Imagination appeared as one of the strongest threats to the development of a moral healthy temper and disposition, and, therefore, it was a ‘problem’ within the educational field. Through the powers of imagination, the child could create a world of its own, livelier than the real world. The problem was not far from complex as if imagination was natural to childhood, and if education should follow the child’s nature, then, which and where were the limits?
The question did not have a single answer, but the question of the imagination had, in the educative speeches, two great operative forces. On the one hand, the fear of an excessive imagination, on the other hand, the recognition of the importance of imagination for the child's life, even if it was an imagination within borders. The gatekeepers of these borders would always fight with the children chewing the borders.
The child’s power to imagine beyond reality was perceived as dangerous within the educational field, particularly echoing some earlier traces of imagination in connection to madness and to female monstrosity. Differentiations were created within the educational discourses as a way of governing imagination, mainly the establishment of the borders of different types of imagination, or a bad and a good way of imagining. The fears of imagination in the educational sciences were also the result of the nineteenth-century fears of imagination in science as opposed to reason and the new polarity between objectivity and subjectivity (Daston, 1998).
C.M.