this is from Maxine Greene’s Releasing the Imagination. What she calls imagination can also be called play, creativity, art. She did a lot of work to get more art in schools, arguing that the imagination is probably necessary for empathy, or at least it usually is how it works. If everyone of our students leaves school with greater empathy imagine the benefit to the world.
“Imagination is what, above all, makes empathy possible. It is what enables us to cross empty spaces between ourselves and those we teachers have called “other” over the years. If those others are willing to give us clues, we can look in some manner through strangers’ eyes and hear through their ears. That is because, of all our cognitive capacities, imagination is the one that permits us to give credence to alternative realities.’
Imagination may be our primary means of forming an understanding of what goes on under the heading of “reality”; imagination may be responsible for the very texture of our experience. Once we do away with habitual separations of the subjective from the objective, the inside from the outside, appearances from reality, we might be able to give imagination its proper importance and grasp what it means to place imagination at the core of understanding’.”