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When I began to write this short essay on wonder and childhood, I think I imagined a homily to  the childlike sense of wonder and an indictment of the forces of the adult world that stifle wonder and regiment thinking and behavior. And in some ways that is what I came up with, but the whole picture is messier and more complicated than that. Wonder is fragile. It comes and goes in fits and starts and is not wholly the province of child or adult but is rather a gift to whomever can remain open to the world. In this vein, I argue that the best a teacher/grownup can do is to to make space and time for wonder to appear by modeling and encouraging curiosity in the presence of  “great and elemental things.” 

Rachel Carson in the Sense of Wonder talks about taking her 20 month old grand-nephew down to the edge of the sea at night to search for ghost crabs. “It was clearly a time and place where great and elemental things prevailed.” She notes that “it was hardly a conventional way to entertain one so young, I suppose, but now with Roger a little past his fourth birthday we are continuing that sharing of adventures in the world of nature that we began  in his babyhood, and I think the results are good. The sharing includes nature in storm as well as calm, by night as well as day, and is based on having fun together rather than teaching.” Let’s get outdoors, outside in nature, whatever “wild” places we have access to, whether we live in the city or the country, a big back yard or an empty lot, and have some fun adventures! 

Let’s also stick close to Rachel Carson as she teaches us how to encourage wonder and curiosity in  young children.  She says she makes no “conscious effort to name plants or animals, nor to explain to him,” but rather just express[es] “my own pleasure in what we see, calling his attention to this or that.” That being said she obviously has a great knowledge of the flora and fauna at hand. But  she shares this knowledge casually as if to  a friend,  rather than pedantically as if to a student.  It’s good to remember her overall point that it is more important to experience nature together and have fun, rather than feel compelled to name and explain everything. Pleasure through a common experience is the medium in which children learn best about the natural world and connect with it in an embodied and compelling manner.

Carson makes the point that adults have to forgo convenience  and a fussy form of cleanliness, if they really want to experience the wonder, magic and grandeur of nature with children. “We have let Roger share our enjoyment of things people ordinarily deny children because they are inconvenient, interfering with bedtime, or involving wet clothing that has to be changed or mud that has to be cleaned off the rug.” This is not an obstacle to be sneered at. Adults and teachers are creatures of habit, comfort and convenience, and are often more put out by physical discomfort and perceived inconvenience than children are. To love the earth we have to love the dirt. We have to shift deeply engrained priorities, routinized time and a sterile aesthetic and ethic of order, so that children can see the sunrise, play in the mud, be outside for long chunks of time, and stay up past their bedtime to see salamanders make their way to a vernal pool.

Children are intimately close to the physical apperception and appreciation of the world. Start with the senses. Carson points out that a rainy day is often the best time to take a walk in the woods because they “never seem as fresh and alive as in wet weather.” Commenting on her love of lichens “because they have a quality of a fairyland—silver rings on a stone, odd little forms like bones or horns or the shell of sea creature,” she was happy to see “Roger noticing and responding to the magic change in their appearance wrought by rain…. Roger delighted in its texture, getting down on his chubby knees to feel it, and running from one patch to another to jump up and down in the deep, resilient carpet with squeals of pleasure.” Rudolf Steiner’s four foundational senses– touch, a physical/psychological sense of well-being, movement/proprioception, and balance are all very relevant here to how a child navigates the natural world in a  happy, healthy curious way.

The most oft quoted passage in the The Sense of Wonder deserves to be read, taken in, savored and read again and acted upon.

“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune  that for most  of us that clear eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence  with the  good fairy that is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world  be a sense of wonder so indestructible  that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment  of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation  from the sources of our strength.”

Carson affirms the Romantic affirmation of the child’s goodness, freshness, newness, and beauty. She acknowledges how children as they learn about themselves and the natural for the “first time” have a way of looking at and taking in the world that is full of wonder and excitement ( see Wordsworth’s Prelude or any child learning to walk, tasting something delightful, meeting up with a chicken, or splashing around at the edge of a river). But she also invokes an almost inevitable dimming, if not total loss, of this instinctive affirmation of life, that requires us to re-find this gift and reawaken to the wonders of the world.

So “if a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering  with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.” What I take from this is that while young children may well communicate with fairies, if for whatever reason this communication becomes blocked, adults need to take the lead in sharing and rediscovering “the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.” Carson is well aware that many parents and teachers will feel inadequate to this task, so she reorients us to what is fundamental in introducing, exploring and celebrating the natural world with children.

“I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused—a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love—then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found it has lasting meaning.”

Carson says to the parent or teacher who feels like they have little nature lore to offer, simply look at the sky, listen to the wind, feel the rain, observe and ponder the mysteries of the natural world from the migrations of birds to the sprouting of a seed. “Exploring nature with your child is largely a matter of becoming receptive to what lies all around you. It is learning again to use your eyes,  ears, nostrils and finger tips , opening up the disused channels of sensory reception.” She offers up a powerful thought experiment. “One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, ”What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?” Try out this experiment and see how it changes the way you look at the world!

She urges us to look at both the vast expanses of space, the brilliant concatenations of the stars, “the misty river of the Milky Way  flowing across the sky, and the world of little things, seen all too seldom” of which “many children, perhaps because they themselves are small and closer to the ground than we, notice and delight in.” So get down on your hands and knees, get some magnifying glasses and look carefully and closely at the forest unseen. Children, having not yet found their place in the world, can travel with Gulliver, one moment being Gulliver towering over the Lilliputians, and at the next, scampering mischievously among the Brobdingnagian giants. Lie back in the grass and play games with the passing clouds, turn over a log and see what you can find. Run to the top of a hill and pretend that you are a bird flying high above the earth, and gather fern fronds and acorns and make a fairy house. Look to the stars and the starfish. This is what it is like exploring the natural world with children. Our sense of scale is constantly being upended, the relationship between the known and the unknown is in a perpetual state of revision, and the possibility to look again at world as if for the first time presents itself again and again. 

Carson ends what she called her most important book with a question. “What is the value of preserving and strengthening this sense of awe and wonder, this sense of something beyond the boundaries of human existence.” And her answer affirms the value of cultivating deep, intimate connections with the natural world and nurturing the child’s innate sense of wonder, curiosity and awe at the beauty of the natural world.

“Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and the mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. . .whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is a symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.”

This admixture of symbolic and actual beauty, revealed by curiosity and wonder, seems to be the food  that fuels the reserves of strength and excitement that leads to inner contentment and a resolute affirmation of life.

In Richard Lewis’s exploration of the imaginative life of childhood, “Living By Wonder,” he situates the child in between a sensory apprehension of the world and the ability to articulate the language of things and beings that make up this world.

“We are animals of instinctive sensory abilities before we become speaking word articulating creatures. It is through seeing and touching that access arises through a language of feeling which rivets the attention on what things are. As children we do not know the names of things, but their shapes, textures, and smells. Their sensory relation to us is a language. It allows us to converse with the immediate world, and through our eyes, fingers, mouth, and nose, we accumulate a wordless vocabulary of where we are.” Like Carson, Lewis sees children as sensual beings first who in their curiosity and wonder seek to communicate with the natural world.

“Our mythic tradition is based on the human ability to bring alive the languages existing in creatures, plants, moons, suns and stars—-any and all things outside of ourselves.”

He hones in on the child’s “desire to question, to separate the layers of reality into smaller and larger entities,” as “the beginning of a poetic understanding. By poetic understanding I do not mean our interest in the craft of poetry. I mean more generally, that understanding which—from curiosity, wonder and our questions— created a bridge to the unknown , those outer and inner elements of our existence which we cannot and will never be able to fully comprehend.”

Curiosity, wonder and our questions create a bridge between experience, reality and “a growing consciousness of being alive.”

“In our grasshopper and salamander days, who among us didn’t ask why the grasshopper jumped so far and why the salamander had black dots on its orange body?… We slept, only to wake with the strange sense of how could we be awake  when we had only just been sleeping? In those days we knew as much as we had to know in order to ask what we didn’t know. Our ignorance  wasn’t just innocence, but the foundation  from which we offered ourselves the daily surprise  of discovering  another question, another way to uncover something mysterious , something  we hadn’t understood yesterday. We lived by wonder, for by wondering  we are able to multiply  a growing consciousness of being alive.”

Lewis quotes Edith Cobb where she writes, “[t]he ability to maintain plasticity of perception and thought is the gift of childhood to human personality.”

This plasticity of perception and thought encapsulates our ability to learn and to grow. The child’s gift to us is his or her immaturity, her openness to the world, her willingness to question, be curious about and wonder with the world. Our gift  is to stay the course with the child, to bring a steady stamina and attentiveness to the child’s kaleidoscopic curiosity, to never give up on our own innate sense of wide eyed wonder,  and be willing to grow and learn alongside our children.

Lewis ends his book with a quote from Lao Tzu, “From wonder into wonder existence opens.”

Let us open ourselves up to existence and the earth. Let us re-enchant the world. Let us find the fairies in the forests, in the rivers, in the city parks, in the tide pools and the the stars. Let us forsake the bubble world of convenience and comfort for the wide open world of wonder and the imagination. Let us re-connect with the elements: the water, the air, fire and earth; and find new, sustainable ways of living with the plants and animals with which we share the planet. Let’s make curiosity our byword for teaching and learning, go outside the comfortable confines of what we think we know, and learn how to wake up with a sense of responsibility and joyful possibility for what each day might bring. 

Resources

Rachel Carson, “The Sense of Wonder: A Celebration of Nature for Parents and Children”

Richard Lewis, ” Living by Wonder: The Imaginative Life of Childhood”

Tips for tapping into a child’s innate sense of curiosity and wonder

http://www.easternflorida.edu/community-resources/child-development-centers/parent-resource-library/documents/curiosity-and-wonder.pdf

Find more resources for cultivating a sense of wonder and curiosity in children on the Resources Page