Early Futures
Concepts by Children
About: What do children know and how do they know what they know? Conceptual ideas from children are integral to understand for studying human development, consciousness and futures. Children are given the luxury to play and explore in childhood precisely in order to help us understand what we are about. The gathering of concepts developed with and by children helps identify what they see as valuable, how they relate to the world – and if engaged closely or systematically – illuminates alternative ways of exploring our deepest philosophical and psychological conversations. The articles below show children’s varying kinds of conceptual interests, as well as the process of documenting them.
How Many Souls Does One Person Have?
For Lilah, age 5, your body has angels in it, who are also your souls.
Books on Children’s Narratives
Not sure how much one can learn from children? Consider reading a few of these works documenting children’s stories of their experience. The books are a diverse mixture filled with inspiring, surprising accounts of a range of children’s experiences, inner, outer and otherwise.
The Spiritual Life of Children
Robert Coles
Robert Coles is a solid, long-standing figure [...]
Tarot Stories
One of the more fascinating tasks of being with children is learning how to obtain (let alone understand) the narratives and inner stories from young children who can find it difficult to express their complex feelings in simple language. Symbols and myths have long been a part of teaching and encouraging expression with young children, from retelling ancient fairy tales to labeling all things in a childhood classroom with words and pictures. Children learn (and are educated) through symbols.
Spirit Presentation
Below is Warner Brockman’s lecture (age 10), presented at the Children’s Think Tank Show. He created and edited the content and the presentation with minimal digital assistance from our Think Tank research assistant team (be sure to let presentation load).
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Warner’s Life, Death and Reincarnation Presentation on [...]
Research Summaries
The Children’s Think Tank completed their first session in December 2010! In the next month we will be updating their final work, including sharing two fantastic presentations made by a few children during our opening. In the meantime, we’d like to share our “Research Summaries” publication put out for the culminating event at the Maryland [...]
A Book of Dreams
A Book of Dreams by Peter Reich is an fascinating read for those concerned with education, futures or children.
Peter Reich is the son of renowned, brilliant psychiatrist and researcher, Wilhelm Reich. A Book of Dreams is his narrative on his life growing up in the midst of Wilhelm Reich’s research. As a child he was [...]
Think Tank Notebook
Each child in the Children’s Think Tank upkeeps a research notebook, filled with mostly drawings.
In this video clip, Lia walks me through what she was thinking during part of her research on mythology, revealing a surprising game her and her 7-year-old friends play.
Life, Death and Reincarnation Essay
Warner’s Life, Death and Reincarnation Essay
Ok so first is the birth of the body (the spirit is already born)
Then you are a baby
Next, you are a kid and your right mind comes to you
Then you are a pre-teen and you become social
Then you are a teen and become super social
Next, you are a grown-up and [...]
Child-led Tours Article
The CYE Journal focuses on Children, Youth and their Environment. They ran a great series of articles a few years back on participation of children with their environments. Here is a fantastic article which discusses what can be learned from letting 7-9 year-olds lead tours of their own environments.
Child-Led Tours to Uncover Children’s Perceptions [...]
Children’s Think Tank Meeting 4
Meeting #4
Summary:
Our meeting this week took us out to the library for our first research into external resources to help expand our topics. The children drew and photographed parts of the books that interested them:
(How the universe was made, by Abigail).
(Spencer looking into things that are related to the Earth, i.e. how the Earth was [...]
“I Want To Learn Everything”
Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Abigail, at the Children’s Think Tank.
(video)
Children’s Think Tank / Meeting 3
Meeting #3
(photo: Annika studying astral projection)
Part 1
This week we did not have a lecture or research meeting agenda. We began by exercising our internal visualization skills with “Breathing” and “Mirror” imagination games from the fabulous book, Put Your Mother On The Ceiling, by Richard De Mille. At the end of this exercise we were [...]
Children’s Think Tank / Meeting 2
Meeting Notes, Meeting #2
Part 1
Meet in group to discuss the choice topic (as voted on in previous meeting): Aliens.
Part 2
Short lecture/discussion on the presentation topic: Research Methods (you can view the .pdf of our meeting agenda). In the research methods lecture, we discussed traditional research methods, and alternative research methods.
A brief transcript of topic [...]
Child Speaks on Food Sources
Good example of child-centered alternative education practices – flip the roles, make the child the lecturer:
Narratives with choices
Storytelling is the play and art of children. Children use playful stories and daily narratives to provide insight into their life, psyche, trauma, hopes, fears as well as possibilities. Within that, we have an obligation to help them create narratives that include choices and options, to share with us their ideas! The concept of narratives [...]
Children’s Think Tank / Meeting 1
Meeting 1 Documentation
Our first experimental session of the Children’s Think Tank has begun. It is a research group with children that helps articulate what they are interested in, while exploring future research methods that attend to their concerns and abilities (view gallery on left for photographs from the first meeting). For those of you have [...]
Inspirational Children’s Book by R. Buckminster Fuller
I felt it to be true that children had great advantage in this respect as they are not burdened with the misconceptions and obsolete propositions with which the grown-ups have been inundated by formal “education”. – Buckminster Fuller
The infamous Buckminster Fuller has already been mentioned in a previous Early Futures article as an excellent [...]
Children Tell The Future
Futures 2010
(brought to you by the 4-and 5-year-old’s at Bolton Hill Nursery School)
Each year we do a futures unit near the end of their last year of preschool. This year we thought and compared three different futures:
1. What do you wish the future would really be like? (Utopian futures)
2. What do you not want the [...]
Non-Human Relations
One thing you almost always see with a child is their non-human companion: a worn out blanket, a stuffed animal, a funny piece of cloth, a baby doll etc. Stuffies and the like are usually seen merely as a “comforting item,” usually used to comfort or to be held over a child’s head if they [...]
Unanswerable Questions
So, what are the questions that 4-and 5-year-olds come up with when asked, “What is your hardest question or what is something you want to know the answer to?”
Here they are. If you can answer any of them, let me know:
HARD QUESTIONS
Why did the baby cross the road? (Errol)
What is inside the USS Nicholas Submarine? [...]
Open Source Education, NYT Article
The New York Times had an excellent section on open source education courses in today’s Sunday paper.
Using open source materials found on Youtube, Academic Earth, OpenCourseWare Consortium among others are wonderful ways to keep education an embodied part of your daily learning practice, as opposed to an isolated thing you have to go “do.”
Top [...]
What We Know About Being Here
We’ve finally put together a full version of the stories told and illustrated by a class of 4-and 5-year-olds at Bolton Hill Nursery School. Early Futures has promoted those stories in earlier posts, but now we present them for the first time all together as a single .pdf.
What We Know About Being Here
Stories [...]
Universe, Birth, Hate, Death: Interview Samples
Here are some samples of some of my recorded interviews with 4 and 5 year olds regarding their ideas on the universe and universal ideas. All are excerpts from longer interviews. These interviews were done in one afternoon and seem more related to the universe and to death, a theme they’ve been interested in lately. [...]
More Philosophies from Children
The Earth Needs People
By Riva, age 5
I don’t believe that people can make their dreams come true.
We’re not fairies. The fairies can, but not us.
We have to die and turn into a fairy to get our dreams to come true. The point of being alive is to be shot and killed. That’s the way you [...]