1.
From philosopher Jana Mohr Lone’s Seen and Not Heard: Why Children’s Voices Matter (2021):
[A]s we grow out of childhood, we move away from being in a state of discovery and our thinking becomes less open and more constrained by settled beliefs. We think we understand, or are supposed to understand, how the world works, and this narrows our sense of what is possible. . . . [In contrast, the] imaginative ability [of children] involves an awareness that what is accepted as inescapable reality can really just be a series of compromises with the way society has been constructed, and not inevitably the way things are.1
2.
From theologian Rubem A. Alves’s Tomorrow’s Child: Imagination, Creativity, and the Rebirth Of Culture (1972):
[Hope] is the presentiment that imagination is more real and reality less real than it looks. It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress is not the last word. It is the suspicion that Reality is much more complex than realism wants us to believe; that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual, and that in a miraculous and unexpected way life is preparing the creative event which will open the way to freedom and resurrection.2
What transforming clarity of vision—
what energy—
what solidarity—
what joy—
might spring from our lives,
intimate and collective,
if we honored
our children
as co-authors
of our moral conscience?
Jana Mohr Lone, Seen and Not Heard: Why Children’s Voices Matter, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021, pgs. 42–43.
Rubem A. Alves, Tomorrow’s Child: Imagination, Creativity, and the Rebirth Of Culture, New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1972, pg. 194.