There is a time in every child’s life when a cardboard box becomes a house, a stick becomes a sword and a bedsheet becomes a tent, a castle or an entire kingdom.
A child does not need much to create a world.
Give a child a few crayons and a blank sheet of paper and a pink elephant may walk beneath a green sky.
There is nothing wrong with this.
The child is not making a scientific statement. The child is imagining.
And then, sooner or later, an adult says:
“But elephants are not pink.”
“The sky is not green.”
And the child learns that there is a correct way to see the world.
I sometimes wonder whether this is where we begin to lose something.
Every child is born with enormous potential. Education is meant to help that potential unfold. It should teach a child to think, to question, to understand, to imagine and to discover what the mind is capable of doing.
But too often education does something else.
It teaches children to remember the answer rather than ask the question.
It teaches them to reproduce rather than create.
It teaches them that being wrong is worse than being curious.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, imagination begins to disappear.
Many years ago, when Project Why was still in its infancy, we held a drawing competition. The children came from different backgrounds and were of different ages. We expected to see different worlds emerge from their drawings.
Instead, we saw the same picture again and again.
Mountains.
A river.
A house.
Trees.
A sun rising or setting.
Perhaps a flower or a fish added for variety.
There were differences in colour and technique, of course. Some children drew with greater confidence. Some used brighter colours. But the basic picture remained almost identical.
It was the landscape they had been taught to draw.
That was when we realised how deeply the education system had entered their imaginations.
Later, we held a workshop and asked a group of teenagers to draw a mother and child.
The results were startling.
Many of the drawings returned to the same familiar landscape of mountains, rivers and houses. Very few children were able to draw something they had not been shown before.
Some simply said they could not draw from imagination.
They could copy.
They could reproduce.
But they could not invent.
The problem was not that these children lacked imagination. They had been children once. They had played, invented games and transformed ordinary objects into extraordinary ones.
Somewhere along the way, they had learnt that their own imagination could not be trusted.
I remember another incident from when my daughter was in Class I.
She was asked to write an essay on “My Mother.”
She wrote about her actual mother: a woman with short hair who worked.
She received an F.
The reason was simple. The teacher had given the children a model essay. In that essay, the mother had long hair, wore a sari and stayed at home cooking while the father went to work.
My daughter had written the truth.
The truth, apparently, was the wrong answer.
I remember being furious. I remember arguing with the school. And I remember eventually having to tell my child that sometimes she would have to write what the teacher expected.
I have often wondered what she made of that lesson.
A little later, she was learning the colours of the rainbow. She carefully learnt the spelling of “violet” as it had been written on the blackboard.
When I corrected her, she looked at me and said:
“But that is what the teacher wrote.”
She was right.
The lesson she had learnt was not about spelling.
It was about authority.
The adult is right.
The book is right.
The blackboard is right.
The child is wrong.
And so, little by little, children begin to surrender their own ability to question.
This is not an argument against knowledge.
Children need knowledge. They need facts. They need discipline. They need to learn how the world works.
But knowledge without imagination can become a prison.
A child who learns only to repeat may know the answer to a question.
A child who learns to imagine may one day find an answer to a question no one has asked before.
Imagination is not a luxury reserved for artists, writers or scientists.
It is what allows us to imagine another person’s pain.
It is what allows us to see possibilities where others see only obstacles.
It is what allows us to solve problems, invent, create, adapt and find a way forward when the obvious way has failed.
It is what enables us to imagine a different future.
And perhaps most importantly, imagination allows us to understand that our own way of seeing the world is not the only way.
That may be one of the most important things education can teach us.
A child who can imagine a pink elephant may grow up to understand that the world does not have to remain exactly as it is.
A child who can imagine a green sky may one day have the courage to ask why the sky must always be blue.
And a child who is allowed to ask “Why?” may grow into an adult who is not afraid to challenge what everyone else accepts.
The purpose of education cannot simply be to produce children who can pass examinations.
We should want children who can think.
Children who can question.
Children who can imagine.
Children who can look at a problem and see more than one possible answer.
Children who can understand that a mistake is sometimes not a failure but the beginning of discovery.
We have created an education system that often rewards conformity because conformity is easier to measure.
It is easier to mark an answer right or wrong than to assess curiosity.
It is easier to teach one standard essay than to listen to a child’s individual experience.
It is easier to tell a child that elephants are not pink than to ask:
“Tell me about your elephant.”
But children are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with information.
They are minds waiting to discover the world.
And perhaps our greatest responsibility is not to fill those minds with everything we know, but to ensure that we do not extinguish the questions, dreams and possibilities already burning inside them.
The world needs children who can see what is.
But it needs even more children who can imagine what might be.
So let the elephant be pink.
Let the sky be green.
Let the child draw a world that does not yet exist.
And let us be very careful before we tell that child that the world cannot be so.
Because perhaps, just perhaps, the child is not drawing the world as it is.
Perhaps the child is showing us the world as it could be.
And perhaps that is what education was meant to do all along.