You are now leaving Flatland: Why we need imagination in education

IMAGINE. What does it really mean to imagine? Is it just the ability to picture – from the Latin, imago? Is it, at the other extreme, about dreaming impossible dreams of never-to-be-realised utopias, like a dream of ‘all the people living life in peace’ as John Lennon put it in 1971? Just imagine if these words referred not only to the self-confessed counter-cultural dreamers of the 1960s and ’70s, but to the mainstream reality of the postmodern world of the new millennium. According to the educational futurist, Richard Slaughter, the only way to avoid a ‘future dystopia’ is to take our ability to imagine more seriously. ‘There are indeed real and vibrant alternatives to the kind of limited rationality that is currently driving the global system toward a diminished and dystopian future,’ Slaughter wrote in his 2004 book, Futures Beyond Dystopia.