"A Heart that Watches and Receives" - A consideration of The Cultivated Imagination vs The Moral Imagination and why I believe Charlotte Mason's phrase may be better for the homeschooling parent.
“…we have only the choice between a badly trained imagination and a well trained one..."
Northrop Frye
I first heard the term, “the moral imagination” several years ago when I was a young mother of small children, new to homeschooling and busy researching various homeschooling curriculums, hoping to find The Perfect Curriculum and give my kids the best education possible.
The options were overwhelming. Curriculum companies abound and homeschooling catalogues list more educational products than Carter’s got pills. As with most things, more options do not equal better options. There are plenty of sub-par gimmicky products out there to scratch the “we did school today” itch.
I don’t want to make it seem like I am above using gimmicky products. I bought my share of them. I lived through a time of having 5 kids 6 and under. Sometimes, if the baby hadn’t slept or the toddler was sick or I hadn’t slept or I was sick or the day was just extra rough, we relied on story time and trips to the park and whatever cheap little workbooks I had picked up from the dollar store. It made me feel like we did something, and they were happy to break from the more serious workbooks for which I had paid Real Money.
Like most homeschooling moms on a quest for The Perfect Curriculum, I laid down lots of the Real Money my husband earned to pay for curriculum that, among other things, told me it would help to cultivate/improve/grow my child’s moral imagination. What thoughtful, conscientious parent doesn’t want their child’s moral imagination to flourish and grow? Especially if you begin to see your children not as persons but as The Future. This child could change the world – should change the world! I’m raising warriors for God! I want my kids to make a difference for Truth!
Notwithstanding whatever good intentions there might be in these sentiments, it slowly changed the way I thought about my children and their education. I thought the moral imagination was a sort of improved imagination, better than the plain old imagination because I thought it was a sort of glorified conscience. This made me vulnerable to all the promises of curriculum companies and homeschooling gurus who said that if I only bought their products and systems, if I only read their books of fairy tales with their comprehension questions, or if we only used these specific moral-imagination-supporting literature study guides, or if I only put my kids in their classical schools, or if I could figure out a way to lead Socratic discussions, or if I only read these virtue-forming stories, we would be on our way to forming the oh-so-desirable moral imagination.
Because you have to do something to form the moral imagination, right? If I don’t form it, who or what will??
Fear always makes us vulnerable to deception and gimmicks. I fell for all of it to some degree. Because what I failed to understand, until I spent a few years putting Charlotte Mason’s Philosophy of Education into practice after the snake oil curriculums came up short, was that there is no such thing as a moral imagination separate from Imagination itself. The moral imagination is simply a healthy, cultivated Imagination in action.
The Moral Imagination
What is “the moral imagination”?
The term “moral Imagination” was coined by Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France:1
'“All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.”
Russell Kirk explains:
“By this ‘moral imagination,’ Burke signifies that power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and momentary events ‘especially,’ as the dictionary has it, ‘the higher form of this power exercised in poetry and art.’ The moral imagination aspires to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth. … It is the moral imagination which informs us concerning the dignity of human nature, which instructs us that we are more than naked apes. As Burke suggested in 1790, letters and learning are hollow if deprived of the moral imagination.”
The moral imagination is a captivating term, and one that has attracted the attention of the homeschooling world because of this connection is has with education. But does it help us think more clearly about this “ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience”? Does it even make a difference what term we use?
I think it makes a great deal of difference because when a term used by historians and ethics professors and philosophers trickles down through society, it often becomes diluted and even twisted out of shape. We hear it as laymen and assume we know what is meant by the phrase because we know what the words ‘moral’ and ‘imagination’ mean, when really, we don’t have the philosophical framework to understand it as it was originally meant, as my example from my own life shows. We surely can’t think about it rightly when it is slapped like a cheap slogan on curriculums, workbooks, study guides, and ads for homeschool conference talks. Throwing around the term “the moral imagination” without regularly defining it for the non-professional leads concerned mothers to ask questions like, “What sort of stories can I read Tommy to teach him that he shouldn’t lie/steal/punch his brother/argue with his parents/do bad things in general?” In that question is the proof that the mother has very much misunderstood the connection between virtue, stories, and the imagination. But when we toss around the term “moral imagination” without defining it, can we blame her?
The professionals who use the term “moral imagination,” carry with it the philosophical context and scholarly associations necessary to use it correctly. But for us boots-on-the-ground homeschool parents trying to raise our kids to be good and morally upright people, I’ve come to believe that “the moral imagination” is simply not the best way to talk about the way the imagination affects how we live. I think Charlotte Mason gives us a better term.
The Cultivated Imagination
In her book Ourselves, Charlotte Mason included the Imagination along with Reason in the description she gives of the Intellect. Both Imagination and Reason give the Intellect its power of comprehension and world building. Under a heading titled ‘The Cultivated Imagination,’ Mason writes, “The more we know, the more ordered and the more rich should Imagination become in us. … In order to have a richly-stored picture gallery of the Imagination we must read much, and, as the French say, figure to ourselves, as we go on, that which we have read.” We build the world within, whether it be from our history book or our story book. Imagination is ‘showing’ us, so to speak, other worlds and places and people, and as it shows us new sights, it expands our inner world while clarifying our vision of the world around us.
As a teacher and educational philosopher in the early twentieth century, Mason saw the influence of French Enlightenment thinkers still alive and well in her own day (as it is in ours) and she spoke out against it:
“…our latest educational authority, one who knows and loves little children, would away with all tales and histories that appeal to the imagination; let children learn by means of things, is her mandate; and the charm and tenderness with which it is delivered may well blind us to its desolating character. We recognize Rousseau, of course, and his Emile, that self-sufficient person who should know nothing of the past, should see no visions, allow no authority. But human nature in children is stronger than the eighteenth-century philosopher and the theories which he continues to inform. Whoever has told a fairy tale to a child has been made aware of that natural appetency for letters to which it is our business to minister. Are we not able to believe that words are more than meat, and, so believing, shall we not rise up and insist that children shall have a liberal diet of the spirit?“ (Philosophy, p.338-9)
In another place she writes, “Our schools turn out a good many clever young persons, wanting in nothing but initiative, the power of reflection and the sort of moral imagination which enables you to ‘put yourself in his place.’”2 Those wants are enormous! Nothing but initiative, the power of reflection, and an active compassion – what is left of a person if those are missing? It put the problems of our own day in perspective – it isn’t necessarily screens or the internet or some other boogey man we point to and blame as the problem; the problem is in us, and we are passing it on to our children.
In his book, Tending the Heart of Virtue; How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination, Vigen Guroian writes: “The moral imagination is not a thing, not even so much a faculty of the mind, but rather the very process by which the self makes metaphors out of images that memory supplies. It then employs these metaphors to suppose correspondences in experience and to make moral judgements. … Mere instruction in morality is not sufficient to nurture the virtues. It might even backfire, especially when the presentation is heavily exhortative and the pupil feels coerced. Instead, a compelling vision of the goodness of goodness itself needs to be presented in such a way that it is attractive and stirs the imagination. A good moral education addresses both the cognitive and affective dimensions of human nature. And stories are an irreplaceable medium for this kind of moral education, by which I mean the education of character.”
You can’t workbook virtue into your child. You can’t lecture morality into your child. You might one day find that, unwittingly, you made it harder for them to hear and see and know personally the truth, goodness, and beauty you desperately want to pour into their souls. We can’t force-feed our children the “ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience.”
The Cultivated Imagination is the Educated Imagination
How then do we educate the moral imagination? Or, to use her term which I like so much better and which I hope to convince you to use, too – how do we cultivate the imagination?
Cultivation is a husbandry term. It means to prepare the land for planting. The etymology of the word as a verb is interesting, and might help us have an expanded understanding of its implications. From etymology.com:
cultivate (v.) by 1650s, of land, "till, prepare for crops;" by 1690s of crops, "raise or produce by tillage;" from Medieval Latin cultivatus, past participle of cultivare "to cultivate," from Late Latin cultivus "tilled," from Latin cultus "care, labor; cultivation," from past participle of colere "to cultivate, to till; to inhabit; to frequent, practice, respect; tend, guard," from PIE root *kwel- (1) "revolve, move round; sojourn, dwell."
In cultivation, the health of the soil is taken into account. It is prepared and tilled, the seeds are sown and watered and guarded. Over time, it becomes a garden, flourishing and beautiful; a place the gardener loves to dwell in. It is so very appropriate to use this term for what happens in the imagination. A cultivated imagination becomes for the child an inner, secret garden, and all the life and beauty within spills out beyond the walls of the mind and touches and improves and enlivens what is outside of it.
Charlotte Mason said, “…a chief function of education is the establishment of such ways of thinking in children as should issue in good and useful living, clear thinking, aesthetic enjoyment, and, above all, in the religious life.”3 The way we think results in the way we live. And thinking is not merely reasoning, as the French Enlightenment or our own compartmentalized modern approach would have us believe. Thinking is an organic event, involving the whole person and affecting their whole life. “For,” she says, “the mind is one and works all together; reason, imagination, reflection, judgement, what you please are like ‘all hands’ summoned by the ‘heave-ho!’ of the boatswain. All swarm on deck for the lading of cargo, that rich and odorous cargo of ideas which the fair vessel of a child’s mind is waiting to receive. … History must afford its pageants, science its wonders, literature its intimacies, philosophy its speculations, religion its assurances to every man, and his education must have prepared him for wanderings in these realms of gold.”
The imagination is everywhere present in their education. It is called upon when the student reads about the Spanish Armada or the life of the spider or the Red Cross Knight or logical fallacies. Indeed, Northrop Frye says, “Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination. But we use our imagination all the time: it comes into all our conversation and practical life: it even produces dreams when we’re asleep. Consequently, we have only the choice between a badly trained imagination and a well trained one, whether we ever read a poem or not.” (emphasis mine)
It isn’t merely the moral imagination that we need to train as if it were some atrophied limb and education is a kind of physical therapy; it is the Imagination itself educated and cultivated, whole and complete, as part of (and yet more than just a part of) the mysterious living organism that is the mind of man that affects the way man lives in all his spheres of influence.
Charlotte agrees with Frye:
“We are apt to work for one thing in the hope that we shall get another and a very different thing; we don't. If we work for public examinations, the questions in which must be of a narrow academic cast, we get a narrow, accurate, somewhat sterile type of mind. We reap as we have sown. … Let us take it to ourselves that great character comes out of great thoughts, and that great thought must be initiated by great thinkers; then we shall have a definite aim in education. Thinking and not doing is the source of character.”4
We are educating the child, she says, “as a person of many parts and passions who must know how to use, care for, and discipline himself, body, mind and soul: as a person of many relationships,––to family, city, church, state, neighboring states, the world at large: as the inhabitant of a world full of beauty and interest, the features of which he must recognize and know how to name, and a world too, and a universe, whose every function of every part is ordered by laws which he must begin to know. … Our part it seems to me is to give a child a vital hold upon as many as possible of those wide relationships proper to him. Shelley offers us the key to education when he speaks of ‘understanding that grows bright gazing on many truths.’”5
This kind of education doesn’t only affect the child. Like the picture of the garden, spilling over its walls and bringing life to the world beyond, this approach to education “has a curious effect on a whole family. …The whole household thinks of and figures to itself great things, for nothing is so catching as knowledge and that fine temper of mind knowledge brings to it … The fine sense, like an atmosphere, of things worth knowing and worth living for, this it is which produces magnanimous citizens, and we feel that Milton was right in claiming magnanimity as the proper outcome of education.” Philosophy, p. 267-8
In cultivating the child’s imagination, we are not inviting only him to develop relationships with all kinds of knowledge which will expand his inner world and make him a flourishing member of the world in which he lives; his family enters that experience with him, to some degree or another. I remember when my only reading time was when I had “school time” with my kids. My mind was just as hungry for knowledge as theirs. An education that cultivates the imagination of each member of a family as well as the family as a whole is, I think, the only one worth pursuing. The family grows in magnanimity together, encouraging each other to keep pursuing those things “worth knowing and worth living for.”
The Cultivated Reader
Maybe the best summary of the cultivated imagination is given to us by C.S. Lewis in the final chapter of his book, Experiment in Criticism. He concludes with a vibrant description of a cultivated and flourishing imagination:
“Good reading, therefore, though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three. In love we escape from our self into one other. In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity. …Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.
“…in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I would see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
The cultivated imagination is the only way to bring about this “enormous extension of being.” Children are born with this capacity for extension. They naturally want to see life through as many eyes as possible. We can witness it in their fabulous ability to pretend for long periods of time. It is the adult who has forgotten how to step out of his “tiny world” of “only himself” and “become a thousand men and yet remain” himself. If we provide an education that cultivates imagination, we will provide an education that encourages the moral imagination without even trying.
Widening the focus of education beyond moral actions to the act of cultivation gives us a clearer vision and a wider field within which to work. Our focus should not be only or even mostly on the morality of our children, but on their whole persons; their whole minds and souls. When our focus is on educating the entire person, morality is necessarily and naturally included because morality is a feature of our humanity. The term “moral imagination” has its place and uses. But for those of us involved in the education of our children, when we aim the bulk of our energies and wallets at educating the moral imagination, we can end up frustrated, disillusioned, and with an entirely backwards understanding of our children and possibly morality itself. As Vigen Guroian says, “Mere instruction in morality is not sufficient to nurture the virtues.” We need to be shown. We need to see “the goodness of goodness itself.” We need to offer our children (and ourselves) an education that cultivates a healthy imagination, that spreads what Charlotte Mason called “a wide and varied feast,” and invites both us and our children to:
“Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.”6
Philosophy of Education, page 25
Ibid., 100
Ibid., 277-278
Ibid., 157
Wordsworth, The Tables Turned
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