At the turn of the century, some educators integrated stamp collecting practices into their classrooms because child psychologists urged them to take advantage of a child\u2019s instinct and desire to collect. We have seen in some popular writing about collecting, generally, the activity was sometimes described as childish given that children seemed to enjoy collecting and saving many different types of natural and manufactured objects. Noted psychologist Granville Stanley Hall and his students from Clark University, pioneered the field of child psychology and researched behavior at different stages of childhood development.<\/p>\n
Caroline Burk pursued the question: is there a collecting instinct in children? After surveying over 1200 children in two California cities, Burk published her findings in 1900. She found that 90 percent of the children surveyed collected something and most kept between three and four collections at a given time. Girls kept a slightly higher number of collections than boys. Stamp collections were very common with boys and girls. Burk determined that the desire to collect began as early as three years old and intensified from ages eight to ten. Influence of friends, family, and fads motivated most youngsters to collect specific types of things, and stamps were no exception. Through her findings, Burk saw potential pedagogical uses for collecting. ((G.S. Hall is probably most notable for his recognition of the need to define the period between childhood and adulthood as distinctive developmentally and called it \u201cadolescence.\u201d Burk was one of Hall\u2019s students. Caroline F Burk, \u201cThe Collecting Instinct,\u201d Pedagogical Seminary<\/em> 7 (1900): 179\u2013207. G. Stanley Hall and Theodate L. Smith eds., Aspects of Child Life and Education<\/em> (Boston: Ginn, 1907), vii. ))<\/p>\n Burk\u2019s study was quite influential. Normal school psychology textbooks included sections on understanding the collecting instinct in children, citing Burk\u2019s findings. Textbook authors, some psychologists themselves, championed collecting in classrooms. Specific pursuits, like stamp collecting, fostered \u201cthe scientific attitude of the mind\u201d by encouraging classification, organization, and arrangement. It was argued that this instinct would lead students to organize historical events in chronological order and recognize national heroes. ((Burk, \u201cThe Collecting Instinct.\u201d; Elizabeth Howe, \u201cCan the Collecting Instinct Be Utilized in Teaching?,\u201d The Elementary School Teacher<\/em> 6, no. 9 (May 1906): 466\u201371; Lawrence Augustus Averill, Psychology for Normal Schools<\/em> (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), 51\u20137; and William D. Johnston, \u201cThe Acquisitive Instinct in Children as an Educational Stimulus,\u201d Science<\/em>, New Series 54, no. 1409 (December 30, 1921): 662\u201363. Other studies of collecting habits in youth include: E. Leigh Mudge, \u201cGirls\u2019 Collections,\u201d Pedagogical Seminary<\/em> 25 (1918): 319; and William Estabrook Chancellor, Our Schools, Their Administration and Supervision<\/em> (Boston: D. C. Heath & Co, 1904), 189.)) Not only did many educators believe that a collecting instinct existed, but that the practice of collecting stamps taught students how to read and interpret the signs embedded in the designs.<\/p>\n Additional research that followed in the late 1920s and early 1930s challenged Burk\u2019s findings by proposing that collecting habits reflected social environments and could be indicative of problematic behaviors. In contrast to Burk, psychologists Harvey C. Lehman and Paul A. Witty found that only 10 percent of children collected anything in Kansas towns and cities during 1925. They also collected interesting data that illuminated gender, regional, and demographic differences and concluded that collecting might be a fad and not an instinct inherent to all children. By the 1930s, Lehman and Witty\u2019s research reflected anxiety about the population shifts to urban areas as they found rural children were more likely to maintain collections than their urban counterparts. Unlike advocates of the playground movement who prized an idealized vision of rural play that associations attempted to replicate in large towns and cities, Lehman and Witty believed their data provided some evidence that the isolation of rural living promoted individualism which adversely prepared young Americans for modern life. Alluding to notions that American farmers were uncooperative politically, Lehman and Witty maintained that farmers\u2019 children needed to learn cooperation and socialization\u2014skills the urban-based psychologists assumed these children lacked\u2014through participation in team activities at school. ((M. T. Whitley, \u201cChildren\u2019s Interest in Collecting,\u201d Journal of Educational Psychology<\/em> 20 (1929): 249\u201361. Paul A. and Harvey C. Lehman Witty, \u201cFurther Studies of Children’s Interest in Collecting,\u201d Journal of Educational Psychology<\/em> 21 (1930): 112-127; Paul A. and Harvey C. Lehman Witty, \u201cSex Differences: Collecting Interests,\u201d Journal of Educational Psychology<\/em> 22 (1931): 221\u201328; Paul A. and Harvey C. Lehman Witty, \u201cThe Collecting Interests of Town Children and Country Children,\u201d Journal of Educational Psychology<\/em> 24 (1933): 170\u2013184. Here we read in Witty and Lehmann\u2019s prose an unease with perceived differences between rural and urban life, and in their use of the term \u201cAmerican farmer\u201d we do not hear an understanding of how rural African American children collect. Rather, their concern is based on a construction of the \u201cfrontiersman,\u201d an individualist, who is of European descent, who would not be well socialized for the modern world. Cooperation is valued in the Witty and Lehmann paradigm, and but there is no understanding of farmer cooperatives.))<\/p>\n Strikingly, given that Witty and Lehman\u2019s later research occurred during the Great Depression, they never examined economic factors (individual family income or locality averages) as influencing collecting habits. Data about the collecting activities of children were instead analyzed to speculate how collecting trends might reflect political behavior in adulthood.<\/p>\n Witty and Lehman\u2019s research indicated a declining interest in collecting among children of all ages in the 1930s, yet we know that the sales of stamps, media attention, and philatelic activities in schools and during extra-curricular groups actually increased throughout the 1930s. Burk\u2019s study in 1900 had already laid the groundwork for stamp collecting to be viewed as an acceptable classroom or extra-curricular activity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At the turn of the century, some educators integrated stamp collecting practices into their classrooms because child psychologists urged them to take advantage of a child\u2019s instinct and desire to collect. We have seen in some popular writing about collecting, generally, the activity was sometimes described as childish given that children seemed to enjoy collecting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":370,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-385","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/385\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}