In my spare time, I am currently reading Montessori's Spontaneous Activity in Education. What I think she was trying to convey on her chapter on Imagination today really struck me. Montessori stressed on how important it is to let the child's mind mature on the imagination platform instead of us encouraging the raw nature of imagination that is in the child for 'illusions' are the beginning of false reasoning, and the concomitants of delirium.
Simply speaking, if you want to teach a child what is a horse show her a horse in all its true form not a lego block of squares. Adults easily fall into the trap of encouraging the child, for the sake of making them imaginative, in flights of fancy. Just like how we make up fables with witches and warlocks and fairy godmothers who grant wishes when things get impossible , just to name a few.
However, Montessori argued that such a propagation does not breed imagination but is instead an act of arrest(ing) artificially a stage of development for our own amusement. Our role is not to let this transient stage become an artifice for the child needs to grow into an adult.
For all its worth, my sons love Lego and it is true how an unsatisfied need create an illusion. For not being able to play with toy guns, my second makes them out of anything. Children in fact, are very capable in that sense to come up with alternatives. However, Montessori warned against them being too deprived of what they desire for it would begin to create fantastical thoughts but he who possesses something attaches himself to that which he possesses to persevere and increase it reasonably.
Imagination can only have a sensory basis, not?
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