Imagination and other-directedness. So much of schools’ failure to engage
children in learning seems to stem from our unwillingness to accept the otherness of their
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ways of thinking. Having spent twenty years or more learning to think and talk in the
culturally sanctioned ways of educated middle-class adults, we hasten to induct new
generations into the same routines, turning a blind eye to all the losses this entails. What
would happen if, instead, we saw teaching as a chance to revive imaginative encounters
with the world that have long lain dormant under the weight of “literal” thinking? What if
being a teacher meant focusing on the ways children think most energetically and vividly
at particular stages in their development? What we have in mind here is not the Piagetian
notion of a biologically-driven unfolding of systematic thinking, but a more Vygotskian
picture of children acquiring and mastering sets of “thinking tools” from their culture, as
suggested by Kieran Egan. The primarily oral child thinks differently about the world
than the newly literate one, and the young adult developing a mastery of disciplinary
thinking is acquiring yet another imaginative perspective on reality. Perhaps real otherdirectedness
implies taking these differences seriously, and not simply regarding earlier
stages as immature precursors of later ones