Imagine with me...

As an author, I want to reach lives through the medium of writing. And yet, as a teacher, I'm noticing fewer and fewer young people are interested in reading.

I assigned my students a reading section from the book we are delving into as we study an ancient historical figure. Their goal: read for comprehension. That's it. As they read, they should take note of important moments in the person's life, important ideas they came up with (which have shaped the world since then) and to write out how the person acted based on those ideas/beliefs. Mind you, the reading is only 8 pages long.

I've demonstrated it.

I've walked them through it.

And yet, they can't seem to do the "hard work" of reading.

I'm sure there are any number of things that I could point to that might explain why; technology/screen time, attention span, the ever-increasing busyness of people's schedules (more and more, the students are doing way more than I ever did in high school), the inability to rest....I could go on.

But I don't think that any of that really encompasses the situation.

I think, for good or for ill, that young people have lost the joy of imagination.

It used to be that you played make-believe as a kid and then, as you became an adult, you grew out of that. Fantastical stories of magic and wonder become passe and you're expected to act mature. For some of us, those stories still entrance us and it is one reason why I love to write - it is a chance for me to make-believe and see the world through the lens of my own imagination.

Yet more and more, I'm noticing young people don't imagine any longer. It's not that they won't do it - I'm coming to find it's that they can't. They've been asked to grow up all too fast and the wonder of imaginary worlds, super powers and saving the world is gone far too quickly.

Take for instance, an assignment I gave to my students recently:

We'd been studying the development of western monasticism (the idea of solitude and the movement of people becoming monks in the deserts of the Ancient Near East). I asked my classes, 15 & 16 year olds, to write a creative short story just 1 page long [hand written, on both sides of a single sheet of paper] describing a monk on his quest for solitude. I used the word quest to invoke the idea of a goal or something to attain. I gave them liberty to create whatever story they wanted, as long as they were showing how this person decided that a life of solitude was for them.

By the reactions I received, you'd have thought I was asking them to recreate Dante's Divine Comedy verbatim.

Imagination is such an integral part of society. Without it, we lose the chance at becoming something greater than who we already are. Humanity has a chance to create and fail, and create again until something magical happens.

Don't lose your imagination. And if you've cultivated one, share it with others. Share it with a young person. They live in a world that is completely unlike anything else we've had to experience when we were their age. I'll keep loving on these young people until hopefully they see the light of imagination as a bright and hopeful beacon of the future instead of a crippled, wasted part of the past.

J.A.