Children outgrow mythical mentality and transforms into rational mentality…… this is a very interesting story where Prof. Wesley Wildman’ explains ‘who’ becomes ‘what’ and ‘why’ becomes ‘how’.
Story: It was a dark and stormy night. . .
A child awoke and began to cry, terrified by the thunder and lightning, and his father came in to comfort him. His rational explanations about the storm did nothing to reassure the child, whose screams almost drowned out the noise of the storm. Desperate, the father tried a story -- a tactic that often comforted the child.
Indeed, slowly, the child quieted his sobs in order to listen. It was a story about the god of lightning, drawn from fragments the father recalled from a collection of mythology. Before long, however, the child stopped the narrative with a question. "Why?" he asked. "Why does the lightning god live in our sky?"
The father tried to weave an answer to the question into the story, but the child soon interrupted with another question, and then another. Always "why?" The questions pushed the father’s creativity and patience beyond their normal limits, and he finally stopped, frustrated. At that moment an enormous bolt of lightning illuminated the sky, followed seconds later by its thunderclap. Immediately, the child began screaming again.
"What does he want? What can I do?" the father wondered. First the crying, and then the questions, which seemed to have no logical purpose, just the incessant "why?" -- a stream of queries without any end. Suddenly, the father had an inspiration. It must end at the beginning, he told himself. And he started another story. This time, he began as far back as he could imagine, with the birth of the world itself. The child gradually quieted once again and began to listen. And so, as the storm continued to rage, the father retold and recreated one of the ancient stories of origins for his son, until the boy dropped off to sleep.
As he walked down the hall back to his bedroom, the father heard his daughter call out. "Dad? Is that you?"
Sighing, he opened the girl’s door. She sat up in bed. "Robert’s afraid, huh?" she asked. And then she continued, "It’s a pretty bad storm. . . but I’m not afraid." The father asked if she would like to hear a story also. She hesitated a moment. "What kind of story? " The father explained that he had told her brother some of the stories from ancient mythology. "No thanks," she said. "We already heard a bunch of those in school." And, as if he might be hurt, she quickly added, "some of them are pretty cool."
The father then kissed her good night and began to go back to bed. "But look at that one!" the girl cried, as a spectacular lightning bolt struck. The father realized he wasn’t going to get back to sleep yet, and resigned himself to at least a half hour of watching and discussing the storm with his daughter. She was extremely curious about it and she was a great talker. "I wonder what it is," she said. Her father began to explain about electricity when she broke in, "I wonder what everything is. I mean, I’m not so interested in that old mythology, but I do wonder about the world and electrons and how they are in this bed," and here she thumped the pillow beside her, "and in the windowsill and the lightning and everything. And yet things are different, they don’t look like they could be just electrons and atoms, do they? It just looks like a regular world." The father nodded. She finished triumphantly, "Your stories can’t tell us anything about that, now, can they?"
Curiosity leads to creativity!
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