Importance Of Imagination In Education

“From the last decade of the twentieth century onward, there were an increasing number of policy statements including changes in the school and pre-school curriculum to encompass creativity. And government-funded development projects established within education, designed to nurture pupil and teacher creativity” (Craft 2003:116). Creativity has become a point of interest for governments starting from the last decade of the twentieth century. Nowadays economic success depends to a large extent on how creative it is.

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2. Why is imagination important?

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all what we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and

“So much of the focus on students’ cognition is in terms of logico-mathematical skills that our very concept of education becomes affected” (Egan 1992:5 as cited in Stewart

2009:2). According to Greene and Egan, there is a serious need to rediscover imagination in education.

Greene (1995) defends a rediscovery of imagination for a very relevant reason which is shown in the following passage:

“one of the reasons I have come to concentrate on imagination as a means through which we can assemble a coherent world is that imagination is what, above all, makes empathy possible. It is what enables us to cross the empty spaces between ourselves and those we teachers have called “other” over the years. If those others are willing to give us clues, we can look in some manner through strangers’ eyes and hear through their ears. That is because, of all our cognitive capabilities, imagination is the one that permits us to give credence to alternative realities. It allows us to break with taken for granted, to set aside familiar distinctions and definitions (P.3 as cited in Stewart

Each of these levels contains several strategies to develop students’ creativity.

1) The Prerequisites: it contains two strategies that are Modeling Creativity and Building Self-Efficacy.

 Modeling Creativity means not preaching and telling the students to be creative but to show them. The teacher should be creative so that his students will imitate him. “The teachers you remember are those whose thoughts and actions served as your role model” (Sternberg and Williams 1996:7). If the teacher is creative in his class, his students will understand and enjoy the lesson and therefore, they will start appreciating creativity.

 Building Self-Efficacy means helping students understand that they can do anything they want to. “The main limitation on what students can do is what they think they can’t do” (Sternberg and Williams 1996:8). All students can be creative and create new things, but they need to be encouraged. When trying to advise children, teachers and parents disrupt their psychic