Close your eyes. Can you imagine children 100 years from now? What will their world look like? What will they play with? 100 years from now will children still build with wooden blocks?
Caroline Pratt, founder of the City & Country School in New York City is lauded as the creator of the unit block, the standard wooden blocks found in preschools, early childhood classrooms, and homes across the country and around the world. And as 2013 comes to a close, let's take a moment to celebrate, as this year marks the 100th anniversary of the unit block.
The Block Book, a classic in early childhood education describes the many ways young children learn through block building and block play. The book also highlights the historical factors that contributed to Caroline Pratt’s interest in hands on education – one being that the world was becoming increasingly complicated. She wanted to offer children a material (wooden building blocks) children could use in their play to recreate and understand their world.
Fellow educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell wrote about the increasingly complicated world that concerned Caroline Pratt in this way:
Modern children are born into an appallingly complicated world. A three-year-old in a city environment may be whisked to his steam-heated nursery in an electric elevator, fed from supplies which are ordered by telephone, sent up in a dumbwaiter, and stored in an electric refrigerator: he may be taken to a hole in the sidewalk and borne rapidly on an underground train to a distant place. The forces which move his elevator, warm his nursery, extend his mother’s voice to a grocery store, cook his milk, propel the subway train, are complicated and difficult to understand not only at three, at six, at nine, but even at forty. (excerpted from The Block Book, pg. 1 )
100 years ago the concern was about dumbwaiters, elevators, phone orders for groceries, and refrigerators – technology that educators thought might make it harder for children to understand the world.
Could Caroline Pratt and Lucy Sprague Mitchell have imagined a future with our technology? Probably not! But perhaps they could have imagined a future where no matter the technology, children continue to play, learn, and explore, recreating their world to learn and understand how it works. Yes some of the tools children use to understand and recreate their world (like apps for digital story telling) are different but some like the unit block are remarkably the same.
Happy birthday unit blocks!
Susan Friedman is Executive Editor of Digital Content at NAEYC. Many years ago, she taught preschool at City & Country School in New York, NY.