The Universal Project of Creation

When our school moved to its current location at The Center of the Universe, a group of us were standing around in the space we were to use as our playground in the side-yard of the Fremont Baptist Church. It was already a playground, but a largely disused one. The rusty, old equipment, other than the swing set, had to go, and as we stood there, we imagined what it could be.

We knew we wanted a "full body" sand pit. We had recently built one at our old place, but this was going to be a much larger one, big enough for a dozen or more kids at a time. The sloped playground was divided into an upper and lower half. Our plan was to put the sand pit at the top of the hill. It was going to be at least five times larger than our previous one.

Four-year-old Thomas had tagged along with his mother. He considered what we were planning. "It's too small. It should be huge. I should be a two level sand pit . . . With a boat in it." We went with his suggestion, which meant filling almost a third of the entire playground space with a depth of sand. It took two entire dump truck loads to fill it sufficiently. From Thomas' imagination our iconic sandpit became a reality.

"If I look around at the ordinary things in front of me -- the electric lamp, the right-angle-constructed table, the brightly glazed symmetrical ceramic cup, the glowing computer screen -- almost nothing resembles anything I would have seen in the Pleistocene," writes psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik in her book The Philosophical Baby, "All of these objects were once imaginary -- they are things that human beings themselves have created. And I myself, a woman cognitive scientist writing about the philosophy of children, could not have existed in the Pleistocene either. I am also a creation of the human imagination, and so are you."

The sand pit the children have now played in for a decade-and-a-half, that the adults have maintained, that we now take for granted as our attentions are drawn to the new and the novel, is part of this work of human imagination that we call life itself.

The Pleistocene represents the Earths' most recent ice age. It's when Homo sapiens evolved and began spreading around the globe alongside other hominoids like Neanderthals and Denisovans. We were not the smartest, strongest, or fastest, but we are the ones who survived, for better or worse, in large part because of our capacity to, collectively, imagine a new reality into existence.

Gopnik invites us to look around at this world of imagination in which we live, in which young children, generation after generation, through good times and bad, have, played their games of imagination, their "Let's pretend . . ." 

There were likewise owls and eagles and vultures during the Pleistocene. There were sharks, crocodiles, bison, sea turtles, cockroaches, wolves, and reindeer. There were mushrooms, mosses, conifers, cypress, oaks, and prairie grasses, all of which have survived to the present day. 

"More than any other creature," writes Gopnik, "human beings are able to change. We change the world around us, other people, and ourselves."

With all due respect to Gopnik, who I admire immensely, I wonder if this statement isn't a little bit biased. I mean, grasses and fungi and cockroaches have survived much longer than our flash-in-the-pan species, and they have unquestionably changed the world, including us. I mean, take wheat grass for instance. It wasn't that long ago that it was a grass amongst others, each blade producing a few kernels at a time, but it has now "trained" us humans to propagate it to the degree that it is far and away the largest food crop on Earth. We were a nomadic species until wheat and other grasses turned us into something else. Did we domesticate it or did wheat domesticate us?

Ah, but did wheatgrass begin by "imagining" an agricultural future the way Thomas did with our sandpit? Probably not, but neither did our human ancestors, who were simply playing with wheat grass, cooperating with it, finding mutual benefit from the things humans and wheat could do together. Plants have been around for some 470 million years, fungi for twice that long. Without them, we would not exist. It's not completely crazy to consider that plants and fungi invented us a mere 300,000 years ago for their own purposes.

Plants obviously don't have eyes, but they are completely covered in photoreceptive cells. Isn't that exactly what eyes are? Plants obviously don't have brains, but their interconnected root systems both look and act in ways similar to brains. They produce fruit, flowers, and shelter to lure us in, like anglers after fish. They seduce us with fragrances, flavors, medicines, and intoxicants. Is it really a bridge too far to consider that these are all products of non-human imagination?

When a newborn cries into nothingness did it imagine the loving presence that appears? Maybe not the first time or even the next, but eventually? Soon enough, we know that this baby will be saying to its friends, "Let's pretend . . ." 

Am I far-fetching? Probably, but it's a failure of imagination, I think, to not at least consider that when we imagine a future, then act to bring it about, we are acting not as mere automatons of evolution, but rather as collaborators in the universal project of creation. All it takes is a little imagination. 

This is what we do when we play. Play, human or otherwise, is nothing more or less than the engine of creation.

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In this course we explore how even small changes in the way we speak with children can create environments in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. For me, this technology is the foundation of how I do play-based learning. It will transform your classroom or home into a place in which children are self-motivated to do the right thing, not because you said so, but because they've made up their own mind. This is a particularly good course to take with your whole team. Group discounts are available. Click here to join the waitlist and for more information.

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