"Let us study this hub of activity from the point of view of a child who goes into it. He goes in and learns unaided to swing and clim, to balance, to leap. As he does all these things he is acquiring facility in the use of his body. The boy who swings from rope to horse, leaping back again to the swinging rope, is learning by his eyes, muscles, joints and by every sense organ he has, to judge, to estimate, to know. The other twenty-nine boys and girls in the gymnasium are all as active as he, some of them in the immediate vicinity. But as he swings he does not avoid. He swings where there is space - a very important distinction - and in so doing he threads his way among twenty-nine fellows. Using all his faculties, he is aware of the total situation in that gymnasium - of his own swinging and of his fellows' actions. He does not shout to the others to stop, to wait or to move from him - not that there is silence, for running conversations across the hall are kept up as he speeds through the air.

But this'education' in the live use of all his senses can only come about if his twenty-nine fellows are also free and active. If the room were cleared and twenty-nine boys sat at the side silent while he swung, we should in effect be saying to him - to his legs, body, eyes - "You give all your attention to swinging; we'll keep the rest of the world away" - in fact - "Be as egotistical as you like". By so reducing the diversity in the environment we should be preventing his learning to apprehend and to move in a complex situation. We should in effect be saying - "Only this and this do; you can't be expected to do more" - . Is it any wonder that he comes to behave as though it is all he can do? By the existing methods of teaching we are in fact inducing the child's inco-ordination in society.

Let us look more closely at the significance of this picture where in the Centre gymnasium - as throughout the Centre - the children proceed without any supervision or direction to use all the available apparatus; wherein each child is a part of the whole; where the individual without clash can thread himself through the complications of a total situation; where mutual action is undertaken in awareness of a complex situation itself forever changing.

The Centre 'gym' affords a concrete piece of evidence that spontaneity is no quality of haphazard action necessarily leading to confusion, but it is an expression of function."

(Taken from 'The Peckham Experiment' by Innes Pearse and Lucy Crocker) (see publications)