Wings And The Child Or The Building Of Magic Cities

Wings and The Child or Building of Magic Cities

"Unique in its approach and scope Wings and the Child teaches adults how to work with children to play and imagine with the mind of a child. Wings and the Child is a work of non-fiction by the pioneering children's author E. Nesbit written in 1913 and published by Hodder and Stoughton in London. ...

"Unique in its approach and scope Wings and the Child teaches adults how to work with children to play and imagine with the mind of a child. Wings and the Child is a work of non-fiction by the pioneering children's author E. Nesbit written in 1913 and published by Hodder and Stoughton in London.

Description"Unique in its approach and scope Wings and the Child teaches adults how to work with children to play and imagine with the mind of a child. Wings and the Child is a work of non-fiction by the pioneering children's author E. Nesbit written in 1913 and published by Hodder and Stoughton in London. ...

"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 gloves for women. And the blind coarse generalisation which underlies that question is the very heart and core of the muddled, musty maze we call education. We talk of the best sort of education for children, as we might talk of the best sort of polish for stoves, the best sort of nourishment for mice. Stoves are all alike, they vary in ugliness perhaps, but the iron soul of one is as the iron soul of the other. The polish that is good for one is good for all. Mice may, and do, vary in size and colour; their mousehood does not vary, nor their taste for cheese. In the inner nature, in the soul and self of it, each child is different from any other child, and the education that treats children as a class and not as individual human beings is the education whose failure is bringing our civilisation about our ears even as we speak.

Unique in its approach and scope Wings and the Child teaches adults how to work with children to play and imagine with the mind of a child. Wings and the Child is a work of non-fiction by the pioneering children's author E. Nesbit written in 1913. It is a passionate argument for the need to encourage simple, creative play in children. Nesbit gives concrete suggestions and fresh ways to engage children's imaginations so they can exercise this wonderful skill fully and for the rest of their lives.Edith Nesbit was an English author and poet; she published her books for children under the name of E. Nesbit. She wrote or collaborated on more than 60 books of children's literature. She was also a political activist and co-founded the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation later affiliated to the Labour Party

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 fact, know nothing that cannot be known by any one who will go to the only fount of knowledge, experience. And by experience I do not mean scientific experience, that is the recorded results of experiments, the tabulated knowledge wrung from observation; I mean personal experience, that is to say, memory. You may observe the actions of children and chronicle their sayings, and produce from these, perhaps, a lifelike sketch of a child, as it appears to the grown-up observer; but observation is no key to the inner mysteries of a child's soul. The only key to those mysteries is in knowledge, the knowledge of what you yourself felt when you were good and little and a child. You can remember how things looked to you, and how things looked to the other children who were your intimates. Our own childhood, besides furnishing us with an exhaustless store of enlightening memories, furnishes us with the one opportunity of our lives for the observation of children—other children. There is a freemasonry between children, a spontaneous confidence and give-and-take which is and must be for ever impossible between children and grown-ups, no matter how sympathetic the grown-up, how confiding the child. Between the child and the grown-up there is a great gulf fixed—and this gulf, the gulf between one generation and another, can never be really bridged.