Wings and the Child; Or, The Building of Magic Cities

IN attempting to explain and enforce a moral code, the first and most essential need is to formulate definitely to oneself the code which one proposes to enforce and to explain....

IT is a mistake when you are going to build a city to make too large a collection of building materials before you begin to build. If it is natural to you to express yourself by...

THE devotion of aunts has often stirred my admiration. The heroism of aunts deserves an epic. But this is, as you say, not the place to write that epic. Give me leave, however,...

CLEVER young people find it amusing to sneer at the old-fashioned ideal of combining instruction with amusement--a stupid Victorian ideal, we are told, which a progressive gener...

WHILE admitting that no pains can be too great, no labours too arduous to spend upon the education of the child, we must not shut our eyes to the fact that the sacrifice of the...

WHEN my city was built at Olympia a great many school-teachers who came to see it told me that they would like to help the children in their schools to build such cities, but th...

A SHARP distinction can be drawn between games with toys and games without them. In the latter the child's imagination has to supply everything, in the former it supplements or...

THE only magic in the city is the magic of imagination, which is, after all, the best magic in the world. The idea of it came to me when I was dissatisfied with the materials pr...

A MOMENT of rapturous anticipation lights life when the kind aunt or uncle has given the bricks, when the flat, sliding lid has been slipped back, and the smooth wooden cubes an...

THE most ardent advocate of our present civilisation, the blindest worshipper of what we call progress, can hardly fail to be aware of the steadily increasing and brutal uglines...

FIRST in your building collection will be the boxes, arches, and steps of which I have spoken. Dominoes and draughts and chessmen you probably have. Odd chessmen--quite beautifu...

YOU wander round the house seeking beautiful things which look like other beautiful things. Let us suppose that you have the run of a house where beautiful things are. I will te...

WHEN the history of our time comes to be written, it may be that the historian, remarking our many faults and weaknesses, and seeking to find a reason for them, speculating on o...

YOU will have noticed that though I began by pointing out that children differ as much as grown-up people do, and that the individual character and temperament of one child are...

"WHAT," we ask with anxious gravity, "what is the best sort of teaching for children?" One might as sanely ask what is the best sort of spectacles for men, or the best size in g...

IT is not with any pretension to special knowledge of my subject that I set out to write down what I know about children. I have no special means of knowing anything: I do, in f...

THE prime instinct of a child at play--I do not mean a child at games--is to create. I use the word confidently. He will make as well as create, if you let him, but always he wi...

TO the child, from the beginning, life is the unfolding of one vast mystery; to him our stalest commonplaces are great news, our dullest facts prismatic wonders. To the baby who...