Messing About

"If education were defined... to include everything that children have learned since birth, everything that has come to them from living in the natural and the human world, then by any sensible measure what has come before age five or six would outweigh all the rest," declares David Hawkins in his book The Informed Vision (New York: Algora Publishing, 2002).

"When we narrow the scope of education to what goes on in schools, we throw out the method of that early and spectacular progress at our peril.  We know that five-year-olds are unequal in their mastery of this or that.  We also know that histories are responsible for most of this inequality, utterly masking the congenital differences, except in special cases.  This is the immediate fact confronting us as educators in a society committed, morally and now by sheer economic necessity, to universal education.

"To continue the cultivation of earlier ways of learning, therefore, to find in school the good beginnings, the liberating involvements that will make the kindergarten seem a garden to the child and not a dry and frightening desert, this is a need that requires much emphasis of the style of work I have called 'Messing About.'  Nor does the garden in this sense end with a child's first school year, or his tenth, as though one could then put away childish things.  As time goes on... 'Messing About' evolves with the child and thus changes its quality.  It becomes a way of working that is no longer childish though it remains always childlike, the kind of self-disciplined probing and exploring that is the essence of creativity."

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