This quotation is taken from Charles Dickens’ book Hard Times, a diatribe against utilitarian education that only believed in the forcing of facts into young minds.
When I was a boy, I spent hours of my life in an imaginary world. ‘Daydreaming’ my teachers called it, and my youthful creative adventures of the mind were dismissed as laziness and lack of ability.
I reckon that it’s this capacity to imagine scenarios as an adult, that has given me the ability to collaborate with others in conceiving complex projects that change people’s lives.
When we recognise the potential in young people for creative thinking, we are giving them something to work with. Help a young person imagine to what they can aspire and you give them ambition.
Far too often I have heard adults complain that they weren’t given the opportunity to be ‘creative’ when they were young. And now they feel it’s too late for them.
So why on earth would we deny today’s young people what we know we missed out on?