Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change - Paperback

by Maxine Greene (Author)

Now in Paperback

"This remarkable set of essays defines the role of imagination ingeneral education, arts education, aesthetics, literature, and thesocial and multicultural context.... The author argues for schoolsto be restructured as places where students reach out for meaningsand where the previously silenced or unheard may have a voice. Sheinvites readers to develop processes to enhance and cultivate theirown visions through the application of imagination and the arts.Releasing the Imagination should be required reading for alleducators, particularly those in teacher education, and for generaland academic readers."

--Choice

"Maxine Greene, with her customary eloquence, makes an impassionedargument for using the arts as a tool for opening minds and forbreaking down the barriers to imagining the realities of worldsother than our own familiar cultures.... There is a strong rhythmto the thoughts, the arguments, and the entire sequence of essayspresented here."

--American Journal of Education

Front Jacket

It is imagination, says Maxine Greene, that opens our eyes to worlds beyond our experience--enabling us to create, care for others, and envision social change. In Releasing the Imagination, this renowned educator and philosopher reveals the critical role of imagination in cognitive and other modes of learning.Ruminating on themes such as literacy, the arts and aesthetics, pluralism, multiculturalism, and the tensions and passions of caring, Greene carefully considers both the realities of hard economic times and the human requirement for expressiveness. She shows that, while today's economic realities require an inevitable emphasis on vocational and technical training, this focus must be counterbalanced by an emphasis on the release of the human imagination and the cultivation of new visions. Greene explains how the arts play a key role in building understanding across differences and in stimulating the capacity to break with the habitual and the taken-for-granted--counteracting the sometimes pervasive sense of futility that overwhelms many of our youth.From an account of school restructuring to a rendering of the shapes of literacy, Greene's essays examine the potential releases of imagination in a variety of contexts--in connection with the arts, and in connection with the community that, she hopes, "will some day be called democracy."

Back Jacket

Releasing the Imagination gives us a vivid portrait of the possibilities of human experience and education's role in its realization. It is a welcome corrective to current pressures for educational conformity.--Elliot W. Eisner, professor of education and art, Stanford UniversityRuminating on themes such as literacy, the arts and aesthetics, pluralism, multiculturalism, and the tensions and passions of caring, Greene carefully considers both the realities of hard economic times and the human requirement for expressiveness. From an account of school restructuring to a rendering of the shapes of literacy, Greene's essays examine the potential releases of imagination in a variety of contexts--in connection with the arts, and in connection with the community that, she hopes, "will some day be called democracy."

Author Biography

MAXINE GREENE is professor of philosophy and education and William F. Russell Professor in the Foundations of Education (emeritus), Teachers College, Columbia University, where she is also founder of the Center for the Imagination. She teaches at the Lincoln Center for the Arts. A past president of AERA, AESA, and the Philosophy of Education Society, Greene's previous books include The Dialectic of Freedom (1988) and Landscapes of Learning (1978).