How can I cultivate my child's literary taste?
The love of beauty is innate, but its appreciation is acquired. Its standards differ between societies and civilizations, and vary across the ages. Language is the tool for crafting literature of all kinds. For a child to feel the beauty of a literary text he reads or hears, his language and literary taste must be at a high level of maturity and awareness, along with his exposure to literary experiences that enable him to perceive and interpret the aesthetic qualities and artistic values in the story or poem he reads or hears. A child speaks spontaneously and naturally without a teacher, but in order to learn to read and write, understand poetry, and critique literature, he will not do without a teacher. This is what Ibn Khaldun calls "the mastery of language ." Listening and imitation are the basis of language acquisition, while the creation of language requires someone to develop it and guide its learner to become a skilled creator of its arts, who knows its grammatical and morphological characteristics and understands the points of rhetoric within it.
Developing children's literary taste is built upon knowledge and evolves through learning and practice. The more a child acquires knowledge and experiences related to a specific field, the greater their ability to perceive quality, distinguish the unique characteristics, and recognize the importance that gives a work value in a particular area. Artistic taste grows through frequent exposure to art and increasing knowledge related to a type of art in order to judge its quality. For example, to judge a painting, we need to teach the child the school to which the painting belongs and what distinguishes the valuable and famous paintings belonging to that school, so that they understand the reasons for their fame and their points of distinction. Someone who has a musical taste must have heard a number of distinctive musical pieces and known their points of distinction, or researched them, or perhaps even learned to play an instrument, in order to offer an objective critique and give an accurate judgment that determines the value of that piece. This is how we begin: by increasing knowledge and learning in the field in which we want to develop the child's taste.
Literary taste consists of the linguistic ability to understand a text, extract ideas from it, evaluate words and structures, and connect imaginative concepts to determine the literary value of a text. It also involves learning critical thinking skills such as analysis, interpretation, comparison, recognizing similarities and differences, and differentiating between them, as well as creative thinking skills such as originality, fluency, and detail. These abilities are the basis for judging and studying a literary work. Simply put, if we want to raise a child's literary taste, we need to raise their linguistic level, first by exposing them to a large number of literary pieces, explaining and analyzing their strengths and beauty, then reinforcing their subjective perspective by asking them what they think and feel, and providing them with the tools that enable them to delve into the depths of the literary text. To create a kind of emotional connection with the work, thus sharpening his literary sense, elevating his taste, making him feel happy, and enabling him to grasp the key qualities that make a text beautiful and distinctive, so that the child can then appreciate the aesthetic values in texts not only in terms of words but also meanings and figurative language. The essential question is: when and how do we begin?
We must start at an early age, from 1-5 years old, when linguistic memory is formed and auditory memory is refined. At this stage, the child retains passages and stories, especially those he heard in the arms of those who love him, to be associated with intimate feelings. Among the influential factors is the child hearing a wealth of stories and songs with good literary formulations and strong rhetorical devices. The more we read to the child and recite poems to him, the more we enrich his linguistic repertoire and pave the way for a fertile ground for literary taste.
At the age of 5-8 years, this stage is characterized by linguistic spontaneity, naturalness in speech, and the ability to perceive the components of language. It is important to surround the child with sound language. Therefore, Arabs and Muslims were keen on memorizing the Holy Quran and teaching the child some prophetic hadiths at this age, in order to control the pronunciation of Arabic sounds and to recognize the finest figurative images, as they are the strongest linguistic models that the child can learn at a stage in which he acquires linguistic behavior, imitates what he sees and hears, and begins to understand and imitate texts. He also begins to deal with the meanings and symbols of language, and interacts with them sensorily, mentally, and emotionally. The child at this stage loves imagination and immerses himself in it, to the point that he may sometimes confuse it with reality, and he brings life to almost everything. The seeds of literary taste are planted at this stage.
Here, literary taste begins to emerge at the age of 8-10 years, when the child appreciates literary stories and poems, and is able to understand some similes, such as telling him, "You are like the moon," or "Fly like an airplane." It is important to encourage the child to read continuously and listen to literary models with aesthetic values and emotional and sentimental dimensions. The child should also be encouraged to interpret, analyze, and understand the meanings of texts, link them to his present and real life, and be given the opportunity to emulate those models and try to imitate them so that his literary and creative abilities grow and develop.
At the age of 10-15, the linguistic and expressive abilities emerge, enabling the comprehension of literary meanings in various texts. The child becomes capable of using linguistic embellishments, rhetorical formulations, and figurative techniques that give an aesthetic musical rhythm to words, such as rhyme, alliteration, antithesis, and others. The child is able to write distinctive literary texts, and is interested in human emotions, appreciates emotional literature, and loves literary models with ambiguity, those that invite thought, and contain a degree of suspense. The child comprehends symbolic literature with its imaginative and semantic density and understands dramatic plots.
I would like to draw attention to the issue of cultural identity and appreciation of local literature, which contributes to the stability and psychological strength of the child. Exposing him to texts related to his cultural and popular heritage and focusing on it positively helps him to connect with it psychologically and emotionally, so that feelings of pride and honor are formed in him regarding the identity of that linguistic and literary heritage that connects him to his cultural origins. He then builds his modern literature on it, and his influence on other cultures is reduced, and he becomes immune to falling into the trap of losing Arab identity and cultural assimilation. I do not mean here to isolate the child from getting acquainted with foreign cultural models, but the fear in the era of globalization is that his ignorance of his heritage will lead him to a state of fascination with a foreign culture, and he may feel inferior compared to his own culture.
Finally, literary taste is multifaceted, encompassing stories, poems, plays, and novels… It would be wonderful if the child were to become acquainted with the diverse facets of literature, which live on with the life of languages, growing and changing to keep pace with the times and the movement of life. Therefore, let us introduce the learner to the classics of literature and open his mind so that he may develop, update, and employ what he likes from the images of his reality. Taste cannot be frozen in specific frames; rather, it is an art and creativity that is always capable of renewal.