Kids are natural learners, and it isn’t a big deal to them most of the time. Learning is what kids do. Simple. When I was a kid nobody bothered to keep tabs on what I was learning, and I had a lot of chances to set up little educational projects of my own. Some of my projects were ragged constructions and others were impromptu experiments. I never thought of this as learning, but in retrospect I see that’s what my projects were about. It’s a good thing nobody tested me on them because most of what I learned held little educational currency. I’m glad I had the chance to ask my own questions before adults came up with tests for fake knowledge and forced kids to only learn what could be filled into a blank space on paper.
My grandmother had a little house in the country with an old broken concrete path near the back porch. There were about two million cats living under her house. The cats were mostly wild. Some had ringworm and were pretty thin. Most of them looked rough and were shy of people, but if they thought you might have food for them they’d get close enough to let you pick them up.
As a little guy of maybe 7 years of age I remember one of my entertainments on visits to Grandma’s house was to crack open walnuts with a hammer on the concrete walkway. One day, for whatever reason, the cats seemed more interesting than the walnuts, and I decided to try a little experiment. I remember wondering whether it was true that cats always land on their feet. Since there wasn’t anywhere high enough to drop a cat for an honest test of the question, I decided to find out if they’d land on their feet when they were traveling UP as well as Down. My project design to test the question was to throw some cats into a tree to see if they’d grab onto it. I expected that most of them would be able to grab the tree because my experience was that they all had sharp claws.
It was a great plan. The large number of cats around the house meant I had plenty of raw material to work with. I knew that a single trial wouldn’t meet validity criteria to justify a conclusion about cats in general, so I tried the experiment many times. I began rounding up cats and heaving them into a big tree next to the house. The cats usually flailed a little bit on their way up, hit the tree, fell to the ground, and ran away. To give them a better chance of sticking to the tree, I revised my technique and tried tossing them feet-first. Most of the time if they hit the tree high enough up they’d bounce off and hit the ground running. Very few of them hung onto the tree. Of course I don’t know if that was because they couldn’t, or didn’t want to. Everyone knows that cats are independent minded. I wasn’t strong enough to throw the big cats very far, so my results were limited to kittens and smaller cats.
I know that the ethics of this experiment are apalling, except in the case of a small boy who’d never heard the word, ‘appropriate.’ That wasn’t a word that was used on kids until the early 1980′s. Until then all we got from adults was either, “Do this,” or “Stop that.” There was a lot of gray area to be explored between those two limits when no authority figures were around, and my cat project was novel enough that nobody had specifically set forth guidelines for that set of conditions.
I wonder how many learning opportunities kids miss these days as we socialize them into the culture of formalized schooling and conventional modes of learning? You know, I don’t remember a single science lesson from elementary school, but that little experiment of mine is quite vivid. Interestingly, I never told anyone about it. I’d forgotten all about it, in fact, until the other night when I was visiting with some friends, and we were talking about walnuts. It was just another day in the life of a kid.
The essential observation I have to make about my project at this point is that you can learn a lot from cats if you have enough of them. The problem with having just one or two is that they are more difficult to catch for additional trials. Live and learn.
4 Comments
I love the analogy! I think this is why I moved from the “big city” back to my small hometown. I wanted my children to grow up “wiggling their toes in the dirt” and in fact they just got out of a mudhole.
I learned a lot in school and college but I think I learned to be myself amidst the mud, pets, and farm. There is a lot to be said for sending kids outside to “throw cats in trees” so to speak.
I grew up in a small town too! I had a great deal of freedom by the fact, that I could walk anywhere and everyone knew me. We did not have organized sports but played outside. When the weather was bad, we played board games like Monopoly, Life, and even Rummy. No one had ADD or ADHD or Autism. We did worry about state tests. We too played in the dirt and did our own little experiments – our experiments involved the physics of crabapples. We would take the crabapple and would puncture it with the end of stick. This wonderful device could then be whipped so that the crabapple would project into the air at various velocities and distances.
I am reading a very controversial book by Charlotte Iserbyt, The Deliberately Dumpling Down of America. She worked under Reagan and considers herself a whistleblower. I am shocked with about her take on direct instruction and mandate testing. She just recently made the book available on http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com She would defintely say that the current public school system is undoing what kids naturally do.
And we used to drive our bikes as close as we could behind the insecticide spray truck so that we could imagine we were in a blizzard in the desert, crush fluffy caterpillars to get green goop to make poison tipped arrows, burn ants with magnifying glasses, lay noose traps for lizards, and pit traps for my little brother, keep stashes of mercury in cigarette tins, and roll it around in our hands, light fires amongst the camel thorn, and try and swing so high that we looped right over the top bar … is amazing that we survived childhood to think again another day
Thanks for the memories, Art…the little mercury bubbles we rolled around on the table…the magnifying glasses for starting leaf fires…the swings that almost wrapped all around the bar – all things I tried as well. I was in the emergency room a few times from spectacular crashes and falls. I also learned never to ride a cardboard box down a stairway. I wished I’d known about the poison tipped arrows because they sound very fun.
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