sand pile part two...

In G. Stanley Hall's book, "The Story of a Sand Pile," he describes the effects of allowing boys a summer's activity guided by their own creative impulses, using a sand pile as follows:

"On the whole, the “sand-pile” has, in the opinion of the parents, been of about as much yearly educational value to the boys as the eight months of school. Very many problems that puzzle older brains have been met in simpler terms, and solved wisely and well. The spirit and habit of active, and even prying observation has been greatly quickened. Industrial processes, institutions, and methods of administration and organization have been appropriated and put into practice. The boys have grown more companionable and rational, learned many a lesson of self control, and developed a spirit of self-help. The parents have been enabled to control indirectly, the associations of their boys, and, in a very mixed boy-community, to have them, in a measure, under observation without in the least restricting their freedom. The habit of loafing, and the evils that attend it, has been avoided, a strong practical and even industrial bent has been given to their development, and much social morality has been taught in the often complicated modus vivendi with others that has been evolved. Finally, this may perhaps be called one illustration of the education, according to nature we so often hear and speak of. Each element in this vast variety of interests is an organic part of a comprehensive whole, compared with which the concentrative methodic unities of Ziller seem artificial, and, as Bacon said of scholastic methods, very inadequate to subtility of nature."

And so, my friends, here we have it. The father of the standardized testing movement, G. Stanley Hall, describing what education should be and could be if we were to dispense with the stupidity of our current methodology in which disciplines are divided and championed as though they are separate from each other. Hall wrote further on this point.

Had the elements of all the subjects involved in the “sand-pile,” industrial, administrative, moral, geographical, mathematical, etc., been taught separately and as mere school exercises, the result would have been worry, waste, and chaos.

And so we have it. Worry, waste, chaos, willingly accepted by parents and teachers who have no knowledge that other alternatives exist. It is the externally imposed artificiality of education that kills its spirit.

As you can see, what the boys created was no ordinary sand pile. It was a microcosm of their own community in which they would learn according to their own inclinations.What we must remember is that children are hard wired for learning. It's what they do, so it needs not be forced, but can be gently directed. Play is the means to do so. I had thought of G. Stanley Hall as being rigid and authoritarian, so finding "The Story of a Sand Pile" has been a surprise to me.

Make, fix, create, and allow for the possibility that others will prefer learning likewise.