Alison Gopnik's Passible Worlds: Why Do Children Pretend?

What kind of power can change the world? Is Military or weapon? Of course not, the most important power that can change the world is imagination. However only have the imagination is not enough, because it also need knowledge to make imagination become to true. Likes hundred years age, everyone had the dream that they wanted to fly in the sky. So they had this imagination, then they use their knowledge to build a plane to fly. In the article “Passible Worlds: Why Do Children Pretend?” Alison Gopnik points out that a lot of young children have the imagination which better than the adult, because the children’s imagination are “counterfactuals” which means it maybe happened in future, but not now. The adults’ imagination will limit by their

Gopnik claims that in the past, people will think that imagination and knowledge are total different, they can never combine together. However during a lot of experiment tests, people find it is possible that make those two together. Gopnik writes: “understanding the causal structure of the world and generating counterfactuals go hand in hand. In fact, knowledge is actually what gives imagination its power, what makes creativity possible. It’s because we know something about how events are connected in the world that we can imagine altering those connections and creating new ones” (181). It shows that imagination and knowledge are indivisible. They are helping each other. If the imagination is a piece of wood, then the knowledge is a knife that let wood become woodcarving. The example, which from the article, is that Harrison ford wants to make a screen for the pay phone. He thinks that will be same thing as put a TV on a pay phone. Although it was sound impossible in the past, it will create in the future by future knowledge. That is why people will like saving a lot of impossible ideas. Although people cannot let it become true, people can wait for the future technology. As people know that imagination and knowledge are very important, however how the children study it? In fact the Chinese mothers’ way of teaching is not the best way. They broke down the connection between imagination and knowledge. Chua claims that the children have to listen their parents, because parents think that they pay the money for their children and the children need them to alive. Chua write: “ Chinese parent believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it’s probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children” (54). So in other words,