"
This business man, unconsciously perhaps, puts his finger upon one of the
weak places in our school procedure. He convicts us of stifling and
repressing the imagination of our pupils. For it is a matter of common
knowledge that every normal child is endowed with a vivid imagination when
he enters school. No one will challenge this statement who has entered
into the heart of childhood through the gateway of play. He has seen a rag
doll invested with all the graces of a princess; he has seen empty spools
take on all the attributes of the railway train; and he has seen the
child's world peopled with entities of which the unimaginative person
cannot know. Children revel in the lore of fairyland, and in this realm
nothing seems impossible to them. Their toys are the material which their
imagination uses in building new and delightful worlds for them. If this
imagination is unimpaired when they become grown-ups, these toys are
called ideals, and these ideals are the material that enter into the lives
of poets, artists, inventors, scientists, orators, statesmen, and
reformers. If the child lacks this quality at the end of his school life,
the school must be held responsible, at least in part, and so must face
the charge of doing him an irreparable injury. It were better by far for
the child to lose a leg or an arm somewhere along the school way than to
lose his imagination. Better abandon the school altogether if it tends to
quench the divine fire of imagination.
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