“Here, then, we meet as a great imperfection in ordinary playthings, a disturbing element which slumbers like a viper under roses, viz. that it is too complex, too much finished. The child can begin no new thing with it, cannot produce enough variety by it; his power of creative imagination, his power of giving outward form to his own idea is thus actually deadened. When we provide children with too finished playthings, we deprive them of the incentive to perceive the particular in the general (P., p. 122).… What presents are most prized by the child? Those which afford him a means of unfolding his inner life most freely and of shaping it in various directions.”—P., p. 142.
“The man, advanced in insight, should be as clear as possible in his own mind about all this before he introduces his child into the outer world. Even when he gives the child a plaything, he must make clear to himself its purpose, and the purpose of playthings and occupation material in general. This purpose is, to aid the child freely to express what is in him and to bring the phenomena of the outer world nearer to him.”—P., p. 171.
“To realize his aims, man, and more particularly the child, requires material, if it be only a bit of wood or a pebble with which he makes something or which he makes into something. In order to lead the child to the handling of material, we gave him the soft ball, the wooden sphere and cube, etc., discussed in the chapters on the Kindergarten Gifts. Each of these gifts incites the child to free spontaneous activity, to independent movement.”[34]—P., p. 237.
As the child grows older his constructions advance, but still they connect themselves with investigating:
“Here he makes a little garden under the hedge; there he represents the course of the river in his furrow and in his ditch; there he studies the effects of the fall or pressure of water upon his little water-wheel.”—E., p. 105.
Investigating naturally leads to exploring, “external objects invite him who would bring them nearer to move toward them,” and so the child once he is able to stand begins to travel:
“When the child makes his first attempts at walking he frequently tries to go to some particular object. This effort may have its source in the child’s desire to hold himself firm and upright by it, but we also observe that it gives him pleasure to be near the object, to touch it, to feel it, and perhaps also—a new phase of activity—to be able to move it. Hence we see the child hops up and down before it and beats on it with his little hands, in order to assure himself of the reality of the object, and to notice its qualities.… Each new phenomenon is a discovery in the child’s small and yet rich world—e.g. one can go round the chair, one can stand before, behind, beside it, but one cannot go behind the bench or the wall. He likes to change his relationship to different objects, and through these changes he seeks self-recognition and self-comprehension, as well as recognition of the different objects which surround him, and recognition of his environment as a whole. Each little walk is a tour of discovery; each object is an America—a new world, which he either goes around to see if it be an island, or whose coast he follows to discover if it be a continent.”—P., p. 243.
The boy has lost none of this tendency to explore, but he goes further afield, and it is worth noting that because the boy has a distinct purpose in view his exploring is distinctly called work.
“If activity brought joy to the child, work now gives delight to the boy. Hence the daring and venturesome feats of boyhood; the explorations of caves and ravines; the climbing of trees and mountains; the searching of heights and depths; the roaming through fields and forests.… To climb a new tree means to the boy the discovery of a new world.… Not less significant of development is the boy’s inclination (Neigung) to descend into caves and ravines, to ramble in the shady grove and dark forest.”—E., pp. 102-5.