This essay places David Graeber's consistent focus on imagination and possibilities into conversation with social studies education. In a sociopolitical climate characterized by neoliberalism, militarized borders, and political censorship of social studies teaching and learning in P-12 schools, it is crucial that social studies teachers and…

Critical reflection on the curriculum offered in the Catholic school is a valuable addition to wider dialogue on the nature of education and schooling. It enables the Church's educational agencies to offer a distinctive vision of education to the diverse range of students who freely participate in its educational ventures. In Catholic thinking,…

Teaching students to appreciate the beauty of life in the world through aesthetic education, using a variety of teaching principles to extend their aesthetic experience, will promote "aesthetic intelligence" for children in Taiwan. This can enrich their aesthetic literacy, and give them a desire to perceive and appreciate beautiful…

This article explores the concept of literacy futurisms as guided by the 2019-2021 Scholars of Color Transitioning into Academic Research Institutions cohort, who conceptualize themselves as part of an emergent literacy research collective. Drawing on the knowledges of our ancestors and children, we offer dimensions of a framework-in-the-making…

Few subjects have suffered as much as the liberal arts from the power of stale rhetoric, hollow appeals to tradition, and journalistic misrepresentation. Leon Botstein, begins this article by saying that together, these three factors have generated and legitimated public skepticism about the liberal arts. A liberal arts education (which is rarely…

Are creativity and imaginative thinking impeded by the emphasis that many American schools place on cooperative learning and collaborative thinking today? This paper explores past and present philosophies concerning individualism and creativity as they relate to education in the USA. A person's ability to individuate is based on the premise that…

The phenomenon of creativity is so prevalent and yet so ill-defined. After examining several definitions, this author posits that creativity is a natural process in which humans use their physical, intellectual, emotional, moral, and spiritual resources to produce something new. Creativity seems to satisfy a deep fundamental yearning to go beyond…

Teaching has moved gradually from being seen as an art or craft to an evidence-based techno-rational profession. However, within Steiner-Waldorf schools, teachers are largely autonomous and seen, like their pupils, as always "coming into being", through the development of an objective imaginative faculty. This perspective is derived from Steiner's…

Examines the philosophical relationship of imagination (particularly its aesthetic aspects) to rationality and teaching. Reviews various criteria for basing education on rationality at the expense of imagination and concludes that children will benefit most from an educational system which teaches them to be imaginative without undermining their…

Discusses the passionate philosophy of Robert Alexander, founder and director of living stage theater company and his views of art, creativity, the entire process of learning, politics, philosophy, and hope. Presents several excerpts from Alexander's presentations for artists and teachers during Living Stage residencies in cities around the…

The existential contexts of education reach far beyond the conceptions of Goals 2000 or the appalling actualities of family breakdown, homelessness, violence, and other "savage inequalities." Classroom encounters with the arts can move the young to imagine, extend, and renew. If the arts' significance for growth, inventiveness, and…

Since vision, imagination, and a passion for justice are in short supply, educators must transcend traditional technical/rational approaches and create space for artists' prophetic voices to emerge. Empowering the voices of imagination through the arts will help renew the metaphysical dimension of educators' work. (27 references) (MLH)

Educators are under almost constant pressure to make schooling relevant to the lives of their students. Students, however, who are never exposed to the realms of possibility beyond their own immediate experience hardly have an equal opportunity to enjoy the benefits of education, since everyday experience tends to reinforce social inequalities.…

An analysis is proposed which reduces the concept of imagination to certain logically distinct forms and modes of imagining. This analysis is related to contemporary definitions of the educated person. Implications for moral education are presented together with an examination of philosophies which oppose development of children's imagination.…

Explores the type of school construction suitable for instruction that includes lectures, experiment, and creation. The philosophical bases of a triadic approach to learning that appeals to feeling, rationality, and imagination are considered. Four detailed diagrams portraying the author's concepts are included. (Contains four references.) (KRN)