I will always be grateful to my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Burick, for two things. One of these things I appreciated at that time. The other I did not.
What I appreciated at that time was that Mrs. Burick was allergic to gerbils (she probably did not appreciate this fact quite as much). After bringing a pet gerbil to school as our second-grade class pet, she soon developed sinus problems, visited the doctor, and discovered her unique allergy. As a result, she held a lottery with the lucky winner receiving the gerbil (with parental permission, of course). I won my first and only lottery that day (unless one counts the case of motor oil I won as an eighth grader at a 1980 San Antonio Spurs basketball game). I enjoyed and neglected that poor gerbil for the next three years, as only a negligent and playful young boy can do. PEETA would have been aghast (especially at the mazes I created from blocks, which I made it run through).
What I did not appreciate at the time, but what I thank Mrs. Burick for today, is her writing exercises. Each week, she would spread out her collection of old magazine pictures, have us choose a picture, and write a one-paragraph story about the picture. We dreamed up beautiful works of fiction that only second graders could compose. One of the only remaining pieces of the voluminous body of literature that I produced, I recovered from my grandfather’s belongings after he died. Apparently, he was so moved by my words that he kept them till his death. As I recall, I became inspired to write this story after choosing an advertisement for breakfast food cut from a magazine:
I hate being cereal. Everybody wakes me up in the morning. Then they make me fall all the way down into the bowl. Then pour on this milk and gets me all wet, soggy, and mushy (yuck). Then they stab me with a spoon and put me into their mouth and chew me up with their teeth, and then that’s the end of me.
I received a smiley face for ideas.
I am not sure Mrs. Burick would have received a smiley face from two early advocates of American public education, Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann. Dabbling in impractical fiction creates dangerous and damaged minds. At least this seemed to be the sentiment of Thomas Jefferson. In a letter to Nathaniel Burwell, Jefferson suggested that one of the greatest obstacles to the education of women was “the inordinate passion prevalent for novels, and the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed.” He contended, “When this poison infects the mind, it destroys its tone and revolts it against wholesome reading. Reading and fact, plain and unadorned, are rejected. Nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy, and nothing so bedecked comes amiss. The result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real business of life.”[1] I’m sure imaginary stories about cereal would also qualify as having little to do with life’s real business.
Horace Mann, the celebrated founder of the American public school system, demonstrated a similar distaste for fiction and even fairy tales. When choosing books to fill public school libraries, he not only excluded what he considered sectarian religious books, but he also excluded works of fiction in favor of “practical knowledge.” Mann even omitted the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, his future brother-in-law. He wrote, “They are written beautifully…. but we want something nearer to duty & Business.” According to Sybil Eakin, Mann asserted that his three sons should not be read Mother Goose rhymes or the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, because he thought the wonders of science should suffice for his children.”[2] Fortunately, his sister-in-law subverted his preferences and nurtured the boys’ imagination by reading nursery rhymes and tales of giants.
Jefferson and Mann’s sentiments find expression in the fictional character of George Banks, who tells his nanny, Mary Poppins:
I am disturbed to hear my children talking about popping in and out of chalk pavement pictures, … having tea parties on the ceiling, and highly questionable outings of every other kind. If they must go on outings, these outings ought to be fraught with purpose, yes, and practicality. These silly words like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious …and popping through pictures have little use. Fulfill no basic need.[3]
In all these men, one finds a disdain for the imaginary worlds created by or for children in favor of science, reason, and “the real business of life.”
I’m glad Mrs. Burick did not take Jefferson and Mann, two staples of educational foundations, seriously. Mrs. Burick may or may not have been a Christian. I do not know. Yet, I think there is something distinct to Jewish-Christian theological anthropology that should exalt our imaginations and how we use them to create imaginary stories and worlds. For Christian educators, there should be something divine about being, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s words, “a sub-creator” of imaginary stories and worlds, because we are imitating the creative and imaginative God in whose image we are made.[4] Of course, tales about cereal are a far cry from Tolkien’s masterful works of fantasy, but the exercise of a young person’s creative and imaginary powers must start somewhere.
Perhaps even one day, they might also create successful fantasy and so give insight into the story God began. As Tolkien wrote, “The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth… it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.”[5]
Mann and Jefferson likely miss this point because they no longer believed in the Incarnation, that wonderful gleam of light into our darkened world from the Creator. For them, the real, mechanistic world concerned “duty and business” (one senses the dry moral influence of Immanuel Kant in this language). Fortunately, Mrs. Burick knew better the glory of imaginary and impractical stories. She perhaps intuitively knew that children are not simply escaping or learning to write when creating imaginary worlds or reading fantasy, adventure stories, comic books, and general fiction; they are drawing upon desires and developing longings that spring from our created nature and our intuitive awareness of the Creator’s creativity and masterful Story.
[1] Thomas Jefferson, Letters [Electronic Resource] by Thomas Jefferson (Alex Catalogue, 1999), 589.
[2] Sybil Eakin, “Giants of American Education: Horace Mann,” Technos Quarterly, 9, No. 2, (Summer 2000) 4.
[3] Mary Poppins. Directed by Robert Stevenson, performances by Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke (Buena Vista Distribution Company, 1964).
[4] J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1964), 70.
[5] Tolkien, Tree and Leaf.
