Children Have Creative Imagination

Creative imagination is a natural phenomenon in children. It rarely appears before the age of a year and a half, when the child becomes able to walk and to test for himself everything his eyes fall upon or his hands can reach. Then the little boy delights in riding a stick and calling it a racing horse, and the little girl in rolling up a towel and pillowing it on her arm as though she were cradling her beautiful baby... Creative imagination develops in them until we may even see children of similar ages acting out a play whose characters are all imaginary, keeping most faithfully to all the precision and mastery their parts demand.

Their imagination carries them to marvel at natural phenomena, and they explain the causes of these according to what their imagination — stripped of scientific facts — suggests to them. Therefore, when we judge a child's thinking and his mental reasoning, we must not let it slip from our minds that he lives in a world of imagination and possesses no trace of the scientific knowledge that governs the universe. He wonders why the stars do not fall upon our heads as apples and apricots fall from the tree, and why people do not change their eyes and their legs as they change their clothes... We must not laugh at them over questions like these; rather let our answers be of such correctness and simplicity that we make ourselves understood to them in mind and in imagination, and satisfy the instinct of the love of knowledge in them.

(1) Sarmad is four years old. He learned from his grandfather, as the outcome of his many questions, that God Almighty is He who sends us out of water food to eat and clothes to wear, and rewards people according to their deserts. Sarmad went up to the mountains and saw the fog for the first time in his life, and his little sister asked him: "Is this a sea advancing upon us, as if it were about to pounce on us and swallow us up?" Her brother reassured her, in the tone of the big to the small, saying: "Don't be afraid; this is not a sea. It is only the water coming down to the earth and passing by all the people, who take from it their need of food and drink and clothing."

So here is Sarmad: he saw a natural phenomenon — a mighty one in his eyes — and, unable to grasp its scientific secrets, he attributed it to God; and he was helped in forming his fancies by the likeness between the fog and the clouds, which he supposed to be water. For further assurance he hurried to his mother, asking whether his explanation was correct; and she sat with him on the balcony and, in an atmosphere of earnestness and mutual understanding, told him the story of the fog. A little while later she passed by him again and heard him retelling the story to his sister, trying to correct his first claim, while his sister listened, assenting with a nod of the head, though her two years kept her from grasping much of its import.

(2) I once sat watching the nursery children at their play in the sand in the garden, and I saw that they had divided into two parties: one party playing the part of the guests, seated on the edge of the sandbox, while the second party set about filling the little molds with sand, turning them out onto a piece of wood which they used as a tray, and offering them to the guests as cakes and sweets; and the guests took them with earnestness and attention and thanked them for them. The sight of them and the breadth of their imagination delighted me; and since the time had come for them to go in to class, I left them to continue their play-acting until they should have their fill of satisfying the instinct of their imagination.

The leaders of education in the world have awakened to the importance of creative imagination in the child's life and have carried out certain reforms in the methods of education in the kindergartens. Whereas the teacher formerly used to make models of handwork and drawing and ask the children to copy them, binding them to follow her method so as to produce a likeness of the original, as close as might be, she now leaves the child absolute freedom to draw whatever his imagination — drawn from the atmosphere of his own life — suggests to him, and to make models of whatever it pleases him to fashion, binding him with no restriction or condition, and so developing in him the power of creative imagination. For children — however simple and unimportant the works they make — there lies in this a growth of their individual personality, of the power of their imagination, and of their independence of thought.

And whereas the kindergarten teacher of the old school used to tell her children stories and tales and ask them to repeat them and hold to them to the letter, today she encourages them to invent stories, however trifling, however far from truth and logic, for these have their value and their importance in the child's mentality. We must, then, prize them, and respect the simplest idea inspired by his imagination.

(3) Ziad told his story with enthusiasm. He said: "On the morning of the feast my father gave me an airplane." Elias interrupted him, saying: "My father gave me an airplane too!" Ziad hastened to make things clear, saying: "But my airplane is big, and it really flies! I rode in it yesterday and piloted it myself and flew over Beirut and saw the sea and the streets!" Elias asked him imploringly: "Will you let me ride in it with you?" Ziad answered him: "Gladly! Come to my house tomorrow, and you will see what a fine time we shall spend together." And the story ended. And Ziad sat proud of his adventures and of his possession of an airplane to fly in!... I understood afterward from his mother that an airplane had flown over their house the day before, so low that it drew all eyes and moved Ziad to ask question after question about it. He wished he might have an airplane like it, and this wish inspired the story in him until it became real in his imagination. It is not right for us to mock his story and insist to children on its distance from the truth, so long as it has filled a great void in his life.

Our duty, then, is to distinguish between lying and creative imagination, and to encourage our children to express their ideas and to develop their imagination, so that their personalities may grow strong and they may become independent in their thinking and their doings, after the example of the children of the advanced nations.