Summary of Imagination, Breakthroughs and the Unexpected

“A primary purpose of education to deny people the opportunity for succumbing to a feeling of futility or the belief that they have come to an end of what is worth having.” - Maxine Greene

This chapter is, in part, a reaction to two main concerns Greene has stemming from the Goals 2000: The Educate America Act. The first of her concerns surrounds the goal that students in ‘academic’ disciplines should “rank first in the world in science and math achievement” (p.17). The second concern involves the creation of a national assessment to ensure that students can demonstrate competency over this “challenging subject matter” (p.17). Green finds these goals problematic for 2 reasons – the implication that standards can simply be imposed and the fact that many diverse talents/energies of students lay undefined, only to be found only through differentiated modes of expression.

Greene puts forth imagination as a means to explore new perspectives, and she makes the case for its great value in the realm of education. However, in order to realize this value a break must be made with old quantitative models and “the quest for certainty” (p.18) should be abandoned. This may prove to be difficult, as economic uncertainties, challenge to traditional authorities, parental desires for assurance, technological demands, and also a longing to recover “the simpler world of a time long past” (p.18) lead to anxiety surrounding alternative lenses.

Greene acknowledges that “some students face fearful obstacles due to inequities” (p.18) but “that a general inability to conceive a better order of things can give rise to a resignation that paralyzes and prevents people from acting to bring about change” (p. 19). It is emphasized, on a number of occasions, that each person’s reality is an interpreted experience depending on her or his situation in the world. But this is not a bad thing, on the contrary, if we are able to live truthfully we may then engage in difference. “It comes along with hearing different words and music, seeing from unaccustomed angles, realizing the world perceived from one place is not the world” (p.20). We have all thought, at one time or another, that “normal” people must live like us, but we must come to realize that there is enormous variety in human lives. If the young can experience imagination, they will be able to interpret events of their own lives and ultimately see their existence as “carrying out the possible (among numerous possibilities), rather than the necessary” (p.21).

Without these realizations one may become trapped in recurrence, uniformity, mechanical routines, and inertia of habits. This leads to a “sense of repetitiveness and uniformity to discourage active learning” (p.21). To see students simply as a series of trends, and to believe there are automatic processes at work, lends to the idea that alternatives are impossible. But our schools, our students and humans in general, are more than trends, and more than inevitable outcomes. We must view ourselves as explorers so that we realize the possible which can open the door for empowerment and self-advocacy. Greene quotes Mary Warnock as saying “there is more in our experience of the world than can possible meet the unreflecting eye, our experience is significant for us, and worth the attempt to understand it” (p.22).

Greene also quotes Warnock as saying a primary purpose of education is to prevent people from “succumbing to a feeling of futility, or to the belief that they have come to the end of what is worth having” (p.23). To translate this into classroom practice calls for both teachers and students to undergo a collaborative search, each coming from the vantage point of their own unique lived experiences. For we all live in a kind of incompleteness; there is always more to see. We must question our daily lives so that the world does not become predefined; we must lead our students to ask why so that everything that was once coloured with weariness can be seen with amazement. But how do we, as educators help students move away from the ordinary to the unexplored?

In terms of literacy, many students who are labeled as illiterate, should be made aware of how “reality” is constructed, and then encouraged to name their world, and through this naming, transform it. For as Freire states “hopelessness is a form of silence, of denying the world, of fleeing from it” (p. 24). Literacy should be associated with a yearning to make sense of the world, and a yearning to leave one’s mark on it. If we can encourage imagination students may be able to find their voice and their way out of oppression.

To find one’s voice, and to undertake a search, involves arousing a type of consciousness. “If teaching can be thought of as an address to others’ consciousness, it may be a summons on the part of one incomplete person to other incomplete persons to reach out for wholeness” (p.26). This may arise through dialogue in the class, the ability to relate literature to contemporary life, or aiming to breaking the bonds of reverence students may have for so-called ‘high’ art.

Greene argues that to accomplish the above, requires a CENTRALITY of the arts in school curriculum because the arts have a unique way to release imagination. Although the arts can be pleasurable, Greene offers us a caution; “that pleasurableness does not mean the arts are to be used simply to ‘balance’ what is thought of as the cognitively rigorous, the analytical, the rational, and the serious. Nor should the arts be used as motivation” (p.27). The arts can demand as much cognitive rigor and analysis as the more traditional ‘academic’ subjects. In terms of how to engage with the arts, we must move beyond beneficent examples, and also allow for soul-chilling and challenging pieces to find their way into the classroom. “The role of the arts is not to resolve, not to point the way, not to improve. It is to awaken, to disclose the ordinarily unseen, unheard and unexpected” (p. 28). The arts should lie at the margin of the respectable, the ordinary, and/or the constrained. To do so, to allow for art to be more than the “carriers of message from men in power and norms of the majority” (p.28), can pave the way for a different lens to be used on cultures, languages, religions and on countless other human differences, so that students will come to realize there are variously lived worlds, and various perspectives.

But this does not happen automatically or naturally. It is not enough to simply label or recognize art, instead there needs to be a living of reflective transactions to reach consciousness. Art should not be revered, but instead approached from individual vantage points and distinct points of view. Hopefully this will also allow us to develop empathy and understanding of difference. Imagination can allow us to break out of the “confinements of privatism and self-regard into a space where we can come face to face with others and call out, Here we are” (p.31)

References:
Greene, Maxine. (1995). Imagination, breakthroughs, and the unexpected. In Releasing the Imagination (pp. 17-31). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.