If we are privileged to glimpse any semblance of the world to come in this our present time, it is certainly to be found in the spring, on a playground filled with children. To see their pent-up vitality running riotous after a long winter, while the flowers spring to life around them – to watch the girls gathering spontaneous bouquets of crocuses while their friends soar on the swings next to them, or the boys muddying their pants while retrieving the kickball from a tangle of bright forsythias – is to come face to face with something eternal in the forms of life.
The first of all analogies for the educator is that of vegetable growth. The very name “kindergarten” suggests the model that educators have always found in the patterns of nature for the patterns of childhood development. A plant with a proper place to root, provided with adequate light and nourishment, grows in accordance with its nature and puts forth fruit; for this entire process, there is an analogous process to be discovered in the way that a child provided with appropriate care and stimulus can flourish, and grow into any number of talents and virtues. On this analogy, the educator is cast into the role of the gardener, tending his or her charges and ensuring they receive everything required to their full flourishing.
But a close familiarity with children reveals that the parallel obtaining between the growth of plants and the growth of children is more than an analogy; in many ways, children do not grow like a plant grows, they grow in the very same ways a plant grows. A boy who runs to the monkey bars at recess, to see how much further he can make it than he did the previous day, is impelled by the very same biological forces that impel the tomato vine ever higher up the trellis; they are both manifestations of a primal exuberance instilled in the organism. A girl doing cartwheels on the hillside is reveling in the energies of her nature in the very same manner of a rose bush exuding its buds. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” is the very same force that drives the child to climb, to race, to throw; the very same proliferation of the very same energies that drive a living thing to express its inner being in the most expansive way possible, in the greatest defiance of external impediments possible. In certain fundamental ways, the growth of a plant and a child are not analogous, but univocal; they are the same kind of thing.
The point extends to the growth of a child’s mind. I of course do not mean to reduce the incipient rational nature of a child to mere biological forces, nor to deny the obvious limits of the assertion, or the obvious ways in which the identity between intellectual and physical growth break down. I only mean to say that if we examine and reflect closely upon what is happening when a child learns, there is present – or, there should be present – an innate drive towards expansiveness, towards a mastery of the world, that is consonant with the forces of vegetable growth operating in their limbs. Children, as has been observed a million times, are naturally curious; they want to know many things, and this desire to know constitutes a desire to expand the realm of the mind over greater and greater territory of reality. They want to know how things work, and how they can manipulate them; they want to understand how to act properly in a variety of situations; they want to be able to figure things out. The efforts involved in developing such mental capacities clearly depend upon faculties of thinking that lie outside the categories of biology, but the original orientation of the child out of which those efforts arise is of an organic provenance. Nature drives a child’s mind to know, as much as it drives his hands to reach and his feet to chase.
This assertion will not seem odd to readers familiar with Aristotle’s De Anima, his treatise on the soul. According to Aristotle, there are three fundamental modes of ensoulment – the nutritive, the sensory, and the rational. Plants are ensouled exclusively according to the first mode; they take in food for growth, which fuels the organized development of their various parts, with the consequent realization of their innate forms. We as rational creatures are ensouled in all three manners; our sensory and intellectual faculties entail forms of development far more complex and conceptually involved than what occurs in plants. But that same nutritive process, that same organic need for the physical conditions conducive to growth, is still operative in us, and still determines the telos of our development. There is still an innate tendency in us – the legacy of unconscious biological forces – that orients us towards expansiveness and fruitfulness, which conditions the function of those other faculties of soul as they arise in us.
Goethe, it seems, was attempting to articulate just this continuity of the modes of ensoulment in his theory of plant development, poetically summarized in “The Metamorphosis of Plants.” There he describes the emergence of the flower as the culminating stage of the plant’s development: “The crowded guardian chalice clasps the stem, / Soon to release the blazing topmost crown. / So nature glories in her highest growth, / Showing her endless forms in orderly array.” This same innate tendency to pursue the “highest growth” is realized – not analogized, but realized – in the moral tenor of human life, which absorbs the capacities of the nutritive soul into its own forms of growth, modifying and transforming them in accord with the faculties accrued through its sensory and rational natures: “Ah, think thou also how from sweet acquaintance / The power of friendship grew within our hearts, / To ripen at long last to fruitful love! / Think how our tender sentiments, unfolding, / Took now this form, now that, in swift succession!/ Rejoice the light of day! Love sanctified, / Strives for the highest fruit.” The good man, the man capable of friendship, is one who has received what was necessary for the fruitful expansion of his capacities, in the same way that the flowering azalea bush is one that has received what was necessary for its innate powers of burgeoning.
The point I am driving at here is that when a child is genuinely learning, when he or she is genuinely growing in mind and soul, the condition that results can best be described as a kind of healthiness. It is best conceived as the latent potentialities of a creature expressing themselves in the face of inhibitions originating both internally and externally. A flourishing organism is one in which the innate form of the thing realizes itself, in accordance with its capacities. A healthy redwood is one that bursts through the forest canopy with its massive foliage. A healthy condor is one that soars imperiously on the winds in search of prey. And a healthy child is one whose mind stands readily disposed to take in greater and greater knowledge, in order to become more and more adequate to experience. Conversely, when we find a student exhibiting a habitual indifference towards his or her studies, we should perceive this indifference as a kind of sickness or lassitude, of the same sort we would perceive in a child too lazy to get off the couch and exercise. The characteristics of a well-developing mind are vigor and strength and increased capacity and fruition in the form of hundreds of actions not previously achievable.
Many things follow from such a conception of child development, too many to catalogue. The most obvious implication – almost too obvious to draw out explicitly, though I will – is how unsuited the modern education system is to facilitate healthy growth in children. The sterile, over-crowded hallways, through which not one ray of natural light penetrates in the course of the day, are an apt symbol for the whole enterprise, which is almost perfectly designed to frustrate the organic equilibrium of the children crammed in there. The tendency of the modern school is almost always to constrict the energies of children where nature bids them expand: to train skills where children long for virtue, to aim at career-readiness where children want life-readiness. Like someone transplanting a seedling into hard clay, the modern school shoves children into an inhospitable climate of utilitarianism and disorder, with all the predictable consequences for the development of the child’s mind.
A school that demonstrates a due regard for the organic aspects of child development is one which acknowledges the intertwining of body and soul in a child, and seeks to cultivate the physical and mental capacities through one another. It is a school where physical education is taken seriously, not just as an opportunity for students to take a break with a quick game of kick-ball, but an integral part of the day where children’s bodies are made stronger, faster, more flexible, so that they can prove adequate to all the tasks of adulthood; where courage and leadership are cultivated through structured play; and where children first discover their ability to achieve previously unachievable goals by overcoming a variety of physical obstacles. But in addition to this prioritization of physical education, such a school will remember the physical aspects involved even in the administering of its academic program. It will plan a schedule which adheres to the daily and weekly rhythms of children’s energy; it will emphasize proper comportment and gesture as students make their way around the school building. It will incorporate classes in its core offerings – not as electives – that require some form of physical expression, such as drama and dance and chorus.
The most important implication to follow from an organic conception of child development I think is the recognition that all genuine examples of learning constitute a growth in the capacities of a child’s mind. In the same way that a flowering bush puts forth an abundance of branches and petals that were not previously there, a flourishing child is regularly exhibiting linguistic, mathematical, and artistic abilities that were not previously evident. Whether accruing Latin vocabulary or acquiring a facility with binomial equations, the learning child is constantly proving to him or herself the possession of capacities heretofore unknown. The specific abilities that follow from this mental expansion are clearly desirable, but the general conviction that their minds are adequate to whatever conundrums they encounter is the chief benefit bestowed on students in the course of their studies. In saying this, I mean to say that an academic program should be duly challenging and demanding, so that students regularly have this experience of achieving things of which they did not think themselves capable. The confidence that grows out of such achievement is one of the greatest gifts a school can offer its students.
It is spring as I write this, and just recently I have watched as a young girl, reveling in the newly hospitable weather, climbed a tree near her house that she previously thought too forbidding for her efforts. I have seen the expression of awed self-discovery on her face as she rested on a high limb, a reflection of wonder to find in her person resources of achievement she did not know herself to be there. That moment strikes me as paradigmatic of the entire learning process: it is an unfolding and emergence and expansion and ripening of powers organically bestowed upon the child. What is to be found at the end of this process is a moral, rational creature, who was not there at the beginning, but whose potential was always there.
Well done, Mark. Very commendable work .