Imagination is the ability to create, evolve, and utilize from mental models of things or situations that don’t yet exist. It is the necessary factor in clutching to new opportunities, and finding new ways for growth. Imagination is essential to help people learn many critical skills. Imagination is also one of the hardest things to keep alive under hard work and overwhelm. With imagination, we can do better than to adapt and follow, we can shape the reality.
Imagination is not a taught quality; more so, we are taught to forget it. We often shatter imaginative thinking in the name of “practicality” or “common sense”, many ideas are rejected without being explored. Imagination is a work of mind that happens when we find ourselves in staggering scenarios where we have to find a unusual way out. Therefore it is no big surprise that our imagination gets supressed when all we do in our daily lives, between school and work, is to follow a routine. Our brains aren’t trigerred or challanged to find ideas or ways out.
Our educational system does little to encourage a child’s imaginative and subsequent creative potential. Memorization without questioning nor adding is the key with the shining light in our current system. Another reason why schools could have hard time allowing creativity might be because of the difficulty in assessing creativity objectively. Unlike math equations or science laws with only one right answer, how can you make an objective value judgment on a student’s creative output? How can you teach that either?
Teachers’ are expected to achieve certain learning benchmarks and follow lesson plans faithfully, meaning teachers often lack the time and or flexibility to work in areas that can promote creative learning. Because of this trend, schools can become a place lacking of imagination and creativity. How do we get ahead of that? How do we keep teaching the basic course but also allow students to express their minds? By loosening the classroom structure, and allowing students to have more control over their learning can stimulate curiosity. Along with this structure, students can re-learn that what they are doing is to improve themselves and not to satisfy. We can put behind concepts such as “deadlines”.
Between the ages 5 to 10, the usage of creativity in one’s mind is 70%. However, between the ages 15 to 20 it can go as low as 12%. Which makes it clear that as we attend an environment where we are forced to close our frontal cortex sensories -school- our creative thinking skills rust. Eventually, students may lose their natural sense of playfulness and curiosity and replace it with a solemn determination to do well.
How would we step into innovations then? Taking away creative thinking is as bad as taking rights of free speech. After all, in either one we get stuck with same old ideas that some person came up with that the rest of the people has had to stand behind. Imagination and creativity goes further back than we might think, they are qualitites to be cherished. Therefore, schools and places of education should take it more into consideration. It is a need in the equation of change.