The Urge To Destroy?

I recall a Peanuts cartoon in which Lucy was repeatedly building a sand castle, then knocking it down, the punch line being something like, "My urge to create is equal to my urge to destroy."

I don't know if the urge to destroy is the equal and opposite reaction to the human urge to create, but there is certainly a drive to destruction in some of us, perhaps all of us, some of the time. For instance, I typically "start" our block area off with a simple structure. It is a rare day indeed that it survives the third child in the room, at least here at the beginning of the school year when the ethic of "knocking down" v. "not knocking down" buildings has yet to become fully established.

I often wonder, however, if that "urge" is an urge at all, but rather a learned behavior because it doesn't seem particularly adaptive to me. Perhaps it's the toys themselves, these blocks and the inherently temporary nature of the structures they build into, which causes children to engage in the "Build It Up and Knock It Down" pattern of play. The same goes for puzzles and play dough, these reusable toys that become one thing that then must be destroyed before they are useful again.

That must be part of the phenomenon, especially inside the classroom, but outdoors things tend to be different. This is where the things that are "destroyed" are permanently destroyed. I'm thinking, for example of Colin, who went through a phase of several weeks during which he would sit astride one of our sand pit diggers and use the shovel to tear away at the underside of a rotting tree stump, hollowing it out day after day. It looked like pure destruction to me until one day he explained that he was, in fact, not decimating a stump, but rather "making a hole." I'm thinking of Sophia who used to get to the top of our climber and strip our pine tree of needles, over time denuding all the lower branches. It looked like pure destruction until she mentioned that it was "medicine for my pony." I'm thinking of the joy we get from smashing our pumpkins after Halloween, when what we are really doing is making our own dirt.

On Wednesday, after several days of using our hand crank coffee grinder in the classroom, a difficult chore, I thought I'd let the kids have a whack at "grinding" coffee the easy way. We took our rubber mallets out to a stump, put on safety glasses, selected the mallet we wanted to use, "small, medium, or large," then proceeded to smash fistfuls of beans, taking turns. 

There is always a balance that one must find when using hammers and mallets between applying force and taking aim. All of the children experimented with this, naturally, without my saying anything. Those that started off wailing away, soon toned it down as they addressed the challenge of hitting those tiny targets, while those that started with great aim, found they had to turn it up a notch to actually break the beans. We were using a mixture of roasted and un-roasted beans and quickly figured out that the "brown" beans were much more brittle, and thus easier to crush, than the "green" ones, which required more force.

As we did this, I was reflecting on the "urge to destroy," thinking that this was certainly a purely destructive endeavor, until Rex, who has twice swung our drum sticks so hard that he's accidentally broken through the drums, but who was now carefully crushing those beans with a rubber mallet, told me, "I'm making this coffee for mom."

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