es 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. Better still, devise some plan of
so reconstructing the work of the school that we shall forever forestall
the possibility of producing a generation of spiritual cripples.

The business man already quoted gives to the schools their cue. He shows
the need of imagination in practical affairs and, by implication, shows
that the school has been recreant to its opportunities in the way of
stimulating this requisite quality. We must be quite aware that the men
and women who have done things as well as those who are doing things have
had or have imagination. Otherwise no achievements would be set down to
their credit. It is the very acme of unwisdom to expect our pupils to
accomplish things and then take from them the tools of their craft.
Imagination is an indispensable tool, and the teacher assumes a grave
responsibility who either destroys or blunts it. Unless the school
promotes imagination it is not really a school, seeing that it omits from
its plans and practices this basic quality. Too much emphasis cannot be
laid upon this patent truth, nor can we deplore too earnestly the tendency
of many teachers to strangle imagination.

We all recognize C. Hanford Henderson as one of our most fertile and sane
writers on educational themes and we cannot do better just here than to
quote, even at some length, from his facile pen: "To say of man or woman
that they have no imagination is to convict them of many actual and
potential sins.