Desire and the source of learning

Desire, like the atom, is explosive with creative force.
Author: Paul Vernon Buser

Meet our ocean alien -- a little bitty creature, smaller than a dime, looks remarkably like a carbon atom. We saw this bitty beast while exploring the coast of western washington. My sons called it an 'alien' but truly, given the importance of carbon to our world (we are, after all, carbon based life forms), this creature is perhaps less 'alien' than we might think.  Nature is amazingly conservative at times.

 

Now I have been thinking about creativity, atoms and the power of desire -- this last element is crucial, after all, to the learning process. Someone with no desire to learn something most often won't... or will learn something unintended by the teacher.  I was reminded of that while reading the book, Soft-Spoken Parenting: 50 Ways to Not Lose Your Temper With Your Kids. There are those who will not look at the book (the book is aimed at a Mormon audience) but I have and I will say, many of the suggestions are very sensible. Amongst them is the comment that yelling and punishing do not teach a child about the topic at hand but rather that adults yell and punish. How one person views an event is rarely the way someone else does. Ever read the The Complete Father Brown Stories (Wordsworth Classics) (Wordsworth Collection) ? G.K. Chesterton, who writes very well, makes this point repeatedly: every person, every individual sees and experiences life differently. A group of people may be present at the same event but what they see and what they remember will be very different. In  the Soft-Spoken Parenting: 50 Ways to Not Lose Your Temper With Your Kids, the author emphasizes learning what it is that the child believed to be the truth BEFORE making a decision about appropriate responses.  Moreover, the author acknowledges that anger and frustration are a normal experience in parenting -- but he points out that just because feelings are common, that does not mean that responses that flow from those feelings are necessarily right or acceptable. The author offers a host of quite useful suggestions as to how one can handle difficult situations appropriately... and how to teach the lessons that you want to teach, rather than teaching something else entirely.

 

But more important than the teacher is the student: the source of the desire. If there is a desire to learn, the student will learn. If that desire is lacking, so shall the learning be. My eldest taught himself to read, more or less, because he wanted to know what happened in a particular book. His fascination for the story -- though by some standards 'twaddle' led him into another world and he has never looked back. Now my youngest wants to learn to read -- truth to tell, he already knows a great deal. He recognizes many words and has been known to correct me if I misread or miss entirely a word in the text. So... how to teach him? From watching him, I see that he has a passion for writing and for patterns. That seems to me to be the road to follow. We are going to use a program called 'Spell to Write and Read'. (Spell to Write and Read) this fall.  I am actually looking forward to trying out this curriculum but then  I have always loved to create patterns and, in some sense, that is all that writing really is.

 

So if learning comes easiest when there is a desire to learn, how does one deal with those 'lessons' that are of no interest? T.S. Eliot once wrote: "No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest. For it is part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude." Thomas Jefferson agreed with him yet I think that they both missed something. In the early stages of education, it is the passion to learn that must be encouraged. Learning to study that which is of less interest comes best and most completely when one has learned the discipline of study through the desire to study. Once that desire has been burned deep into the bones of our soul, then the understanding and willingness to pursue less interesting topics is much easier. Discipline is best sowed where Desire has readied the soil. [I think I am reading TOO much!]