The Beauty of a Child's Mind, Part one

I love the way that children think. So often it just blows my mind completely. For instance, the kindergarten teacher just told me today about an incident in her classroom. She was relating to them the story of Abraham and God's promise when she asked, "How could Abraham count the stars?" With exuberance one student cried out, "By tens!"

One of my professors used to tell us that the goal of higher education, as he saw it, was to retrain the "adult," "mature" mind into something more childlike. He did not mean behaviors or content as much as he meant that curiosity and inquisitiveness that so represents the child's mind. Only by asking good questions and having an open mind, he maintained, could you really continue learning. Calvin, from the cartoon strip Calvin and Hobbes, happened to be his favorite theologian/philosopher. The kid had something going, that's for sure.

We, and I mean adults, tend to work off of so many assumptions that we hardly question or perhaps even acknowledge. Increasingly, through teaching, I am confronted by questions in class such as "why?" or by the need to explain further the way things are related. Children, especially in the grammar stage, need those concrete explanantions, which has challenged my own thinking.

While we may feed on meatier stuff than milk, we must not, in academic pursuits or heavenly pursuits, lose that childlike awe that brought David to his knees before God or that questioning spirit that raised up reformers in the 15th century. Just something I was thinking about one day....