4
IMAGINATION
Matters of child-education became really interesting to me for the first time that winter. There were certain unfoldings of the little daughter in our house, and I was associating a good deal with a group of teachers in town, some of whom while still professionally caught in the rigid forms of modern education, were decades ahead in realisation. I recall especially a talk with one of my old teachers, a woman who had taught thirty years, given herself freely to three generations—her own and mine and to another since then. She had administered to me a thing called rhetoric in another age, and she looked just the same, having kept her mind wide open to new and challenging matters of literature and life and religious thought.
I had the pleasant sense in this talk of bringing my doubts and ideas to her tentatively, much as I used to bring an essay in school days. She still retained a vivid impression of my faults, but the very finest human relationships are established upon the knowledge of one's weaknesses—as the Master established His church upon the weakest link of the discipleship. Speaking of the children, I observed:
"I find them ready, when they ask. In the old occult schools there is a saying that the teacher will always come half-way, but that the student must also come half-way——"
"It is soil and seed in everything," the woman said. "In all life, it is so. There must be a giving, but also a receiving. I talk to five classes a day—twenty-five to fifty students each—but so much falls upon stony ground, among tares, so much is snapped up by the birds——"
"When a child asks a question, he is prepared to receive," I repeated. "If the answer is true and well-designed, it will stay. The question itself proves that the soil is somehow ready——"
"Yes," she said, "but one cannot sit at a desk and wait for questions. The teacher in dealing with numbers must not only plant the seed, but prepare the soil, too."
"I should say that the way to do that would be to quicken the imagination—to challenge the imagination," I suggested. "I know it has to be done in writing a story. One has to pick up the reader and carry him away at first. And most readers are limp or logy in the midst of abundance."
The teacher bowed gravely. Apparently she had come to listen.