The Age of Reason

The elementary children have now reached the age where they can reason.  They are able to distinguish between fact and fantasy.  The children can make use of their imaginations to help them explore things long ago - things that are beyond the senses.  They can also see into the future.  Imagination is the ability to picture material things in their absence.  All it needs is previous experience.  Experiences gathered in the primary years provide a foundation for continuing development and understanding that happens in the elementary years.  Children can imagine a tropical rain forest even though they have never visited one.  They can do this because they know that forests are made of trees in a particular formation and because they have seen trees.  If they had never seen trees before, it would be hard to imagine a tropical forest.  This imaginative faculty helping the intellect is the type of mind human beings possess.

Imagination has three possibilities - it can gather images, apply these in reality and it can make inventions.  We have to remember that the elementary age child has an immense capacity and a creative force urging him to work.  It gives the child the powers of possibility for his own creative use.  We can see this in our elementary children only if they are given freedom because the imagination requires freedom to encounter those things that appeal to it.  It is the way that art, science and inventions have come about through the ages. 

Jacob Bronowski in the book The Ascent of Man says, "There are many gifts that are unique in man, but at the center of them all, the root from which all knowledge grows, lies the ability to draw conclusions from what we see to what we do not see, to move our minds in time and space."

-Mrs. Stone

Millipede Teacher