MYTH AND EDUCATION

Ted Hughes

Who Was Ted Hughes?

Career

Personal Life

English poet who was published in notable British & American magazines and newspapers

Taught at University of Massachusetts, Amherst

worked on programmes for the BBC as well as producing essays, articles, reviews and talks Committed to the writing education of children appointed a member of the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II just before he died poet Samus Heaney who spoke at his funeral described Hughes as a tower of tenderness & strength, a great arch under which the least of poetry's children could enter and feel secure. His creative powers were, as Shakespeare said, still crescent. By his death, the veil of poetry is rent and the walls of learning broken.

Known for infidelities First wife (Sylvia Plath) committed suicide

Their child later does the same after suffering a long period of depression

Mistress committed suicide by the same method as his first wife

She took the life of their only child before she died

The deaths led to rumours that Hughes was an abusive husband and father

A Synopsis: Myth & Education

A.

B.

Hughes tries to understand Platos view of the proper kind of education for future citizens 1. For Plato that would mean looking to Greece 2. Hughes attempts to understand how Plato came to that conclusion. But why Greece? Because 1. everything in the modern world is prefigured in the conceptions of early Greeks (p. 31) 2. the ppl of Greece created their own religions and mythologies, rituals and values 3. Similar stories, from various places (Africa via Egypt, Asia via Persia) ended up converging on Greece. 4. Greece becomes the hub of philosophers who later give generate universal human truths 5. And this is why Plato places value on the study of Greek mythology

Why Greece, you say?

Myths & Legends: Ancient Greece

Myths_and_Legends__Ancient_Greece.mov

Implications for Education

Quotes from the reading:

In Summary:

A story that engages, say, earth and the underworld is a unit correspondingly flexible to the childs imagination. It contains not merely the space and in some form or other the contents of those two places; it reconciles their contradictions in a workable fashion and holds open the way between them. The child can reenter the story at will, look around him or her, find all those things, and consider them at leisure. (p. 32) In attending to the world of such a story there is the beginning of imaginative and mental control. There is the beginning of a form of contemplation. To begin with, each story is separate from every other story. Each unit of imagination is like a whole separate imagination, no matter how many the head holds. (32) These words (and their stories) bear the consciousness of much of our civilization

Teach the story The story combines the workings of the inner (self) and outer world The story contains one unit of the imagination If the story is learned well it is reduced to one word That single word carries with it the same emotions, associations, images and meaning that the story would have, if it were being retold at length Consider the Christ & Hitler example

Implications for Teaching continued

Quotes from the Reading:

In Summary

Without stories how could we have grasped those meanings?...Stories reveal something that is already there once we laid it down firmly in imagination, it became the foundation for everything that could subsequently be built and exist there (p. 34) Stories think for themselves, once we know themThey attract and light up everything relevant in our own experience; they are also in continual private mediation, as it were, on their own implications. They are little factories of understanding. New revelations of meaning open out of their images and patterns continually, stirred into reach by or own growth and changing circumstances. (p. 34) It doesnt matter how old the stories are every story is still the original cauldron of wisdom, full of new visions and new life (p. 35)

From story we create a meaning that is similar to the meaning we achieve if we had experienced it ourselves The story is our first order understanding and becomes malleable, more layered as our own experience grows

On Imagination
A.

Can vary from one person to the next

1.

People said to have little to no imagination are rigid planners, and ruthless slaves to the plan which substitutes for the faculty they do not possess. And they have the will of desperation. Where others see alternative courses, they only see a gulf. (36)

B.

But there are 2 classes of people (and a rare 3rd class)

Class 1: rigid planners with little to no imagination Class 2: vivid imaginators, unpredictable and inaccurate Rare 3rd Class: People whos imaginations are both accurate and strong

Imagination = Our Perceptions = (inner world + outer world)

The Problem/Our struggle towards the imagination
A.

The 2 Worlds:
A.

Outer world
1.

the world we live in, where we need sharpness, clarity, to be objective inner world Indescribable & invisible and there is no sharp, clear, objective eye of the mind our bodies and everything pertaining to it, yet we dont really understand it. We live on it as on an unexplored planet in space It cannot be seen objectively. (p. 37) anytime we are aware of this awareness of our inner world we coin it psychic, spiritual, cosmic (p. 38)

B.

B.

1. 2.

3.

in order to look at the inner world objectively, we have to separate ourselves both worlds are talking incessantly, in a dumb, radiating way about themselves, about their relationship with each other, about the situation of the moment in the main overall drama of the living, growing, and dying body in which they are assembled, and also about the outer world, because all these dramatis personae are really striving to live, in some way or other, in the outer world That is the world for which they have been created. The world that created them (p.38).

4.

But there are bigger problems

Quotes from the reading:

In Summary:

all the urgent information coming towards us from that inner world sounds to use like a blank, or at best the occasional grunt, or a twinge. This is because we have no equipment to receive and decode it. The body, with its spirits, is the antenna of all perceptions, the receiving aerial for all wavelengths. But we are disconnected. The exclusiveness of our objective eye, the very strength and brilliance of our objective intelligence, suddenly turn into stupidity of the most rigid and suicidal kind. (38-39)

There is an increasing drive toward the ideal as it is created in our objective minds

Our perception has become a camera And the same morality of the camera but has nothing to do with human morality (p. 39)
Reality has been removed beyond our participation, behind the very tough screen, into another dimension. Our inner world of natural impulsive response is safely in neutral gear. we are reduced to a state of pure observation (p. 40) Everything that passes in front of our eyes is equally important, equally unimportant

Why cant we move?

We are detached We solve problems using a scientific approach and not a spiritual one We strive to mimic a single conception of ideal and that paralyzes us from acting outside that ideal.

Howd we get this way?

Muting the inner world:

Results:

The inner world as associated with Christianity But religion fell out of style and was quickly debunked during the after the Middle Ages and more so during the scientific revolution as religion was stripped away, the defrocked inner world became a waif, an outcast, a tramp. Denied its one acceptance into life As a result the powers of the inner world were muted, deemed elemental, chaotic, primitive a place of demons (p. 41)

Belief in the inner world was equivalent to believing in fairy tales, superstition, and lies We become deaf to ourselves, We are so disconnected from it that we miss picking up its signals. All we register is the vast absence, the emptiness, the sterility, the meaninglessness, the loneliness.

Hope

children are most sensitive to the inner world, because they are the least conditioned by scientific objectivity to life in the camera lens. They see how their parents are imprisoned by objectivity and want to escape that world. Children then are more apt to follow their impulses with great surges of energy

So what is imagination then?

Quotes from the reading:

A reconciliation

the full presence of the inner world combines with and is reconciled to the full presence of the outer world. And in them we see that the laws of these two worlds are not contradictory at all: they are one all-inclusive system; they are laws that somehow we find it all but impossible to keep, laws that only great artists are able to restate. They are laws of human nature, they balance every imbalance the inner world, separated from the outer world, is a place of demons. The outer world, separated from the inner world , is a place of meaningless objects and machines. The faculty that makes the human being out of these two worlds is called divine. That is the only way of saying that it is the faculty without which humanity cannot really exist. (p. 42)

The Inner & outer world of perception in synch with each other

Imagination & Education

To educate means? fostering negotiations between the inner and outer world Education means to sketch possibilities whereby the two can be reconciled (p. 43)

What do we do now?

The first thing? Learn the story.

With its pattern and images It later sets out on its own The road it travels depends on the brains capacity for metaphor, imagery It will later transmit intuitions of psychological, spiritual states Imbuing a rich perception of emotions, feelings and spirit that would have otherwise been languageless (p. 43)

Let the natural process of imagination begin

this sketching is what Greek philosophers did and this is why value is placed on myth in education

The use of stories now has be more deliberate

This collision of the inner and outer world what now makes for a greater (human) understanding. (p. 44)

For Discussion:

What arguments can one make for not teaching moral/spiritual education in schools? What would a curriculum look like for social responsibility/morality? Do current advisory programs measure up? To what extent should the current educational system dictate the kinds of morals taught in schools?

References
Hughes, T. (1988). Myth and education. In K. Egan & D. Nadaner (Eds.), Custom course materials imagination and education (pp. 30-44). Columbia University, NY: Teachers College Press. The 1930s Childhood in Mytholmroyd and Mexborough. (n.d.). The 1930s childhood in Mytholmroyd and Mexborough (bio-/ ibliographic sketch). Retrieved July b 4, 2011, from http://www.tedhughes.info/ iographical/ -bio-bibliographicalb a sketch/he-1930s.html t Ted Hughes. (n.d.). Ted Hughes [Wikipedia]. Retrieved July 4, 2011, from Wikipedia website: http://en.wikipedia.org/ iki/ ed_Hughes w T