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p K. Kanayeva

p If it is true that everything begins with childhood and that our childhood is so firmly implanted in us that even when we grow up we remain,’ without really knowing it, under the influence of experience, whether we recognise it as such or not, accumulated some time in the past, then the theme of these notes (or article) will not seem unimportant. After all, the individual’s ability to reflect, for which lie is conditioned by his “human” origin, is also shaped and continuously “in the making”. And for all the importance of education and the assimilation of the social experience in the process of “nature developing into man”,  [225•1  it is child’s “ spontaneous" association with nature which teaches him the first lessons of good and beauty that will shape his personality. A developed, that is, a truly human and cultured ability to feel and to perceive is the product of a complex interaction of a child’s outward (practical) and inner (psychic) activity in which nature holds a place entirely its own. Nature, for a child, is not only and not simply the primary and irreplaceable source of emotional experience, but also it serves as his first “practical” schooling for transforming the material into the ideal.

p The question is how seriously is this self-evident circumstance treated by “adult” science and the practice of public education? And what happens when grownups try to “raise” the child to their own, adult awareness and understanding of nature? It is this which the present article intends to examine.

p I do not suppose there are any parents or grandparents in the world who do not wish their child, or grandchild, to be sensitive to 226 beauty, kindness and fairness. Everybody wants his child to have inner richness and outward beauty, to have a perceptive understanding of people, to know much and to be able to experience profound emotions. In modern conditions, more than ever before, nature plays (it should play!) an enormous role in cultivating spiritual wealth and a high culture of feelings in the personality. Teaching a child to perceive nature poetically, to love nature, is a noble task, because only love engenders trust, reciprocal feeling, and understanding. One must not forget that apart from everything else, a love for one’s native countryside engenders a love for one’s country too.

p Ah, nature! An eternal, guileless and disinterested friend! All it asks is attention, and it gives one so much in return! I do not think I’ll be doing an injustice to either parents or teachers if I say that it is very difficult for them to compete with nature in the power of the impact it has on children for such is the affinity between them. A child’s relations with nature are always intimate and deeply personal.

p It may be assumed that everyone will agree with this. The “trouble” begins when grownups, ignoring the peculiarities of a child’s psychology, try to pull the child up to their own level of thinking (of course with the best of intentions), whereas it is the grownups themselves who should “elevate themselves" to the child’s attitude to nature.

p Nature and children are equally naive, unsophisticated and open-hearted. A grownup will say: “That’s a beautiful tree”, or: “Look at all that timber going to waste!”, as a character in a modern novel said when he saw the wonderful Byelovezhskaya forest. A child would never say anything like that. His view of nature is not blocked by any practical, considerations or interests. His attitude is disinterested, and disinterestedness, as everyone knows, is the essential virtue of aesthetic perception as such.

p For another thing, a child’s thinking is always associative; he thinks in comparisons, in images that are often so fanciful and unexpected that grownups, alas, fail to understand them.

p Nature is material: you can see it, touch it, and even taste it. To a child it can give the world, provided it is spoken of in simple words and images capable of evoking an almost physical sensation. Mikhail Prishvin, a great nature lover, used to say that a feeling for nature was a personal, subjective feeling: “I am nature”. In a child, this feeling is very strongly developed. Such abstract concepts as “beautiful”, “splendid” and so forth mean little to him. Later, in his school years, he will perceive these concepts consciously and naturally. But in the meantime, he has to go through a complex 227 phase of purely figurative perception, without which the most concise concepts and words will never be anything but anaemic abstractions, leaving him completely cold.

p Far be it for me to advocate absence of thought in the upbringing of children. Children are always inquisitive, so much so that adults sometimes actually envy their unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Their most favourite word is “why”. They ask their endless questions from morning till night, expecting and demanding an answer. Remember Rudyard Kipling’s verse?

p “I keep six honest serving-men
        (They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
        And How and Where and Who.
I send them over land and sea.
        I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me
        I give them all a rest.

p     But different folk hold different views;
        I know a person small—
She keeps ten million serving-men,
        Who get no rest at all!
She sends ’em abroad on her own affairs,
        From the second she opens her eyes—
One million Hows, two million Wheres,
        And seven million Whys.”

p When answering their questions, we must remember how a child’s mind works. Here is an example of a wise approach to a child.

p The writer Mikhail Prishvin tells us this story.

p “In the forest I met a little girl, the daughter of a woodsman, and asked her:

p “~‘Are there any mushrooms?’

p “~‘Yes, some.’

p “~‘Any white mushrooms?’

p “~‘White mushrooms too, only it’s getting cold and they’re moving under the fir trees. Don’t bother to look for them under the birches, they’re all hiding under the firs.’

p “~‘But how could they move to another place, have you ever seen a mushroom walk?’

p “The little girl was momentarily at a loss, but suddenly she understood me and, making a puckish face, replied:

228

“~‘They walk at night, of course, so how could you see them in the dark? No one has ever seen it.’~"  [228•1 

p They are talking, you will note, in all seriousness. The grownup does not use baby talk, and shows a genuine interest in the girl’s story. With his question, worded tactfully so as not to shatter the peculiar psychology of a child, he brings an element of reality into the girl’s fairy-tale world, inviting her to stop and think. Children are quick, and they are grateful to us when we take them seriously and treat them as equals.

p 1 once overheard a conversation like this on the beach at a Black Sea resort. A little boy had gathered some pebbles in his toy bucket, and taking them out one by one he told their “story”. “This one is Gagarin’s pebble, this is his orbit round the earth (it was a round, black pebble with a white line around it).... And this one is Herman Titov’s (he held up a nicely polished grey spar, slightly flattened at the poles and encircled with many white lines).... This one here is Vaska the tiger cub (he picked up a brick pebble with black stripes)....”

p A man lay on the beach beside the boy. He was watching the dolphins play, admiring the swiftness with which they dove in and out of the waves, and saying: “Many legends are told about dolphins. They are even called ’sea people’, you know. They rescue shipwrecked sailors, they talk in a language all their own, they let children ride on their backs, and when they hear a friend calling for help, they hurry to his rescue.... They also say that if people could learn to understand the language of dolphins they’d find out many secrets about the ocean deep, about sea monsters, and other things which are still mysteries to us but which we’ve got to learn about. Dolphins can also help us to catch tish....” The boy listened spellbound.

p The next morning he brought his new grownup friend a picture he had painted called “The Sea”. There was everything in it— dolphins, rays, and sea monsters of the most fantastic shapes. It was not merely a token of gratitude, it was the boy’s response.

p Grownups communicate their experience of associating with nature through the most varied media—a chemical formula, a poem, a painting, a technical invention. Children, too, do more than simply contemplate nature, they also feel their way along for 229 closer contact with it and find their own “formulas” to express the feelings, thoughts and images it has evoked. A child’s delight in the amazing gifts and secrets of nature is a joyous discovery of a new world. He marvels at the cleverness with which everything has been arranged in nature, and begins to ponder over its “secrets”. Finding the answer is a creative process, arousing a desire to copy nature.

p As a rule, children do not simply repeat or copy things. They create their own. In any construction—a sand castle or an edifice erected from building blocks—you can always see that the child’s imagination has been at work, complementing what he has seen in the surrounding world with his own personal predilections. Of course, the shaping of personality is a long and difficult road which a child will have to traverse before he can choose a profession after his own heart and begin to understand other people. But the early seeds of his interests, of his human qualities, ripen here, on the threshold of life, shall we say. And, perhaps, the most important thing is for us to learn how to discern the child’s nascent vocation in his purely aesthetic, naive emotions and fantasies, and arouse in him a desire to act, create, and invent, to see what he can do. We must make the child see the connection between the water lily and a pontoon bridge devised and made by man, and the connection between the pattern designed by a textiles artist and the verdurous carpeting of the earth.

p Art can be a great help. We often and readily take our children to the cinema and the theatre, and read books aloud for them. But you will rarely see children at art exhibitions. Apparently the parents are afraid that their kids will not appreciate the paintings they see. They should not be. Is not drawing all but the main occupation of children from infancy? Is not the sense of colour the most popular aesthetic experience which children are capable of knowing? Discussing the painting before you, or talking about it afterwards at home, can do more good than dozens of general discourses on the “beauty of nature”.

p After viewing the Moscow Exhibition of Children’s Drawings, keynoted “My Country Is My Home”, people wrote and said: “Children, yours is a beautiful world. I visited it, and it was like being in paradise. Please, take me along with you!" “Thank heaven there are child-artists, otherwise there would be no adult-artists.” “A good example for grownups to follow: here everyone expresses himself freely, the children do not imitate anyone, they draw as they feel, without prompting.” “There are no clichés. No desire to stun or impress the viewer. A total absence of bleak, drab grey colours. Nothing is contrived. They have a knack for seeing 230 and understanding the forms of nature, of things.” And more to the same effect.

p There was a picture called The Lion And His Trainer, painted by a boy of 11 from Hungary. The trainer, whip in hand, stands before the cage, and behind the bars is the lion—a clever, sly, and very, very ginger lion. And he seems to be saying: “Look at him, he thinks he has tamed me. It’s the cage that keeps me here, and you and 1 know it. He’s a fool, that tamer!" Then, there was a picture called A Cow Herd by a Soviet girl of 7. It’s a great parade of cows of the most extraordinary colours and different facial expressions. 1 repeat, “facial expressions”, because I can’t help wanting to call every cow here a “personality”. One of them glares at you threateningly, another has a freckled nose, an impish twinkle in her eyes, and a coquettishly twisted horn; there is one cow that seems to be nursing a grievance, and another one who seems too lazy to care. There is a veritable riot of colours—mauve, red, pink, orange.... Children seem to paint with nature’s own juices and colours. There is no naturalism in their pictures because they are alive with sincere feeling, with a faith so infectious that no one can be left indifferent to it. What captivates us is the children’s disinterestedness—that “strange” thing without which there can be no real kindness, no real art. Brains and talent without this virtue lose their infectious quality. Is it not symptomatic that a child’s acquaintance with the surrounding world and his upbringing begins with fairy tales where objects and animals are humanised and very often behave contrary to all scientific concepts? It is as natural as the Ancient Greeks’ self-expression in mythology, an art which never ceases to amaze us, people living in the atomic and cybernetics age. A grownup cannot turn into a child again, childishness does not suit him. “But does he not delight in the naiveté of a child, and does he not himself have to strive to reproduce, at a higher stage, his own true substance."  [230•1  In “exposing” the fairy tale, grownups lose their freedom of selfexpression and fall prey to utilitarianism which begins to prevail over emotions. Envying children, they strive to recapture not only their spontaneity but also, and most important, their uninhibited sensations.

p A child takes his first lessons in morality from associating with nature. He does not yet know the concepts of “good” and “evil”, but he already humanises nature, endowing it with purely human qualities. There are good and bad things in nature; some he loves and others he dislikes. There is no direct link, of course, between 231 respecting nature and respecting people, but an indirect link there certainly is. Nature, like people, can either be respected or not. Respect for nature means an ability to feel and not disturb its rhythm, to hear the magic world of sounds in the forest or the steppe. The working man has carried this respect through the centuries. In his remarkable book Recollections of Rocks, Academician A. Fersman speaks of the amazing subtlety of a miner’s observations: “Over the long years his eyes became accustomed to those barely perceptible combinations of colour, shape, pattern and glitter that cannot be described, painted or put into words, but which for the miner were inviolable laws of nature.”

p It is this “inviolable” respect for the laws of nature that we must cultivate in our children. Let a person go through life with the aesthetic impressions of his childhood—the rapture evoked in him by a sunset or sunrise, the tranquility of spirit brought on by a moonlit night, the delight of listening to the chirping of birds. It will be a help to him in living and working.

p “I remember,” writes M. Prishvin, “when I was a young man I once found a very, very white birch tree framed in gold, and it was so tall that I had to crane my neck to see its golden crown high up in the blue, and it was so beautiful that I didn’t notice that my hat fell off and I walked hohie from the forest without it.

“Today is a day like that one, and I wandered about the forest as enraptured as then, and found a birch tree that was just as beautiful, and my hat fell off again, and I felt just as young, but only one tiny little thing was different: my hat did fall off, but now, in my advanced years, I did not leave it behind in the forest."  [231•1