Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher who also wrote frequently and eloquently about education. He was a contemporary of Maria Montessori (though I’ve yet to find any record of them actually meeting) and it’s instructive to examine how their thoughts on pedagogy overlap. Whitehead saw the learning process as having three components, which he labeled romance, precision, and generalization. In the romance stage, the child is first presented with a new concept and enjoys the emotion of discovery. According to Whitehead, the child is “becoming used to curious thoughts, of shaping questions, of seeking for answers, of devising new experiences, and of noticing what happens as the result of new ventures.” Picture a child’s first experience at a beach strewn with shells of various shapes, sizes, texture, and color. They are given to the visceral excitement of the moment as they explore the myriad of what is before them. If this energy is acknowledged and supported, Whitehead asserts that a second desire will arise, one that craves deeper, more precise information, to answer the very questions that the stage of romance engendered. The child, home from the beach, gets out shell identification books and the “S” encyclopedia (Googles it?) and excitedly learns the types, biology, and nomenclature of shellfish. Whitehead made a point of noting that traditional education puts an emphasis just on this second stage of precision; the facts, the specifics, the right and wrong. But without the more general, the broader view that comes from the romance stage, he argued, the facts are barren and nebulous, unattached to any larger context, and quickly forgotten. The third stage of the learning process, is that of generalization and synthesis. It is a stage that leads the child further, allowing the integration of this new-found information into creative ideation and a cogent “whole”. It also, quite elegantly, leads the child back to the first stage of romance, of discovery, but with the addition of this gained wealth of knowledge. Subsequent excursions to the beach equal the excited discovery of the first trip, but the experience is now imbued with a greater sense of wisdom, as the specific is now seamlessly integrated with the whole.
Tag: books
fast-forward, please
Dad – I’m making a little baby box about Lyra’s birthday with some of her hospital stuff. I wanna include a paragraph from you about remembering when she was born or when you first met her. Skip the trauma part.
There’s a picture of a baby on the kitchen windowsill at my daughter’s house. It’s small and round and cropped in an outline of Lyra’s six-month-old face. Her eyes are scrunched closed. The photograph itself is attached to a popsicle stick, and this allows it to stand in a clay pot, sharing space with an aloe plant. It is just one of a couple dozen shots of Lyra, spanning her first year of life, still to be found, now over two years later, in odd spaces around their house. Lyra looking surprised, Lyra mid-laugh, Lyra in sunglasses. Lyra with a small teddy-bear bandage holding tiny oxygen tubes as small as new stems of grass, onto her blush cheek. There are no photos of the feeding tube, none showing the nickel-sized electrodes dominating her small chest, none taken at the NICU.
All of those photos, all of those Lyra-adorned cupcakes, had once been frosted and laid out on a fold-up table along with the other party food, the pizza and cookies and cake. The birthday cake had a single candle that day, marking a year, a tally of emotions that come with a first child, for Amarinda and Brendan, and a first grandchild for Sandi and me. Gathered that bright and lush September Saturday in Maine, which was bravely holding onto the last of that summer’s warmth, were Lyra’s uncles and aunts, cousins and friends, all there to celebrate an infant turned one. She sat on a dozen different laps, sampled most of the food, and was generally unaware of the fuss and festivities unfurling around her. Every first birthday party is for the adults after all, to see each other, to catch up, the how’s the new job and I can’t believe he’s almost a teenager conversations, and the common question of, “can it already have been a year since Lyra was born?” And if there were thoughts of a year prior, when she arrived eight weeks ahead of expectation, well, those past emotions had healed and changed and grown right along with her.
If we had known, those first fraught hours and days of her life, that in twelve short months we’d be eating Lyra-cupcakes and helping her open the many birthday presents she received from us, her devoted legion, it would’ve been less scary. We could collectively have said, “Oh, THAT’s how this works out.” But life doesn’t work that way, does it. The Buddhists tell us to stay in the moment. To be mindful and dwell in the present. Be now. But in some cases, being able to glimpse just a whisper ahead, would be good for the soul.
Dedicated to Flor, who says I shouldn’t just write about Montessori.
