A Theory of Collecting

As a boy, I was a collector. Baseball cards and comic books are the specific items around which I most often place the sepia halos of nostalgia, but those collections didn't start until I was eight and ten respectively. By then, I had already developed a theory of collecting. Beginning in my preschool years I collected hats, seashells, rocks, Matchbox cars, flags of the world, and stuffed animals. Indeed, I collected almost any appealing thing to which I had easy, inexpensive access. Rocks and seashells were obvious things to collect, whereas hats, stuffed animals and Matchbox's came my way through the kindness of gift-givers. Once people know you have a "collection" that's what they bring for birthdays and other holidays.

"Almost all children collect something," writes psychologist and philosopher William James and I've found that to be true. A while back, I wrote about a boy who collected sticks. One of the aspects of his collecting was that he had a robust criteria even if he wasn't able to put it into words. Once his collection became common knowledge, people -- both children and adults -- were, in the spirit of gift-giving, forever offering him sticks "for your collection." He would take each offering seriously, studying it for a moment with his discerning eye, looking for whatever it was that made a stick collectable. Most of the time, he would say "No thanks," but every now and then, to the giver's delight, he would add a pro-offered stick to the collection.

This boy's collection endured over the course of months, but preschool collections might just as easily exist for only a few hours. Over the years, our playground has been seeded with thousands of florist marbles. We keep seeding the playground because most of them disappear into the depths of the sand pit or under the wood chips (a delight for future diggers) but many go home in pockets, collections for a day (although a mother once sheepishly returned hundreds of "jewels" in well-sorted jars that her son had been secretly collecting in his bedroom for months). But that isn't all: pinecones, pebbles, leaves, unripe blueberries, rubber bands, worms, and just about anything that occurs "naturally" in numbers on our playground can be collectable.

As a boy, I would play with my collections by spreading them out on the floor or on my bed, organizing them, sorting them, ranking them, experimenting with them, and wondering about them. Not being a child of the internet, I relied on our family's set of encyclopedias (with Mom's help) to inform me about those flags of the world. The seashells could be sorted by shape or size or color or according to the beaches from which they came. Same with the rocks. My stuffed animals were organized alternatively by "personality" (e.g., clever, funny, mean, nice) or athletic ability (e.g., strong, fast runner, high jumper, good thrower). Likewise with the Matchbox cars, although, given their wheels, I could spend hours, building ramps of books then ranking each car based on how far and/or straight each car could go based on gravity alone. This is what I mean by a "theory of collecting." By the time I got to baseball cards, I was ready for all those statistics printed on the back. They could be sorted in dozens of different ways.

James wrote of childhood collecting as the basis of natural history study: "(N)body ever became a good naturalist who was not an unusually active collector." In collecting, he saw the emergence of neatness, order, and method as being "instinctively gained." He pointed out that collections, like stamp collections, serve as an "inciter of interest in the geographical and historical information." This was certainly true for me and my collection of foreign flags. But that's far from the only place collecting leads.

For one thing, a collector is exploring basic concepts in mathematics. Collecting is an exploration of how things connect as well as diverge. It is a process of discovering and experimenting with nuance, shades, and subtly. It leads to questions about origins, uses, functions, and beauty. To be a collector means making a study of things, not because there will be a test, but because it's interesting.

As a play-based educator, it's always useful to learn about a child's collections. This is where we see their passion. In a play-based environment, we see this urge to collect as part and parcel with the urge to go more deeply into a subject, any subject. As adults, we are wise to avoid allowing our judgments to dismiss childish collections. That Pretty Pony collection, for the collector, is every bit as valuable as the stamp or coin collection, and can lead to as many places. But that's beside the point. There is nothing I collected as a child that I continue to collect today. In each case, one by one, I lost interest: I'd exhausted each one's capacity to "teach," at least for now, and moved on to the next collectable.

One caution, however. Just because a child shares their collection with you, their passion, that isn't an invitation to attempt to "extend" or "scaffold" their learning. A father I know killed his son's passion for collecting knives by becoming too passionate about it himself. His idea was to "share" something with his son, but instead he took it over. And there is nothing that can put an end to a collector's passion faster than to have it made into a lesson. 

The beauty of collecting is that it must remain self-selected and self-motivated, like that boy and his sticks. Of course, we help them answer their questions, but this is their thing to master. And it is up to them to determine what mastery entails. The power of collecting is that it's not only self-selected, but self-assessed. What is being collecting hardly matters to anyone, but the child. The process of attaining mastery through collecting is vital to intellectual development. 

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