just play all the time by themselves." One teacher brought out an
attractive picture and when a group of children gathered round it she
proceeded to tell the story; they listened politely for a few minutes,
and then the group gradually melted away; they were not ready for
concentrated effort. If those children had been in the ordinary Baby
Room of a school they would have been quite docile, sitting in their
places apparently listening to the story, amiably "using" their bricks
or other materials according to the teacher's directions, but they would
not, in the real sense, have been playing. This is an example of the
need for both principle and courage.
It is into this chaotic method of gaining experience that the teacher
comes with her interpretive power--she sees in it the beginnings of all
the big things of life--and like a bigger child she joins, and like a
bigger child she improves. She sees in the apparent chaos an attempt to
get experience of the different aspects of life, in the apparently
aimless activity an attempt to realise and develop the bodily powers, in
the fighting and quarrelling an attempt to establish a place in social
life. It is all unconscious on the part of a child, but a necessary
phase of real development.
Gradually the little primitive man begins to yield to civilisation. He
is interested in things for longer and asks for stories, music and
rhymes, and what does this mean?
As he develops a child learns much about life in his care of the garden,
about language in his games, about human conduct from stories; but he
does these things because he wants to do them, and because there is a
play need behind it all, which for him is a life need; in order to build
a straight wall he must classify his bricks, in order to be a real
shopman he must know his weights, in order to be a good workman he must
measure his paper; all the ideas gained from these things come to him
_along with sense activity_; they are associated with the needs and
interests of daily life; and because of this he puts into the activity
all the effort of which he is capable, or as Dewey has expressed it,
"the maximum of consciousness" into the experience which is his play.
This is real sense training, differing in this respect from the training
given by the Montessori material, which has no appeal to life interest,
aims at exercising the senses separately, and discourages _play_ with
the apparatus. It is activity without a body, practice without an end,
and nothing develops from it of a constructive or expressive nature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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