A World Without Imagination

The past few visits with my nephew have been a blast.  He's at a stage in life where everyone is a superhero.  When he is visiting, we fight crime, watch superhero shows, play with masks and action figures, and serve justice...all before nap time.  Playing pretend is always so much fun.  I love my nephew's wild imagination.  I don't get to use my imagination much anymore.

As a child, I had a crazy imagination.  I didn't ask my parents very many questions.  I just made up reasons for things.  For example, one question I do remember asking my mom was how the street lights know when to turn on in the evening and off in the morning.  She said something about computers.  I got it in my head that there were tiny people sitting inside those street lamps playing solitaire on their computers until it was time to light up the neighborhood.

I also remember playing The Floor is Lava with my siblings.  We would gather all our pillows and blankets and jump from pillow to pillow onto our lava resistant ship built from blankets.

While working with kids for the last eight years (Cub Scouts, Primary, babysitting), I've begun to notice a decrease in imagination.  I've witnessed children pretending, but only what they've seen on TV.  They rarely come up with their own stories.  They will, in fact, recite full lines from movies and TV shows.

What does this say about today's children?  Are they spending too much time in front of the television?  How about iPads and Tablets?  The games they are playing are preprogrammed to work a certain way.  No need for imagination there.  And even public schools are cutting back on teaching children how to be imaginative.  If a school district is running low on money, what is usually the first thing to be cut?  Music and art, where children are free to express themselves.

What can we do about this?  Unplug the kids.  Give them an arts and crafts project.  Let them play make believe.  Read to them.  Through books, children can be taken to a new world that they have to picture in their minds, assuming we're reading a novel and not a picture book.  

A world without imagination is a world I don't wish to be a part of.  Without imagination there would be no future.  No new ideas or inventions.  Nothing would ever change.  So next time I'm pretending to be a superhero with my nephew, I'm going to tell him that his greatest super power is real.  Imagination is a super power.  Imagine that.