September 6, 2006

• Let’s talk about something, okay?  Great!

  It is impossible to know because it can in no way be measured, but I would speculate that this generation’s children have less imagination than the last generation’s did. 

  When I was growing up I was homeschooled, and each day when my friend finally came home from school we would go out and play army.  It was worth more than you may think, creating entire worlds all for the sake of traveling them and finding the unknown — which was whatever we invented when we felt like it.  Honestly we invented creatures, worlds, weapons, scenarios, identities — basically everything.  We walked lands you have never seen.  It wasn’t a shallow, one day mission either.  Most of the time we would start a scenario one day and build on it througout the week, adding nuances to enhance the experience, often resulting in complex situations; sometimes we drew or used maps to show how enemy advances were progressing.  All we had were our toy guns.  The rest we imagined.

  My little brother is nine years old and has never played army.  He has beaten a plethora of computer games, some of them multiple times, and could probably recite the programming schedule for Disney and Nickelodeon from 3 PM all the way 10 PM.  I would not blame him entirely — I hang out with him a lot, but other than that he has only one friend (which is all I had, but we got along really well) and is otherwise forced to do what he can around the house, which usually means watch TV or play on the  computer.  Watching television, outside of the educational channels, is one of the lowest forms of activity on the planet.  And he does it for hours and hours — this is his childhood.  Some movies he has watched 10 or 11 times.  Over the summer he watched The Two Towers five times.  A good movie, but it fosters no more imagination to watch it a second time than it does to go and “play outside” (ahh, that phrase dominated my childhood).  His childhood is the exact inverse of mine: in my younger years all I longed for was to get the A-ok from a parent to call my friend to play.  I learned to use the telephone when I was probably about eight and this conversation probably occured thousands of times until fizzling out around age thirteen:

  (Riiiiing)
  Parent of friend: Hello?
  Me:  Hi, is Alex there?
  Parent of friend:  Hold on.
  Me:  Ok.
  Alex:  Hello?
  Me:  Hey, wanna play?
  Alex:  Let me see if I’m allowed.
  (A few moment go by)
  Alex:  Yeah, I can!
  Me:  Sweet, your house or mine?
  Alex:  You can come on over here. 
  Me:  K, bye. 

  After this, anything was game.  Oh, the times! While my childhood flipped between being allowed to “play” and being grounded, my little brother’s flips between the computer and the television.  I try to help.  Sometimes while putting him to bed at night I ask him to give me three variables: person, place, and thing.  With them I produce a story that implements each variable.  But I can only do so much.  His childhood is shaped by multidinous circumstances.  And here is the sad thing:

  I think he is only conforming.  Most kids are becoming more inside-oriented, closed off from the world of adventure I grew up in.  Kids used to loathe school because they longed to be outside, to feel free to roam around the house, to create adventure in their backyards.  Now kids loathe school because they long to be home on their computers, free to roam the internet, to roam the television channels.  

  This deprives them of imagination.  Growing up exercising the imagination gives books their flavor (and it might support my theory that the number of book-readers is declining, which it is).  Heck, growing up exercising the imagination gives life its flavor.

  The imagination is just plain silly fun.  The possibilities are up to the author: in class one day a teacher may be giving a wordy lecture, and I look around to see my classmates sinking in their chairs, so I start to imagine.  Now it’s not just a classroom of kids and a teacher, but Switchfoot is in the front of the room, with a full set of instruments.  They hesitate for only a moment, and then synchronize the start of the obnoxiously loud music with the landing of their jumps.  The image comes in clear, and they rock their best hits only a few feet away from my teacher, who apparently has no clue that she is trying to give a lecture over the greatest lyrics in rock today. 

  Of course I don’t just go around imagining anything, anywhere.  The imagination is not to be cloyed nor interfere with other important things.  I wouldn’t want to miss all the lectures; education is vital too.  Imagination is not meant as an escape from reality, it is an addition to it, meant for the innocuous benefit of exploring what our minds can conceive.   

  This is why I love Calvin & Hobbes and C.S. Lewis.  The wonderful touch of imagination. 

  Choosing imagination means extending the possibilities.  I might even believe that when people grow up without imagination they have the propensity to not listen to other people, and can’t imagine how things could work another way than their own. 

  Am I right?  Are electronics influencing kids to lives of lesser imagination?  To lives with less proclivity to love nature?  To lives that are uninterested in the surrounding world?  Is it as bad as I say it is?  Are other kids like my little brother? Does a lack of imagination give people cold hearts?  Are the days gone when kids had no criteria for friends, except that they have fun together?   

  P.S. Sorry if I cloyed the word “Imagination.” 

  Everything here is underdeveloped, these are just some thoughts. 

  “There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.”  – Emerson.   
  

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