We all desire to educate children to be creative, critical thinkers. Educational approaches differ in how best to accomplish this task, but humans have thousands of years of experience to guide us toward what really works. And the answer is clear: creativity, imagination and critical thinking start with memory and experience.
At the Grammar level, a classical school provides students with the framework and information about what is so that then they can, as they mature, imagine what can be. Creativity does not come out of a vacuum, and a child throwing random words or paint on a page is not necessarily creative. Rather, if we understand truth, goodness and beauty as something that can be described and defined, the randomness is not creativity.
“…a developed memory is a wondrous and terrible storehouse of things seen and heard and done. It can do what no mere search engine on the internet can do. It can call up apparently unrelated things at once, molding them into a whole impression, or a new thought. Without the library of the memory…the imagination simply does not have much to think about, or to play with.” --Anthony Esolen
Think about a group of children playing a game outside. Almost all children will tell you that the best games are the ones they make up themselves. The game that they will create, independent of adults, will have their favorite elements from all the games they already know: chasing, tagging, or hiding. The more games they have played before, the more ideas they have for creating new games. Or consider children playing pretend. You will see the elements of all the stories they have ever heard blended together in a way that is unique. Children who have been exposed to the greatest stories, and lots of them, will have the most imaginative play.
We have been made in the image of the great Creator; therefore, we are made with an intrinsic need to create, too. I enjoy doing illustrations, painting, and textile work. I gather ideas from multiple sources, and then put them together in a way I haven’t seen before. Sometimes I revert back to copying another artist’s style for a little while until I understand it (grammar level), then as I feel comfortable with it, I blend it in with additional styles to make it new (rhetoric). This applies to all creative work, whether it is writing, cooking, building things, speaking, solving problems, or coming up with new ideas. We don’t make new things out of nothing—the new comes from the old, reimagined.
So tell your children stories, read them books, give them experiences, and feed their memories. Then watch them use that raw material to fashion something surprising.
Jennifer Cable
Elementary Principal