What are we doing to our children’s imagination?
We are at a time in history when we need to be able to think creatively and completely outside the box. We have to redesign our lives to use less carbon. At the same time our toy makers and media are stultifying out children’s minds!
I bought some new Lego for my grandson to add to the much diminished remnants left over from my own children. Eventually I found a tub of Lego but even that had pages of designs for children to follow and not really many blocks for $50. Most Lego now comes in sets to build a specific thing.
When my kids were young their Lego was a large collection of blocks with assorted strange shapes and a few “people” blocks. No plans or ideas because the idea was to encourage them to think for themselves and dream up their own grand designs.
When I was a child, we had wooden blocks that did not lock together and we needed to think about how things balanced and locked in together if we wanted to build larger structures. We also improvised and incorporated toilet roll tubes, scraps of wood from Dad’s workshop and cardboard boxes. We still built our grand designs but we used our imagination and created our own.
My children were born in a remote part of North Queensland in tropical northern Australia. We did not get television until my kids were aged 5, 4 and 3. They were attending the local kindergarten when the TV tower was commissioned at Bartle Freere, near Cairns. That week the children’s games changed. They all played the games they saw on TV because it impacted at once on the entire town. What a pity their old imaginative games were gone. They never came back.
During my time in NQ I taught biology and science in the local high school and was astonished at difference between those pre-TV kids and the ones I had taught previously in the city. They were not as good at writing BUT they were streets ahead in maths and most importantly, compared with city kids, they were really creative thinkers. They were the children of people who improvised, built their own lives, their own houses, their own workplaces and made their own fun. They were a joy to teach. I returned to the city and taught very well mannered sponges who did not think much. You can’t waste time thinking when you need to cram for exam results. I left teaching. Now I hear that you can do a “science” degree with no physics, chemistry or maths! How can you understand a fish with no concept of pressure? The world has gone mad!
We now need people who can think creatively and not be blocked by being told that it can’t be done. We need Government and other regulators to be tough on polluters but to be flexible for people who are innovating and trying new ways. We need to encourage our kids to be creative, even when it does make a mess.
We won’t solve the problems of reducing our carbon emissions and thinking about our use and waste of embodied energy unless we allow and encourage creative thinking.
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