Primary Understanding

Education in Early Childhood

Kieran Egan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415672436
• eBook ISBN: 9781136701054
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Beginning with descriptions of the ways in which children make sense of their experience and the world, such as fantasy, stories and games, Egan constructs his argument that constituting this foundational layer are sets of cultural sense-making capacities, reflected in oral cultures throughout the world. Egan sees education as the acquisition of these sets of sense-making capacities, available in our culture, and his goal is to conceptualize primary education in a way that over comes the dichotomy between progressivisim and traditionalism, attending both the needs of the individual child and the accumulation of knowledge.

1

Some Educational Implications of Children’s Fantasy

Introduction

In some senses fantasy seems the opposite of rationality and, as education is preeminently the process in which rationality is prized and developed, children’s fantasy has usually been neglected as having no educational value or interest. When it is noticed, it is often considered an enemy of education. Rationality and reality are closely entwined in our mental lexicon: rationality is the tool we use to discover reality. Education is the process in which we use rationality to show and discover what is real and true, and so fantasy, which ignores the boundaries of reality, is seen as the enemy which slips out of the constructive constraints of reason and runs mentally amok in unreal and impossible worlds. Fantasy asserts the impossible, the unverifiable, the unfalsifiable; it is casually hospitable to contradiction, irrelevance, and inconsistency. In rational activity the mind is awake, about constructive work, in accord with reality, attuned to the logics whereby things operate; in fantasy there is mind-wandering illogic, dream-like indulgence of the flittering shapes of the idle mind, disregard of hard empirical reality.

This, anyway, is how fantasy is sometimes represented as at odds with constructive rational thought. And certainly these characteristics of fantasy are common elements of young children’s talk. What was once so often dismissed as the mindless babble of children, or considered quaintly charming, has increasingly of late been recorded and carefully transcribed. We can see fantastic elements constantly transform discussions that adults might like to shape otherwise:

Wally:	I know all about Jonas. He got swallowed by the whale.
Fred:	How?
Wally:	God sent him. But the whale was asleep so he just walked out.
Fred:	How did he fly up to God? I mean how did he get back to shore if it was so deep?
Wally:	He didn’t come from the sky. But he could have because there’s an ocean in the sky. For the rain to come down.
Fred:	Oh yeah. That’s for the gods. When they go deep they never drown, do they?
Wally:	Of course not. They’re just going nearer to Earth.
Jill:	How does the ocean stay up?
Fred:	They patch it up. They –
Wally:	They take a big, big, big bag and put it around the ocean.
Eddie:	Which reminds me. Do you know how many Christmas trees God gets? Infinity.
Teacher:	Who gives Him Christmas trees?
Eddie:	He makes them.
Wally:	When people burn them. … You see he’s invisible.
	He takes up the burned parts and puts them together.
Rose:	Are there decorations?
Wally:	Invisible decorations. He can see them because He’s invisible. If you tell Him there’s an invisible person here, He believes it.
Eddie:	You can’t fool God.
Wally:	Sure you can. It’s a good trick. You can say, “I’m here,” and you’re really not, but He can’t see you. He can only see invisible things. You can fool Him.
Eddie:	But He hears you.
Wally:	Right. He hears you talk. He talks, too. But you have to ask Him. He talks very soft. I heard Him.
Eddie:	You know, 353 years ago everyone could see God. He wasn’t invisible then. He was young so He could stay down on Earth. He’s so old now He floats up in the sky. He lived in Uganda and Egypt.
Fred:	That’s good, because everyone in Egypt keeps. They turn into mummies.

(This is taken, with thanks, from Vivian Paley’s Wally’s Stories, pp. 30, 31. In that book she shows what can result from sensitively encouraging children’s fantasy rather than trying constantly to correct it or suppress it in favour of more logically acceptable forms of thought.)

Anyone who has spent much time with children knows that a prominent part of their mental life is fantasy, and that much of this fantasy is playful, energetic, and, one cannot help but feel, an important and wholesome activity. But this is not, of course, how it has always been viewed. We have inherited the idea that fantasy and reason are in opposition. This comes most powerfully from the ancient Greeks. In Greek psychology, expressed in their myths, there is a clear contrast between Apollo, representing order, harmony, and reason, and Dionysus, representing frenzy, fantasy, and passion. Our inheritance of this ancient contrast has come through the Victorians, many of whom used their somewhat perverted view of ancient Greece as a social and educational model. In their image of ancient Greece they, unlike the Greeks, greatly emphasized Apollonian reason and creative order and depreciated the wild element contributed by Dionyian religion (Dodds, 1951; Jenkyns, 1981; Turner, 1981). The educational job of a civilized society, to the rational Victorians, was to teach the young to tame, control, or suppress fantasy and to order their lives on rational principles. So in the myths, the growth of civil order is reflected in Apollo’s taming of Dionysus, suppressing the orgiastic and fantastic aspects of his cult, and leading him into the civilized sanctuary at Delphi.

Plato, who has so profoundly affected our ways of making sense of the world and experience, also saw reason and passion as opposed principles. The Plato who wrote poems and tragedies was in conflict internally with Plato the philosopher; and so “he struggled within himself and proclaimed one part of himself the enemy of the other. He knew his inner war had to end with the victory of reason and the grudging surrender of passion, the victory of philosophy over poetry” (Simon, 1978, p. 157). As reason must rule the appetites, the senses, and the will, so those with most reason must rule those with less. And so Plato wanted philosophers to be kings and wanted to banish poets from his reasonable and realistic Republic and, as we shall see below, wanted to exclude fantasy from the education of children.

This image of rationality and fantasy as conflicting opposites, then, is very ancient and profoundly ingrained in our commonsense psychology and in our language. (“Ignore him; he lives in a fantasy world.”) It is only relatively recently that some people have tried to show that fantasy is not reasonless, and that those expressions of fantasy in dreams, myths, and “primitive mentality” also have their order and reason, and uses, if one only looks at them properly. Fantasy, dreams, and myths also have their logics, but the matrix of their logic has to be sought, to use another old metaphor, in the heart as well as in the head.

This newer image of fantasy is akin to the product of what Lévi-Strauss calls in his pun-laden way La Pensée Sauvage. The leaden English translation, The Savage Mind, misses the French associations of sauvage with freedom, unbridled playfulness, the touch of Dionysus. Pensée also carries the punning associated of “thought” and “pansies” and so the echo of Ophelia’s mind-wandering “and here is pansies, that’s for thoughts.” Children’s fantastic narratives, the stories that most engage children, have this quality of freedom, this mind-wandering lack of apparent logic.

One of the major contributors to our developing image of fantasy as something other than an opposite of reason is Freud. He has taught us, though we may sensibly dispute much of the framework in which he has embodied his insights, that our fantasy is not mad and reasonless, but has its logic. In his distinction between primary and secondary processes he echoes an older distinction between mythoi and logoi; the latter in each case representing the reality principle which seeks to overcome the undiscriminating preference for constructing mental worlds that conform with our desires. One of Freud’s disciples, Bruno Bettelheim, has recently argued with some force and ingenuity that fantasy not only has its enchanting uses but also, especially as it is embodied in folk-tales, provides a vital educational and psychological benefit to children. I will consider some of his arguments below.

My purpose here, however, is not to praise children’s fantasy, nor, obviously, to bury it, and there seems to survive an equally regrettable tendency in some to sentimentalize it and try to preserve it in children and even offer it as a model for adult thought. Nor do I want to seem to be suggesting that the kinds of fantasy stories and characters common in Western middle-class children’s literature and talk are natural engagements for the young mind. I have little knowledge of how widespread such thinking is in other times and places. As Bettelheim notes, however: “Through most of man’s history, a child’s intellectual life, apart from immediate experiences within the family, depended on mythical and religious stories and on fairy tales. This traditional literature fed the child’s imagination and stimulated his fantasizing” (Bettelheim, 1976, p. 24). Emphasis may usefully be put on “stimulated” here. For whatever reasons – natural, cultural, developmental, some mix – it seems clear that a diet of fantasy stories either generates or gives form to, or some mix, pullulating intellectual activity in young children. My initial purpose is to explore what may be inferred from the form and content of this fantastic activity for education. And while we may not establish anything firmly to begin with, this slightly odd perspective will enable us to see a number of important educational issues in a new light; it will allow us to approach them from the side, as it were, and it will perhaps enable us to see ways past some long-standing educational impasses.

The Neglect of Fantasy

It seems worthwhile to begin this brief inquiry by considering why something so obvious in children’s intellectual lives, and in all our experience, should have been so neglected or depreciated in educational literature. That it has been seen as an opposite of rationality is obviously a large part of the answer, but it is worth looking at how some of the most influential educational thinkers have dealt with it. It is perhaps an overstatement to head this section the way I have, but not much of an overstatement, I think, given the prominence and persistence of fantasy in children’s mental lives. There is a long tradition of hostility to, or irritation with, children’s fantasy in works that have profoundly affected thinking about education.

Plato’s arguments for barring from his state the makers of “phantoms far removed from reality” (Republic, X. 604) are at the beginning of this tradition. These “poor things by the standard of truth and reality” (Republic, X. 604) appeal to an inferior part of the soul and undermine reason. Whatever stories are available must be censored because even in stories “a high value must be set upon truthfulness” (Republic, II. 388) for their purpose is to express what we can discover of “how the truth is to be told about human life” (Republic, III. 392). Plato’s concerns are moral and his reasons for these conclusions are too well known, if still matters of dispute, to need sketching here. But this great story-teller and myth-user nevertheless seems to want to exclude fantasy: “Mothers … are not to … scare young children with mischievous stories of spirits that go about by night in all sorts of outlandish shapes” (Republic, II. 380) because such stories lead to “the presence of falsehood in the soul concerning reality” (Republic, II. 381) (Cornford, 1941).

In the Christian tradition the typical fantastic features of children’s thinking received no greater attention and no higher valuation. We have to wait for Blake and Wordsworth before we hear again echoes of Christ’s wonder at the distinctive qualities of childhood: “Suffer the little children to come unto me … for of such is the Kingdom of God.” St Paul’s message to the early Christians was to put off childish things as irrelevancies in face of the serious tasks of adulthood. The doctrine of original sin also discouraged attention to young children’s “natural” expressions. Our nature is corrupt from the beginning and our natural condition is enmity with God and with our fellow man. The Church and its sacraments provided the means of restoring amity – charity – between oneself and God and between oneself and one’s fellows (Bossy, 1985). St Augustine in The Confessions influentially represented childhood as a time of monstrous egotism, evil temper, violence, and the range of vices: “I am loth, indeed, to count it as part of the life I lead in this world” (St Augustine, 1944, p. 8). In the Christian view, which prevailed through many centuries, childhood was a time of unreason during which adults began the work of controlling the evils and weaknesses of human nature. Childhood was rarely and at best dimly perceived as exemplifying anything of distinctive value.

Childhood, as a subject of concerned attention, fared little better from the Enlightenment. The philosophic insight that concluded Descartes’ search for a bedrock of knowledge was “I think, therefore, I am.” Rational thought was what distinguished humanity, and rational thought emerged slowly through an arduous process of education. The fantasy of childhood was a confusing froth to be blown away from the infancy of mind in order that rationality can begin to be formed. “Only in its promise of humanity – that is, its potential of rationality, its eventual educability – was [childhood] in any way a subject worthy of interest, study, and attention” (Coe, 1984, p. 11).

The most powerful Romantic reaction to this view of childhood might have been expected to draw respectful attention to children’s fantasy. But at the fountainhead of “progressive” educational ideas we find Rousseau quoting Plato with approval. Rousseau’s most startling and influential idea for early childhood education is that the child “should be taught by experience alone” (Rousseau, 1911, p. 56). The ruin of young children is the

apparent ease with which they learn … you fail to see that this very facility proves that they are not learning. Their shining, polished, brain reflects, as in a mirror, the things you show them, but nothing sinks in. The child remembers the words and the ideas are reflected back; his hearers understand them, but to him they are meaningless. (Rousseau, 1911, p. 71)

Early education, as it had been generally conceived by traditionalists, was merely “Words! Words! Words!” The aim for Rousseau is to keep the young child uninfected by knowledge, reading, and words, words, words. These only create confusion which cannot later be completely sorted out. Let the child experience nature and see how it runs. “His ideas, if indeed he has any ideas at all, have neither order nor connection; there is nothing sure, nothing certain, in his thoughts” (Rousseau, 1911, p. 70).

In this context Rousseau considers fairy-tales and fantasy generally as more words which will convey intellectual confusion and moral chaos. Like Plato he objects to fairy-tales, even the very best of them, on moral grounds. Because of their impressionability young children will indeed gather moral messages from fairy tales, but because of their simplicity and lack of experience they “will reverse the order and imitate the villain instead of taking warning from his dupes” (Rousseau, 1911, p. 80). And even worse:

How can people be so blind as to call fables the child’s system of morals, without considering that the child is not only amused by the apologue but misled by it? He is attracted by what is false and he misses the truth. … Men may be taught by fables; children require the naked truth. (Rousseau, 1911, p. 77).

Rousseau then takes his readers through La Fontaine’s “The Fox and the Crow”, showing line by line the confusions and perversions that it would induce in the child’s mind. His point is that most of the tale is utterly meaningless, a part of it is totally confusing, and the remainder perverts the truth of nature which should be the child’s sole mentor. (“So foxes talk, do they!”)

It is hard to take Rousseau’s alarmingly literal readings of La Fontaine seriously. Tied to this is our slowly developing understanding of children’s thinking. Rousseau’s opening observation – “We know nothing of childhood” (Rousseau, 1911, p. 1) – is one that would be even more of an exaggeration today than it was in his day. We do know some things, and they challenge Rousseau’s premise about children’s invincible ignorance or confusion.

I need hardly mention the immense influence of evolutionary ideas in education, and their support for a view of children’s thinking as “primitive” and of interest only in providing methodological guidance for how most effectively to “civilize” it. I have already touched on the early evolutionary recapitulation schemes, and will return to that topic in Chapter Five.

Dewey’s relationship to his self-appointed progressivist followers is a contentious one whose intricacies are not my concern here. But Dewey’s sensitivity to children’s thinking and his sophisticated social philosophy have certainly tended to be debased and perverted in substantial parts of the progressivist tradition. What I want to focus on here are some phrases of Dewey’s that I will take out of context much as they have been taken out of context in progressivism at large. Progressivists’ preoccupations with certain aspects of social initiation allowed them to color Dewey’s words and use them in a more impoverished sense than Dewey intended. The net effect, however, has been that such sentiments of Dewey’s as I shall quote below have also led to a depreciation of fantasy in progressivism. A fundamental principle of Dewey’s educational thinking is expressed in his observation that “It is a cardinal precept of the newer school of education that the beginning of instruction shall be made with the experience learners already have,” and that there should be “orderly development towards expansion and organization of subject matter through growth of experience” (Dewey, 1963, p. 74). “Experience,” however, came to be seen in significant sections of progressivism largely in terms of the everyday practical world of children’s lives. In addition, Dewey’s claim that “The knowledge which comes first to persons, and that remains mostly deeply ingrained, is knowledge of how to do; how to walk, talk, read, write, skate, ride a bicycle, and so on idefinitely” (Dewey, 1966, p. 184) has tended to focus progressivist attention on the mundane and practical world in which children live. What has been lost is the ability to see that world as the child sees it, transfigured by fantasy.

Most adults hardly notice the cracks in a sidewalk or between paving stones. For most children, however, such cracks are fraught with fantastic meaning. Watch a child negotiat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editor’s introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Some Educational Implications of Children’s Fantasy
• 2. The Domestication of the Sauvage Mind
• 3. The Story Form and the Organization of Meaning
• 4. Some Further Characteristics of Mythic Understanding
• 5. Cultural Recapitulation: Some Comments on Theory
• 6. A Curriculum for Primary Education
• 7. A Framework for Primary Teaching
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index