Why Children's Theatre Matters

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http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2013/oct/23/why-childrens-theatre-matters

At a time when the pressures on young people are perhaps greater than they have been at any time since the second world war, and the challenges faced by massive cultural and technological shifts, climate change, and economic collapse are immense, what we need is a rising generation who can use their heads to solve those problems but also their imaginations. Some time ago I heard a government spokesman on the radio talking about raising standards in schools, and making changes to the curriculum and the arts and humanities in higher education 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, particularly theatre for children, 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. We should value children's theatre and take it seriously and that means treating it with the respect that we would any work of art including reviewing and critiquing it.