When my son, Dan, was about three years old, we were sitting in my big recliner, watching "Thomas and the Magic Railroad," for about the 209th time, and he asked me, as James, the Red Engine, was being pused towards almost certain doom by the evil Diesel engine (whose Christian name escapes me):
"Will James be OK?"
"Yes, Dan," I replied. "James will be fine."
We kept watching, and Dan kept asking questions about upcoming plot issues. Will this-and-such happen? Will they find the gold-dust? Will the giant rats feast on the living brains of the graduate students (that may be from a different Thomas the Tank Engine movie… they all run together in my head)?
The point being… he kept asking questions about a movie we’d watched together many, many times.
Finally, I asked him, "Dan. We’ve seen this movie before. Do you understand that it will be the same every time?"
"Oh," he replied. "No. I didn’t know that. OK."
"He’s never asked me questions like that again about movies he’s seen before."
It was an absolutely explosive moment for me as a father, and as someone who thinks about thinking and learning and creating.
Why should a child — new to the world, and new to our very fast-paced, media rich world — have any idea that a movie will be the same every time? We, of course, as adults understand this implicitly. But a child’s world is different everyday. And not in the same way that our days are different — they discover the world every day; we just experience it.
So until we learn that a movie — or a book or any recorded media — proceeds along the same line each time, we have no way of establishing that this is, in fact, the case. It makes no more sense to assume a thing is one way as opposed to another.
The Buddha called this state of being, "The Beginners Mind."
The Beginners Mind is incredibly important to the creative experience. Why? Because it is, essentially, the blank canvas. Assumptions are deadly to creativity, both in one’s private, personal art, and in the art of business, marketing, commerce, etc.
My son, Dan, is now in Kindergarten. And he’s having a grand time of it. We were afraid, at first, that he wouldn’t. He goes hot-and-cold on structured learning activities. He loves picking stuff up on his own, and, if he becomes comfortable with a teacher or group of other kids… goes gangbusters. But if something makes him uncomfortable, he can really zwang off into a corner (both emotionally and physically) and avoid participation. But his teacher and class — a public-school in Columbus, OH — are doing a great job at providing what I might call "non-threatening structure." Which is, frankly, what the Kindergarten model has been about for quite some time.
Kindergarten was invented around 200 years ago by a young German academic named Friedrich Fröbel (good article about Fröbel at Boxes and Arrows). Before that time, it was generally assumed that kids younger than seven were unable to think and learn in a fashion appropriate for schooling. They were, from an educational standpoint, ignored.
Frightening, eh? We know, now, after two centuries of developmental psychology and physiological study, that children’s minds are most active and open to learning during their first five to eight years. So, ignoring them until they are seven or so, is not only a bad idea, it is, in fact, totally wrong-headed and counter-productive from a cost-benefit standpoint. It is, frankly, the absolute worst thing you can do.
But it took Fröbel to figure out that it wasn’t kids who couldn’t learn, but school — the old-style school for older kids — that couldn’t teach. He needed to apply the Beginner’s Mind to the subject of the mind itself.
How meta is that?
What assumptions are you making in your creative life? Who are you continually correcting or challenging, when, really, you may simply be seeing things from very different perspectives? What basic views do you have that need to be examined at a root level so that you can wipe your creative canvas clean and reinvent your process?
If you don’t start fresh once in awhile, you may be losing out on major opportunities.
Ah yes, I agree we should not ignore education from birth – but ‘education’ is a broad term and I hate that most mothers now HAVE to enlist their children in child care places because of the economic need to work. A choice would be nice. Personally, I believe a lot of what we learn takes away the creativity – as you state clearly with “The Beginners Mind is incredibly important to the creative experience. Why? Because it is, essentially, the blank canvas. Assumptions are deadly to creativity, both in one’s private, personal art, and in the art of business, marketing, commerce, etc.”…
I believe I may have strived for a beginner’s mind but was told I wasn’t paying attention in class!LOL Actually, there is some fact in the humour. I resented art class where they told me to draw how they said it should be but loved English where they gave me free rein to do as I would with the words.
With my own daughter, I never pushed too hard with education as I feared it treading all over her nature. She speaks three languages fluently that she ‘picked up’ on our travels and is a natural drama queen (handy for her current college course in performing arts). But very little of her intellect came from school – she attended 15 different schools due to the fickle nature of her mother who was chasing a living anywhere she could get it! I think she is amazing, articulate and destined for a happy life and didn’t need a moment of bullying into class to get it.
Your son will have such a head start with you as a daddy Andy, your ideas are the aspirations I didn’t know I had. Namaste
Tina — Your daughter has had an exceptional childhood. Which is great; both for her and for you. The challenge, from a societal and educational standpoint, is how to distill some of those exceptions into programs that will yield good creative results across a broad spectrum. Although I applaud (and, many days, envy) the lifestyle you two lived, it would be impossible for most of us.
I grew up in an almost 180-degree opposite, totally “normal,” suburban, middle-class environment. I went to a good (but not exceptional) public school, attended a very good college, married my high-school sweetheart, etc. My parents are still married. I work in marketing. My socks match. I do not stand out in a crowd at all. I am, on the surface, almost the ultimate bourgeois, middle-class dopus.
Does that make it impossible for me to create art or poetry? To comment on creativity? I hope not… Or else I’m being quite the fraud.
And, if that’s the case, maybe “fraud” counts as an art, and I’m an artist after all. Fraud certainly requires craft…
Anyway… my point is simply that creativity, as you point out, tends to get “bullied” out of us in many institutional environments — but I think that’s because we have, as a society, many incorrect and unhealthy prejudices against creativity. We think of it as predominantly a destructive force, because we associate it with artistic creativity, which is often associated with artists, who are often self-destructive or who choose to live outside the “lines” of general society. And so, rather than saying, “What can we make of this?” we say, “Let’s throw it out.”
T.S. Eliot was a bank clert during the day. On his breaks and in the evenings, he wrote some of the greatest poetry ever (IMHO). Einstein worked in a patent office. We all have day jobs (most of us, anyways). There’s this idea, and I think it’s erroneous, that “creativity” lives somewhere up in the clouds, above the mundane, daily world. That it reaches out and smacks “special” artistic people and leaves salesmen, mothers, kindergarten teachers, ice-cream salesmen, congress people, plumbers, etc. alone. Hogwash, I say.
We just need more ways of bringing the muse back into the kitchen, basement, Oval Office… wherever. More flux. Less judgement.
Total agreement, creativity is in the person not the circumstance. I do feel I missed out (and my daughter by proxy) in not having at our fingetips, the knowledge of facts and history that a steady education brings. I do feel that my biased (though not intentionally) way with my daughter will hinder certain aspects of her life. Life throws its circumstances and we simply have to adapt – a more stable life would have been lovely and ‘our way’ has not been easy or chosen – just a series of knee jerk reactions I think. As to you being “the ultimate bourgeois, middle-class dopus.”…clearly this is an aspect not apparent in our dealings with eachother through poetry. I love that revelation – that we can share so much in our passion and yet have taken such different roads. Somewhere in there is a ‘fact of poetry’ but I can’t word it.
As always, a pleasure to spend time in the ether with you. Namaste Tina x
Un-knowing should be followed by un-schooling. Here is the dialogue with my son’s school officials and teachers back when he in the third grade “Challenge” (i.e. Gifted) program.
scene: a conference table with two teachers, one school administrator, and me.
Teacher: Max is one of the brightest children in our class, always knows more than the others, works hard, nice kid.
Me: So?
Teacher: His handwriting is not good.
Me: I don’t care.
Administrator: But he’ll fail his county-wide exams in March.
Me: I don’t care.
Teacher: But that’s how WE’RE evaluated!
Me: Oh, so this is about YOU.
I pulled him out of school the next day. It’s five years later and he hasn’t been back. And, (insert here a long list of my child’s brilliant accomplishments and qualities).
The 9-year-old son of a woman I work with was recently berated for poor handwriting at school. When called in for a conference with the teacher and her son, my friend (let’s call her Ms. W), asked her son, “What’s the problem with your handwriting?” He replied, “I can type 50 words a minute. Why do I need to write well?” She told him that he needed to learn to write legibly in order to be able to take notes in situations where he might not have access to a computer, and for other situations like that. He agreed that that might be important. But that for papers and reports, it seemed pointless. She agreed, but said he needed to work on it. He agreed, and she thought the matter settled.
Until his teacher reported that his next paper, very well hand-lettered, turned out not to have been hand-lettered by him. He had typed it out on his computer, but then paid another child 50-cents to copy it out long-hand. When confronted, he confessed, saying (I’m not making this up), that he had simply “outsourced” the handwriting part of the job.
I want that kid working for me.
But not that teacher.
Love that story! Did you read about the guy in Silicon Valley who outsourced his job to some guy in India for one fifth of his salary?
Great tales that give support – especially as my family tell me I don’t take education seriously enough. I don’t take school seriously enough is probably more accurate – I take learning and observation very seriously and have never been known to give a simple answer when a complete one is available!! Namaste