In this view of the matter we can see one of the weaknesses of some of the
work in our colleges as well as in other schools. The teachers are fertile
in arriving at facts, but seem to think their tasks completed with these
discoveries and so proclaim the discovery of facts to be education. It
matters not that the facts are devoid of significance to their students,
they simply proceed to the discovery of more facts. They combine two or
more substances in a test-tube and thus produce a new substance. This fact
is solemnly inscribed in a notebook and the incident is closed. But the
student who has imagination and industry inquires "What then?" and
proceeds with investigations on his own initiative that result in a
positive boon to humanity. Imagination takes the facts and makes something
of them, while the college teacher has disclosed his inability to cope
with his own students in fields that only imagination can render
productive.

To quote Henderson once again: "In most of our current education, instead
of cultivating so valuable a quality, we have stupidly done all that we
can to suppress it. We have not sufficiently studied the actual boy before
us to find out what he is up to, and what end he has in mind. On the
contrary, we proclaim, with curious indifference, some end of our own
devising, and with what really amounts to spiritual brutality, we try to
drive him towards it. We do this, we irresponsible parents and teachers,
because we ourselves lack imagination, and do not see that we are
blunting, instead of sharpening, our human tool. Yet we define education
in terms of imagination when we say that education is the unfolding and
perfecting of the human spirit; or, that education is a setting-up in the
heart of the child of a moral and æsthetic revelation of the universe; for
the human spirit which we are trying to establish is not a fact, but a
gracious possibility of the future."