Materials, nature provide an alternative classroom for young kids

Carbon-copy playgrounds; cramped classrooms; "car park" school grounds. Across the industrialised world, these are the environments in which many young children are expected to play and learn; zoo enclosures can look more enriched.

Studies are emerging that reveal poor design as a hindrance to learning in the very young, as damaging as militaristic drills. Meanwhile, frogspawn and starry skies - once the recruiting agents of science - are beyond many children's experience.

The nexus of young child and physical world is a supercharged space, where burning potential meets a chunk of the new. Developmental neuroscientist Alison Gopnik has described young children's lamp-like awareness of the world and the 360-degree intensity of their absorption. Babies' brains grow at an amazing rate, making 700 new neural connections a second. By the age of three, a child has one quadrillion synapses, up to four times the number in an adult brain; these are later pruned.

While this neural crescendo builds, the infant and toddler is exploring the world holistically, with hands, feet and body, as well as eyes, ears, nose and mouth. Sensorimotor, materials-based learning was the bedrock of our evolution, and it shapes the brain.

In his 1973 book The Ascent of Man, mathematician and biologist Jacob Bronowski wrote: "The hand is the cutting edge of the mind."