In quoting Emerson, about poetry saying “more with less” the latter day New England Transcendentalist, Buckminster Fuller (great nephew of Margaret Fuller, Dial editor and international correspondent) circles what we might call the “child’s eye view”; less cluelessly naive, or uninformed, than penetrating, to the point.
Children see through a lot of adult obfuscations sometimes. Unpoetic language comes caked in cruft.
“To be poetic is to have both a child’s eye and gift for self expression” would be the thesis here. Fuller set up this identification while adding resistance to “creative” as in “to be poetic is to be creative”.
“Bucky” — as he liked to be called (“RBF” in some literature) — did not see humans as performing an additive function vis-a-vis Creation i.e. they’re not, contrary to some of the hype, “little creators”. Rather, the poet is good at synthesizing, in a succinct and memorable fashion, that resonates for people.
Philosophy for Children is the name of an actual program or mission, espoused by some universities, notably Montclair University in New Jersey. What ought to be the exact content of such a curriculum is of course debatable, or we could say: many experiments have been running in parallel.
Not all of these experimental programs revisit elementary school mathematics under the…
