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peckham experiment> activities> ticketing system>
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The ticket system devised by Lucy Crocker was important for three reasons: "Lucy Crocker solved the problem of how to allow each child to choose how to occupy himself while he was in the building and to move from one occupation to another with the least fuss and trouble but with the knowledge of a responsible member of staff. The solution was her 'ticket system'. At first she gave each child that came to her asking for permission to swim or play in the gym a piece of paper on which she had scribbled his name, chosen activity, the date and her initials. Later she had small coloured cards printed with 'Name', 'Activity' and 'Time' followed by spaces for the child to fill in. She carried a bundle round with her - a different colour for each day. She also carried a pencil and encouraged the child to fill in the card or, at least, to write his name on it or the nearest he could get to it. The ticket system proved to serve many important purposes. One of its effects was to accord the children the same privilege as the adult members, who could obtain for three old pence from the cash desk in the Cafeteria a metal counter, which let them through the turnstiles that were situated between the toilets and the men's or women's changing rooms. (A member of staff supervised access after the war.) A child could do the same with his 'ticket'. ..It also enabled the staff to treat the children as responsible people." (Taken from 'Being Me and Also Us' p 196, by Allison Stallibrass) "The genius in devising the ticket system lay in the fact that Lucy Crocker had found a means by which each child was able to gain access to all the apparatus individually and spontaneously. The ticket system achieved this while at the same time giving the social biologist - acting here as 'Curator of all instruments available for use' - knowledge of where each child was likely to be, and yielding a record at the end of the day of what each had done while in the building." "The ticket is very important to the child, for only with it is he able to obtain access to or use of any instrument. It is important to the Curator, for it is a deliberate method of ensuring recurring contact with each child and of learning where he or she will be and what doing in the Centre. And finally, the tickets collected at the end of each day was evidence used by the Curator of the activities of the child, to be entered in the family records. The ticket thus is a common symbol current in the daily business of child and Curator alike, and equally essential to both for their business in the Centre. Such as arrangement has also its practical and economic aspect. Let the reader picture to himself the situation every day from 4 - 7 pm with two to three hundred children moving freely in the building, each exhausting his capacity for action in as many ways as are made available, under the enquiring eye of the Curator assisted only by a student, and whose primary interest is in watching what is going on. Not only is this a method suited to the needs of our experiment, but… it is an economical and severely practical method of social organisation. The tickets have another use - an incidental one. The child who has not yet learned to write finds a mother or other grown-up or older child to sign its card, but, once even the initials of the name have been mastered, no one is asked. The student working on the records has thus to keep up-to-date with the progress made by the younger children, so that when 'MB' appears for the first time in a bundle of 500 or more tickets, it is recognised as Maureen Brown's first use of the newly acquired art of writing. The need to write the ticket to get what she wants makes writing a very desirable achievement, especially as she is mixing with a number of older children who can already write." (Taken from 'The Peckham Experiment', p 198. Innes H Pearse and Lucy Crocker) |