Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 5417542" data-attributes="member: 59082">Sorry, but this is complete and utter BS. I did not "tar" anyone, especially the younger generation. Recognizing that there is a problem, that they are being influenced in (what I believe to be) a negative way is not tarring them, in the same sense that if I say that a person is psychologically scarred through being abused I am not tarring them.I work with teenagers on a daily basis - I am a teacher and dorm counselor at a private day and boarding high school. I have great fondness for the young people I work and live with and believe that they have amazing capacities that older generations do not have. But I also believe that they are in grave danger of losing something so precious, so intrinsic to being human: the imagination. Specifically, self-generated imagination, the capacity to create/discover imagery from within. The kids I work with tend to be culturally privileged so haven't necessarily been plopped in front of the TV and/or computer from an early age, so they tend to be generally pretty healthy in this regard. My view is that the cultural domain and exposure to virtual and information technologies experienced by children creates a kind of good news/bad news. The good news is that they are developing potentials that we don't have, a capacity to deal with complex amounts of information, for example. The bad news is that they are losing their ability to create from within, namely imagery, or at the very least this capacity is in danger of being lost or damaged or atrophied.This is one of the reasons that I am teaching a class in World Building, to give students a chance to engage this creative imagination in a way that they otherwise probably wouldn't have. It is direct creative, imaginative experience and it amazes me what happens when you give young people tools and opportunity - what they are coming up with is simply astounding. To put it another way, I think they are hungry for this sort of activity because their imaginations aren't being stimulated; and the trick with "stimulating" the imagination is that it must happen from within, through its own activity. It is one thing seeing a cool movie or even reading an interesting book, but the experience of the imagination itself being inspired and active is another thing altogether. This inner activity is what I feel is in danger of being lost, or at least under-used and thus under-developed.This is a much larger topic and one that my original post was meant only to allude to, not explore in depth. If you want to explore it in depth, I could get into that. But please don't assign a position to me that is simply not true. Again, I am not tarring anyone (OK, I am tarring WotC a bit, but at least without the feathering <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />).</blockquote>

Verification