The transformative action of childish meaning-making works relentlessly on their world. Their ravenous appetite for meaning- making leaves no object, no material untouched. All are drawn into structures which are both stable and novel. The voraciously analytical eyes of child sign-makers assess the semiotic possibilities of the world around them: ‘reading’, in the sense of detailed analytical scrutiny of all aspects of their world for their potential use in representation. What may at times seem like preposterous collages are no less deliberate than the modernist collages and constructions of a Picasso and a Duchamps: and as deliberate, usually, in their design.
The 4-year-old, sitting and kneeling on chairs with her two friends around the kitchen table, cutting out shapes from large sheets of blue paper was clear—even if somewhat surprised— about her creative activity when she uttered ‘My Gawd, I made it
like Australia’ when she unfolded the piece of paper she had just cut out (Figure 2.7). Both her ‘I made it’, which is clear about authorship and agency, and her instant disposition to read meaning in(to) the object she had just ‘made’, show deliberation, planning, design, as a quite normal, expected, and unexceptional state of mind: even if, as here, the result was perhaps accidental more than deliberate.
There are however very many instances when design is absolutely clear. The most stunning example that I can recall concerns the Panadol-man, a figure which I have unfortunately lost. Sitting with her parents at the breakfast table on a summer weekend morning, the 4-year-old saw an empty packet of Panadol (an analgesic common in the United Kingdom). The package is blue with blue and white printing; inside are one or two white plastic sheets with pressed indentations in which the individual elongated tablets are sealed. She got up from the table, got a small pair of scissors from the kitchen drawer, and started cutting out the individual bubble-like indentations of the plastic sheet. This seemed like mere idle snipping. She then cut around the sides of the blue packet, so that it could be folded out, producing a flat piece of cardboard, twice the length of the initial packet. She cut around one end of the square unfolded cardboard, producing a blob at one end of the whole square. Next she went upstairs and returned with a roll of sticky tape. She now proceeded to tape the cut out bubbles onto the whole square, clearly now for us at last, as buttons. She proceeded in this fashion until she had a human figure, policeman-like in a blue uniform with white buttons. The whole sequence unfolded without fuss, without hitch, without talk, without any attention to the parents, one of whom was utterly astonished by the degree of planning, the precision of the staging, by the very fact of design.
I have another figure, the genesis of which I did not witness, but which also uses the Panadol-‘bubbles’, and which, on asking, I was told was ‘an alien’. It is a complex figure in its own right, made again from what was to hand, but showing that the empty Panadol sheets had achieved a kind of established place in the range of materials for representation.
Attributing intention to children as young as 4—or, as I would want to do, even much younger than that—both accords with common sense, and offends it. We know that children are clever, even wise, at an early age; yet we may shrink from attributing full intentionality to the things they do and make, so effortlessly, and which look so unlike our adult conceptions of what things are and should be. The incredulous response to attribution of intention is
also quite common in relation to things that adults do ‘naturally’, automatically, unreflectingly. This is very much the case with language. For instance someone says something to me to which I take exception, and I tell them so. They may say ‘But I didn’t really mean that’, to which I’m likely to respond, overtly or silently: ‘Yes you did, otherwise why did you say it?’ Or, in my professional role, I might analyse a bit of language, drawing out a particular meaning, to which someone else might say: ‘But how do you know they really meant that?’, ‘How do you know they did that deliberately?’ To which I would say that all I really know is that they did it; and if what they did happens quite regularly, I feel justified in attributing intention, design, even if that design was not overtly there in the speaker’s consciousness.
The problem is compounded when we look at images, because in popular understanding (aided by the absence of strong theoretical descriptions and explanations), pictures, images, are not usually subjected to the same analysis for meaning, not seen as being as much a part of communication as language is for instance. Images of most kinds are thought of as being about expression, not information, communication. We acknowledge of course that a political cartoonist working for a newspaper is intending to communicate, has meanings that he or she wants to convey; and we may acknowledge similar intentionality for certain kinds of photography, and some other forms of visual art. In general however, popular common sense says otherwise. And if the makers of the pictures, images, objects, are children, as I said above, the question of intentionality and design becomes contentious.
We have a choice to make: either we accept that makers of signs do so with intent—even if that is not fully overt and articulated by them, and that signs express their interests, complex and difficult to recover fully; or we assume that we live in a world of constant Figure 2.7 ‘My Gawd, made made it like Australia’
accidents. The choice may be particularly difficult to make with respect to children. However, the examples that I have so far cited in this and in the first chapter, seem to me harder to explain as accidents than as the result of design, deliberation, under- standing, intent. In fact, I find it entirely implausible not to accept that as my working assumption. And all my other examples, which can be multiplied endlessly by observing children everywhere, point in that same direction.
Of course, the corollary of this assumption is that we have to look at these childish productions with entirely new eyes, and with at least the same seriousness which we accord, say, to adults’ use of language. Similarly, we will need to revalue the young makers of these objects. But that is my intention in this book.
As a final point here, we need to consider the question of whether we can aid this design, assist it, foster it, direct and channel it, or whether we should leave it unaided, undirected. This goes to the heart of educational politics. The preceding discussion in part provides my answer. In so far as I do think that there is a difference between the physically present object as sign, and the more distantly represented object as sign (a drawing of a car on a sheet of paper, compared to the cut-out car, or the Lego car), and in so far as I think that different forms of cognition and affect are involved in either, my strong preference is for enabling the possibility of each, the availability of the means of producing both kinds of sign (and their many intermediary versions). To that extent at least my preference is for intervention, for aiding and abetting, for making sure that children have to hand what will make that possible.