EDUCATION
Wonderful world of children
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Children and their aesthetic life are crucial to the full realisation of our human potential. DIPTIRANJAN PATTANAIK
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THIS book not only contributes a new perception of the world of children, but also phrases that perception in a refreshingly vivid way. The anecdotal style serves the purpose of Prof. Spitz’s work well, which is the aesthetic education of child
ren. To be aesthetic for Spitz means to embark on a programme of sensory intensification. It is to expand the realm of “feeling, sensing, perceiving and imagining”.
In several anecdotes involving children from various cultural backgrounds, Prof. Spitz demonstrates how the aesthetic and imaginative realm of children can be nourished. These anecdotes may deal with quite mundane circumstances, but with a child-centric awareness and an “attentive listening to the world”. They could be transformed into extraordinary educative encounters.
Transformative exercise
This transformative exercise, asserts Spitz, might not only be beneficial for the child but also offer the adult the opportunity to be an alert and creative parent or educator.
The book’s experientialist stance should not, of course, lead the reader to cast aspersions on its scholarship. These anecdotes are frequently interspersed with a reflective distancing, which is the precondition of theoretical analysis. There is a definite point of view, which informs this reflectiveness; there is a sincere effort to make sense of the wide variety of experiences life with children offers coupled with enough scholarly allusions and citations, which is characteristic of well-researched studies. What it meticulously refrains from is a top-down view postulating a final truth about aesthetic education of children.
Overarching theorising, has been jettisoned here for a more diverse and polyphonic response — hence the book’s anecdotality — to child rearing and aesthetic education of children.
Thus, lack of intellectual capital is not one of its weaknesses. On the contrary, the attempt to soften and mellow it enough for its easy absorption among a wider and less technically qualified readership must be rated as its major strength.
Organic view
The book is extremely important for Indian readers: it militates against the dominant view of child-rearing practices prevalent in India, which sees adult-child relationship in a hierarchical manner.
It substitutes such an instrumental view with a more organic view of human life, the kind that W.B. Yeats visualised in “Among School Children” and to which the title alludes.
In such a view we never really outgrow the phase of childhood; rather the child in us continues to shape us throughout our lives.
This book, like Yeats’s poem, aims to nurture such a double-vision. It sets out to quicken in our children a more opulent aesthetic life even as it invites us adults to relive our own childhood.
Childhood is not a preparatory phase for induction into the market-driven economy and, as such, is too serious to be left in the hands of academic experts only. Children and their aesthetic life, Professor Spitz has eloquently demonstrated, are crucial to the fuller realisation of our human potential.
The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood; Ellen Handler Spitz, Pantheon
Books, $25.
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