Wonder drives learning. Nothing else really works. Ambition doesn’t drive education at all. It just compels the learner to think more of herself than she ought. I am completely fascinated about how passion and beauty drive education, but really, all of that boils down to the ability to wonder. God fascinates me, and the amount of talent and effort that people spend in worship of Him is amazing.
“General curiosity, imagination in forming hypotheses, and method in testing them, then, mark the classical spirit of inquiry. This bent of mind allows the educated man to go on educating himself or extending the realms of knowledge for his fellows” (Hicks, Norms and Nobility 18).
If I wonder at something – the turn of a phrase in a poem or a hymn, a scientific fact, a historical event – my children usually will wonder with me. If we are walking in the neighborhood and I marvel at a mushroom, they will take note of it also, whether they comment on it or not.
I wish I could get them out in real nature more. I wish we had a travel trailer and could easily camp in as many National Parks as possible, but I can’t make that happen right now. But we find plenty to wonder at in our own yard, in city parks and gardens, and on friends’ farms.