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OCTOBER 2004

Educating the Imagination
by Scott-Noppe Brandon

During my vacation this past summer I read the final report of The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon The United States, or as it is generally known, the 9/11 Commission Report. I felt compelled to read it for several reasons besides the obvious reasons of a concerned citizen. As a parent of two young children who attend public school in NYC, I need to believe that I am doing all I can to help keep them safe. In that same spirit, as an educator in this day and age, I need to better understand how the world has changed since that tragic date, so that I might better perform my duties in my daily partnership with teachers, students, and their families. Another reason I read the report was because I had heard Commission Chair, Governor Thomas H. Kean, mention in an interview how imagination relates to the report. The 9/11 Report speaks of a failure of imagination in U.S. national security. It states that, “Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies,” and that, “It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.”

Momentous words that I will not forget. By recognizing the importance of, and the need for, imagination in the sphere of national security, the 9/11 Commission has hopefully started an important new discussion about the role of imagination within pre-K through grade twelve education. It may have started the discussion unintentionally, but it is now on the table. For how else can imagination become “routinized” than by being first encouraged at the source? I am from the school of thought that teaches that the curriculum and pedagogy of schools, far from being purely academic matters, should relate to the living questions and issues of the everyday world we inhabit—past, present, and future—the world of children and the world of adults. The questions we ask, the problems we pose within education, should be the kind of questions asked by professionals in their particular fields, adapted to the age level of the students.

Maxine Greene, Lincoln Center Institute’s Philosopher-in-Residence, speaks of an imagination that discloses possibilities—personal and social as well as of aesthetic imagining—through which we are enabled to look at things, to think about things as if they could be otherwise. Is this not what the Commission’s statement implies? That we, as a nation and, by extension, as the human race, for our wellbeing and prosperity, must be able to think, question, and understand in ways different and new.

The question is, how do we educate students about the imagination so that it can become part of our everyday existence, become “routinized,” even “bureaucratized” in our various forms of government, in industry, in everyday life? In order to do so, we need to better understand the relationship and the dynamic tension between what we think of as factual information and knowledge and those elements of life which ask us to engage in imaginative thinking and understanding. All too often, one is considered useful, the other playful at best. To make sense of this, we must teach students not to be confused by the “space” that exists between these different ways of knowing and perceiving; in fact, we must acknowledge this tension and embrace it. I do not pose this as a radical thought. I intend only to underline the obvious. For me, and I imagine for most of us, bridging that gap is part and parcel of the development of all of us as thinking and feeling, informed and intuitive beings. Schools have an important role to play toward making this discussion a vital and necessary part of the curriculum. Whether we think of imagination as a noun or a verb, it should be part of our aesthetic, moral, and political discussions and part of the everyday lives of all students.#

Scott Noppe–Brandon is the Executive Director of the Lincoln Center Institute.

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