detail of dedication sign

The School Yard as a Research Environment for Children

I think that playgrounds should be renamed "research environments." This is what the children are doing so vigorously. They are not playing. They are finding out how the universe works. This is spontaneous research which is inherently gratifying, often joyously gratifying. How wonderful to find out to use gravity as an accelerator or a brake. Nobody is around to tell you or to give you the name gravity, but you learn quickly that the greater the drop, the more it hurts your legs. That is what Galileo's work with falling bodies was all about. You want to understand that invisible power that is working around for you; you wish to check out your theory on a slide.

Children learn about tension. They have got to tear a great many things apart to find something that won't tear, that they can spontaneously grab for to arrest the falling and anticipate leg shock or break. They don't have to know the names tension, compression, gravity, or acceleration, but they have to get very familiar with such phenomena before a sound emanating from somebody's mouth can develop a word meaning experience. City-born and -matured children have almost no access to operative research environments as have had the billions of humans in the millions of years of their occupancy on planet Earth's pre-city eons.

Playgrounds provide children with experience-fortified gratification of physical research. Thus, their intuitive assumptions of "can do" are proven; they are thereafter confident of their own capabilities for sensing and employing the principles operative in nature, such as gravity, flotation, wind resistance, tension, and compression.