Five Birthday Cakes - Stonework Play

I don't know whether to laugh, or cry, or smash something. 

I just read an article in the Deseret News titled, "Why Creativity Experts Believe Storytelling and Creating with Stones May Help Unleash Creativity in Young and Old."  It tells of an American education consultant's experience in 2011 in classrooms in Kathmandu, Nepal and how she revolutionized their education, using stones. Basically, she let the kids get out of their seats, go outside, and touch and handle and create and move and do. You know, the things kids are supposed to be doing.

My emotional response is due in part to the appearance that Nepalese children, who have nothing, are having a better experience than American children, who have everything. Why? Because somewhere along the way someone here decided that children should be treated as mechanical objects to be programmed and used and managed and controlled rather than as living, breathing, sensing beings full of life that need to be... living and breathing and sensing life. Somewhere along the way someone decided that things that can be counted count more than anything else--certainly more than happy, healthy children. And somewhere along the way everyone else got caught up in the counting and failed to notice that with all of our everything, we aren't giving our children anything that matters.

That this article was written as though it's the discovery of a lifetime makes my head spin. Hallelujah that people are seeing it--yes! But none of it is new. While this may be "uncharted territory" simply because in all our counting we've never counted this--it's the way children learned for years and years and years--in much happier, bygone days.

Read the article. And then take your kids outside.