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11 CHAPTER TWO Imagination: Unleashing Our Children’s Ability to Mentally Soar Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. —Albert Einstein1 If Einstein ran today’s schools, he almost certainly would give the imagina- tion a prominent place in classroom instruction. After all, by using his imagination, he managed to change civilization’s ideas about space, time, and the very structure of the universe. As a child, Einstein had enjoyed working with puzzles and three-dimensional models (he once made a card house fourteen stories high). In his midteens, having failed the natural sci- ence and language sections of the entrance examination to the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, he was told by the director to wait a year to take the tests again and to enroll in the meantime in the Kanton Schule in Aarau, thirty miles northwest of Zurich. This was a school based on the educational philosophy of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, an eighteenth- century Swiss educational reformer who thought that visual conceptualiza- tion (Anschauung) represented the very height of thought. He believed that images were more important than letters and numbers. This new school environment that placed a value on visual thinking was a far better fit for Einstein. Encouraged to use his imagination, at the age of sixteen Einstein did what he called “a thought experiment” (Gedankenexperiment), where he imagined himself racing beside a beam of light. He discovered that if he