Monday, June 6, 2016

My Year With Proust - Day 165

"'Someone advised me once,' I said, thinking of the conversation we had had with Legrandin at Combray, as to which I which I was glad of an opportunity of learning Elstir's views, 'not to visit Brittany, because it would not be wholesome for a mind with a natural inclination towards day-dreams.' 'Not at all,' he replied. 'When a mind has a tendency towards day-dreams, it's a mistake to shield it from them, to ration them.  So long as you divert your mind from its day-dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will be the victim of all sorts of appearances because you will not have grasped their true nature.  If a little day-dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.'"
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 901-902

Here Elstir is giving Proust advice on the relative dangers of day-dreaming. On one level it's difficult to disagree with Elstir's admonition to Proust to day-dream more.  One of the problems with education today, and I lay a lot of it at the feet of No Child Left Behind teaching to the test non-sense, is that we're devoting too much time to memorizing facts and not celebrating the process of deliriously creative thinking.  When we trim art and music from the curriculum to feed more "practical" subjects, including, oddly, football, we're also crippling the creative spirit.  While I tend to abuse, in a fairly good-natured way, our mass of gaming students at Champlain, I actually like having them around.  They're odd ducks, but they are also very creative souls, and I think natural corrective to our practical curriculum.  Now, of course, the other side of this discussion is that all too often we don't take into account that the heart of creative thinking is critical thinking, and that day-dreaming is only the first step on a longer journey that requires a goodly amount of academic and intellectual rigor.

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