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Social Imaginaries: An Overview

Chapter · January 2016

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_379-1

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SOCIAL  IMAGINARIES:  AN  OVERVIEW1  
John O’Neill
Institute of Education, Massey University, New Zealand
j.g.oneill@massey.ac.nz

Introduction  
Historical analysis of the life cycle of educational ideas and ideals is integral to an
understanding of educational policy and practice in a particular society at any given
time. How do ideas and ideals about the nature, aims, and effective organisation of
formal educational activities come into being, flourish and wither? To what extent do
they become embodied in the everyday language, practices and relations of education
policy discourse in various parts of an ‘education system’? Why do some appear to
gain widespread popular support and acceptance within a society, and others do not?

The term ‘modern social imaginary’ was coined by the Canadian hermeneutic
philosopher Charles Taylor (2004). Taylor analyses the way in which western
societies have both imagined and attempted to realise themselves according to popular
conceptions of their moral purpose and moral order. He does this according to three
modes of imagination and realisation: the economy, the public sphere, and self-
governance. His philosophical interest concerns the continuities and discontinuities in
the ordinary social processes through which ideas and ideals transform and re-
normalise the everyday practices of societies over centuries. In this respect, his
analysis has far more in common with, say, Foucault’s (2002) archaeology of
discursive knowledge-power formations and their embodiment in disciplinary
practices and individual subjectivities, than it does with, say, Lacan’s psychoanalytic
study of the imaginary self. The social imaginary serves as an heuristic to examine the
material relationships between educational ideas or ideals and educational policies
and practices as they operate within an educational system and its host culture. Using
this heuristic, we may also raise useful questions about the reasons why public

1
Final amended version published online as: O’Neill, J. (2016). Social imaginaries:
An overview. Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. DOI:
10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_379-1
1
education is so contested, why some educational ideas appear to enjoy universal
appeal and similar effects irrespective of local context, while others are seemingly
realised in quite different and even contradictory ways across diverse cultural settings.

This entry begins by briefly elaborating Taylor’s philosophical concept of the modern
social imaginary. It then presents a selection of analyses of the ascendancy of major
educational ideas and ideals in the 19th and 20th centuries. It concludes with an
assessment of the insights on educational ideas, policy and practice that are afforded
by adopting a philosophical orientation of education as social imaginary.

Modern  social  imaginaries  

Taylor uses the term ‘modern social imaginary’ (Taylor, 2004) to describe the way in
which people imagine and work to maintain the society in which they live. The
imaginary is essentially a commonly shared moral conception of the ideal society.
Taylor’s social imaginary has elements of both moral structure (what is right) and
moral agency (what is worth striving for). A social imaginary, for Taylor, is about
how people “imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how
things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met,
and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie all these expectations” (p.
23). Taylor uses the term imaginary in preference to theory because he is concerned
with how “ordinary people” imagine the social “and this is often not expressed in
theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories and legends” (p. 23). Imaginaries
are shared by large fractions of society, whereas theory may remain the preserve of
minorities or elites. Additionally, “the social imaginary is that common understanding
that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy” (p.
23). Public education, particularly schooling, is not based on a single canonical body
of objective knowledge. Instead it is a culturally based selection of ideas and ideals
that have to become accepted as meaningful and right for families, communities and a
society as a whole. These features of social imaginaries are highly relevant to an
appreciation of how common understandings of education shape the genesis,
enactment and continual contestation of specific educational policies and practices
within a system.

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For Taylor, modern social imaginaries manifest three distinct forms of “social self-
understanding” (p. 69). These are the economy, the public sphere and democratic self-
governance. In the transition from classical to modern social imaginaries, Taylor
identifies a shift in conception of the moral order from one in which society was
divinely prescribed and hierarchically organised, and where one’s duty was to one’s
designated place in that moral order; to one in which humans exchange goods and
services within what we conceive of as an economy. Consequently, what is right and
what is worth striving for is increasingly an economic order, with all that entails about
normative valuing of behaviour, relations and achievements in social institutions such
as education. Within an economically framed moral order, the ability of individuals to
engage in productive work and to create and maintain a private space for their family
unit, together with the personal autonomy these require, is of primary importance.
Taylor’s notion of the primacy of economic self-understanding helps to explain how
education policies that are premised on personal responsibility, family advancement
and freedom of choice and association may acquire significant appeal within
contemporary society because they are essentially seen as morally good and worth
striving for.

For Taylor, the public sphere is a fluid and mobile social commons where people
meet (physical and virtually) “to discuss matters of common interest; and thus to be
able to form a common mind about these” (p. 83). The public sphere is part of and
essential to an appreciation of the importance of civil society. In the public sphere,
individuals choose to associate in order to pursue their mutual interests. The public
sphere is “extrapolitical” and “metatopical” (pp. 92-93). The public sphere actively
mediates the political and polity spheres. Accordingly, in terms of public education, it
may be seen to be vital for education ideals, ideas and the resultant policies, to speak
to and be responsive to concerns articulated through the public sphere if they are to
gain enduring popular consent and support.

Taylor’s third form of self-understanding concerns the transition from the undivided
monarchical rule of the classical age to the constitutional political state of the modern
age. The transition has been characterised by struggles, often revolutionary, as
peoples become dissatisfied with what they perceive as the unjust exercise of power
over their lives, and seek to have this replaced by a more acceptable balance between

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executive power, collective obligations and individual freedoms. A simple summary
of the process during such periods would be that elite theoretical attempts to identify
moral and practical problems grow to become a mass popular resentment at the
perceived injustice of the current settlement. This precipitates attempts to initiate
practical governance change. At first, such attempts may continue to draw on social
imaginaries that successfully made sense of the past. That they cannot explain new
and changed practices leads eventually to the emergence of new theories and
conceptions of the ideal moral order. These permit a more radical departure from old
assumptions and a move towards new governance settlements.

Public education represents a microcosm of these societal transitions in the form of

efforts to achieve lasting education settlements that meet the needs and aspirations of
greater and greater fractions of a society. However, the ideologies and ideas that
underpin these have carried quite diverse understandings of the economy and the
public sphere and how these should inform system level education funding and
provision. Thus, at the time of writing, education policies in many western and non-
western societies still exhibit ongoing unresolved struggles for ascendancy between,
for example, neo-liberal, social-democratic and authoritarian conceptions of the
purposes and necessary forms of organisation and administration of education (early
childhood, school, tertiary and community).

Overall then, the social imaginary is focused on common or popular understandings

of what is right and worth striving for in society, rather than on the abstract theories of
academic, political or bureaucratic elites. Taylor’s three forms of self-understanding
enable us to examine the complex and contested ways in which educational ideas and
ideals are positioned with regard to (i) both the macroeconomic (re)distribution of
public educational resources at national level and the micro-economic strategies
families follow to improve their personal circumstances; (ii) the positioning and
choices of groups within society to associate and communicate around particular
educational policies in the public sphere (physical and virtual); and (iii) the extent to
which educational policies and practices are perceived to advance a society’s moral
ideals and norms in respect of acceptable social and economic settlements.

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Educational  imaginaries  
Until the second half of the eighteenth century, education in England was largely the
church’s educational enterprise, based on “the idea that education is a unity, the key
to which lies in religion” (Burgess 1958, p. 4). Universities and grammar schools
were the preserve of social elites, while basic charity schools were established for the
deserving poor. During the eighteenth century, the church’s corporate monopoly on
schooling and a classical curriculum was gradually fragmented by the emergence of
what Burgess calls the private classical school, established by individuals to provide a
liberal education (p. 7). As grammar schools became more exclusive, charitable
founders and private benefactors greatly increased the number of “non-classical
charity schools” (p. 8) to provide moral education though religious instruction and the
teaching of literacy and numeracy: “these were to be the answer to both pauperism
and irreligion” (p. 9). The number of day charity schools grew, through donations and
subscriptions, and their administration became incorporated in the form of local and,
later, national societies, many of which exhibited active co-operation between church,
dissenters and secular groups. The second half of the eighteenth century saw the
introduction of state maintenance grants and a short-lived system of payment by
results. The 1870 Education Act created school boards to advance the ideal of
universal entitlement to elementary education, and subsequently, the establishment of
a unified national system of local education authorities to provide greater assurance to
central government that this was actually occurring. While this example is peculiar to
England and Wales, it has broad historic parallels with education systems elsewhere.
Together they illustrate the emergence over several hundred years of what is arguably
the first systemic educational imaginary, mass compulsory schooling.

Similar discursive trajectories may be seen in the emergence, proliferation and decline
of educational ideas, and their contiguous policies and practices in all western
countries, together with many examples of contestation or rejection of dominant
schooling forms through ‘alternative’ education. Cremin’s (1964) classic study of the
ordinary school, for example, shows how the American progressive education
movement emerged after the Civil War and was “part of a vast humanitarian effort to
apply the promise of American life–the ideal of government by, of, and for the
people–to the puzzling new urban-industrial civilization” (p. viii). While it declined
and disappeared in the decades after the Second World War, Cremin argues that its

5
success as an idea lay in broadening the scope of schooling beyond basic skills to
include issues of health, work and the quality of life; introducing pedagogies that
were based on the new psychological and social science research; a recognition that
the education offered must meet the needs of a diverse child population; and the
democratization of cultural values (pp. viii-ix). While progressive education attracted
a significant following across political, polity and civil society groups, including
teachers, its dominance was by no means uncontested. Kliebard (2004) thus
documents, across much the same historical period as Cremin, the constant struggle
for ascendancy and popular support among four curriculum ideologies, each of which
held relatively greater sway at particular times across the different interest groups that
make up the schooling discourse community. Herbert’s four ideologies were:
Humanist, Progressive, Traditionalist and Social Reconstructionist. Each may be said
to reflect diverse understandings of how society and the economy interact, and
consequently, therefore, what the school curriculum should comprise in order to best
prepare young people for meaningful social and economic participation.

That curricula and attendant schooling forms in a given period reflect the ideas and
ideals of dominant groups in society, aptly demonstrates that “how one conceives of
education … is a function of how one conceives of the culture and its aims, professed
or otherwise” (Bruner, 1996, p. x). Moreover, notes Bruner, “learning and thinking
are always situated in a cultural setting and always dependent on the utilization of
cultural resources” (p. 4). In this sense, the educational imaginary materially shapes
and is shaped by topical economic, social and cultural discourses. Thus Callahan
(1962), for example, is able to show how at the beginning of the twentieth century in
America, the administration of public schools came to be dominated by what he
called the ‘cult of efficiency’ expressed in the form of business ideas, assumptions,
processes and practices applied to educational activities. In seeking to explain the
dominance of industrial or commercial over educational ideas, he observed that
educators enjoyed relatively low status in American society at the time, compared
with business which was regarded as a defining cultural, social and economic ideal.
Furthermore, “what was unexpected was the extent, not only of the power of the
business-industrial groups, but of the strength of the business ideology in the
American culture … I had expected more professional autonomy and I was

6
completely unprepared for the extent and degree of capitulation by administrators to
whatever demands were made upon them” (pp. vii-viii).

Formal education may therefore be seen in some ways as an idiosyncratic modern

social imaginary in terms of how Taylor’s three forms of self-awareness play out.
While mass compulsory schooling has consistently lain at the heart of system level
official education policy because of its facility to sort entire student cohorts for
diverse employment and higher education outcomes, discourses around the value of
adult and community education (and, for that matter, early childhood education) have
proven more ephemeral. This is so despite periodic recognition that adult and
community education (e.g. Blyth 1983) has an important role to play in enabling those
who may not have succeeded in formal education to acquire the knowledge, skills and
dispositions to engage more confidently and autonomously in the economy and the
public sphere.

For many students, there may also be a significant difference between the official
curriculum and how it is experienced. In this regard, for example, Branson (1991)
analyses the relationships between gender, education and work and argues that “we
are all born into an economically and culturally biased environment, biased in class,
gender and ethnic terms” (p. 95). Education both produces and reproduces existing
power structures within a society and therefore needs to be seen as potentially
regressive, not progressive. According to Taylor’s conception of the imaginary,
gradual realisation of the regressive elements of an education system will create the
conditions in which elites, alliances of interest groups, and then society as a whole
seek to change what becomes perceived as an unjust educational settlement.

Relatedly, Ball (2012) uses the term ‘neo-liberal imaginary’ to describe how, today,
influential individuals, non-governmental organisations, venture philanthropists and
business interests develop largely private, virtual networks of interest outside the
public sphere to promote the adoption of privatisation and commercialisation
ideologies in the policies and practices of public education provision. Finally,
returning to Taylor’s notion of the imaginary as “images, stories and legends” (2004,
p. 23), an iconic former Director of Education in New Zealand C E Beeby (1986)
articulated the notion of an ‘educational myth’ which is required to sustain any

7
successful educational settlement. In Beeby’s case, the defining myth of the decades
following the Great Depression in 1930s New Zealand, was the state’s commitment to
provide free, universal access to education according to need and merit, and thereby
to create equality of opportunity. Looking back a quarter of a century after his
retirement, Beeby argued that a successful myth needs to be in accord with a strong
public aspiration; expressed in language flexible enough to accommodate different
interpretations of it; and unattainable for at least a generation. In time, as the
weaknesses of the old myth become clear, the old myth is absorbed into a new
educational myth of the next generation (pp. xv-xvi). This description is consistent
with Taylor’s account of how accepted norms of self-governance change through
growing public awareness of the injustices of the current social and economic
settlements.

Conclusion    
The conception of the social imaginary enables analysis of the dominant moral
purpose and moral order of a society in terms of private (or familial) and public (or
systemic) economic agency. It also encourages a focus on the strategies of association
and communication that are employed by interest groups within the public sphere and
between the public, political and polity spheres. Finally, it requires an analysis of the
ways in which societies over time change their shared understandings of socially just
economic and social settlements, and the events through which old settlements are
abandoned in favour of others that appear to have greater moral purpose and utility.

The introduction of modern mass compulsory education has typically been advocated
on the basis that it provides significant economic, social and community benefits,
both public and private. The concept of the social imaginary permits contiguous
analysis of each of these, and of their complex interactions in the context of general
and particular educational ideas and ideas, in and between societies, at particular
historical junctures and over much longer periods of time. In this sense it makes sense
to talk of modern educational imaginaries. A hermeneutic philosophical orientation
such as Taylor’s encourages a focus on the meanings, values and moral worth that
ordinary people in society attach to educational ideals and ideals, how political and
polity groups both shape and are shaped by these, how lasting educational settlements
are achieved, and why they fail.

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 References  
Ball, S. (2012). Global education inc.: New policy networks and the neo-liberal
imaginary. London: Routledge.
Beeby, C. (1986). Introduction. In W. Renwick, Moving targets: Six essays on
educational policy (pp. 1-22). Wellington, NZ: New Zealand Council for
Educational Research.
Blyth, J. (1983). English university adult education 1908-1958: The unique tradition.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Branson, J. (1991). Education, gender and work. In D. Corson (Ed.), Education for
work: Background to policy and curriculum (pp. 92-110). Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters.
Burgess, H. (1958). Enterprise in education: The story of the work of the Established
Church in the education of the people prior to 1870. London: National Society.
Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University
Press.
Callahan, R. (1962). Education and the cult of efficiency. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Cremin, L. (1969). The transformation of the school: Progressivism in American
education 1876-1957. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Foucault, M. (2002). The archaeology of knowledge. London: Routledge Classics.
Kliebard, H. (2004). The struggle for the American curriculum 1893–1958, 3rd edn.
New York: Routledge Falmer.
Taylor, C. (2004). Modern social imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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