Imagination and Education

When I was a kid I imagined a world in which we all had the ability to communicate easily in a short period of time, where TVs turned into two way devices that allowed people to see each other. I imagined a world where a phone did not just exist at home, but did not rely on wires to work. I saw people driving cars not powered by gasoline. I imagined that natural resources were going to play a big role in the future and that traveling physically from one place to the next was not going to be as much necessary.

Today, I work in a job that didn't exist back then, a job that most people never imagined, where most things I imagined have come to exist. Today, as I look at our kids in our world, I wonder how many of them are imagining the world of the future and how many people are realizing that the visions of the future exist within the imagination of our children and younger generations.

In a world where we don't even begin to understand the future of our kids as adults, have we started to imagine new ways to educate? Have we gone back to the feelings and experiences we had as kids and projected them well enough into the coming times? I'd like to think that some us have and are doing a good job at understanding the new future being forged in today's young minds. I also and with great worries see that the immense majority of the rest of us are so much into today's problems that imagination has been relegated to a mere thought. A limited thought that carries the potential of preventing us from seeing, developing and forging the near world ahead of its existence.