THE WISDOM OF THE PEANUTS KIDS
Ever since they first appeared in 1950 – Charlie Brown and his friends, including Snoopy – I have been an avid reader. While Charlie represents the average, nearly always somewhat confused kid, Lucy plays the antagonist, and the other kids round out the cast. Snoopy often gets his own role in each comic strip, while young Linus usually serves as the strip’s protagonist. He is simple, straightforward, and always beguilingly humorous. Whenever there is a positive message to be grasped, Linus usually embodies it.
My all-time favorite Linus performance is from the day he comes home after his first day of kindergarten. Over the years of my teaching career, I have often used that particular strip to introduce and explain my philosophy of teaching and learning. Linus bursts through the door after his first day of kindergarten, all pumped up by the marvelous thing he learned that day. He proceeds to tell his sister Lucy all about it, even though she isn’t at all interested. Nonetheless, he enthusiastically shares what he learned that day.
He begins by explaining that in class, they learned to place one wooden block on top of the other, and how amazed he was, since he himself would never have thought of stacking them. He tells his bored sister, Lucy, that it was a special learning experience for him because he never would have thought of doing it. “I tell you, it was wonderful.” Linus goes on to say that it never would have occurred to him to place one wooden block on top of the other. “It was a very special thing,” he says. “What a day!”
Linus does not explain why it never occurred to him to place the blocks one on top of the other, but in doing so, he realized that some things support others that depend on them. I read this as a metaphor for grasping the basic concept of reasoning, in which one item logically supports another based on it. This is the very core of logical reasoning. We see here how one line of thought can support or depend upon another. What a day, indeed! Learning to learn is, if not the very essence of reasoning, a crucial step in it.
Learning how one fact or idea supports another is key to understanding how phenomena in the world depend on or lead to one another. It may be “Peanuts” to some, but it’s a very deep insight for the likes of young Linus. Socrates would have been pleased with Linus’s ability to grasp this simple relationship between one thing and another. It’s what some psychologists call an “Aha” moment, the moment when you see the connection between one thing and another. Sherlock would have said to his partner, “Do you see, Watson?” It is this process of discovery that Socrates sought to teach his students. Linus was “Learning to learn.”