LINGUISTIC INTELLIGENCE

At the age of 10, T.S. Eliot created a Magazine called “Fireside. He was the sole contributor, and during three days of winter vacation, created 8 entire issues. Each contained poetry, adventure stories, a gossip column and humor. 

Howard Gardner writes that the gift of language is universal and its development among children is strikingly constant across cultures. Even deaf children invent their own sign language and use it surreptitiously.

My own work with children has convinced me that we hardly understand the surpassing play of intelligence that governs children’s ability to learn language. More than once a three year old who could not speak English upon arrival, became fluent with no special instruction within three months of playing with English speaking children.

The father of Whole Language, Don Holdaway asserts that another aspect of linguistic development, learning to read, draws on these very same processes. If our society would only break free of it’s fear-based rigidity that dictates a child must have such and such skills at such and such an age, we would see the brilliant beauty of this process at work in its own way and in its own time for each child.

Benjamin Franklin learned to be a writer by laboriously copying and recopying articles in The Spectator and other models. Contrary to the expression “born genius,” Franklin stressed “ingenuity,” which included the ability to learn from others. 

[B]eing still a Boy, and suspecting that my Brother would object to printing any Thing of mine in his Paper if he knew it to be mine, I contriv’d to disguise my Hand, and writing an anonymous Paper I put it in at Night under the Door of the Printing-House. It was found in the Morning and communicated to his Writing Friends when they call’d in as usual. They read it, commented on it in my Hearing, and I had the exquisite Pleasure, of finding it met with their Approbation, and that in their different Guesses at the Author none were named but Men of some Character among us for Learning and Ingenuity.

Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

In Benjamin Franklin’s case, his own Will, his own Initiative to master linguistics skills drove his progress. One of the great challenges in modern education is to recognize and free the unique Individual Will of each and every child for self-expression. Even in our so-call A.P. courses, characterized by a step-up in demands on the intellect, fail to free the caged bird of Individual Will.

When astute thinkers decry the “dumbing down of education,” the sense of loss concerns something beyond the mechanical grasp of the three ‘r’s. It’s not more or the same or even stepped up momentum that is the key to graduating people of heightened culture, who throughout life love literature, and literary self-expression.

The golden key rests in the Individual Will of the Child. Like the heart and imagination, the Will is something to be evoked and nurtured, not suppressed; celebrated for its uniqueness, not overridden by curriculum; its unstoppable momentum given a clear path and fed with tantalizing opportunities from a True Teacher.

Sadly, in the current craze, the Cogs of Control freeze the intuitive/responsive flow of the True Teacher. But a current is building, reminiscent of the springtime flow of the river beneath the ice. Let us join this current and celebrate the development of the Individual Child Will as the source of all worthy literary expression Contrived assignments based on this or that skill, coerce mere trickles compared to the creative torrent of the unified force of the Heart, Imagination and Will.