Here's Part III if you need to review.
Imagination is a key element in education, and Mason makes extensive use of it in her curriculum. Usually we think of imagination as taking form and being exercised most in the creative, self-expressive domains, and that has its place (although it should never become a temple to the self).
Mason and her fellow P.N.E.U. members and teachers, however, spend more time focusing on the uses of imagination in deepening sympathy and understanding for others. They approach this in many ways. In this blog post series I am just sharing what I've found about how imagination is cultivated and directed towards compassion and understanding for others in different parts of the curriculum. In this post, we'll look specifically at literature and a few of its subtopics.
Literature: Mason says intellect cannot even walk in the realms of literature without imagination and imagination is
required to clear our eyes to understand the literature we read. In vol. 1 Charlotte Mason encourages us to let children 'have their tales of the imagination, scenes laid in other
lands and other times, heroic adventures, hairbreadth escapes, delicious fairy
tales,' and she clarifies the purpose of this level of literature. This is not, she says, for
their amusement only, but because tales of imagination that fill the mind
squeeze out self-occupation, and "only then are we capable of large hearted action
on behalf of another person or cause.” See that? The right use of imagination squeezes
out ignoble thoughts of self. (v1) Mason says we need living books like those tales of the imagination, rather than the typical weak diet of school textbooks, in order to get students who
have the sort of moral imagination that
enables them to put themselves in another’s place.
"We must read novels, history, poetry, and whatever falls under the head of literature, not for our own 'culture.' Some of us begin to dislike the word 'culture,' and the idea of a 'cultivated' person; any effort which has self as an end is poor and narrow. But there is a better reason for an intimacy with literature as extensive and profound as we can secure. Herein we shall find the reflections of wise men upon the art of living, whether put in the way of record, fable, or precept, and this is the chief art for us all to attain."
Good literature is like travel, it
broadens the mind, but as G.K. Chesterton said about travel, first you have to
have the mind, the curiosity, the interest. Then, as we read, we see live from the eyes of a poor barefoot orphan on the Mississippi, from the perspective of an adventurer in South America, a missionary in Africa, an orphaned serf in old Korea, a kidnapped Prince taken from Africa to America, to England, we look at life through the eyes of a young woman bereft of father and fortune in a single night, of a beggar maid, and so much more. We read the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley and pick up additional interests, perhaps in Colonial America, perhaps in the life of Phyllis herself, perhaps in poetry, other black American
poets or in the history of slavery in America, or topics that have not even occurred
to me. We read the story of Marco Polo and perhaps become interested in Mongolia, China, in the silk route, in other explorers, in the Khans, or leadership, porcelains, and the middle ages. We see ourselves in their lives and adventures and consider how we would act, how we should act, if we were to encounter the same challenges.
It’s important not reverse our
goals- schools today treat books as
delivery systems, but good books, living books, are the goal, not the delivery system. As a lit
prof says: "One
does not read Dostoevsky to learn about Russian history; one becomes interested
in Russian history from reading its classics." Read books because books are worth
reading.
Books, living books, fictional or nonfictional, teach us many truths and it requires truth to cultivate and nourish the imagination.
In the story Mason tells of her first discovery of children as they truly are in their own home environments, and how much that is wonderful and remarkable they have within them, she also notes one key exception. She says that their ignorance is illimitable. They come with much capacity and an already functioning mind. They don't come with experience or knowledge.
Ruskin says that true imagination rests on accurate
knowledge and observation.
Mason talks about cultivating the imagination and
explains imagination increases in both order and richness the more we know. She advises that if we want to have a well stocked imagination, we need to 'read much' and picture to ourselves what we are reading.
This section from volume IV is too good to just paraphrase:
"The Realm of Fiction––Essential and Accidental Truth.––What shall we say of fable, poetry, romance, the whole realm of fiction? There are two sorts of Truth. What we may call accidental Truth; that is, that such and such a thing came to pass in a certain place at a certain hour on a certain day; and this is the sort of Truth we have to observe in our general talk. The other, the Truth of Art, is what we may call essential Truth; that, for example, given, such and such a character, he must needs have thought and acted in such and such a way, with such and such consequences; given, a certain aspect of nature, and the poet will receive from it such and such ideas; or, certain things of common life, as a dog with a bone, for example, will present themselves to the thinker as fables, illustrating some of the happenings of life. This sort of fiction is of enormous value to us, whether we find it in poetry or romance; it teaches us morals and manners; what to do in given circumstances; what will happen if we behave in a certain way. It shows how, what seems a little venial fault is often followed by dreadful consequences, and our eyes are opened to see that it is not little or venial, but is a deep-seated fault of character; some selfishness, shallowness, or deceitfulness upon which a man or woman makes shipwreck. We cannot learn these things except through what is called fiction, or from the bitter experience of life, from the penalties of which our writers of fiction do their best to spare us."
Included in the category of literature would be Shakespeare's plays, which are ultimately a kind of study of humanity.
From volume IV: "We probably read Shakespeare in the first place for his stories, afterwards for his characters, the multitude of delightful persons with whom he makes us so intimate that afterwards, in fiction or in fact, we say, 'She is another Jessica,' and 'That dear girl is a Miranda'; 'She is a Cordelia to her father,' and, such a figure in history, 'a base lago.' To become intimate with Shakespeare in this way is a great enrichment of mind and instruction of conscience. Then, by degrees, as we go on reading this world-teacher, lines of insight and beauty take possession of us, and unconsciously mould our judgments of men and things and of the great issues of life."
Within the pages of books and stories
we can meet characters and see their motivations and thought processes and the
consequences of their choices over decades in ways not available to us in real
life. It’s fiction, of course, but the thing about living books is that they
are written by people with a talent for observing human nature and showing us
something about how it works, and filling our imagination with a pageant of humanity and people types and the human condition.
Poetry: Mason says both poetry and essays are instructors of conscience and teachers (volume IV) and it seems to me they can only truly be successful at this insofar as they strike at our imagination and take hold of it. This is because "the power of poetry to instruct conscience does not depend on its direct teaching." (volume IV again)
Modern researchers are finding this as well, thin a dandy little study I encourage you to read about. It turns out that the indirect, incomplete, open ended message is more likely to catch hold of the mind and engage the imagination than the simplified, easy, version interpreted for us by somebody else. Researchers find that "reading poetry, in particular, increases activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, an area concerned with “autobiographical memory”, helping the reader to reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they have read."
During this study, "Using scanners, they monitored the brain activity of volunteers as they read works by William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, T.S Eliot and others.:
Most interesting to me, "They then “translated” the texts into more “straightforward”, modern language and again monitored the readers’ brains as they read the words.
Scans showed that the more “challenging” prose and poetry set off far more electrical activity in the brain than the more pedestrian versions."
When you read "she walks in beauty as the night" your mind grabs that, holds it, puzzles over it and works at it, like chewing a substantial bite of solid feed. When you read, "there is a woman as beautiful and mysterious as a dark night,' there isn't really anything to think about. Your mind glides over it with no more effort than it takes to swallow a spoon full of baby food, and it is applied effort that makes our education our own, that makes the imagination work and helps it grow.
Poetry: Mason quotes Matthew Arnold, saying, "Matthew Arnold tells us that poetry is a criticism of life; so it is, both a criticism and an inspiration; and most of us carry in our minds tags of verse which shape our conduct more than we know."
Let's talk about those tags of verses. First I want to share an idea about
memory called ‘chunking.’ It's not a very elegant term but the general idea is that because we have a limited short term memory we help ourselves remember more things by glomming them together in different ways 'chunking.- If I tell you to memorize 7208658500, that's a bit daunting. You have no context, and it's just a long string of numbers. If I tell you dial 720-865-8500 for a dial-a-story program, you have context, and you have a chunking system. Instead of ten numbers in a series, you probably think of that as three numbers, 720 and 865 rather than 7-2-0 and 8-6-5, and 8-5-0-0 becomes eighty-five hundred.
We do this with words, too- if you ask me to list the things I think of when you say the word seashell, I will come up with a list of words, places, associations. I will think of islands I have lived and gathered seashells, I will think of calcium carbonate and limestone and an easy experiment to discover whether a bit of rock is volcanic or coral reef in origin, I will think of seashells I have collected and spirals and the geometry of seashells, of things they eat and that eat them- you will also have a list and it will likely be very different.
If I ask you to tell me what you think of when I say cherry, you might think of pies and George Washington, your grandmother's canned cherries, and dozens of other things.
We chunk words together with related ideas, facts, stories, events, places- some personal, some from our reading. The more we learn, the more bits and pieces adhere to our other knowledge, combining, chunking together, and so a single word in our vocabulary brings up dozens of possible images, rifles through a hundred files in a quick second, represents half a dozen events in history, has connections to ideas about science, math, and possibly more. The more we learn, the more we expand our horizens and our reading, the more our feet are set in that wide room Mason mentions (quoting the Psalms, the more wonderful things a single good word represents in our minds.
People with good vocabularies don't just have a nice collection of words, they have a wide and generous education full of wonderful things to know.
Poetry does this chunking as well- or rather, our minds use poetry in the same way. a phrase, a line, from a
well known poem will bring up a host of other associations and ideas-
connections, relations.
Writer and teacher
J. Bottam says, "...one reason we read poetry to children is to hand on a deposit
of words and phrases, the investment of prior generations in the language.
There is a purpose in putting lines like “young Lochinvar is come out of the
West” in children’s anthologies—and “’Twas the night before Christmas” and
“what is so rare as a day in June?” and “I hear America singing” and “Under a
spreading chestnut tree” and all the rest of the Victorian parlor classics,
together with the most hackneyed, overquoted lines from Shakespeare and Dryden
and Pope and Keats... The person who is not given these references as a
child will be deprived as an adult, lacking old memories around which the
language can thicken."Language is the amber in which a thousand precious
thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved," said Ralph Waldo
Emerson, poet, writer, philosopher, '
Poetry expands our imagination, and it does this partially through the way it touches the emotions. At some point (I believe in the first couple of years after Mason's death) the PNEU recommended the poetry anthology Tom Tiddler’s Ground compiled by Walter de
la Mare for form I or II. In the preface to one edition de la Mare says:
'Whatever you
admire you look at with all yourself in your eyes; and your love for it adds to
its beauty.'
Remember: Imagination is born of love. The more they love, the more they care, the more their imaginations are warmed and peopled by others than themselves.
Some additional reading links and resources:
http://www.causinglearning.com/blog/words-determine-a-childs-future/
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Have you ever watched a chicken roam the yard? It wanders here and there, going in circles, darting off after a moth, now a mosquito, now a grasshopper, scratching the earth, rarely looking up.
