There’s a silent education taking place in every home, classroom and playground. It doesn’t arrive in a workbook or a lesson plan. It happens passively through everyday life. It is the lesson of materials.
As children, we learn a lot from what things are made of. Not just their names; wood, paper, plastic, metal, but what those materials mean in use. We learn it through weight and warmth, through scrapes and marks. Long before we can speak about “sustainability,” we absorb a set of expectations about care, value and replacement. The world teaches us whether things are worth mending, whether breakage is an ending or an invitation, whether ownership is stewardship or simply consumption.
I think of the party-bag toy that cracked on the way home, and the humble wooden spoon that, by some family mystery, survived decades of stirring. Both were “toys” at different times in my childhood. Only one taught me anything useful about how to live with things.
From materialism to material literacy
Materialism tells us happiness is a matter of more. Material literacy offers a different promise… that a better relationship with things starts by learning to read them. To pay attention to how a material feels and how it invites (or resists) repair.
When children encounter a stream of single-use, plastic sealed, brittle novelties, the message is predictable: things are cheap, failure is normal, replacement is easier than repair. It’s not just the landfill that should worry us; it’s the mindset. A throwaway object breeds a throwaway habit.
But place in a child’s hands something that welcomes imagination, an object with an allowance for scuffs, a screw you can undo and re-do, a part you can replace, and the script changes. Care becomes interesting. Mending becomes a small act of power. The material is now a collaborator, not a disposable prop.
Noticing
Material literacy is, at heart, learning to notice that a scuff can be a story and that a repair can add value. It is also learning to ask upfront questions: Where will this go when it breaks? Could it be opened? Will it age with character? Can parts be replaced? These questions are not anti-joy; they are pro-wonder. They give children a vocabulary for stewardship that sits comfortably alongside play.
There’s a consumer dimension we shouldn’t shy away from. Material literacy doesn’t make children feel guilty for wanting things; it builds discernment. It swaps the reflex to acquire for the curiosity to understand. Material literacy doesn’t fight the desire to have things; it upgrades it, teaching children to choose fewer, better objects they’ll care for and use deeply.
What this means for The Wonder Why Society
At The Wonder Why Society, we treat materials as a language children can learn to read. Our work (books, prints, cards, and the products that sit around them) try to make that language legible. But we’ve learnt that process is also part of that language. The traces of making teach just as powerfully as wood grain or paper weight. Evidence of process turns an object from a sealed mystery into something a child can understand and care for.
We design for openness so our products invite re-use in many contexts, and we keep the construction honest so children can see how things are made. We favour recycled and responsibly sourced papers, avoid coatings that peel rather than patinate, and choose materials that age with grace. Just as deliberately, we surface the process: a visible stitch line rather than a hidden glue line; a fold tab you can unhook; things that say “you’re allowed in here”. In print, we often use risograph, precisely because its honest artefacts (slight mis-registration, halftone dots, rich overprints) make the making visible. Those small cues build material literacy and confidence.
This is not a moral performance; it’s a design position. We believe materials and the evidence of making together shape how a child values and looks after things. When the object tells the truth about itself, through feel and through visible process, care and repair become normal. It’s also an invitation to our community to hold us to account and to co-invent with us: share fixes, suggest improvements, tell us when a material wears badly, or when a process could be clearer. As better options emerge, new stocks, safer inks, smarter materials we’ll adopt them, and we’ll show our working.
A small rebellion worth making
If there is a north star in all of this, it is simple: raise children who feel at home with things. Not overawed by newness, not bored by longevity, but confident with use, care and repair. That confidence starts with tiny experiences; a satisfying click, a tightening screw, a scuff that doesn’t ruin but records. It gathers force as a child learns that materials are not a mystery, and that ownership brings the steady joy of looking after something well.
The rebellion is small, teach children to read materials, and you teach them to read the world.
