CREATIVE LEAPS:
Journal for the Arts in Leadership and Interdisciplinary Learning

Review: Releasing the Imagination by Maxine Greene

Recommended Reading for any who educate, and any who like to learn

“Of all our cognitive capacities, imagination is the one that permits us to give credence to alternative realities. It allows us to break with the taken for granted, to set aside familiar distinctions and definitions.”

So begins education philosopher Maxine Greene as she navigates literature and educational practices in her seminal work Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (Jossey-Bass, 1995). Nearly a decade later, Greene’s essays ring clearer than ever, as does her seminal philosophy: that if we’re going to effect change in this world, we’d better start imagining how good—or at least how different—things could be.

Maxine Greene is a professor of philosophy and education (emerita) at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she teaches courses in educational philosophy, social theory, and aesthetics. She is also Philosopher-in-Residence of the Lincoln Center Institute for the arts in education. Releasing the Imagination reflects Greene’s primary concerns: contemporary philosophies of education; aesthetics and the teaching of the arts; literature as art; and multiculturalism.

Rather than cry the beloved country of most critics of the public education system—plummeting test scores, overcrowded classrooms, inadequate funding, incompetent administration—Greene takes a higher road with a much broader view, placing the responsibility of education (the process of becoming, whether it be in the classroom or beyond) on the bulk of society.

She addresses, for example, the American competitive spirit and its effect upon our children’s education. The very ambition that makes us valiantly desire “world-class” standards for our children in the classroom is the same ambition (or is it obsession?) that drives us to merciless competition. Our obsession with being Number One in the World when it comes to test scores in major areas (reading, science and math) has pigeonholed us into our race to be The Best—a race we seem to be running, like rats in cages, against no one but ourselves—no matter what the cost.

Greene argues that engagement in the arts (particularly in literature, which is the primary focus of Releasing Imagination), makes these social changes more possible, more powerful, and more tangible. They make the impossible and the unreal (read: the un-imagined) very possible and real indeed. Art engenders participation, and participation creates community, and communities can effect change.

The essays that comprise Releasing the Imagination are full of philosophy and quotation from John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Mikhail Bakhtin, and others. But the philosophy and criticism (which makes for dense reading at times) is but a touchstone for the true heart of Greene’s belief and focus. She urges us, ultimately, to take our cues not from philosophers, critics, or political leaders, but from the arts. She guides us to such fictions as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where new societies—sometimes entirely new realities—are imagined into being. She urges us to listen to the guitar player in Wallace Stevens’ poem “Man with the Blue Guitar,” who refuses to “play things as they are” and insists instead that we must “throw away the lights, the definitions,/ And say of what you see in the dark…”

Greene argues that imagination cannot be separated from what is ethical, political and/or social. All of the constructs and conditions under which we live are a result of us imagining them into being. And like imagination, our social values, even our fundamental perceptions of reality, are not static. They are mutable. They can change. To hear Ms. Greene, if our schools and education systems are going to benefit—nay, if they are going to survive at all—then the current values and perceptions we hold so dear must change.

In releasing our imagination we open roads to new dialogue, new perspective, and new possibility in the classroom and in the world. But there is nothing that can be measured objectively about imagination, one might argue. How can we assess it in the classroom? How do we rate its success?—The very act of asking those questions, Greene argues, is proof positive that we have lived far too long in an objective reality that leaves no room for imagined possibility or a better world.

Name your world, she says, then change it.