I just wanted to get these reminders down. Dewey suggests that imagination is not so much a thing as "it is a way of seeing and feeling things as they compose an integral whole" (p. 278). "an imaginative experience is what happens when varied materials of sense quality, emotion, and meaning come together in a union that marks a new birth in the world." "Time is the test that discriminates the imaginative from the imaginary. The latter passes because it is arbitrary. The imaginative endures because, while at first strange with respect to us, it is enduringly familiar with respect to the nature of things" (p. 280). Engaging with the arts have the ability to send us from a place of security into imagination and wonder.
To see imaginatively is some aspect of seeing artistically, and seems to me to be necessary in the evolution of thought. Dewey avoids discussing imagination much like he avoids beauty, because in aesthetic thought the two seem to be of the essence of the arts, things which are ethereal and undefinable.
Of course, Dewey opens the next chapter with "Esthetic experience is imaginative. This fact, in connection with a false idea of the nature of imagination, has obscured the fact that all conscious experience has of necessity some degree of imaginative quality" (p. 283). A point Allan has mentioned with respect to education and marriage, and one I would assume extends to parenting.
Lastly on imagination, when left alone and unrealized it stays dreamlike, and in education this type of imagination could be argued as a distraction or off the point. But through the creation of art, imagination must be ordered and worked with, realized and continually criticized by the young artist struggling to achieve the creation of the imaginative impulse. In this way I think art education could serve as practice for goal setting and achievement, an argument perhaps necessary in town politics.
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