- Two Functions of the Imagination in Greene’s Aesthetic Educational Theory
In Art as Experience, Dewey claims that “‘imagination’ shares with ‘beauty’ the doubtful honor of being the chief theme in esthetic writings of enthusiastic ignorance. More perhaps than any other phase of the human contribution, it has been treated as a special and self-contained faculty, differing from others in possession of mysterious potencies.”1 Despite this “doubtful honor,” or as some might claim, because of it, imagination seems to have become a matter of unquestionable value in educational rhetoric over the last half-century.2 This value is doubtless due in part to the immeasurable influence of Maxine Greene’s understanding of aesthetic education on broad swaths of educational thought.3 Yet Greene’s influence can itself be traced to its place in a zeitgeist that comprises at least two other important trends related to the power of the image, providing her aesthetic-social theory with a fertile environment in which to flourish. One of these trends is an emphasis on including and celebrating diversity as a means to a vision of society that has yet to be realized or codified and therefore necessitates the imaginative breaks that Greene’s ideas require. After the Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision, America came to see education as a scene of practical application in the Civil Rights movement—a place where the difficult task of realizing the democratic promise inherent in America’s laws might be undertaken without failing under the weight of deeply embedded social norms. The classroom has become the ever-open site where progressive idealism might claim children’s imaginations on behalf of a radically changing picture of what counts as human.
The second of these trends is a repeated skepticism about the discursive workings of power and a shift in emphasis in some scholarly work on education to non-discursive elements of human experience. This backlash against both structuralist social sciences and analytic philosophy drives educational studies toward a greater interest in existential experience, the extra-linguistic, affect, idiocy, suffering, and the abject. Within this trend, the irrational, unthought, unrepresented aspects of the human being operate on two distinct levels. On the one hand, educational theorists draw our attention to those elements of our shared humanity that our discursive practices obscure and marginalize in order to exclude what cannot be explained without putting the discourse itself into question. On the other hand, the [End Page 25] marginalized, extra-discursive position serves as a novel, if contingent, perspective from which to launch critical attacks upon the status quo.
Joined with these allied trends, imagination can be seen as a means to liberate subjectivity from the particularity of its constructed, discursive nature through the presence of an “other” who offers the possibility of change for both the individual subject and the discourses to which she is subject. If the goal is progressive growth, achievable only through the ritual breaking of those beliefs and values that shape the way we see the world, imagination seems to provide the means, allowing us to see the limits of our existing discourses and the possibilities inherent therein. While this story of progressive growth and the possibility of social progress by means of critical breaks with the past is by far the greater theme in Greene’s work, I argue here that her writings also maintain a second, less developed or perhaps simply less influential theme, namely, that of imagination as an integrating and coordinating action upon a diversely populated environment and a disjointed feeling of selfhood.
The problem with this second concept of imagination in Greene’s work is that, if it is taken together with the first, these two ideas provide a seemingly paradoxical definition of imagination, particularly in its educational applications. In short, this compound definition would seem to state that imagination is both that which disrupts and undermines my established sense of selfhood by presenting incomprehensible alternatives and that which provides the sense of narrative continuity essential for establishing a stable sense of selfhood. By acknowledging the first, more influential theme that aligns imagination, critical thought, and social change, the aim of this essay is to...