What a six-year-old taught us about colour theory

We handed out primary colours and asked the room to make green.

One of them made brown, looked at it for a long moment, and announced that brown is just green that gave up. We have not been able to stop thinking about it since.

There is a real lesson in there about how children reason from materials rather than from rules — and about how much of what we teach as theory is really just description after the fact.