Mans Reach Exceeds His Grasp?

All the hard work is done for you

Are the children of today less creative than the children of yesteryear?

In a word yes.

Imagination, the most beautiful thing a child can have, is being stolen away from them at a time when it is needed most. Sir Ken Robinson famously asked at TED Talks the question "do schools kill creativity?" to which the answer must be unequivocally "yes".  During his 20 minutes he told a story of a woman who told him about her childhood, being 8 years old and a "disruptive influence" on fellow class mates, as her head teacher puts it to her parents; a scene I am sure we are all familiar with or can recall such characters.  The head then proceeded to switch on a radio and invite the parents to leave the room with him and watch her.  She began to tap her feet and hands, "she's not disruptive, she just needs to go to a dance school" he explained.  Or so the story goes, and she was enrolled by her parents in to such a school where she found like minded pupils and went onto become a famous, millionaire choreographer on the West End and Broadway.

In today's society Sir Ken Robinson claims that the child in question would be diagnosed with ADHD and given some medication, I agree.

This is not to say every parent should, or has the means, to enrol their children in to all manner of specialist schools to find something that might inspire them. However, it is true to say that the current education system is stagnated and fixed on it's path since its inception from the industrial revolution. If you do not get the grades in Maths, English and Science you are deemed a failure and success is based almost solely on these subjects.

On a much more general scale creativity and imagination is being taken out of our children's hands, gone are the days it seems where children would create entire worlds from nothing but the grey matter that they are gifted with at birth.
Lego is a fine example of something that has been taken and turned into a profit driven cash cow , where the main drive is maximising profits rather than unleashing the creative mind of the next Leonardo Da Vinci or Jacque Fresco.  In the last 20 years since I was a child building monster trucks, tanks and castles I have seen a dramatic shift in Lego and its focus.  Now instead of building a fire engine you can buy one more or less ready made. Instead of building an X-wing fighter from Star Wars, you can buy one more or less ready made, and so on.

There is no need to imagine it and build it. It is done for you.

The same can be said for the basic art of play time. Dressing up as Superman, Batman, Spider-man or Harry Potter (it pains me to mention Potters name in the same breath as such heroes) can now only be done with the official costumes as seen in Toys R Us or some other corporate cash cow company peddling their products to kids.  When I was a child a broom handle made a great lightsabre and it did not cost anywhere near the £10-20 that they are ripping off already financially stressed parents.  The same cannot be said for today's children who now insist on having the official Harry Potter wand to be the mug-blood wizard where a stick would do the same job. That is if their imagination were up to the task. It seems todays children can imagine nothing like the scenes from Nickelodeon's Rugrats, where boxes and living rooms become huge worlds of dinosaurs and grand adventures, with their minds alone.

I could go on about bathrobes doubling up as capes for Superman or Darth Vader but you may be suspecting that I have far too much play time on my hands myself and a strange affinity to the man of steel. 

So in essence it seems as though children are not able to freely entertain themselves as they once were in previous generations.  I am sure you would have heard various golden oldies such as "in my day we had a yo yo" and the various Facebook posts "we played till it got dark, got a clip around the ear, raised on Blue Peter...." etc etc and to some extent it is a Playstation generation problem but it is also a problem of our own making as we now live in a constant state of fear, when all we have to fear is fear itself.

Blue: Expressing the human body in all its glory

A programme called Concrete Circus (now on 4oD) aired on Channel 4 this week, at 2100.  Ridiculous when you consider the direct target audience or the supposedly 'lost generation', would either be asleep or at the mercy of their parents viewing habits.  Part of Channel 4's urban society, about four of the best in urban sports featuring skate boarding, trial riding, free running and bmx flat landing.  It was a truly epic piece.  At 28 I know what will hurt and what is not going to hurt (so the chances of me recreating any of the moves seen in this show are remote) but for the 'lost generation' between say 8 and, well not 28, there was a lot to be gained by watching it.  By seeing how amazing the human body truly is and what it is capable of achieving with even a small amount of application.  In the case of free running, so long as you have a pair of half decent running trainers, or a freshly looted pair from JD Sports, you can be away in no time, with no specialist equipment.  Just the nerve and mettle to carry out some of the actions but then this is the crux of it.

You are only limited by your own imagination on what you can achieve.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/concrete-circus/4od
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHy9W9LpvlQ&ob=av3e
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY