By Robert E. Samples, director, instructional materials development, Earth Science Curriculum Project.

Of course. The only way it could be explained is that snow is a cloud laying down. The ocean breathes a cloud into the air and it becomes tired as it ripples up and down across the desert. When it must rest, it will lie down on a mountain. Maybe it's making love to the mountain. Oh, if it is, I wish I were a mountain. If it stops too long, it can't leave the way it came. The mountains bleed their cloud away and it becomes soiled. But what beautiful punishment.... it can escape out of the inside of an aspen tree to get back into the air... but only a little at a time. That's what it costs to be too tired. Maybe though, it could.....

"Kari!"
Damn you! It was silent, but she thought it. Aloud she said, "Yes Mr. Clyde?"
"Have you solved the problem yet?"
"oh..... no; I'll need more time."
The teacher's voice rang with bitterness, "You're the only one who needs more time. Have it here by 8 in the morning."

IF YOU SAW her running between classes with too many books in her arms and a little bit late, you would never notice that she was different. When she sat in class engrossed in the patterns the window light made on the floor, she seemed commonly inattentive. But once you got to know her, you fully realized that she was different. She flushed with a kind of awareness. Kari was handicapped. But her handicap wasn't a limp or a distorted speech pattern. Her handicap was creativity.

What is creativity? Sometimes creative connection is done in a manner unique to mankind, but most often such connections bring a spark of "newness" to the connector only. In our society those who have the "duty" of determining what is creative and what is not are the critics. They are armed with peculiar kinds of subjective authority focused upon those who attempt to create. The prejudices they bring to their decision making are erudite and usually are not in the realm of the commonplace.

Teachers and other adults who must work with younger people are shadowed by the awareness of the critics'' role. As a result, there is often the tendency to use societal definitions of uniqueness when viewing the creative efforts of individual children. Few realize that both effective surprise and connecting the unconnected are firstly individual and secondly societal. A child whose perception is acute enough to see the road as a "ribbon of moonlight" cannot be punished because Alfred Noyes saw it first. Yet in many instances they are.

Teachers are instruments of society, and in an awkward way, they are the judicial branch of society's government. The term in court called the school year is serve by each child. The child is sentenced to these years of examination and indoctrination by a society bent on self perception. I this environment Kari is a misfit. Her teachers have been spawned by a society that has provide them with a host of cliches that guide their perception. They go into rooms full of thirty children with the knowledge that "each child has his own personality" and "each child is an individual" and that "each individual should respect the rights of others." In their implementing of these cliches pervasive concepts of democratic behavior and underdog worship cloud the teachers' analysis of class needs. Protectivism and conformity are built into Kari's school walls.

Kari has too many classmates. But the high numbers are only one excuse for the response of the teachers. Actually, if there were only ten students in each class, Kari would still be mistreated. The school reflects the society from which Kari comes. The school compartmental treatment of intellectualism is a microcosm of society's patterns. Words, numbers and activities are separated by fences labeled LANGUAGE, MATH and GYM.

Kari tries to synthesize all the elements of her world into relevance. In doing so, she makes the choices an act which gives her the plague mark of individuality. She sees an algebraic solution as symbolic poetry that rhymes in the symmetry of logic. The logic doesn't matter, but the meter she perceives does. her teacher is disgusted by her lack to please him. He makes his requirements clear and is piqued by her apparently intentional effort to ignore his needs.

The mathematician Jules Henri Poincare once described the way he solved a knotty group of problems in the following manner:

For fifteen days I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions. I was the very ignorant; every day I seated myself at my work table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results. One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds. I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable connection. By the next morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions...... I had only to write out the results.........

This suggests something that has been known by psychologists fro a long time -- more than one mode of thought guides our approach to solving problems. The substantive and internally consistent mode is the "logical, clear thinking" one that is most admired and accepted by society. More metaphoric and intuitive kinds of thought are regarded suspiciously and only a small segment of society is permitted license to perform them. Regardless of the breadth society's approval, the capabilities for both modes exist in each of us.

In addition to these two, Lawrence Kubie cites the kind of thought whose source lies within unconscious realm. Substantive thought is born of the conscious realm, and the intuitive is the product of the preconscious realm. Non-creative people, when solving problems and patterning their world, draw heavily upon conscious or substantive modes of thought. Creative people, on the other hand, are dependent on their use of the preconscious or intuitive. Thoughts and behavior resulting from the interference of these two modes from the unconscious realm inhibit both logic and creativity. Thought in the unconscious realm is the kind over which the individual has no control. When this kind of thought predominates, the individual is "sick."

Schools are most dedicated to rewarding substantive thought. Thus, they are effective mirrors of society's rules and operationally they force the position of the student toward the logical and chronological. The substantive is identified with our professional life while the intuitive dominates our personal lives. At the same time that an awareness that the leisure segment of our lives is increasing, the schools perpetuate the substantive reward patterns. What this means is that while claiming to be attendant to developing the individual to lead a better life, the schools yet serve the institutions recognized by the group. The professional and societal aspects of the role of the individual are stressed by deed and innuendo. The micro-society of the school is modeled after the industrial patterns which pervade the "real world." This means that the cliches prevail while indeed Kari and her kind are discriminated against. The teachers say they will serve the individual, but in action they homogenize individuals into anonymous, ineffective groups. This efficiency overwhelms effectiveness.

Kari begins to learn that society expects her, as female, to act in an intuitive fashion. The adjective society uses, however, are "emotional" and "irrational." She learns early that upon the male image is bestowed "logical" and "rational" expectations. The fetish of efficiency is superimposed upon the expected behavior of Kari and her classmates. The goals society has set must be reached almost ritualistically and this is what so offends this girl. She does not want to have to be a bright mother of two. Nor is she interested in becoming "man-like" and "rational" so that career success will be hers. Kari is just interested in being honest and free.

When the school bells ring Kari is required to cast an experience full of the brilliant orange of paint and the smell of linseed into a new form. This new image from is called civics. Here she learns to be "civil" by memorizing other new rules structured into a language so formalized that it brings tears to her eyes as she reads them. She learns that laws are written by individuals and interpreted by groups. She learns that when she respects her own rights, the chances are she infringes on another's.

Kari obviously has begun to reject elements of the role that she has inherited. She watches fads drift like culture clouds across the scene. She sees paisley print blouses give way to ragged tennis shoes. None of these elements of controlled change apply, for they are not relevant to her. She appears strange to the conformity-cloistered society around her, for it sees her respond to herself rather than to its collective voice. She creates a guilt in the cliche-makers which they transform to resentment for their own self-preservation. they decide that she is the element of abnormality and ply her toward the norm. her resistance is interpreted as immaturity and stubbornness that must be overcome.

She and those like her are called immoral and they are often admonished by phrases like, "These kids are getting worse every day." The difference between Kari and the voices of rebellion around her is that Kari's questions will continue. Her WHY will not be relinquished when she graduates or marries or has children. Kari is not a victim of her youth. Rather, youth, in asking similar questions and bathing in uninhibited perception is a victim of a state of mind that is too temporary. With Kari a question is a beginning, an answer, a challenge. Kari somehow resents the giving of an answer. It makes things too pat, and its precision is immediately subject to mistrust.

Kari was the one student in class who defended the heroine in Hawthornes THE SCARLET LETTER for having the courage to be apart from the society. At the same time Kari was damned for her dishonesty to herself. The teacher was angry because virtue wasn't winning out in the analysis. Kari said virtue was in doing what HAD to be done, rather than "obeying like a starved rat in the corridors of a maze somebody else built." The teacher was so frightened by Kari's argument that she gave her a "D" for her participation.

Kari's uniqueness is only part due to her creativity, for most children exhibit high creative potential in their youth. Kari's main mark of difference is her courage. It requires courage to ignore the matrix defined by others. She is aware of society's rules of order as surely as she is alert to the way that F=MA in physics. Her courage is expressed in the way she behaves. She knows that subjectivity of society's rule, "Thou shalt not," is very different from sciences rule, F=MA. In the first case, man's subjectivity is highly influential in guiding the interpretation, while in the second, subjectivity is far less relevant.

By knowing this, Kari has learned to trust the natural far more than the societal. her courage is displayed by her acceptance of the responsibility that is attendent with mediation. She mediates her experience and ignores the way society claims the right to influence her conclusions. Because the schools fundamentally speak in a language of mediated cliches, they do not greatly affect Kari. She once expressed her role in society by likening herself to a tree. She claimed that the tree could not want, for a tree could use only what it needed; all else was simply irrelevant.

The creative person is able to convert substance into metaphor. Instead of a natural fact, like F=MA being a deductive end to the experience of the scientist who investigates relationship between mass and force, it is an inductive beginning. Kari weaves the substance of formalized experience into her intuition.

Her attendance to nature reflects her rejection of mediated sources of experience. Kari sees within the commonplace elements of the natural world a source of elements that are infinitely repatternable. The realm of the commonplace in the world of society is filled with already mediated devices. She is not content with the reassembling of other people's ideas or products. She instead prefers to deal with the source -- nature.

In a line of poetry she once wrote, Kari claimed that "Before you can love you must know how to walk in the snow leaving no tracks." She knew the thrill of dashing through a virgin field of snow. In addition, she knew the excited fulfillment of willing abstinence. Both of these ideas were synthesized into the beautiful statement that applied to love.

Kari is sixteen and growing up. She and her generation will soon be ours. The structured constraints of society are becoming real to these young people, and we must accept the responsibility to guarantee the nature of their course. Are they to preserve the structure or alter it? It would be foolish to claim that the structure will remain the same, so it WILL evolve. We must save the Karis, all of them, but how can they be saved? The simplicity of the answer is as frightening as it is demanding: We must be more like Kari.

SR/July 15, 1967