Tag: Jeannine Ouellette

I don’t save many magazine articles anymore (I filled up too many file cabinets that way while working as an Utne Reader editor), but I intend to save Jeannine Ouellette’s very fine feature on the death of the American imagination from the November 2007 Rake.

This is the kind of sweeping, thorough thought piece that is much easier for an editor to assign than for a journalist to actually report and write. Ouellette did such a beautiful job of it that by the article’s end I was inspired, despite its somewhat dire assessment of the state of things.

Too bad The Rake couldn’t have included a sidebar about Waldorf education (Ms. Ouellette is a veteran Waldorf teacher), which although no panacea, is at least one strong counter-cultural trend to the soul-deadening typical American education.

Jeannine Ouellette’s puzzling article [“The Death & Life of American Imagination”] seems to cite the regimentation of children’s lives and the role of technology as a threat to the development of imagination. As a girl in the ’50s and ’60s, I faced far more restrictions to my imagination and free play than any kid today.

But the greatest threat to imagination goes unmentioned: the intrusion of religion into the schools. It may not seem so bad here in Minneapolis, but there are parts of the country where the schools are not focused on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). They are afraid to teach anything that might threaten third century AD notions of cosmology or biology. There is a brain drain due to restrictions on research (stem cells, etc.) and government science is censored on the subjects of reproductive health and climate change.

Minneapolis doesn’t have to do all this to limit the development of its children, however. Its school board has merely decreed that education be withheld from anyone not rich, not white, or not a resident of the southwest quadrant of the city.