childhood
A crumpled drawing
A child is walking with a crumpled drawing in his hand. Someone asks him if the crumped drawing has a "name"...
"Every thing," he replies.
If children are transferred from a lively city street
In real life, what significant change does occur if children are transferred from a lively city street to the usual park or to the usual public or project playground?
In most cases (not all, fortunately), the most significant change is this: The children have moved from under the eyes of a high numerical ratio of adults, into a place where the ratio of adults is low or even nil. To think this represents an improvement in city child rearing is pure daydreaming.
Inheriting Froebel's Gifts
A Podcast by Kurt KohlstedtFroebel’s Gifts were meant to be given in a particular order, growing more complex over time and teaching different lessons about shape, structure and perception along the way. A soft knitted ball could be given to a child just six weeks old, followed by a wooden ball and then a cube, illustrating similarities and differences in shapes and materials. Then kids would get a cylinder (which combines elements of both the ball and the cube) and it would blow their little minds. Some objects were pierced by strings or rods so kids could spin them and see how one shapes morphs into another when set into motion. Later came cubes made up of smaller cubes and other hybrids, showing children how parts relate to a whole through deconstruction and reassembly.
These perception-oriented “Gifts” would then give way to construction-oriented “Occupations.” Kids would be told to build things out of materials like paper, string, wire, or little sticks and peas that could be connected and stacked into structures.
Walking lessons
A TweetLecturing Birds on How to Fly, from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile
If children started school at six months old and their teachers gave them walking lessons, within a single generation people would come to believe that humans couldn't learn to walk without going to school.
Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation
A Research PaperWe directly establish the importance of environment by showing that exposure to innovation during childhood has significant causal effects on children's propensities to invent. Children whose families move to a high-innovation area when they are young are more likely to become inventors. These exposure effects are technology-class and gender specific.
Home Star
I am a sucker for stories in which seeds of cosmic revelation are found hidden inside everyday materials, especially when those materials are architectural in form.
In this case, it was “the imprint of a rare solar storm” that left traces in the rings of trees cut into logs by Vikings and used to build cabins 1,000 years ago on the Atlantic coast of Canada.
…While there is obviously more to say about the science behind this discovery—all of which you can read here—what interests me is simply the idea that astral events, cosmic storms, stellar weather, electromagnetic pulses from space, whatever you want to imagine, leave traces all around us. That in the depths of our buildings, in our walls and floors, even in the wooden dowels of mass-produced furniture, there can be evidence of immensely powerful and beautiful things, and I would like to remember to look for that again. It’s been a miserable couple of years.