Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change

"This remarkable set of essays defines the role of imagination in general education, arts education, aesthetics, literature, and the social and multicultural context.... The author argues for schools to be restructured as places where students reach out for meanings and where the previously silenced or unheard may have a voice. She invites readers to develop processes to enhance and cultivate their own visions through the application of imagination and the arts. Releasing the Imagination should be required reading for all educators, particularly those in teacher education, and for general and academic readers."
--Choice

"Maxine Greene, with her customary eloquence, makes an impassioned argument for using the arts as a tool for opening minds and for breaking down the barriers to imagining the realities of worlds other than our own familiar cultures.... There is a strong rhythm to the thoughts, the arguments, and the entire sequence of essays presented here."
--American Journal of Education

"Releasing the Imagination gives us a vivid portrait of the possibilities of human experience and education's role in its realization. It is a welcome corrective to current pressures for educational conformity."
--Elliot W. Eisner, professor of education and art, Stanford University

"Releasing the Imagination challenges all the cant and cliché littering the field of education today. It breaks through the routine, the frozen, the numbing, the unexamined; it shocks the reader into new awareness."
--William Ayers, associate professor, College of Education, University of Illinois, Chicago

About the Author
MAXINE GREENE is professor of philosophy and education and the William F. Russell Professor in the Foundations of Education (Emer.) at Teachers College, Columbia University. She still teaches there and directs the Center for Social Imagination, the Arts, and Education. She also serves as "philosopher-in-residence" at the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education; and she is a past president of the American Educational Research Association, the American Educational Studies Association, and the Philosophy of Education Society.