One Christmas, I must have been seven or eight years old, my parents presented me with a toy baseball game, a simple contraption created years before anyone thought of video games or in-home computers. It was a thin sheet of tin with a baseball diamond painted on it and checkered with holes throughout the infield and outfield. The holes were designated as certain actions—single, double, triple, out, double play, etc.—all the activities that could be imagined in a real game. The field was backed by another piece of tin that served as a fence about two inches high, and leading into the fence along each foul line, a small ramp ran up and over. This marked even the possibility of hitting a home run.
Once laid out, the game began. The baseball was a steel bearing sprung from the center. It rolled from a pitcher’s mound toward home plate at a good clip. You activated a spring-loaded plastic bat by pushing buttons on the side of the game very similar to the setup on a pinball machine. The bat swept forward and, based on your timing, met the ball bearing. The bearing rolled forward until captured by one of the aforementioned holes in the tin ball field. Where the ball came to rest indicated an out or a hit. If you pushed the buttons at exactly the right time, it could even roll up one of the ramps and over the fence for a home run. There were, of course, click counters that rolled over to track outs, innings, and the score.
I spent hours and hours playing that game when I wasn’t outside playing for real in the summer, not because of its complexity, but rather because of its simplicity. The complexity and interest in the game occurred in my mind. I imagined each team based on my knowledge of major league baseball gleaned from sports pages and the newspaper, weekly games on an old black and white TV or the radio, my baseball card collection from Topps Bubble gum, and a personal understanding of strategies and actions that came from playing baseball for real with friends outside. All of this intimate knowledge and my love for the game combined, synthesized, and powered by a human ability that, to me, seems woefully underused and under encouraged in children by our society today, a positive and open imagination.
More than half a century has passed, and technology has grown in leaps and bounds over this time. Kids don’t have to create baseball seasons anymore, or anything else. In fact, much of the creativity that used to exercise a young mind has given way to computers, video games, and sophisticated self-actualizing electronic devices that do the creating and most of the playing for us. We call this progress, and it infects adults in many aspects as well. I’m not trying to make a case here that progress is bad. It isn’t. Progress is neutral. Humans use it poorly or use it well. My point rests in an old country proverb learned from my grandmother. She always said that cleanliness is a good thing as long as you don’t “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” It’s important to develop new ideas as long as we realize that new ideas come from old ones being built on, expanded, and if the old ones serve a viable purpose, they should continue to be used in harmony with the new ones.
Once we throw out our need to exercise our imaginations simply for the sake of life being more convenient or easier, once we no longer feel the need to encourage creative and critical thinking in our children, we run the risk of stagnation in the areas that make us independent and free. Imagination is the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses. Once we quit teaching things like history, philosophy, art, and literature—things not always present in our immediate physical senses, we weaken the ability of the mind to be creative or resourceful in many areas that one could argue are just as important as science and leisure. What good is progress in scientific inquiry if we don’t temper it with progress in our basic humanity?
This seems to be the direction in which America is moving at the present time. We are drifting away from encouraging creative thought and ideas aimed at the elimination of poverty, racism, the value of artistic endeavor, and peace while making great strides in things that increase profit and power for a small class of wealthy elitists. I believe firmly that one way to improve as a society is to once again encourage the expression of our inherent imaginative abilities in a joyful way, and this begins by giving children more opportunities to exercise it freely rather than constricting or directing it in such ways that make them easier to manipulate and control as adults, which is exactly what I see many politicians attempting to do for their own short-term benefit and, through fear, some parents as well.
Jim McGarrah, Author 