Greene’s Cultural Call to Action

Greene, Maxine
Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, Art, and Social Change
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1995.

If you seek solace from the drone of daily life and envision a society in which our imagination enables us to strive together for a better, more engaged future, read this book! If you share my love for education, social justice, and poetry, read this book! If you are interesting in imaginative teaching and learning through aesthetic education, read this book!

Those of us at Lincoln Center Institute (LCI) know Maxine Greene as our official philosopher-in-residence, and look forward to hearing her speak and reading her essays. We know her through her long-standing relationship with the Institute, through periodic lectures and discussions, and through her beautiful and thoughtful writing. With a lineage that includes the philosophy of John Dewey, she is a living, breathing wealth of inspiration and information not only about the philosophy of aesthetic education but about life. I have long been familiar with Greene’s Variations on a Blue Guitar, a compilation of lectures given at Lincoln Center Institute, but this work was new to me.

To me Maxine Greene is the wise elder, one who is full of information and takes the responsibility of asking tough, thoughtful questions. In fact, it is largely her wise philosophical reasoning that “hooked” me as a proponent of imaginative teaching and learning through aesthetic education.

Releasing the Imagination is a record of Greene’s musing on her life’s work in contemporary educational and social philosophy and activism. Not so much a how-to or a set of instructions, this book is more a set of philosophical reflections with which Greene intends to provoke us—she wants us to ponder and make connections, sparking our imaginations to think beyond the every-day situation and enable us to join in community (much like the scenario we want for our LCI students in classrooms).

In this work, Greene speaks of imagination as the key to creating a better educational structure, and thinks and writes specifically of poetic and of social imagination. While re-thinking educational structure is central to her musings, to me this work is filled equally with a plea for a more active shaping of our whole culture, something she believes must come simultaneously or even first. And I love that Greene freely admits her thinking is utopian, she envisions a world that passes beyond the status quo and envisions “more vibrant ways of being in the world” (5).

This is certainly inspiring reading and I’d recommend it cover to cover. Greene’s writing is bursting with literary, philosophical, and cultural references; it reads as an inspiring essay with the flow of her articulate, varied, and highly stimulating style. It is worth noting, however, that there is a comprehensive index in the back, including references to both people and terms, which would make using this book as a practical resource or reference point more possible – something I find is rare in scholarly essays. It is also worth noting that Greene divides the book into three thematic parts, “Creating Possibilities,” “Illuminations and Epiphanies,” and “Community in the Making.”

“I want to help us think in ways that move beyond schooling to the larger domains of education, where there are and must be all kind of openings to possibility,” (5) Greene states. I appreciate the way Greene draws partially personal narrative partially reflection on literature and culture and democracy. While the book is a personal history, illuminated by cultural and literary examples, to me it is nothing short of a treatise on the power and importance of imagination. It is a call to action.

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