Introduction

“Just the facts, ma’am.” The words of Sergeant Joe Friday on the old television series Dragnet are perhaps the most famous, if inaccurate, in the history of television. As simplistic and inane as these words are, they dominate educational policy and practice in the English-speaking world. Nothing is wrong with getting the facts, of course, but the problem is that all facts are mediated by history, memory, imagination, and cultural construction. We never know “just the facts,” for they are mediated by myriad versions and visions. An educational system that does not deal seriously with these versions and visions is destined for extinction.

The project of this book is urgent. Resistance to the domination of education by belief in the facts revealed solely by mandated standards and standardized testing must be practiced on many fronts, none of which is more fundamental than the imagination, which is the source of all versions and visions of the natural and cultural world.