I think I’ve mentioned before that Poetic Knowledge is my favorite book ever, ever, ever. Truth be told, though, this is only my second time completely through. I suppose my stolen glances at random chapters over the past few years add up to an additional reading, but there really is something to be said for reading a book straight through, from beginning to end.
It’s funny how a different reading can provide a different lesson.
This time around, I have much room for the poetic. I don’t worry about measuring or producing evidence for others to see {at least, not nearly as much as I used to}. This time, what really stood out to me was the importance of love.
The Disadvantaged Girl
When we were first married, we knew a family with six adopted children. These children had sustained varying levels of damage from their birth parents. One daughter in the family stands out in my memory. I believe she had been a crack baby, or some sort of drug baby. She was very socially immature, had trouble controlling her mind and emotions. She was attending the local public high school, where she performed miserably in almost every class.
What I remember is that there was one class in which she did well. Her ADHD, her reading issues, her possible other learning disabilities–it was almost as if they suddenly vanished!
They didn’t, of course. {Vanish, that is.}
But all of these hurdles were much more easily jumped when she loved the subject.
I remember thinking about this, and then reflecting that the hardest times for me in learning had been when I wasn’t interested in the subject {when I had not love}, and I had seen friends in college overcome their own obstacles because, if they didn’t learn to love the subject at hand, at the very least they had a goal they loved which motivated them to conquer said obstacles.
So now I think: why do children learn anything in the beginning? Why do they crawl? Why do they walk? Why do they talk? Why do they run or jump or climb or color on a page or write their name or do any of the number of things that children do?
For the love of it.
Children are born with a passion for discovering things about the world around them. Daughter A. began crawling at four months of age and I thought I might perish, but the truth is she loved her brother and she just wanted to get closer to him.
And find out a little more about his toys.
Ahem.
If I Have Not Love
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.
I feel like there are innumerable thoughts we could still think thanks to this book. We could talk about schools based upon friendship, and that Aristotle said that true friendship was based upon mutual love of the Good. We could talk about how multiculturalism merely dilutes love rather than engendering it. Or we could talk about order as a species of beauty, and discuss how to get my office tidier.
The possibilities are endless.
But, for me, I’m taking away some lessons on love. Here, I mean love in its broadest sense. I mean a passion for something, or an affection for something. Love, in proportion to the worth of the thing at hand, motivates learning in a way that nothing else can.
Not getting good grades.
Not earning a prize.
Not being paid by your parents for your achievements.
Not graduating with honors.
Not being afraid of punishment for poor grades.
Not getting a job in the future.
Not getting accepted into a good college.
None. Of. It.
Man was created to know his world, and to manage it well. God made a beautiful, wonderful world for man to live in, and even though he is fallen, and it is still groaning for the fullness of its redemption, we are still in the image of God, and therefore we can still delight in the works of His hands.
Even more so for those who are redeemed.
What I’m thinking about now, then, is this: if something is worth loving, it is worth learning about. And also: if something is worth learning about, it is worth loving. True, some things are worth loving more than other things, for some things have greater value than other things. But all of God’s creation is good, and therefore worthy of love.
If education really is about ordering the affections–of learning to love rightly, to feel in accordance with the created order–well, then, our task is somewhat different from what I initially thought it was.
The poetic, then, becomes the foundation of love that will bear up our children as they travel into higher and higher levels of learning. Learning to love fully and rightly is imperative for a healthy childhood, and yet these loves aren’t outgrown, but rather built upon.
Sort of like marriage, I suppose. You never outgrow love; you build a life upon it.
I think I’ll close with a little bit of Charlotte Mason
After all life is very short; we all of us have only one life to live, and during that life let us get into ourselves as much love, as much admiration, as much elevating pleasure as we can, and if we view education merely as discipline in critical bitterness, then we shall lose all the sweets of life and we shall make ourselves unnecessarily miserable. There is quite enough sorrow and hardship in this world as it is without introducing it prematurely to young people.
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