Frances Pockman Hawkins - Logic of Action: Young Children at Work

Copyright 1969, 1974, 1986. by Frances Pockman Hawkins

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Hawkins, Frances Pockman, 1913 The Logic of Action.

Rev. ed. of a work first published in 1969 by the Elementary Science Advisory Center, University of Colorado.

Bibliography: pp. 143-44.

1. DeafEducation. 2. Open plan schools. 3. Teachers of the deaf. I. Title.

HV2430.H38 1974 371.9'12 74-5270

ISBN 87081-161-4

I am grateful to so many friends and colleagues that I find it almost impossible to select out names. I have tried, but like the little old man in Wanda Gag's Millions of Cats I end by choosing them all.

Let me instead trust these friends to know how I appreciate their confidence, their patience, and their impatience. Perhaps especially I needed the last.

Two must be named, however, because my debt there is so specific and so great. In different ways but equally generous, the late Jane Richtmyer and David Hawkins understood and loved these six children and hence could help me communicate what I observed and believed to be true about the mornings with them. Having sustained me by the delight they took in the project and the narration of it, they will join I know in the thank-you to those who are my chief support, the six children.

There is, then, no difference in kind between verbal logic and the logic inherent in the co-ordination of actions, but the logic of actions lies deeper down and is more primitive; it develops more quickly and overcomes more rapidly the difficulties it meets, but they are the same difficulties as those that make their appearance later on the verbal plane.