A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our
misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and
awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the
good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her
gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout
life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile
preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the
fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him
the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in. Parents often have a sense of
inadequacy when confronted on the one hand with the eager, sensitive mind of a child and on the
other with a world of complex physical nature, inhabited by a life so various and unfamiliar that
it seems hopeless to reduce it to order and knowledge. In a mood of self-defeat, they exclaim,
“How can I possibly teach my child about nature--why, I don’t even know one bird from
another!”
I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half
so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom,
then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must
grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have
been aroused--a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of
sympathy, pity, admiration or love--then we wish for knowledge about the object of our
emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way
for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.
Rachel Carson
