Healing Harmony

On a TV show there was a about raising standards in schools, and making changes to the curriculum, so we generated the skills necessary for a successful 21st century society. Did that mean, asked the interviewer, that there needed to be more emphasis on skills such as maths and engineering? Yes was the reply. Of course we do need those skills, nobody would argue against their importance. But while we need people with the skills to build – let's say a bridge – we also need the people capable of imagining that bridge in the first place, or thinking how we could create a very different kind of bridge. Or perhaps asking whether we need a bridge at all. Theatre, fires the imagination, it gives our children the skills and the creativity necessary to face the world, to understand it and perhaps to change it too. Through the use of role-play and other such improvisational skills and fun activities such as mask making, children can explore their feelings both conscious and sub-un...