, chocolate-kissed chili, and ranch dressing.

Back when I was writing my home education series, I expressed frustration that the Sunday school class—the one we were doing on education—never actually got around to the topic of learning. If learning is at the heart of education, I asked, then why aren’t we talking about it?

A couple of you recommended Peter Gray’s book Free to Learn. After a bunch of pondering (and trying to scrounge it for free), I ordered it from Amazon. It was the smartest twenty bucks I’ve spent in a long time.

Reading this book, my insides get trembly. I’m all fired up giddy. I have so much pent up energy and harebrained ideas, I can hardly settle down to focus on the actual words in the book because they are SO CRAZY INSPIRING THAT I MUST TYPE IN ALL CAPS AND FLAP. My husband is on pins and needles because he never knows what wacko thing I’m going to say next. I’m poised to scream radical ideas from the mountaintops while he’s frantically yanking me back from the edge and I’m all like, Just let me go, I want to flyyyyy!

So what’s so wonderful about a boring old research-based book?

First, it’s not boring. It’s facts and studies and evidence, but it’s approachable and friendly.

Second, the topic is enormously relevant. Schools are an integral part of our society. Everybody learns.

Third, Gray is an evolutionary developmental psychologist (in other words, he studies child development and education from a Darwinian perspective) who answers the question that no one else will: how do we learn. (Ironically enough, I doubt Gray’s ideas are anything our current educational system will want to hear. Which is probably the reason no one is talking about it.)

Here. I’ll toss you some tidbits from my figurative mountaintop. If you’re not interested, duck and run. I hope I don’t squash anyone’s toes.

Peter Gray says:

*The educational system is not democratic. Our government proclaims that everyone is allowed freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and yet we deny that to a large portion of our society, not because they’ve done anything wrong but merely because of their age. Why aren’t children (and their advocates) taking the school system to court?

*Gray equates schools with prisons and then raises the hard question about all the people working in the educational system: “How can I say that these good people—who love children and have poured themselves passionately into the task of trying to help them—are complicit in a system of imprisoning them?” (67). Gray’s piercing critique is not an attack on people, but on the society we live in. It is complicated and dicey.

*How do mammals learn? Through play, though Gray doesn’t get around to addressing this directly until page 139. (He spends the first part of the book talking about hunter-gatherer cultures, a progressive school called Sudbury Valley School, and our failing school system.) The more evolved the species, the more playful they are. Humans require incredible amounts of space and time to play in order to be successful. We’re not talking about just toddlers needing tremendous freedom to play, but children up to, oh say, the late teen years, gasp. (Remember that post I did a couple months back on what I will wish I’d done differently? Ha!)

*Play is (and I’m snatching the section titles from pages 141-153) 1) self-chosen and self-directed, 2) motivated by means more than ends, 3) guided by mental rules, 4) imaginative, and 5) conducted in an alert, active, but non-stressed frame of mind. According to this definition, my blog is one hundred percent play.

*There is no way that anybody can learn even a small sliver of all the information that is out there. Don’t spend time trying to get everyone to cover all the same topics: explore, discover passions, be different, play.

*Young children learn by exploring their physical world; older children, ages 11 and up, learn by
exploring other people’s minds. I am seeing this shift with my children. Last night, in addition to our normal suppertime crazy, there was an animated and extended conversation about all things China, tariff, and sanctions. Super fun.

These nuggets are just the tip of the iceberg. The ideas in this book are startlingly radical. It takes a good bit of reading and pondering to wrap my mind around them. There’s no way I can do them justice in one little blog post. Even though I do not agree with everything Gray says (and I’m mighty skeptical of some of his claims), his book provides the best answer to my how-we-learn question that I have yet found.

My paradigms are shifting. I have no idea where I’ll end up. The only thing I know is, I’m loving the ride.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a book to read … and a fretful husband to soothe.

This same time, years previous: the quotidian (5.20.13), the trouble with Mother’s Day, the quotidian (5.21.12), the boring blues, and fowl-ness.

This same time, years previous: help, a burger, a play, and some bagels, ’twas an honor, baked brown rice, my favorite things, rhubarb streusel muffins, strawberry spinach salad, caramel cake, cinnamon tea biscuits, and talking points, rained out.