[Chapter Eight]
Imagination
In his very stimulating book, Learning and Doing, Professor Swift quotes from a business man as follows: “Modern business no longer waits for men to qualify after promotion. Through anticipation and prior preparation every growing man must be largely ready for his new job when it comes to him. I find very few individuals make any effort to think out better ways of doing things. They do not anticipate needs, do not keep themselves fresh at the growing point. If ever they had any imagination they seem to have lost it, and imagination is needed in a growing business, for it is through the imagination that one anticipates future changes and so prepares for them before they come. Accordingly, as a general proposition, the selection of a man for a vacancy within the organization is more or less a matter of guesswork. Now and then an ambitious, wide-awake young man works into the organization and in a very short time is spotted by various department managers for future promotion, but the number of such individuals is discouragingly small. The difficulty with which we are always confronted is that our business grows faster than do those within it. The men do not keep up with our changes. The business grows away from them, and quite reluctantly the management is frequently compelled to go outside for necessary material. We need, at the present time, four or five subordinate chiefs in various parts of the factory and I can fill none of the positions satisfactorily from material in hand.”
This business man, unconsciously perhaps, puts his finger upon one of the weak places in our school procedure. He convicts us of stifling and repressing the imagination of our pupils. For it is a matter of common knowledge that every normal child is endowed with a vivid imagination when he enters school. No one will challenge this statement who has entered into the heart of childhood through the gateway of play. He has seen a rag doll invested with all the graces of a princess; he has seen empty spools take on all the attributes of the railway train; and he has seen the child’s world peopled with entities of which the unimaginative person cannot know. Children revel in the lore of fairyland, and in this realm nothing seems impossible to them. Their toys are the material which their imagination uses in building new and delightful worlds for them. If this imagination is unimpaired when they become grown-ups, these toys are called ideals, and these ideals are the material that enter into the lives of poets, artists, inventors, scientists, orators, statesmen, and reformers. If the child lacks this quality at the end of his school life, the school must be held responsible, at least in part, and so must face the charge of doing him an irreparable injury. It were better by far for the child to lose a leg or an arm somewhere along the school way than to lose his imagination. Better abandon the school altogether if it tends to quench the divine fire of imagination. Better still, devise some plan of so reconstructing the work of the school that we shall forever forestall the possibility of producing a generation of spiritual cripples.
The business man already quoted gives to the schools their cue. He shows the need of imagination in practical affairs and, by implication, shows that the school has been recreant to its opportunities in the way of stimulating this requisite quality. We must be quite aware that the men and women who have done things as well as those who are doing things have had or have imagination. Otherwise no achievements would be set down to their credit. It is the very acme of unwisdom to expect our pupils to accomplish things and then take from them the tools of their craft. Imagination is an indispensable tool, and the teacher assumes a grave responsibility who either destroys or blunts it. Unless the school promotes imagination it is not really a school, seeing that it omits from its plans and practices this basic quality. Too much emphasis cannot be laid upon this patent truth, nor can we deplore too earnestly the tendency of many teachers to strangle imagination.
We all recognize C. Hanford Henderson as one of our most fertile and sane writers on educational themes and we cannot do better just here than to quote, even at some length, from his facile pen: “To say of man or woman that they have no imagination is to convict them of many actual and potential sins. Such a defect means obtuseness in manners and morals, sterility in arts and science, blundering in the general conduct of life. Children are often accused of having too much imagination, but in reality that is hardly possible. The imagination may run riot, and, growing by what it feeds upon, come dangerously near to untruthfulness,—the store of facts may have been too small. But the remedy is not to cripple or kill the imagination; it is rather to provide the needed equipment of facts and to train the imagination to work within the limits of truth and probability. The unimaginative man is exceedingly dull company. From the moment he opens his eyes in the morning until he closes them at night, he is prone to the sins of both omission and commission. No matter how good his intentions, he constantly offends. No matter how great his industry, he fails to attain. One can trace many immoralities, from slight breaches of manners to grave criminal offenses, to a simple lack of imagination. The offender failed to see,—he was, to all intents and purposes, blind. At its best, imagination is insight. It is the direct source of most of our social amenities, of toleration, charity, consideration,—in a word, of all those social virtues which distinguish the child of light.” Another fertile writer says: “Many a child has been driven with a soul-wound into corroding silence by parents who thought they were punishing falsehood when they were in reality repressing the imagination—the faculty which master-artists denote as the first and loveliest possession of the creative mind.”
Some of our boys will be farmers but, if they lack imagination, they will be dull fellows, at the very best, and, relatively speaking, not far above the horse that draws the plow. The girls will be able to talk, but if they lack imagination they can never become conversationalists. The person who has imagination can cause the facts of the multiplication table to scintillate and glow. The person who lacks imagination is unable to invest with interest and charm even the mountain, the river, the landscape, or the poem. The gossip, the scandal-monger, or the coarse jester proves his lack of imagination and his consequent inability to hold his own in real conversation. We hope, of course, that some of our pupils may become inventors, but this will be impossible unless they possess imagination. A sociologist states the case in this fashion: “Wealth, the transient, is material; achievement, the enduring, is immaterial. The products of achievement are not material things at all. They are not ends, but means. They are methods, ways, devices, arts, systems, institutions. In a word, they are inventions.” In short, to say that one is an inventor is but another way of saying that he has imagination.