Ten Ways: Ch. 1 Truth is Your Enemy

I am behind in the book study, but I'm still working at it. I love thinking about the imagination. Am I imaginative? Have I encouraged imagination in my children? What does encourage it? I consider the imagination a sacred thing. And I have some thoughts on it, but I am not sure if I'm right. I'm going to put down some thoughts on Ch. 1 and then race over to the other ladies' posts to see what they thought of it. (I'm staying away from reading their comments until I'm done doing my own reading and writing.)

Before I get too far into talking about the content of this first chapter, however, I have to say that his changing voice can get a little confusing at times. Sometimes he's singing the praises of the thing that encourages imagination. Then he seems to remember that he's supposed to be telling us how to destroy the imagination, and he jumps back to a sarcastic voice and discouraging the use of the thing.

This first chapter of Ten Ways calls for the essential need of filling the memory with facts. I couldn't figure out why he didn't have keeping the memory weak and empty as one of his "ways" (except that the book would have been "11 ways." :-)

From pg. 9: "...A developed memory is a wondrous and terrible storehouse of things seen and heard and done. It can do what no mere search engine on the internet can do. It can call up apparently unrelated things at once, molding them into a whole impression, or a new thought. The poet T. S. Eliot understood this creative, associative, dynamic, function of a strong memory."

I couldn't agree more.

But I would disagree with what creates this creative, dynamic faculty. Mr. Esolen gave many examples of the kinds of things to memorize that he believes will feed the imagination, but I would make a distinction among them.

His examples on the bottom of pg. 4, pg. 5, and pg. 7 were examples of curiosity, which is not quite the same thing as imagination. I don't mean to be nit-picky, but I don't want to mistake curiosity for feeding imagination.

Imagination and creativity have always been very important to me. The books I have on my shelf show it. I have titles like "The Courage to Create,""Creators," "How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci," "Cracking Creativity," "The Liberated Imagination," "Human Accomplishment," "Keys to Drawing with Imagination," and many more. Many of the books I've read aren't that helpful, to tell you the truth. I think Charlotte Mason's writings have been the very best for that.

I looked up imagination, creativity, and curiosity in the dictionary so as to keep straight in my own mind the differences. Imagination means "the faculty or action (in the mind) of forming new ideas, or images, or concepts of external objects not present to the senses." And creativity means "the use of the imagination in the production of a work." Curiosity means "a desire to know or learn; careful attention to detail; inquisitiveness." 

Imagination is forming a new idea/image, and creativity is using the idea/image to produce something. As Esolen points out, schools pride themselves on being places of creativity, but they often leave out the first step - feeding the imaginative faculty in the first place. 

I also realized that a child or adult could have a vivid imagination but not actually create anything (or at least not for a very long time as it incubates, or they don't create anything because they aren't encouraged to go to the next step of creating something). And children and adults create things all the time that manifest no imagination at all (only pale anemic copies of other more vibrant things). And curiosity doesn't have to include the other two.  

It seemed at times that Esolen couldn't decide if Gradgrind in Dickens's Hard Times was a good example to follow or not. I've concluded that he was saying that Gradgrind's method was bad, and that dry, dull facts are bad, but they are better than what we currently have, which is no memorization at all. I didn't find this particularly helpful.

He knew that Gradgrind's method was in keeping with preparing folks for work in industry, and was no longer about giving a child the liberal arts, but it's "not a bad way to begin." The lesser of two evils? I can't agree with this.

In various places in the chapter, Mr. Esolen recommends memorizing: basic facts about things in our world - animals and science (not as good as living with them, but the facts do present 'a challenge to the mind' - in my opinion, they may and they may not), geography (admittedly they're inferior to reading about places in Greek literature, The Lord of the Rings, and being out in the woods, etc. - in his sarcastic voice calling these the "heights of ignorance"), history facts (saying they can be flat, but they can be "dangerous" too), Latin and Greek grammar (the point being, of course, learning all that grammar for the purposes of reading the poetry of Roman and Greek authors), rules, timelines, math, maps, poetry, music.

Esolen does say, "a fact may not be much, by itself, but it points toward what is true..." Yes. But if we're not careful, and I see this all the time, we stop at the fact, because we're already tired, and full, and out of time. We're always satisfied with the lesser things. 

And this is coming from a mom who has her child in CC. I'm not against learning facts or I wouldn't be there. But I don't think that all of the facts that she is memorizing is necessarily sparking her imagination. Her history books do that. Memorizing "After the church split into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, William the Conqueror defeated King Harold of England in 1066, and started feudalism" can't hold a candle to reading great books about those subjects where the characters are full-bodied, and an image can form in the mind.

Only some of these facts to memorize would be, it seems to me, fodder for the imagination. I would not call these unimportant things of life. These facts are goods, to be sure. And they can and often do support the production of new and beautiful things. But I've seen many a child not have the flame of their imaginations kindled by memorizing a ream of "grammar stage" (sorry, my own bit of sarcasm) facts. I don't think I've ever seen a child not come alive after hearing really great stories or singing songs, though.   

We watched a little girl for a time who hated to be read to. She wasn't read the right sorts of books, of course, and to make matters worse, the books were only ever used to put her to bed. They were "tricks" to get her out of the way. No one ever read to her just for the sheer joy of going into another time and place. By the time we no longer babysat her, we had won her over to loving story-time. It's one of my favorite memories of what I've done in my life. 

I love the example of Caedmon, one of my favorite figures in history. Caedmon, of course, had no storehouse of memorized facts. No Latin reading. Never any Greek. He lived and breathed real things all day long. Cows, and barns, and weather, and liturgy. But he did have a storehouse of memory of poetry and Bible stories. When God gave him the gift of song, he sang. He sang his own new songs.    

I have to add some quotes from Charlotte Mason's writings: 

"But let them have tales of the imagination, scenes laid in other lands and other times, heroic adventures, hairbreadth escapes, delicious fairy tales in which they are never roughly pulled up by the impossible--even where all is impossible, and they know it, and yet believe.

Now imagination does not descend, full grown, to take possession of an empty house; like every other power of the mind, it is the merest germ of a power to begin with, and grows by what it gets; and childhood, the age of faith, is the time for its nourishing. The children should have the joy of living in far lands, in other persons, in other times--a delightful double existence; and this joy they will find, for the most part, in their story books. Their lessons, too, history and geography, should cultivate their conceptive powers. If the child do not live in the times of his history lesson, be not at home in the climes of his geography book describes, why, these lessons will fail of their purpose. But let lessons do their best, and the picture gallery of the imagination is poorly hung if the child have not found his way into the realms of fancy." 

"The object of children's literary studies is not to give them precise information as to who wrote what in the reign of whom? -- but to give them a sense of the spaciousness of the days, not only of great Elizabeth, but of all those times of which poets, historians and the makers of tales, have left us living pictures. In such ways the children secure, not the sort of information which is of little cultural value, but wide spaces wherein imagination may take those holiday excursions deprived of which life is dreary; judgment, too, will turn over these folios of the mind and arrive at fairly just decisions about a given strike, the question of Poland, Indian Unrest. Every man is called upon to be a statesman seeing that every man and woman, too, has a share in the government of the country; but statesmanship requires imaginative conceptions, formed upon pretty wide reading 'and some familiarity with historical precedents. "

Some of my favorite lines in Ten Ways were at the end of the chapter on pg. 25,

"Keep the students busy and idle at the same time. Have them study Germany by cooking a bowl of bean soup, or frying some wienerschnitzel (rather like studying baseball by grilling a hot dog)."

"At all costs have the assignments devour time. Call them "creative" if you like. Appeal to the student's vanity - never a difficult maneuver - and enlist his good will as you rob his days."

"Schola edax emporis sit - let the school be the eater of time." Indeed.