Abstract
Maxine Greene (1917–2014) was a philosopher of education who grounded her work in existentialism, pragmatism, critical theory, and aesthetic education. A prolific writer, public intellectual, and teacher, Greene offered (and continues to offer) contemporary educators and policy makers a valuable critique of education and schooling in the USA. In particular, her concept of the social imagination is a potent antidote to the negative forces of scientism, technicism, and instrumental rationality that have dominated educational thought and practice for several decades, especially through the over-reliance on authoritarian accountability systems. This chapter locates the social imagination in Greene’s existential commitment to provide openings, to create more possibilities, to move us to a more empowered stance in the world. For Greene, it is through encounters with a range of art forms that we are provoked to ‘think of things as if they could be otherwise.’
Portions of this chapter first appeared in a paper given for the 2015 Presidential Symposium of the John Dewey Society: The Legacy of Maxine Greene, and subsequently published in Education and Culture 32(1), 15–24, 2016.
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Notes
- 1.
The Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in New York City, now Lincoln Center Education, was founded by Maxine Greene over 30 years ago. http://www.aboutlincolncenter.org/education-community/lincoln-center-education/lincoln-center-education
- 2.
http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/03/M299/default.htm. From the website of the school: At the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry we work to infuse our interdisciplinary curriculum with experience in, and reflective study of, the arts in accordance with the model created by the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education. We believe that encounters of this sort release imagination and open unexpected intellectual possibilities that provoke students to reach beyond themselves as they “look at things as if they could be otherwise” and, most significantly, encourage civic dialogue which empowers all of the members of our diverse school community to work towards a more just, humane and vibrant world.
- 3.
See Greene’s classic text 1988, The Dialectic of Freedom, for her historical and philosophical justification of “education for freedom.”
- 4.
This is drawn from Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, Chapter Two “In Search for the Great Community.”
- 5.
- 6.
The instructor was not referring to the classic book by Elliot Eisner, The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs, when naming the course.
- 7.
Teaching the course for 10 years, the instructor used a range of material. However, the core texts for the course remained stable: Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934), Greene’s Releasing the Imagination (1995), Greene’s Variations on a Blue Guitar (2001), Freire’s Teachers as Cultural Workers (1998), Cahan and Kocur’s Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education (1996), or Joo and Keehn’s Rethinking Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education (2011).
- 8.
As context, the graduate students getting their Masters degrees in Education are mostly white, female, middle class, suburban teachers.
References
Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York: Penguin Putnam.
Greene, M. (1973). Teacher as stranger: Educational philosophy for the modern age. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing.
Greene, M. (1978). Landscapes of learning. New York: Teachers College Press.
Greene, M. (1988). The dialectic of freedom. New York: Teachers College Press.
Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts and social change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center lectures on aesthetic education. New York: Teachers College Press.
Gur-Ze’ev, I. (Ed.). (2005). Critical theory and critical pedagogy today. Haifa: University of Haifa Press.
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Kohli, W. (2018). Maxine Greene’s Concept of the Social Imagination. In: Smeyers, P. (eds) International Handbook of Philosophy of Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72761-5_16
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