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

"This remarkable set of essays defines the role of imagination ingeneral education, arts education, aesthetics, literature, and thesocial and multicultural context.... The author argues for schoolsto be restructured as places where students reach out for meaningsand where the previously silenced or unheard may have a voice. Sheinvites readers to develop processes to enhance and cultivate theirown visions through the application of imagination and the arts.Releasing the Imagination should be required reading for alleducators, particularly those in teacher education, and for generaland academic readers." (Choice)

"Maxine Greene, with her customary eloquence, makes an impassionedargument for using the arts as a tool for opening minds and forbreaking down the barriers to imagining the realities of worldsother than our own familiar cultures.... There is a strong rhythmto the thoughts, the arguments, and the entire sequence of essayspresented here." (American Journal of Education)

"Maxine Greene, one of the greatest education philosophers of thelast half century, constantly reminds teachers that the arts andthe social imagination are central to humane and caringlearning.... Her work is a constant reminder that teaching is amoral profession and that children's imaginations are a treasure wecan neglect only at the peril of our future." (Review in Teacher byHerbert Kohl, senior fellow, Open Society Institute, New YorkCity)

"Releasing the Imagination gives us a vivid portrait of thepossibilities of human experience and education's role in itsrealization. It is a welcome corrective to current pressures foreducational conformity." (Elliot W. Eisner, professor of educationand art, Stanford University)

"Releasing the Imagination challenges all the cant and clichelittering the field of education today. It breaks through theroutine, the frozen, the numbing, the unexamined; it shocks thereader into new awareness." (William Ayers, associate professor,College of Education, University of Illinois, Chicago)