Abstract

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...