The role of imagination in education is underrated.
Everything that can be learned or understood hasn’t been learned or understood. If all we do for our kids’ education is to encourage our kids to memorize what the world has already learned, then are we really allowing our kids a meaningful education.
Let’s get out of our kids’ way and allow them to co-create in this world.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
Albert Einstein
What is the role of imagination in education?
I share two thoughts to consider so you can get out of the way and allow for the role of imagination in education in your homeschool.
First, observe your child to engage your child.
Who is this child right before me?
And how is she showing her interests, revealing her curiosities, and displaying her imagination?
I’ve seen my oldest daughter make mud patties and clay bricks in the backyard for days.
- She spent hours painting and repainting her nails.
- She spent hours wandering the backyard with a picnic blanket, dragging her siblings from one end to the next.
- Then she told me they were traveling from Australia to Paris.
This gal would rather be doing, well, anything other than math.
- She was least likely to catch on to the rules of a new game or read the directions of a map.
- Yet, when she decided she wanted to sew, she began cutting and pinning, with no patterns.
- When she cooked, she left the recipe books unopened and just played.
After she finished her prescribed creative writing time in her morning studies, she disappeared into her room to write her stories or read other people’s stories.
Her pages were filled with clever, realistic dialogue. And her plot lines were as a Hollywood film.
My oldest daughter was the kiddo that everyone followed in the playground because she made up clever stories to act out. She play-acted since, well, forever...switching from British to German to French accents unprompted and untaught.
She lived most happily in her quiet world, her made-up world, her dream world. She was the dreamer and embodied the imaginative life.
Secondly, be clear that there’s an art and science in an education.
If one could type symptoms into the Google bar and spit out a diagnosis, would medical doctors be required?
There’s a certain experience and constant exposure that surrounds the assessment and diagnoses in medicine that can’t be captured in the Google bar.
The same is true for the idea of an education: there’s an art and science to an education too. We could try to jam a bunch of facts into the minds of our children and hope they spit out the requested knowledge later. But I believe that education would merely be judged inadequate, adequate, above average, or excellent.
What value is that?
Isn’t an education more than cramming knowledge bits into our brains?
What is an education anyways?
An education begins and ends with imagination. An imagination sparked and fueled by the one that initiated it.
Teresa Wiedrick, author of Homeschool Mama Self-Care: Nurturing the Nurturer
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