A child learns more in one split second, carving a little stick, than in whole days, listening to a teacher.
—SimĂłn RodrĂguez
Orville and Wilbur Wright were bicycle salesmen from Ohio. They weren’t engineers. They didn’t go to college; they didn’t have any technical training. Meanwhile, there were teams of engineers from the top universities working on the same problem. One was funded by a grant from the U.S. War Department.
How could the Wrights have possibly bested those deep pockets to become the inventors and pioneers we know them as today? “It began for them with a toy,” David McCullough writes in The Wright Brothers, “a small helicopter brought home by their father, Bishop Milton Wright, a great believer in the educational value of toys. . . . It was little more than a stick with twin propellers and twisted rubber bands, and probably cost 50 cents.”
It might not seem like a toy could change a child’s life, but of course it can. Toys are more than just things to play with. They are worlds to discover. They are things to be responsible for. They are things to take apart and put back together. They are laboratories for life.
We spend a lot of time introducing our kids to the world of ideas. Let’s also carve out some time to bring home cool toys. Toys with educational value. Toys that teach them about other cultures. Toys that get them interested in flight or science or math or history or technology. Toys that are, in and of themselves, vessels for ideas.
Who knows what might come from their exploration of fun.