How the child does develop further through culture and imagination?

How the child does develop further through culture and imagination?

Children of this age are urged by the law of their nature to find active experience in the world about them. If we leave children free in the new kind of environment that we have provided, they give us quite an unexpected impression of their nature and abilities. The real explosion takes place within the inner personality.

Children feel a special interest for those things already rendered familiar to them (by absorption) in their earlier period. On these can focus their minds with great ease. For example, the child’s explosion into writing is closely connected with his special sensibility for language, and this was operative at the time when he began to speak.

Is the child’s mental horizon limited to what he sees? No. He has the great power of imagination.

Up to what point can children imagine? Not knowing the answer, we began experiment with children of six, but instead of starting with the leaser geographical units (river, bay, island, etc.); we tried the effect of presenting the whole world at once: that is to say, we showed a land and water terrestrial globe “the world”.

Now, the world is something for which there is no sensorial image draw from the child’s surrounding. If, therefore, he has formed an idea of it, this can be only in virtue of an intangible power of his mind, an imaginative power.

The child’s mind between three and six can not only see by intelligence the relations between things, but it has the higher power still mentally imagining those things that are not directly visible. Imagination has always been given a predominant place in the psychology of childhood, and all over the world people tell their children fairy stories which are enjoyed immensely as if the children wanted to exercise this great gift as imagination undoubtedly is.

If a child can imagine a fairy and fairyland, it will not be difficult to him to imagine America. Instead of hearing it referred to vaguely in conversation, he can help to clarify his own ideas of it by looking at the globe on which is it shown. Imagination is a force for discovery of truth. The mind is not a passive thing, but a devouring flame, never in repose, always in action.

People have always thought that to play with bricks and exercise the imagination of fairy tales, were two of the children’s primary needs at this age. The first was supposed to set up a direct relationship between the child’s mind and his environment, so that he could know it and master it, thus achieving much mental development.

Children of this age are always asking us to explain things. Everyone knows how curious they are, and we feel we are being bombarded by questions. But if we do not regard these as a torment, but as the expressions of a mind longing to know, we may find them illuminating.

Play, imagination and questions are the features of this age, and this is known to all. Luckily the child learns more from his surrounding than he does from us, but we need psychological insight to help him as much as we can. The child’s way of doing things has been for us an in-exhaustible fountain of revelations.

The child who has working with our sensorial apparatus has not only acquired greater skill in the use of his hands, but has also achieved a higher degree of perceptiveness towards those stimuli which come to him from the outside world.

No less than speech and writing, it is one of the forms of culture which bring perfection to the personality and enrich its natural powers. The senses, being explores of the world, open the way to knowledge.

Simultaneously, everything appertaining to the child’s higher energies becomes a stimulus, setting his creative powers to work and extending the interests of his exploring mind.

In fact, culture is not a matter of accumulating information, but it implies an extension of the personality. To teach a child whose senses have been educated