On the Educational Value of Stamp Collecting

Joseph Bellina wrote the following on The Hub @ Stamp SCHOOL to start a conversation. Though written with young people in mind, it seems to me that not all new collectors are young collectors. We should be trying to interest adults, too because while it's important to 'start them when they're young' it's also important not to exclude younger or older adults as new collectors! I'm publishing it here because I think it's worth preserving for philatelic posterity. Joseph writes:

The value of stamp collecting for a young person is not in the content that is what is on the stamps - but rather the process that is the act if organizing the stamps in some way based on the content. Organizing requires seeing similarities and differences making order out of chaos. Just the act of matching the picture in the stamp with the picture in an album is an intellectual process. Grouping topical stamps or thinking how to display them on a page is a creative act. 

There are few places these days where children are free to make choices so much is organized yet free play is powerful learning. Collecting stamps gives them that since they can choose what they do with the stamps. Of course as they organize these objects they may become curious about some aspect of what is on them and then the content becomes more important.  

Let me get a bit more technical. We make sense of the world by a mix of observation and inference - that is what we experience and what we think about what we experience. What we experience are the facts about the world. What we think are our ideas. With stamps usually we can agree about the facts what is on the stamp. Of course as one looks more closely at perforations or watermarks, our thinking evolves and other important facts are discovered. 

So, observation and inference are not completely separate since what we choose to observe depends on our thinking, and what we think is affected by what we observe. But the opportunity for a young person to do this, and to engage with others is powerful learning, because in the beginning the facts regarding what is on the stamp are clear, and easily agreed up so the focus because developing ideas. 

That is the real power of stamp collecting.

(Top photo - recent Canada sorted for a potential trade.)

I completely agree with Joseph re: albumizing stamps being a creative act. Too much so to be constrained by printed black & white images, lines and boxes in an album!