Read/download all of Part I here:
Part I doesn’t have a particular narrative and only the occasional thread: there is a Michael who isn’t me but is because that is my name who appears here and there, and another American who definitely isn’t me and should be obvious. Otherwise, as with found poetry, the ‘content’ emerges in its moment.
With no travel embargo on the imagination, I have returned to The Aran Islands, Part II. This is my first outing in this area.
[from a sequence I am currently writing, © MF]
[based on a line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge]
[Image by artist and photographer Nick Dormand]
‘In all processes of the understanding the shortest way will be discovered the last and this, perhaps, while it constitutes the great advantage of having a teacher to put us on the shortest road at the first, yet sometimes occasions a difficulty in the comprehension, inasmuch as the longest way is more near to the existing state of the mind, nearer to what if left to myself, on starting the thought, I should have thought next. The shortest way gives me the knowledge best, but the longest makes me more knowing.’
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Chapter V, ANIMA POETÆ
Managing the Coleridge Memorial Trust social media platforms and website as well as its memorial statue Crowdfunder campaign [now postponed], I have over at least the last three months been immersed in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s writing – his poetry of course, but perhaps more so his aphorisms and maxims from ANIMA POETÆ which is a collection of the written intense outcomes of his relentless thinking and contemplation on issues ranging from a comparison of the efficacy of wood vs coal burning to expressions of deep love to philosophical ruminations.
Accepting that we can all sometimes find what we want to find, I have been reading and re-reading the quotation of his that leads this post, never feeling confident that I have pinned down exactly what he means. It is a complex thought and sentence to articulate this. But I do feel I now have its emotive and intellectual gist, and that is about how knowledge acquired over time and experience is more meaningful – and useful/purposeful – to that acquired quickly by instruction, and that [quite obviously] by rote.
That may seem eminently sensible, and I think it is, but Coleridge’s expression is quite convoluted. However, I don’t intend to unravel his expression further through analysis as I am more than happy with his conclusion about knowing over knowledge, or certainly as I see and understand this.
And I have found this certainty because I believe it to be true. I believe it to be true because it underpins my teacher’s objection to the current fashion for a Knowledge Curriculum, that purported by the American educationalist H.D. Hirsch and his UK acolytes Cummings, Gove, Gibb and even lesser less-knowers Young. That this fashionable theory for learning [though I use that term ironically] has informed the current Ofsted Inspection Framework is part of the danger I see in giving primacy to Knowledge over Understanding, the latter which is Coleridge’s knowing.
That’s it.
