Reclaiming “Magical Thinking” in Education

The best thing we can do for our planet is to nourish children's magical imagination of positive futures.

Young humans inhabit a waking world imbued with fantasy, where their creativity runs as wild and free as every human’s does during nighttime dreaming. Little children spontaneously make up stories, inventing characters, plots and settings as naturally as a tree puts out leaves in the springtime.

Then they start school. Suddenly laughing, curious little children are forced to sit still and listen to the droning of their teacher.

Too often early schooling robs us of the sense of fun, freedom and magic that we are born with. As we learn to listen to instruction, follow the rules and give the teacher what they ask for, a heaviness, a woodenness, a seriousness sets in that holds our spirits down.

This is exactly the opposite of what we need in the 21st century, when everything is changing so rapidly and we need to cultivate a lightness of spirit, a buoyant, can-do attitude that sees challenges as opportunities for inventive, transformative growth.

Humans have tremendous creative potential, but education often limits the framework in which we create. We are trained to think inside the box and to color inside the lines provided for us by the established social order.

On the contrary, school should be a place where young people are encouraged to dream big and develop their creative faculties, which can build the Arks that will carry us safely through the current social and environmental storms to calmer, happier times ahead.

The Gaian system runs on an expectation of flourishing. If Mother Nature encounters an obstacle, she immediately sets to work on overcoming it, creating new opportunities for thriving growth.

Cut a forest, and the land immediately starts to regenerate, growing the flowers and lichens that will steadily create the conditions for a new forest to emerge.

Dam a river, and the turtles and dragonflies will flock to the newly created pond.

Even chemical spills can be processed by naturally occurring microbes. It may take a million years, but radioactive waste will be reclaimed and brought back into the system of regeneration. The planet has all the time in the world.

This is magic. And children need to be taught that their spontaneous practice of “make-believe” is part of our species’ natural ability to translate the stuff of our dreams into the reality that surrounds us.

Children’s creative abilities must be affirmed and celebrated, their imaginations fired up with the knowledge that we live in an endlessly generative, flourishing planet, in a limitless creative cosmos, of which each life form is an emanation, and to which every life form is connected on a spiritual level, that is to say through what we loosely call consciousness.

Jane Roberts’ Seth describes consciousness as the creative matrix that underlies all reality. We visit this limitless psychic landscape every night in our dreams, which are the repository and the seedbed of all manifested reality.

We know, through “scientific” observation, that a human being, like any animal, will go insane and die, quite rapidly, if deprived of sleep. Every living being must spend nearly half its life in the dream world, to be refreshed and restored through the unconscious—that is to say, “magical”—process of dreaming.

One of the most disturbing trends of modern life, to which our educational practices contribute, is the dismissal of the importance of dreaming and daydreaming. Little children are harshly torn from sleep by the demand to show up for school “on time,” and these days, even in the long nights of winter, the lighted screens of our digital devices keep young people awake and consuming the imaginative products of others—products that are too often violent, dark and despairing.

In my observation as a parent and teacher, young people are literally losing the capacity to daydream. If they have a spare moment, they use it not to relax their own minds in creative revery, but to stay focused on the ideas of others, fed to them by their screens.

For better or worse, young people are suggestible. If you keep repeating the message that the world is a dangerous place, full of disease and violence, showing young people images of social breakdown, hunger and suffering, then these are the images that will fill their imaginations, snuffing out their ability to imagine a better world.

A steady dystopian diet causes our potential to imagine positive futures to wither on the vine. Children are born with the potential to create anything they can imagine—every single thing that humans have ever created, we saw first in our mind’s eye. But if we are told, over and over, that the world is doomed, that people are cruel and violent, that evil always triumphs over good, we are being indoctrinated in dystopian thinking, which is like poison fed to the young green shoot, preventing its inherent tendency to vibrantly flourish and grow.

The best thing we can do, as parents and teachers, is to give children the time and space to dream, both at night and during the day, while nourishing their imaginations with magical stories the show our marvelous capacity for invention and regeneration.

Fairytales, myths, legends and modern fantasies do not deny that darkness exists, but notice how children love the stories where in the end, goodness and light triumph. It’s not for nothing that humans naturally gravitate to stories that show us the potential for happy endings.

Even in these dark days of the early 21st century, it is possible to imagine brighter times ahead. It’s our urgent responsibility as educators to nourish the dreams that will create the reality we want our children to joyously live into.