The land on which Oak Grove school is situated is a numinous place to learn, work and educate future generations. A place we are invited to inhabit for the day and participate in creating and accessing the common ground of real-time awareness with students. In all honesty, asking young students to direct their attention to a single subject for a reasonable amount of time is the most challenging aspect of being an educator. It is not because they do not want to learn or are not curious about the subject matter but it has to do with anxiety fuelled by an imagined perception of oneself that says, “I do not think I can do…(fill in the blank)”.
We frequently have the good fortune of meeting opportunities to look at deeper truths and the illusory nature of what we perceive about ourselves, our abilities, and others. These openings emerge throughout the day. Invitations like these require an attentive mind, profound sensitivity, and vulnerability to engage. They are the wealthiest learning opportunities due to the transformative potential of Oak Grove’s holistic attitude towards education. These moments offer the possibility of moving beyond the binary of past and future.
Students come forward with their concerns not because they seek a solution but because they seek a witness to their emerging ability to self-correct and regain balance. Oak Grove is a supportive environment for students and staff alike because of the space we hold to enquire, experiment, make mistakes, build tolerance for failure, and be humble enough to try again. This environment is essential for building strong creativity muscles and honouring processes over the end product.
In the third-grade classroom for example, enquiry might take the form of a skit, silent meditation, a poem, illustration, written reflection or a friendship agreement detailing what support students need in their friendships. Together, we learn through nurturing innate curiosity, utilizing discernment, gently provoking each other’s defences, revealing our assumptions and biases, and challenging perceptions we held that we did not know we carried.
Awareness of the role thought and imagination play in shaping our sense of reality can be a necessary discomfort. As David Bohm explains, “we are conditioned to resist seeing that this is happening.” We must question the presence of imagination in shaping what we perceive as reality before reacting to that perception. We learn that it is in the holding of contradictions that meaning eventually comes forward because, in doing so, one can reflect, and that which is in flux can take solid form. Imagination has little chance of unfolding meaning if that undergoing is truncated or destroyed. A person’s full potential is not knowable in its emergent state.
A vital part of conflict resolution is to watch for the ‘fix-it’ mentality. Sometimes this mindset is helpful, but complex cultural issues require more than a tiny adjustment. Disrupting destructive patterns in our society requires a creative response capable of giving birth to a new consciousness. When we create psychological space and strengthen our tolerance for ambiguity, we can gain new understanding by observing the unfolding feelings and perceptions of ourselves and others. This process gets derailed by reaching for a tidy conclusion that restores comfort in the known, even if it’s false. That is where the danger lies. The brain needs security to function, is uncomfortable with not knowing, and uses images from our collective consciousness to generate a version of reality that feels known and comfortable.
Our visual perception depends on imagination to create the illusion of an open field of view. There are blind spots in our field of vision where the nerve endings enter the retina. Our imagination fills in the gaps in vision without sensors with imagery pulled from memory. This process generates the appearance of a seamless whole. Ever wonder why you can see your nose when you close one eye but cannot see it when both eyes are open? Perceiving movement was essential to human survival, so our imagination blocked our noses to create an unobstructed view.
Likewise, similar involuntary imaginative effects create a narrative or patterns out of seemingly unrelated bits of tacit visual and psychological information with amodal perception. This is not a problem as long as we know this process is happening. On the other hand, there are ways we consciously use imagination to help students visualize symbolic imagery for phonological and orthographic processing when teaching reading and spelling. It is a potent tool when used in this capacity.
We are infusing our imagination, our past, our knowledge into what we see… that isn’t necessarily bad; it may be very necessary in many contexts. However, when we fail to see this happening, we are in danger. Especially if there is resistance to seeing it, and we are conditioned to resist seeing that this is happening. That’s really when the self-deception arises. —Thought as a System, David Bohm
Reality is undivided wholeness; imagination creates the illusion of separation. It shapes thoughts and beliefs about who we are and what we can and cannot do. Starting life as conscious beings in the anthropocentric era makes it challenging to imagine a reality where humans are not separate and superior to nature. Mostly, this perspective is accepted as ‘how it is’ because it’s how it is perceived, but the two are not the same.
Through awareness of how perception is constructed and sustained through our imaginative faculty, we could reclaim imagination’s creative potential to envisage a collective consciousness that recognizes itself as part of a network of intelligence rather than the source of it.
What creates meaning in our lives? In the knowledge era, there is much information, but more meaning or correlation is needed. If we are unaware of the role of imagination in our lives, we may view the invocation of imagination as a waste of time and energy. Einstein explained, “Imagination is more important than knowledge because knowledge is limited”. This quote suggests that imagination is unlimited in its capacity.
Future generations may find themselves at a nexus point where society switches to a more intelligent design that will reorient the primitive brain from fighting over scarcity to optimizing for creativity. This moment is an opportunity to ask—what quality of being, thinking, and awareness can an educator participate in co-creating with students and everyone else on campus to meet challenges we cannot predict? No one knows, but that should not stop us from asking questions.
The work of Krishnamurti is like a massive window into the imagination. It opens a reciprocal relationship with life and all the things we encounter within it freshly and with the appropriate level of uncertainty. We must not take anything for granted, but reflect on how we educate ourselves, and come to students more completely. We must be free to change how we educate future generations in ways beyond what we have already imagined. As educators, we must lovingly care for the fertile ground from which creativity spawns. As futurist Buckminster Fuller explained, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something”, first imagine, then “build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”