"There can be no substitute for work, neither affection nor physical well-being can replace it."
Dr. Maria Montessori

Thursday, October 17, 2013

I wonder...


Wondering is about entertaining and exploring possibilities.

It is about hope and faith. It can also be about questioning and doubt . . . wondering why things are the way they are.

We invite good things to make an appearance. We expect that dreams can make life better. We refuse to settle for less.

“Hold fast to dreams,” warned Langston Hughes, “for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.”

Our sense of wonder - if alive and well - applauds each marvel, each grace, each surprise. We appreciate the extraordinary, the novel and the unique. We hunger for the good, work for the better and hope that the hohumdrum pressures and banalities of life will be supplanted by something more magical. We dream that we can transcend the mundane, that we can escape oblivion, boredom and a life without consequence.

If we are capable of wondering, our mind takes flight and dares to dream. Wondering infuses our questioning and our thinking with a spiritual aspect. Children learn that life can be much more than another brick in the wall.

Much of my own thinking about wonder was inspired by reading Rachel Carson’s The Sense of Wonder, first published by Harper & Row in 1965. As an elementary principal spending lots of time wondering about the dreaming, thinking and questioning of very young children, I found that certain passages resonated intensely with my own impressions and thoughts.
If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later life, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength. 

The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused - a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love - then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response.

Once found it has lasting meaning.

It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.
If young ones can maintain a sense of wonder as they pass through early childhood into adolescence and early adulthood, that inclination may inspire much of their questioning. As they yearn to understand and make the best of life, a sense of wonder tilts their thinking forward. They grow bolder and stronger in their questioning, testing the edges and boundaries of conventional reasoning, pushing into new territory, demanding fresh truths and answers. They will not see school as a time to memorize time honored answers to multiple choice questions. They will refuse to participate in the “one more brick in the wall” rituals.

By Jamie McKenzie