Let’s pretend an alien from another planet visited your elementary class room while you were playing the game Hangman.  Imagine trying to explain the rules and the purpose of the game, knowing the alien doesn’t have any background in human behavior.

“You see, in America, we teach our kids how to spell by making them guess random letters of a word.  When they guess wrong, a nameless stranger is slowly constructed in effigy.  After a sufficient number of incorrect guesses, the nameless stranger is hanged, thus saddling our children with the emotional burden of a pretend public execution.  This execution takes places in front of all the children so they can witness the horrors of poor spelling.  It’s a game, but it’s also how we teach our children new words.”

If Steven Spielberg decided to edit out two shotguns from the closing sequence of ET; and if kids now believe the word “stupid” is a bad word (as one elementary student explained to me); then it’s time we take this gruesome game of public executions out of the classroom and replace it with something that better reflects our values.

That replacement is Amnesty Man.  It promotes a completely different set of values – ones that do not rely on the death of a nameless stranger to reinforce the importance of spelling.  It’s also an example of error-less learning, a pedagogical tool that rewards kiddos for knowing how to spell instead of penalizing them for not knowing how to guess.

Here’s how it works.  You pick a word that you want the children to spell and then draw a stick figure in a prison cell.  Each letter of the word is represented by a single bar across the cell.  Each time the children guess a letter correctly, you erase the corresponding prison bar and place that letter above where it was.

After the children get all the letters for the word, all the prison bars will be erased, and our nameless stranger will have achieved amnesty.  It’s an example of error-less learning because, by definition, the game cannot end in failure.  Eventually, the children will guess all of the letters in the alphabet, at which point, you will have erased all of the bars of the prison.  Hence, your students are guaranteed to achieve Amnesty within 26 guesses or less.

Aside from a step up in pedagogy, Amnesty man is the metaphorical difference between freeing a prisoner who was wrongly convicted and executing a nameless stranger by accident.  The former teaches kindness, where the latter inculcates children with a calloused indifference left over from educational standards of the 1950s.

When I went to grade school, we had a bona fide metal jungle gym that formed a metal cage on top of asphalt.  As you can imagine, it was a blood bath.  First the school put shredded tires underneath it.  Then they removed it all together.  They removed it because kids were getting hurt; and it was the right decision.  In retrospect, we look back and wonder how a school could keep something so dangerous to children for as long as the did.

The game Hangman is likewise a relic from an earlier era that continues to harm children.  It doesn’t break their bones like the jungle gym of my school days; but it does chip away at their soul.  With every “Hanged Man”, our kiddos learn to be just a little bit more indifferent to the highly divisive social issue of capital punishment.

Playing hangman will not cause your children to go out and organize public executions.  That’s not what I’m saying.  It will teach them to give less thought to capital punishment.  That lack of thought is a lost opportunity to feel compassion for another human being.  If we as educators are trying to build a better world, then we need to give our kiddos that opportunity.  Amnesty Man is that opportunity.

So, let’s take the public executions out of the classroom and replace it with a more caring, considerate alternative.  Let’s teach kindness to our kids every chance we can.  And let’s enjoy a rousing game of Amnesty Man.