"The world is a colossal university, and no matter how far removed you may be from great institutions of learning, if you are alert and eager to learn you can always absorb something from your environment. We are all in God's great kindergarten, where everything is trying to teach us its lesson."

--Orison Swett Marden

​Art credit: The Garland by Frederick Morgan (Wikimedia Commons)

 "The very foundation of our national life is laid in the home, and the wife and mother is the center, the mainspring of all true home life...

"Our wives and mothers have as yet hardly entered the outer chamber of the beautiful edifice of the ideal home of the future. It is the holy of holies of evolution, and in it lies the very secret of human progress...

"The highest civilizations have scarcely as yet glimpsed the possibilities of home."

--Orision Swett Marden

Art credit: And the Symbol of Welcome is Light by Normal Rockwell (artrenewal.org)

"Beauty is a quality of divinity, and to live much with the beautiful is to live close to the divine. Every beauty in any form...refines and elevates character...

"The time will come when our children will be taught...to consider beauty as a most precious gift...and regarded as a divine instrument of education."

--Orison Swett Marden

Art credit: Apple Time by Frederick Morgan (Wikimedia Commons)

"Childhood is happiness. Every child is happy if no brutal hand is interposed between it and happiness. Air, light, liberty, a little sand and mud--in childhood we need nothing more for being happy. And God gives us these things."

--Armando Palacio Valdes

Art credit: At Scarborough by Frederick Morgan (artrenewal.org)

 "Every great is a special language of the human spirit, and he who desires to awaken his artistic nature will learn to read all these languages...

"What form of art should be studied? Every form as far as possible; for each art is a distinct language, which expresses some aspect of the human soul and realizes some truth apprehended in NO OTHER WAY."

--S.S. Curry - Imagination and Dramatic Instinct

​Art Credit: Apollo and the Muses by Claud Lorrain (artrenewal.org)

I know we are all horrified by the massacre of Muslim worshipers in New Zealand.

One of this month's topics is the study of Islam. What impressions will you place on your children's hearts? Will they fear people of other faiths or will they seek to understand them? Remember the danger of the single story.

Like the song says in South Pacific:

You've got to be taught to hate and fear
You've got to be taught from year to year
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught

[Verse 2]
You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade
You've got to be carefully taught

[Verse 3]
You've got to be taught before it's too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught

Tomorrow's world will be shaped by what you teach your children today.

Art credit: Evening Prayer by Jean Leon Gerome (Wikimedia Commons)

"I do not like to read lies to my child," is the verdict of many a mother. "I give him only histories, biographies, and useful books."

She does not know, this really earnest mother, that she is shutting the door of her child's imagination, and that she may be hampering his power to do great things in after life, by thus closing to him the storehouse of imaginative literature. For later he will not be able to draw full sustenance from classic writings unless he has been fed in youth on the best of folk-literature.

The action of the picture-making power of the mind--the imagination--is a part of almost every mental process.

--Frances Jenkins Olcott

Or, as Albert Einstein puts it:

"If you want your child to be intelligent, read him fairy tales. If you want him to be more intelligent, read him more fairy tales."

Art credit: Sleeping Beauty by John Collier (Wikimedia Commons)

"It is said that John Bunyan, during the years he was in jail, became so absorbed in some of the characters in 'Pilgrim's Progress' and was so often carried away with them, that he would often fall on his knees and shed tears of joy in his ecstasies.

"His IMAGINATION transformed his prison into a palace beautiful."

Art credit: John Bunyan in Bedford Jail with his Blind Daughter by Alexander Johnson (Wikigallery)

"If instead of a gem or even a flower, we could cast the gift of a lovely thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as angels give."

--George MacDonald

Art credit: Marie and Madeleine on the Terrace by Daniel Ridgway Knight 

This month's Mother's University topic is imagination. Here's a crash course from an 1896 text, Imagination and Dramatic Instinct by S.S. Curry, PhD.

Why should the imagination be trained?

1. Its perversion is one of the leading causes of the degradation of character.
2. It is the chief creative faculty.
3. It gives man taste and refinement.
4. It raises him out of a narrow prison into communion with the universe.
5. It lifts him into relation with all things and all men.
6. It develops the comprehension of universal principles.
7. All true appreciation of art and literature is dependent on its exercise.
8. It enables man to appreciate not only the art of his own age and his own country, but that of all other lands and times. By its power he can become a Greek, and see as the Greeks saw, and feel as the Greeks felt.
9. Unless it is developed, there can be little improvement in the ideals of a man or a nation.
10. It enables us to enter into sympathy with our fellow-man. By its power alone can we appreciate the point of view of those different from ourselves.
11. It gives us the power to penetrate to the heart of Nature.
12. It is the faculty which sees beauty and loveliness.
13. It discovers grace in the motion of the storm.
14. It is the faculty which enables man to realize eternity and God.
15. Work without imagination is drudgery, but with it the humblest employment is lifted into the realm of beauty and art.
16. The imagination is the source of all inspiration and interest in life; its activity creates beauty in the commonest objects of handicraft, and gives charm to the humbles home.

Yet, the development of the imagination has been given little or no place in the courses of study in our schools.

How much time are you allowing for the development of the imagination in your busy days?

Art credit: Dressing Up by Fritz Zuber-Buhler (artrenewal.org)