About fifteen years ago, my neighbor told me that, if I jumped off the top of the couch, I would be able to fly. Now, I had no reason to believe that I wouldn’t fly, so, naturally, I tried it.
I landed on my head. It didn’t end up well.
More tragically, I learned that I could not fly.
Ten years later, I cemented my place as social pariah in middle school by spending all my spare time designing a flying machine at the lunch table. That’s right. A flying machine. According to my detailed plans, I would be gliding into eighth grade as the envy of my peers on an individual pair of wings made of balsa wood, melted crayons, and a nuanced ripcord system that made absolutely no sense.
Now, you might be thinking, “Gee, Shyama. Doesn’t that already kind of exist?” And the answer to that is yes. Yes, it does. It’s called an airplane. Man has spent many, many years perfecting the art of the airplane. It probably won’t be refined by a twelve year old at the back of the cafeteria, but you never know.
See, one thing that I’ve always appreciated is that my parents never told me that building a flying machine was a ridiculously stupid idea. Don’t get me wrong – it was. And I’m sure my parents would’ve stepped in if I had tried to test my contraption by jumping out of the tree in the front yard as my plans dictated. They asked me lots of questions about how said "flying machine" would work. But, as long as I was keeping up with my schoolwork and not doing anything dangerous, they weren’t about to tell me to stop.
I’m not at all saying that we should let crazy ideas go unchecked. As we grow up and try to make our ideas grow into fruition, we need outside voices to debate with us and fight with us. We need more than to just be creative.
That being said, when it comes to little kids learning how to use their imaginations, maybe we need to think a little differently. Maybe the first step to learning to think critically is learning to think imaginatively.
Thinking critically is, in essence, addressing every part of an idea and coming up with potential problems and solutions. Expanding our imaginations gives us the capacity to do this much more; it allows us to come up with problems and solutions that aren't immediately obvious.
My flying machine idea obviously never really panned out. But I learned a lot in trying to make it pan out. Instead of telling me that making a flying machine was a dumb idea, the people around me questioned specific parts of my plan. They forced me to reevaluate the way I constructed my idea instead of challenging the idea itself. They valued my use of imagination, and chose not to shoot down that aspect of the project, but force me to think hard about the external implications of my idea.
In a world that is in need of very real, tangible solutions to so many problems, it is easy to shut down childhood ideas that seem unfathomable. Maybe we should consider embracing each other's and our children's creative powers instead.
