Local community experimenters Gemma and Jeni trundled the Listening Cart back to school to capture the inner thinking of The Children (whom they believe are indeed our future). Together they looked at repair, what it means to different people and how it might connect us to others through the shared need to fix, not throw away our often immense collection of stuff.

As Gemma explained  – we liaised with the art teacher and through her instruction the children from Year 3 brought in toys and objects from home that were broken.

We were amazed that every child had brought something in.

We introduced the session and ourselves and approached each object as a scientist would.  We divided each class into small groups and asked each group to examine the broken object and come up with solutions as to how they could be fixed.

We were astonished at the extensive knowledge that the children already had on repairing.  They came up with brilliant ideas with many regularly engaged in repairing with their parents and siblings.  Perhaps we had considered they would be entrenched in the throwaway culture – but they really weren’t and had a really good understanding of the merit of repair and reuse.

This understanding would be gold dust for manufacturers.  One boy said his trainers had broken three times already and he wasn’t very impressed.   Perhaps they would take more note if they heard his opinions on something deliberately being made not to last.