Raspberries and Children

The teacher is at one level, an artist, and like the artist, attempts to give order, coherence and necessity to a random set of materials. The teacher helps the child make a composition of his experience. The primary impulse to art is an impulse to give the world an order that it appears to lack, an arbitrary order for the time being and for the perceiver's purposes of understanding. In one sense we are all artists, though we may not think of ourselves as such. Perhaps in the way we have made a garden at home, or planned the strategies of a business transaction, completed a collection of something or other, or arranged a room or our lives. We seek a harmony of parts that will be pleasing to the eye, calming to the spirit and valid to the intellect. Likewise the teacher is a scientist. As an artist is a scientist who understands the necessities of matter and can predict outcomes. Children require the company and example adults who are both scientists and artists. Some such adults are called teachers, but just as often they are called parents. There are times when a good and imaginative teacher or parent will intuit a particular mood or immanency within a child and serve as a midwife to its expression. Perhaps it will be as a result of a child's private researches, or a class's, where random information searches in the child's mind for a metaphor. Perhaps the observation, garnered from the child's observation of bears, butterflies and a baby sister that changing is sometimes a result of taking naps. "There is," Whitehead writes, "a certain ruthless definiteness in teaching." Yes, but the definiteness of the medium, of the teacher's art -- not the definiteness of the textbook that has no soul or will to make sense of things. Only the teacher or the pupil can invent sense. An individual class can be a kind of epiphany, a glimpse of order emerging from random movements and events. A good teacher is an improviser who works within certain ordered conventions and with a repertoire of skills that can range from the competent to the virtuoso. Much in children's lives is bound to be random. Much in school as well. But in the measure that a teacher can elevate particular moments and give to them the compelling order that we call art, she provides for those children a confidence in the possibility of coherence, certainty and meaning -- a confidence that they will be able to make order in their own lives as well. The difference between two childhoods is in one sense the difference in the character and imaginations of the adults who populate those childhoods. Those who have a knack for making sense (which is an art, after all, like making good macaroni and cheese or a painting) will catch a child's imagination and inspire emulation. Not borrowing sense. Not copying sense. Making sense.