Six Years to Lie Fallow
In this accelerated and competitive world, parents are eager to see their child excelling academically from a very young age. They choke their children’s hours with educational toys, educational television, educational computer programs, and early schooling. More and more are we encroaching upon the precious years a child has simply to experience and make personal, meaningful connections with the world in which he lives: his family, his community, and the local nature. Sooner and sooner we are pressing him into the world of symbols and dry facts.
There is no sort of knowledge to be got in these years so valuable to children as that which they get for themselves of the world they live in. C.M. [emphasis mine]
Educator Charlotte Mason recommended delaying lessons (not learning) until the age of six. “Let the child lie fallow,” she expressed it in her volume on early education. I found the agricultural reference interesting, and was reminded of this passage from Rachel Carson’s essay “The Sense of Wonder”—
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. It is more important to pave the way for a child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.
Grown-ups need to time to lie fallow, too. Read my post “Sit Down Quietly.”
Photographs: Second Brother is growing a pine tree on our windowsill.
Friday, March 2, 2012