The world of chimps using tools is just a hop skip away from kids using and responding to puppets. The hand puppet, after all, is actually a tool for self-and outer referencing that is unique to human communication. Much like the chimps, we are, in effect, using puppets to arm ourselves with a tool that invites us out of ourselves further than we might otherwise venture; that re-casts the world as symbol and, with gesture, movement, involving the hand and calling upon speech and emotions. The dynamic that exists between children and puppets amounts to a wavelength of visual, audio, and social expression that is as powerful, if not more so, as the communication calls and displays of animal species.

The following quote from a New York Times article on the communication capabilities of a chimp and Alex, the late famous parrot, indicates that our forebears “armed” themselves with various media to assist in their orientation to their world as well as ours.

“They were not unusually gifted members of their respective species, Washoe and Alex. But armed with our words, they opened our minds, making us aware of the pervasive and protean nature of the linguistic impulse across species. Of the many tales they told us, the most universal tells of an early ancestor of our own, standing hundreds of thousands of years ago on a lakeshore somewhere, seeing a large winged creature drift by and signing or saying outright, in whatever language it might have been: “water,” then “bird.””

Given the need on the part of Education to discover some universal truths about children that can open people’s minds about the emotional and social needs and requirements of their developing minds, I hope you will reconsider reviewing the material I have been sending you for the past several years. As you may know, Paul D. MacLean, the scientist who coined ‘the limbic system’ and theorized the ‘triune brain’ died last month. Dr. MacLean was a good friend who embraced the work I was doing, and with whom I shared an enduring focus on the importance of play. I would greatly appreciate an opportunity to speak with you further about this work, which stands to emerge as an important step past the use of testing and control that now plagues our learning culture.

Thank you.