The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of the Child

Abstract

It was neither theology nor psychology that drew us to ask small children for their perceptions and resource appraisals, but curiosity about the world inside peoples' heads and its relationship to the world perceived by science or, in this case, by adults. In pursuing such an inquiry, we seem to be unique. A review of the voluminous psychological literature from 1927 to the present finds that most studies of children's thoughts, concepts, and perceptions do not deal with children and the physical environment as they experience it.3 Elm Park Center, where our observations, interviews, and field trips took place, is a small day care center attached to an equally small training institution for day care workers. The twenty-four children of working parents who come each day are free to choose activities and to move indoors and outdoors in an open-education setting. They are a cross-section of their age group in Worcester, an industrial city of 176,000 in central Massachusetts. It is the special quality of preschool age, the mixture of innocence and worldliness, unspoiled by formal teaching, that allows us to report introductory findings derived with pleasure and delight. One of us, a resident in this day care setting, began a year ago to collect from the staff anecdotal material and observations related to the children's experiences with water. Our initial reaction as geographers, specialists in water resources and not in child development, was surprise at the sophistication of experience. For example, * We wish to thank Hilary L. Renwick for her creativity and skill in drawing illustrations more delightful than we were able to imagine.