Anna Sewell's Black Beauty is a good book to teach young learners about animals: how they think, how they feel, and (perhaps) what we imagine they would say if they had a chance to speak. What makes this book magical is that the first person narrator is a horse. Is Sewell indulging in presumption by making the horse a narrator? Well, I take this book to be an experiment in empathy; one which is actually meant to stretch one's ethical imagination to embrace something that is "different" or "other". I am reflecting that studying this book can help both children and adults alike reflect on the strengths and limits of using imagination to empathize.
I don't think that a person can ever, with any sure confidence, absolutely step into the skin of another being. Two problems: the first is that we are not having access to a "live" experience of another person, aside from what they say, do or record on paper. Second, and related to the first, is the issue of time. Even if I write down on this blog every single thought I am having in this moment (a daunting task, and beyond my present typing speed), that view is already shifting: there is nothing whatsoever to capture, because the source of all this mental activity is infinite and boundless. Such is the danger of "framing" anything or anyone: one is only really using a model to temporarily capture a person's thinking, including one's own. If I pretend that Black Beauty is an authentic representation of a horse's experience, I commit the double presumption that a) I can know another being's thoughts; b) those thoughts are static and can be recorded for posterity. In fact, no words can capture the experience of a changing shifting life. I believe it's important to cultivate humility by respecting that shifting nature of being itself.
I find it might be helpful in one's daily life to get into the habit of not simply seeing what's in front of them, but looking slightly forward, beyond what they are seeing. This requires relaxing the mind's habitual tendency to frame things and stick within the boundaries of those frames. Even when I believe I have figured out a person, a problem, or a situation, it doesn't mean that I have fixed (literally, stuck!) that person, problem or situation to a particular pegboard. It's okay to have that frame, but not to fall for the mind's tendency to take those frames as being an absolute "map" of all experience.
Montessori also writes about this idea in Discovery of the Child (1967). According to Montessori, placing too many restrictions on how a child moves in a classroom can feel like "control" and "discipline", but it has the opposite effect of inhibiting a child's natural abilities to regulate their own actions gracefully. She points to evidence showing that children confined to desks and tables are much less capable of coordinating themselves in open spaces, because their bodies are not used to having an open space to move: it is as though the table literally becomes a "mental crutch" which prevents children from exercising their own God-given abilities to coordinate their activities. In this way, too many "framings" in the classroom can unnecessarily define a person or reduce them to a kind of puppet without their own free self-determining abilities.
Montessori, M (1967). The Discovery of the Child. New York: Ballantine
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