WOYC Part 3 (Vivian Gussin Paley)

I recently read Vivian Gussin Paley's book "A Child's Work: the Importance of Fantasy Play". All of her ideas and work with young children is great, but these paragraphs summarize it perfectly for me. (Chapter 20: Musical Chairs)

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"Every day brought me new evidence of the preeminence of fantasy in children's thinking. It has reinforced my certainty that we perform a grave error when we remove fantasy play as the foundation of early childhood education.

We are going too far in the opposite direction. Some school people feel that because young children engage in magical thinking we must pull them on to another track as early as possible; having added extra years of schooling to their lives, we are emboldened to counteract fantasy play with "reality-based" activities.

Is this not the adult version of magical thinking? To imagine that the purpose of early childhood education is to reorder the staged of human development is like the story of the prince who was turned into a frog. In attempting to turn children into creatures who are unchildlike, we ignore all the messages young children give us as they play. The frog turns back into a prince when the princess recognizes his need to be treated with kindness and respect. In the case of our children, this would include the kindness of acknowledging that their perceptions and premises are not the same as older children's or as our own."