Maxine Greene is a lover of the arts, a - edu224spring2011

RELEASING THE IMAGINATION

CEO I .

Maxine Greene is a lover of the arts, a sential NewvYrker. She is dedicated to s5U tion recently established in her name and aimed social justice. Hler life's work has been a continu and just. It is a process that is, as she says, geare she has changed with it. In 20 years as the philo Center for the Arts in Education, she nurtured < Center for the Arts, Social Imagination, and Ed she is professor emeritus of philosophy and edus American Edutcational Research Association, til Association, and the Philosophy of Education S school, she is also a friend of many Klingensteir presentations are legendary. Greene is the authc Releasing the Imagination, Essays on Education, (Jossey-Bass, 1995) and Variations on a Blue Gu

Lectures on Aesthetic Education (Teachers Co6le, ary eloquence, Greene argues for using the arts ers to realities other than our own familiar cultu tured as places where the previously silenced or past August, in an interview with John Braman across from the Guggenheim Museum, Greene mere compliance wiih standards and looks dowv more fulfilling social order. 80

aq xpression mne, decen .g world. ) at the Lin rs College ' president ne cc

har Center Institute lith her custombreak down barnto be restruce a voice. 7Fhis I000 ;00000 -ity aparttrnent ation that refuses00 'l.,en in hopes of a

A SIMPLE CONCEPT WILL DO, AS A WAY TO RESIST THE VALUEFREE, THE DOGMA-HEAVY, AND THE TAKEN-FOR-GRANTED.

Maxine, it was 1988 when we last sat down together for an interview. I was writing for the Klingeisieii Newsletter about your views on Allan Bloom's Closiig of the A_erican Mind. At the time, your perspective was that the real danger of a 'closing mind" came from too much stress on competency over caring and on discipline over the exploration of a multiplicity of ways of knowing. Where are we today? They say I'm just a dinosaur. I've been so busy I haven't mastered the computer yet. My son doesn't understand at all why I can't do it. So he bought me something I didn't know existed that puts the Internet on your television screen, and I'm thinking I don't want this. This is information. You can vomit with all that information. I realize the trouble I have with endless supplies of discrete facts. That's not learning or knowledge; it's just an amassing. And I guess the job is for teachers to find ways of ordering all that stuff. A simple concept will do, as a way to resist the valuefree, the dogma-heavy, and the taken-f orgranted. Imagination goes even further than concept, though, not to resolve or improve, but to disclose the unseen and unexpected. That's what I mean about how imagination atvakents. W I N T E R

2 0 0 4

81

0


BRAMAN: You have always challenged us to think about organizational structures that support learning experiences that release imagination. Any examples of 'artistic school structures"?

IN THE WORDS OF MAXINE GREENE

From Releasing the Imagination, Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Chiange (Jossey-Bass, 1995):

lit--%ne danger that threatens both teachers and stu%,.Vdentsin such emphases [on national standards] is that they will come to feel angry at being locked into an objective set of circumstances defined by others. Young people find themselves described as 'human resources' rather than as persons who are centers of choice and evaluation. They are, it is suggested, to be molded in the service of technology and the market, no matter who they are. o matter what our personal inclinations, teachers "Nespecially can no longer obliterate the diverse voices, unashamed of their distinctiveness, speaking life stories and cultural stories at odds with or contemptuous of the sacred rites of mainstream life. Nor can anyone hide any longer from the troubling fact that industrialized, technological societies have turned out to be fundamentally unequal ones when it comes to status and reward, that they parcel out unequal chances in life."

82

I N D E P E N D E NT

S C HOO L

GREENE: We have New Visions schools in New York that were started by the Annenberg people. They were allowed to develop themes for the schools. One is called El Puente, the Bridge to Freedom and Justice. They're very dedicated to the arts and to a curriculum that actually puts concepts of justice into practice. So, for example, they had the kids do a poll of the neighborhood about immunization, because a lot of the people are immigrants from South America and many kids were never vaccinated. They also had another project about the building of an incinerator in the Williamsburg section of New York City. They found out that the rate of asthma in Williamsburg was worse than any part of the city. It became part of the curriculum. That seemed wonderful to me. Another school is connected with Outward Bound. Others are arts-centered. Another one is the Museum School, which spent each day of the week at a different museum, so the classroom was the Natural History Museum or the Jewish Museum and so on. They developed a unified curriculum out of these visits. I know they're all experiential. I guess the attractive thing is it draws teachers who have a passion for that kind of thing. One of the educators I admire beyond belief is Ann Cook, who came from Antioch College with deep convictions about the inquiry method. She is co-founder and codirector of the Urban Academy High School - a very successful school for at-risk children in New York. The school is part of the Julia Richmond Education Complex - a formerly large, single high school building now divided into six smaller, autonomous schools, one of which is the Urban Academy. Among other things, they have a civil rights week where they put up doors that say 'Whites Only' and that kind of thing. I was there one day.

MEMORIZING IS LIKE EATING A POEM. YOU LIVE IN IT - THE SOUNDS, THE TEXTURES. PERSONAL EXPERIENCE USED TO BE IRRELEVANT IN EDUCATION.

All the teachers at 5:00 pm were talking about their day, and they were arguing, of all things, about The Scarlet Letter. I thought, this is the kind of school where I'd like to be - you know, the teachers going at each other about things that really matter. One time Ann Cook came to dinner here, and my husband said, "How do you deal with those kids?" He had this vision of these terribly unruly children with dreadlocks. And she said, "We create a culture. The kids know that certain things this culture accepts and other things they know the culture doesn't accept." It's wonderful. BRAMAN: You have said that the role of imagination is not to resolve or improve, but to awaken, to disclose the unseen and unexpected. Do you remember any of your own early childhood experiences of this sort of awakening? GREENE: I remember two things: what libraries meant to me and writing poetry. My library was

one of those little neighborhood libraries that we don't have anymore. I wanted to read every book on the shelf. And I used to tell people I collected words. Words like "porcelain" or "columbine." And then I wanted to write poetry, and I had The Book of Knzowvledge, an early children's encyclopedia. I learned a lot from The Book ofKnowvledge. I always tell people I read Edna St. Vincent Millay. I remember first reading her poem, "Recuerdo," with its simple, but engaging refrain: "We were very tired, we were very merry." And then I thought, "Was that a poem? Why should that be a poem? I could do that myself." So simple - about a young couple in love, taking the ferry boat back and forth all night and buying fruit in the morning from a vendor: "And you ate an apple and I ate a pear.. .and we gave her all our money but our subway fares." This is the sort of stuff that awakened my imagination. I also had a very old fashioned English teacher in high school who taught Shakespeare in the old way. We memorized passages, and I think

W I N T E R

2 0 0 4

4 ,;;2 , V

4J

,V

83

El


WHEN IT WAS TIME TO GO TO COLLEGE, THE PRINCIPAL SAID, "IT'S SUCH A SHAME YOU ARE JEWISH. I COULD GET YOU A SCHOLARSHIP TO MT. HOLYOKE."


From Releasing the lImaginationt, Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change

4,,~ 4I

t

A

EEE

le_'If

4~2 vcE

,b.r , .t.0t

44 ^ s teachers, we cannot predict the comAmon world that may be in the making; nor can we finally justify one kind of community more than another. We can bring warmth into places where young persons come together, however; we can bring in the dialogues and laughter that threaten monologues and rigidity. And surely we can affirm and reaffirm the principles that center around belief in justice and freedom and respect for human rights, since without these, we cannot even call for the decency of welcoming and inclusion for everyone, no matter how at risk. Only if more and more persons in their coming together learn to incarnate such principles and choose to live and speak in accord with them, are we likely to bring a community into being. All we can do is to speak with others as passionately and eloquently as we can; all we can do is to look into each other's eyes and urge each other on to new beginnings. Our classrooms ought to be nurturing and thoughtful and just all at once; they ought to pulsate with multiple conceptions of what it is to be human and alive. They ought to resound with the voices of articulate young people in dialogues always incomplete because there is always more to be discovered and more to be said. We must want our students to achieve friendship as each one stirs to wide-awakeness, to imaginative action, and to renewed consciousness of possibility."

84

:

I

N D E PEN D E N T

S C H OO L

we still ought to do that. Memorizing is like eating a poem. You live in it - the sounds, the textures. Personal experience used to be irrelevant in education. Memorizing comes from a very old way of teaching, but we can avoid imposing meaning if art springs from our experience. BRAMAN: What school was that? GREENE: Berkeley Institute, a private school in Brooklyn. We went there for the terrible reason that my father wanted us to assimilate. It was a school with chapel every morning and even today I know Episcopal hymns better than any others. Like 'The Church Is My One Foundation." I could burst into song. My father couldn't afford to send his other three children. But they kept me as the token Jewish kid. When it was time to go to college, the principal said, 'It's such a shame you are Jewish. I could get you a scholarship to Mt. Holyoke." And I said no thanks and apologized. Imagine. And I went to Barnard because they had a higher quota for Jews. BRAMAN: Well, speaking of anti-Semitism, what meaning does 'awakening the imagination" have in the face of the terrors of current times? GREENE: Lately I've been obsessing about the destructive imagination. What do you do about the imagination that ended up in the bombing of the Twin Towers, the imagination that allowed the building of Auschwitz, or the imagination some kids have which comes from a terrible dark childhood? Herb Kohl just wrote a book in which he refers to the 'stupidity in fear." What's important in schools is to get kids to think about what they're imagining. To think about the consequences is, I guess, the best we can do when our feats of imagination take place in a moral community, a community in which people agree to live together according to certain norms. It's frightening, though, when you look around and see the degree of destructive imagination at work

EI

RELEASING e5v

THIE IMAGINATION

vrr,

Or

THE THING THAT MOVES MOST PEOPLE IS NOT THE ABSTRACT NOTION OF JUSTICE, BUT THE FEELING THAT THINGS AREN'T FAIR. EXISTENTIALISTS TALK ABOUT A SENSE OF DEFICIENCY THAT MAKES YOU THINK ABOUT VALUES.

I 41;j

v

gViez kfr`,"Air

",

t

-

4 XN LA

OiK v


From Releasing the Inagination,Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Clhange 44 t is, I am suggesting, incompleteness I-

b.

41,

.c;Ž4.

2)

titt

4>XP

v_.

'IdfA

5tAL4 az

4JqVq4

,;q

86

rqf

I

the open question, perhaps

--

that summons us to the task of knowledge and action.... What seems crucial is the noticing, the active insertion of one's perception into the lived world. Only after that does a project come into being, putting an explanation into words, fighting a plague, seeking homes for the homeless, restructuring inhumane schools. To ponder this is to become convinced that much of education as we know it is an education in forgetfulness. Distracting the young from their own perceived landscapes and shapes, we teachers insist on the given-ness of predetermined explanatory frames..." "To tap into imagination is to become able to break with what is supposedly fixed and finished, objectively and independently real. It is to see beyond what the imaginer has called normal or "common-sensible" and to carve out new orders in experience. Doing so, a person may become freed to glimpse what might be, to form notions of what should be and what is not yet. And the same person may, at the same time, remain in touch with what presumably is!'

N DE P E N D E N T

S C H OO L

today. So many of us are a little crazed. Although I have to say that during the blackout that struck the Northeast in August, at least this time, New York was kind of wonderful. BRAMAN: Perhaps there needs to a hefty dose of aesthetic persuasion in the moral community. GREENE: Yes. For example, Long Day'sJourney Into Night, Eugene O'Neill's play, now playing in New York (starring Vanessa Redgrave). It's the most wonderful thing in that it's sort of autobiographical for O'Neill. The father, who's an actor and a drunk, has two sons, one of whom is based on Eugene and the other is also a drunk. The mother, so oppressed by the drunken wandering father, is a morphine addict. The play so powerfully raises the issue of determinism. Can the mother help being like that, given her past? And so the issues of personal responsibility and choice and human dignity come up. The play doesn't tell you what to believe, but those questions are such burning ones. Should that woman, who really is a very inept mother because of cocaine, be held responsible? The questions are not easily answerable. But I hope the experience of seeing the play gets us talking about these things. BRAMAN: Speaking of experiences, in Releasing the Imagination, you say that being conscious involves a venture out into the unknown to risk the rearrangement of our notion of the known. Many of our independent schools now have 'service learning7 programs. The aim is to ignite a passion for justice by engaging with people in socially contrasting environments. GREENE: And this is so important. When I was young, I did a little bit of that at the Broadway Presbyterian Church. They had a soup kitchen. A couple of us went. What I

EDUCATOR"S ALLY, INC,

discovered is that I had to deal with the feelings within myself. I wanted the people we served to be grateful for our help or at least be polite, and instead I got quite the opposite. It took me a little while to realize they are perfectly entitled to feel that way. The thing that moves most people is not the abstract notion of justice, but the feeling that things aren't fair. Existentialists talk about a sense of deficiency that makes you think about values. I used to pass some of the burned-out Harlem buildings, and I'd think, "It ought not to be that way." But the fact that there are homeless people is testimony to the fact that we don't live up to our ideals. We don't have a successful social support system. To get our students to notice these deficiencies is really good.

Providing personalized placement services for teachers/administrators and independent schools in the greater New York/Connecticut area since 1975

BOX 295 BEDFORD HILLS, NY 10507 914-234-6323

SUSAN S. LOVEJOY ELIZABETH C.MEYER

I

63rd Annual

BRAMAN: Then I trust you agree that educators must be willing to interpret the deficiencies that children notice, even when educators themselves, like most people, would prefer to believe that the horrors were not theirs? GREENE: When I was first in college and was introduced to the democratic ethic and ethos - about the dignity of man and the nobility of the rational individual - we were taught to think of human beings in terms of that kind of ideal Jeffersonian image. But I keep wondering now - when I hear about the massacres in Rwanda or children warriors - how do children conceive of the value of human life today? I don't think I ever would have imagined the depths of human frailty like the Rwandan massacres. So, yes, there's so much to talk about.

Ed i't'ion Oldest free guide to independent schools and camps

* Advertisers also included on our website www.VincentCurtis.com * Free link to your website * Free editorial content by school heads and camp directors * Free referral services

"The Educational Register is a good source when beginning (your) school search." Enrolled daughter Lee at St. Margaret's School Mr. and Mrs.TR. Osborne, Charleston,WV

Tel. 1-800-354-4081 or 1-508-457-6473 E-mail: [email protected] I

0

0

.

0

*

W

I NT

E R

2 0 0 4

87

f%~ r[a


From Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education (Teachers College Press, 2001) "I hope you think about the wonder of multiple perspectives in your own experience. I hope you think about what happens to you when it becomes possible to abandon one-dimensional viewing, to look from many vantage points and, in doing so, construct meanings scarcely suspected before.... Our object...where young people are concerned, is to provide increasing numbers of opportunities for tapping into long unheard frequencies, for opening new perspectives on a world increasingly shared. It seems to me that we can only do so with regard for the situated lives of diverse children and respect for the differences in their experiences."

Every day there's something to talk about. As educators, it's one of the jobs we have to take on. BRAMAN: Given all the horrible behavior in the world, how do we unearth a better vision? GREENE: I'm a great admirer of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He talks about each of us somehow recapturing our original landscape through an art experience. The perceived world, before you even learned

88

I ND E P E N D E N T

S C H OO L

El


to speak or even think, was an imagined world. To be in touch with that and to feel the continuities in your life can be restorative and lead to a better vision of life. At the beginning of Moby Dick, for instance, Ishmael talks about a dark drizzly November of his soul, a depression. The book, in a way, is a way of breaking through that depression. He said, 'I knew it was time to go to sea," when he found himself following funerals in the street. 'I knew it was time to go to sea." I tell people it's sort of interesting to be old, even though it's depressing, too, because you have no real rehearsal for it. We who are existentialists know that we're living toward our mortality. The other day, I got up and I thought "I'm going to be teaching this class on Art and Social Policy, and I want to read that book on atonement,' and I had this instant feeling of restoration. As long as there's something we want to do tomorrow, we muster whatever resources we have. I think, 'I'm not going to read so many magazines so I have time to read books that really matter." And that's restorative. I guess that's one reason why I keep believing. The other is that I think it's possible for teachers in this confused time to show the difference between distorted reality and the meaning of students' own lived lives. It's a delicate balance, pointing out the illusions without stopping young people from wanting to learn more. And we don't want to falsify. We want to bring kids into a critical awareness of something that's worthy. John Braman is president of the Indepenidenit Schools Association of the Central States. 90

1N

D E P E N DE

NT

S C H O O L

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

TITLE: Releasing the Imagination SOURCE: Indep Sch 63 no2 Wint 2004 WN: 0436002826011 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: http://www.nais.org/

Copyright 1982-2004 The H.W. Wilson Company.

All rights reserved.