Poetry in children's education

bloguerouniversal

· 17 Apr 2022

Poetry in children's education

#Educacin

The child begins his journey through the field of knowledge; he does not do it alone, there is no possibility today for the blank mind, because the stimuli with which he begins his schooling are vast.

It would be redundant to reflect here on the vision of the world that has already conditioned it since its earliest years through the culture of hearing and image; and no less redundant, to point out its dubious content, its simplified — if not subverted — scheme of reality.

Faced with existing and difficult to refute stimuli, we can offer, as another proposal in plurality, an educational path that incorporates poetry, as a vision and celebration of things. That the child should not lack the possibility of listening, too, to what is founded on harmony and points to beauty as a joy of the perfect, as well as going through the other forms of aesthetic relationship with the world, which voluntarily or involuntarily will be presented to him. It is about giving the option of an antidote that introduces a perspective of the world from eternity, and that provides a horizon where beauty and mystery come together in the poet's privileged voice.

Let us offer, then, a staff to travel the world, a world that our children will first inhabit and then refound as men, in contemplation or in action. The staff of poetry as a possible perspective that counterbalances the other paths of noise, ideology or trivial fashion. To reveal to the growing man that, before virtual reality, there is a symbolic reality that he can sense.

One way of evangelizing culture involves reformulating the areas of knowledge, so that they orient towards the gradual perception of a transcendent foundation in the natural order; the pragmatism of content, the exclusivism of methods, are disorienting. What could be the use of the brilliant strategy of transmitting knowledge when the substance to be communicated is empty, ambiguous or insignificant?

Art is an effective instrument for such a reformulation, by directing sensitivity to beauty, intelligence towards truth, creating in the soul of man the nostalgia for an ever greater good, for God himself.

The many difficulties of teaching poetry.

In a society that daily renounces its rationality — and, therefore, its human language — that encourages instinctive simplification, whose aesthetic expressions are a reflection of the power system, and artistic consecration respects the laws of marketing, the emergence of independent ideas is condemned as suspicious; in this context, the simple but traditional poetry is a rare vestige of archaic times and mentalities.

Teaching poetry has been allowed with the magnificent mechanisms of updating, interaction, transversality and virtuality, as reported by the mass media. Today the verb “educate” is replaced by that of “train”, and in order to train, it is natural, we must respond to the urgencies of a present that demands effective responses to the world of work and subjugates with messages of insatiable pleasure. In both cases, oppressions of freedom. Well, it's obvious that poetry is fortunately useless for either of these two mandates.

Poetry, in its most absolute notion, that of “pure poetry”, which is at the basis of every lyrical variant - with its penetrating manifestation of things - has a gift of gratuitousness that is neither interpreted nor exhausted. Let us remember that “pure poetry” is nothing less than word, expression of human intelligibility, and word, as Martín Heidegger says it is “the human abode of being”.

Where do we live perfectly, if not in our words? Where to look for what we are, if not in our language? What a valuable ferment for a child to provide him with a horizon of words!

or the ease of teaching poetry in childhood

Nothing more natural than teaching poetry in childhood; in fact, the child's first relationship with the world can be lyrical: lullabies, cooing, maternal singing in the long hours of the night are filled with small and clear poems, pure rhythm and melody, which seek to convey a harmony necessary for the baby to sleep or serene, in everything case, is in line with the world.

In the first years, coexistence with beauty — the substance of poetry — will allow the child to glimpse an order in things, a harmony in reality, which will be conducive to the intuition of a higher order.

Poetry for the child should not be theoretical, abstruse, or hyper-symbolic; it must arise from one thing, from anything simple that he recognizes and from there, grow towards its connection with the whole order of reality. Great poets know that there are no trivial things-words, that everything can be poetic. In the “can be” we need, precisely, the superior action of the good artist.

Only the true poet can make this transition between the material object — as an excuse for poetic experience — and that new creature of expression, which is the poem.