Chukwuma Agubokwu

Education and Imagination

For many, education is a compulsory set of information that they simply have to learn, and subsequently regurgitate. Most encounter education before they are truly cognizant of its omnipresence in their lives (around thrice the time spent with parents) in the form of play. At this level, play is composed of both education and the equally important factor of imagination. Imagination’s reputation has been much more forgiving than that of education.

When children play, they exercise their ability to see what is not there and do what they cannot do, this is usually attributed to imagination alone. My opinion is that imagination is seriously augmented and complemented by education. Its different forms are to imagination what various eyewear (night vision, correction, rose-colored) are to eyes.

When your doctor friend sees you cough and hold a certain part of your chest, he does not just see this outward action, he sees a Minority Report-style menu slide out beside you. This menu might have a list of symptoms that, if displayed after your cough could indicate a minor issue like some spicy Ethiopian food or a major case of SARS. The same can be said for a great sartor, lets say Gai Gohari, for example. When he looks at you coughing, his slide out menu may concern the way in which your bent arms affect the shape of your garment or if you’re maybe due to let some areas out a bit. For a furniture designer, his gripe would be with the amount of movement you needed to make to avoid hitting the awkwardly designed table at which you are sitting.

For people who choose to go into some endeavor armed with only imagination in such an age of accessible and refutable knowledge, maybe this picture has not been painted. The point I am making here is that all of these people are imagining what is not apparently there, but are able to do so at such a degree because of what they have learned.

This grand conclusion is a result of my first semester of formal art education. Before, I felt many impulses of creativity with a sort of intuition of what did and didn’t work towards the idea I wanted to communicate, but now I walk around seeing the world around me with more informed eyes. It is a really great feeling, this education thing, the key is to be sure you are learning about what is most inspiring to you.

Thrall

(Old Norse:þræll) was the term for a slave in Scandinavian culture during the Viking Age. They were the lowest in the social order and usually provided unskilled labor. Thralldom is a noun meaning the state of being in bondage; slavery; servitude.

Enthrall, a verb literally meaning to enslave, is a linguistic remnant of this institution, though it is now mainly used as a metaphor.