{"id":4328,"date":"2024-08-10T08:14:09","date_gmt":"2024-08-10T13:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/educationalrenaissance.com\/?p=4328"},"modified":"2024-08-10T08:14:15","modified_gmt":"2024-08-10T13:14:15","slug":"the-role-of-imagination-in-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educationalrenaissance.com\/2024\/08\/10\/the-role-of-imagination-in-education\/","title":{"rendered":"The Role of Imagination in Education"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Imagination. The word brings so much to mind for us today. If there\u2019s one thing that everybody can agree on for children, it\u2019s the need to help them develop a vivid imagination through school, play, and well\u2026 everything they do. Or perhaps, \u2018develop a vivid imagination\u2019 is the wrong way of putting it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cEvery child is born blessed with a vivid imagination,\u201d said Walt Disney. \u201cBut just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

So maybe it\u2019s not children who need to develop an imagination, it\u2019s us adults who need to rekindle it.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe the problem is school. Maybe we\u2019re the ones who educate students out of imagination and creativity, as Sir Kenneth Robinson has claimed. In a TED talk from 2007, entitled \u201cDo Schools Kill Creativity?\u201d<\/a> he argued that we have rethink schooling entirely for our new era because of how our organized structures of school only focus on one type of \u201cacademic achievement.” This has become a popular idea and might be connected to another recent movement in education: Howard Gardner\u2019s idea of multiple intelligences. There isn\u2019t just IQ, but other imaginative and creative areas of intelligence that traditional schooling disregards or at least categorizes as not as valuable. In addition to verbal and mathematical intelligence (which are often prominent in standardized testing), Gardner posits that there are visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and other intelligences. The multiple intelligences theory has had its critics. One article said,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Gardner\u2019s theory has come under criticism from both psychologists and educators. These critics argue that Gardner\u2019s definition of intelligence is too broad and that his eight different “intelligences” simply represent talents, personality traits, and abilities. Gardner\u2019s theory also suffers from a lack of supporting empirical research\u2026. Despite this, the theory of multiple intelligences enjoys considerable popularity with educators. Many teachers utilize multiple intelligences in their teaching philosophies and work to integrate Gardner\u2019s theory into the classroom. (see Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (verywellmind.com)<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Some parts of this idea resonate with a postmodern retreat from any standards in education. Everyone has their own special intelligence area, no matter plummeting math and reading scores. Perhaps there\u2019s also a fair bit of sentimentality about childhood in our talk about imagination. But on the other hand, many of these other types of intelligence that Gardner proposed are staples of the classical tradition: music, gymnastic, the prudence to engage with other people in the human world, and the rhetorical skills to persuade and communicate well interpersonally. Maybe Gardner is just repackaging lost arts of the classical tradition as a new psycho-educational theory. Of course, we\u2019ve all probably felt in our own lives how the drudgery of school or work or daily life can seem to socialize us out of imagination and our creative intelligences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But it\u2019s not just one side of the aisle that is saying we need to reinvigorate education and modern life with imagination. Anthony Esolen, a conservative Catholic professor and social commentator, wrote a witty book entitled, 10 Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child<\/a><\/em>. It\u2019s written kind of like C.S. Lewis\u2019 Screwtape Letters, with biting irony showing us what not to do. For Esolen the culprits of our loss of imagination actually is the result of our anti-traditionalism. It\u2019s because we\u2019ve lost or abandoned things that progressives would decry, like the power of memory in school, or because we are \u201ceffacing the glorious differences between the sexes.\u201d We\u2019ve lost traditional childhood games, and won\u2019t let kids pick their own teams anymore. We overly separate children from the adult world, and we deny the existence of transcendent and permanent things, we also keep children indoors too much because we\u2019re afraid of them getting dirty or hurting themselves. (I rely partly on Justin Taylor’s review on the Gospel Coalition<\/a> for this assessment.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To his list from over a decade ago we could add a host of growing modern phenomena:<\/p>\n\n\n\n