Imagination is a dying art. Children are now growing up in an age where technology is the main form of entertainment and the imagination is thrown by the wayside like an unwanted dog. Smart phones, tablets, and television are kings in the world of entertainment. Unfortunately, they remove the need for too much thought being put into how our leisure time is spent. Instead of cuddling with our favorite book or making up convoluted scenarios with our well-loved toys, we now sit and check Facebook or websites for inane, and often pointless, bits of entertainment.
When I was little, I remember being able to take a bin full of stuffed animals and model horses and being able to turn them into a host of different characters. A horse could be a doctor and that fox over there may well be a bookstore clerk. They each had their own personality and occasionally their own unique voice. This allowed for any number of situations to crop up in any game my friends and I decided to play with these toys. Technology is a limited thing and can only do so much. If someone sets their mind to it, then really anything could be possible in a make believe game. This concept also bleeds into reading and writing.
When I learned to read it was great! All of these fantastic worlds were open to see if you could only imagine them inside your mind. Granted, picture books were predominant at the beginning, but series like The Magic Tree House and Silverwing proved to be just as fantastic in the pictures my mind could conjure. Kids nowadays seem to be picking up fewer and fewer books, often with the only reason given being that it's boring. One reason for this could be that they simply can't see the pictures the words are meant to paint. The Harry Potter series and the Inheritance Cycle from J. K. Rowling and Christopher Paolini respectively both paint entire worlds to explore. Rowling's novels did have a successful movie adaptation, however this is no substitute for the books. We now live in a world where it seems completely acceptable to simply watch the films instead of slogging through the hundreds and thousands of pages to get the full story as the author intended.
In short, recent generations no longer know how to get by without their much abused electronics by their sides. This has done them a great disservice in that they will no longer know the value of making up a game and playing it with their friends. They will no longer be able to appreciate a book as well as they could have without having known the butchered language often seen in social media posts. Imagination is a dying art. Maybe, we should try and save it.
