2.
Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or
representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the
work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response
involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure
"facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field.
The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any
activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to
identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and
intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an
exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and
something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and
appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters,
leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative
acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information.
Theory, and—to some extent—practice, have advanced far
enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise.
But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off
stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference
between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a
difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a
difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The
result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal"
phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to
a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results.
Achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned
machine can do better than a human being can, and the main effect of
education, the achieving of a life of rich significance, drops by the
wayside. Meantime mind-wandering and wayward fancy are nothing but the
unsuppressible imagination cut loose from concern with what is done.
An adequate recognition of the play of imagination as the medium of
realization of every kind of thing which lies beyond the scope of direct
physical response is the sole way of escape from mechanical methods in
teaching. The emphasis put in this book, in accord with many tendencies
in contemporary education, upon activity, will be misleading if it is
not recognized that the imagination is as much a normal and integral
part of human activity as is muscular movement. The educative value of
manual activities and of laboratory exercises, as well as of play,
depends upon the extent in which they aid in bringing about a sensing of
the meaning of what is going on. In effect, if not in name, they are
dramatizations. Their utilitarian value in forming habits of skill to
be used for tangible results is important, but not when isolated from
the appreciative side. Were it not for the accompanying play of
imagination, there would be no road from a direct activity to
representative knowledge; for it is by imagination that symbols are
translated over into a direct meaning and integrated with a narrower
activity so as to expand and enrich it. When the representative
creative imagination is made merely literary and mythological, symbols
are rendered mere means of directing physical reactions of the organs of
speech.
