Institute Goals

The arts, especially the literary arts, not only have value in providing children aesthetic experiences; they can also be revelatory of how children are to conceive themselves and their human way of life. The arts can also show us what possible alternatives to these conceptions would be like. As Martha Nussbaum has argued, the arts, especially the narrative arts, cultivate capacities for judgment and sensitivity that can and should be expressed in the choices a citizen makes. Art and stories are essential in the development and refinement of children’s feelings and emotions about the human condition and the important events and circumstances of life and history. Thus a child deprived of art and stories is deprived, as well, of certain ways of viewing other people. Too often, however, it is claimed that while stories are full of wonderful things like values and meaning and ideals, and cause us to have wonderful reactions, like feelings and emotions, they contain little factual knowledge and knowledge is what children are sent to school to acquire.

The Institutes I direct have three main educational aims for K-8 classrooms. (1) To demonstrate how children’s literature provides models of humanistic thinking, feeling, and acting that are of great importance in preparing children to responsibly participate in the civic enterprise. (2) To examine ways in which children’s literature and humanistic themes mined from it can be used to promote reasonableness, understanding, and apt judgment in children. (3) To provide a link between reasonableness and the humanistic development of children’s judgment making as they struggle to understand themselves and others, and their role in the community, the society, and the world.