The organic vision of Hélan Jaworski

In the nursery we repeat the life that historical man lived in the nursery of Egypt; when the same routine went on, unchanged, day after day. Nanny Pharaoh ruled with a rod of iron, and time seemed to roll on never endingly. The enormous Egyptian statues were surely the child’s eye view of mummy and daddy. The child’s passion for building with bricks or making sand-castles recalls the building of the pyramids and the zikkurats of Chaldea. There is even a correspondence between the fact that children draw before they can write, and the first Egyptian script was a pictorial one and the Egyptians covered the walls of their tombs with pictures.

Time passes and the child reaches the age of eight and enters the Greek period. This is when all children are at their most beautiful and fascinating stage. They really seem to have taken full possession of their bodies and walk about like little gods and goddesses—heads held high and the whole world before them.

This is the main play period of childhood when running, dancing and jumping the same pattern is followed in childish games, as was worked out in Greece on the greater stage of the Olympic Games and the gymnasium.

The great age of Pericles marked the flowering of sculpture, music, the theatre and philosophy—but in their small way can anyone deny that children of this age show remarkable wisdom, great promise of artistic development and great appreciation of music even if their execution is limited?

All too soon the child grows out of this blissful period and, about the age of ten, becomes angular and clumsy. He enters the Roman period. Rome with its countless marching soldiers, its cruelty and grossness, is mirrored in the marching gangs of small boys who run about getting into all manner of mischief. They tease and are cruel to animals, gloating over their cruelties like the Roman crowd enjoying the scenes of torture and bloodshed in the Colosseum.

The well-known greed and gluttony of children at this age reflects the debauchery of Roman society—debauchery which is basically a greed and gluttony of the senses. When his poor parents have nearly reached the end of their tether the child leaves the Roman period and enters the Middle Ages—the adolescence of