Just recently, I had two experiences where the phrase "what if" was cited as a way to describe people seeing the possibilities inherent in our world. In the first case, I spent two hours with my ten year old son watching a silly movie called The Tooth Fairy. In this sappy and predictable movie, which my son loved, a roughneck hockey player learns the painful lessons of cynicism and the joyful possibilities of living a happy life if he only looks at the positive change he can make in his world. As one would expect, everything turns out well when he asks "what if" for the first time.
In a more interesting and far more profound discussion of the power of asking "what if", physicist S. James Gates, Jr. reflects on the life of Albert Einstein in an episode of American Public Media's Speaking of Faith with Christa Tibbett. In Einstein's Ethics, the second part of a two part series called Einstein's God, Gates compares Einstein's approach to ethical issues to the way he studied meta-physical events in the universe. Einstein's asking "what if" as he watched trains passing from his position in the Basel patent office led him to consider the relative nature of time; similarly, his escape from the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany made him question the racism in American society as he asked "what if" a country treated all of its citizens justly.
As educators and as parents, our teaching our children to ask "what if" may be one of the most powerful gifts we can give them. All too often, young children ask why things are and how they could be different, but as they age, they become inhibited and lose the power to imagine things differently. They become imprisoned by the here and now, and we fail to encourage their creative imaginations. In the process, they only go so far and settle for the probable rather than envisioning the possible. In a world characterized by rapid change, it may be more important than ever to help children see things that are not there and not allow them to settle for seeing only what they have in front of them.
I recently read in an article that Apple made more than two billion dollars on iPhone apps last year. Think about that; the iPhone is less than three years old, and already Apple is making billions of dollars on the applications alone. We have no idea what the next iPhone is, but somewhere out there, someone is asking "what if.....?"
In science and math, students need to study what they can, but they need to seek out the things the less visible. Not only should they learn about history, but they should consider alternative histories and ponder how things today could turn out differently. Mark Twain once said, "history does not repeat itself-it rhymes." I can remember many years ago overhearing a tutor helping a child learn about the American Civil War. The student stopped for a minute, had a far-away look in her eyes, and said, "I wonder how things would be different if the South had won." My heart broke when the tutor said, "that's not important, and we don't have the time to talk about it." The tutor should have reveled in that act of historical imagination and allowed the student's creativity to soar. The historian Barbara Tuchman once said that we should teach students historical empathy so they can place themselves in the minds of our predecessors and really try to understand both the slave and the slave owner. Studying literature allows us to live in the mind and the times of others, and learning a Foreign Language should be as much about gaining a window into another culture as it is studying the conjugation of verbs. In all these ways, we are teaching children, and adults, to be inquisitive and empathic.
Perhaps what we really want is for all of our children to echo the line from Bobby Kennedy's speech when he quoted George Bernard Shaw and said, "Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?"
