Maxine Greene's Concept of the Social Imagination as Critical Pedagogy

• In Event: Dreaming in Greene: Reframing Contemporary Educational Policy, Practice, and Research Through Maxine Greene’s Critical Lens

Abstract

As a philosopher of education, Greene grounded her work in existential phenomenology, pragmatism, critical theory and aesthetics. A prolific writer, public intellectual and teacher, Greene offers contemporary educators, philosophers, and policy makers a valuable critique of education and schooling. In particular, her concept of the social imagination is a potent antidote to the negative forces of scientism, technicism, and instrumental rationality that have dominated educational thought and practice for several decades. It is also a generative idea that supports the viability of multicultural communities in our schools and in our democratic society at large. This paper will address Greene’s resistance to the increasing standardization of teaching and learning, the corporatization of schooling, and the shrinking of the public sphere, through a critical understanding of the arts.
Since her earliest writings in the 1970s, Greene has provided a sustained critique of our bureaucratized schooling systems, systems that offer a reduced and packaged concept of education (Greene, 1973; Greene, 1978). She laments the situation of many teachers and students who often experience a loss of their own subjectivity—their own agency. In her later work, Greene makes a compelling case to transform this disempowering situation through critical aesthetic experiences. By invoking the imagination, particularly the social imagination, Greene seeks to move us beyond education as “simple transmission” (Greene, 1995, p.3) and also “the hollow formulations, the mystifications so characteristic of our times” (Greene, 1988, p.126). She maintains that “a concern for the critical and the imaginative, for the openings of new ways of ‘looking at things’, is wholly at odds with the technicist and behaviorist emphases we still find in American schools” (Greene, 1988, p. 126).
It is important to underscore Greene’s insistence on the social dimensions of the imagination-- imagination that is critical and transformative, imagination that can produce a more humane and just world. Drawing on critical theory, existentialism and the arts to develop her critical concept, Greene deploys it to provoke, to provoke us into “wide-awakeness.” As she tells it: “I am interested in trying to awaken educators to a realization that transformations are conceivable, that learning is stimulated by a sense of future possibility and by a sense of what might be” (Greene, 1978, pp. 3-4).
Through her long teaching and writing career, her thirty-year role as Founder and Philosopher in Residence at the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education, and as co-founder of a small New York City high school focused on the arts and social inquiry, Greene inspired, and continues to inspire, countless generations of teachers, artists, professors, and community activists. Ever the philosopher of education, Greene continually asked us to reflect on the perennial question—to what ends are we preparing the young in our schools? One response from her was to ‘educate for freedom’ through an engagement with the arts (Greene, 1988, pp. 117-135). Her critical concept of the social imagination provides a fuller understanding of Greene’s philosophy of education and its impact on our world.

Author

• Wendy R. Kohli, Fairfield University