Imagination is in peril in our culture, because little is left to the imagination any more. Young people’s minds are subject to a constant barrage of powerful and emotive images, none of which have emerged from the fertility of their own minds but have been handed to them ready-made with all the high-impact gloss and glitter available to the entertainment industry.

However, we can do little to promote imagination in the young if we have none ourselves. The attitude that we have a body of prescribed content to teach, and that any excursion outside these narrow limits is an unjustified digression, is the antithesis of a broad and balanced curriculum. It is our vision in extending students beyond these narrow limits which goes far beyond the process of constriction which is occurring in state education and which provides the enriched dimension of independent school education. Imagination is not something which should be restricted to subjects conventionally associated with “creativity”, i.e., language studies, literature, art, drama. The way we can foster it is first and foremost to increase it in ourselves through the richness of our own interests and aspirations.

I believe that one of the features of the very best schools is their resistance to the erosion of the humanities and the arts. In the case of Muslim schools, I believe this can be a weak area of the curriculum. According to Jean Houston, “arts kindle the imagination, stimulate the brain’s connectivity.” The arts “make us human.” We know from research that only 15% of learners are auditory learners (i.e., absorb information through hearing it); 40% of students are visual learners (i.e., they process information primarily through seeing pictures); and fully 45% are kinesthetic learners (i.e., they learn best through the immediate sensory stimulation of hands-on experience and action).

The implications of this are very clear. The best schools do not rely on predominantly verbal instruction, which is one of the main sources of the pervasive boredom which inhibits learning. To do so would not only ignore the learning styles of the majority of people, but also fail to make use of the full potential of the individual human brain.

The best schools will always balance the seduction of hi-tech by providing highly stimulating visual and tactile environments, and use multi-sensory teaching techniques. An Islamic education system in tune with the findings of contemporary research needs to re-evaluate the place not only of music in the school curriculum, but also the educative potential of movement activities such as dance, which energizes and stimulates the entire mind-body system. Research has shown that test scores in language arts rise in correlation to the amount of time spent in movement activities. I have already referred to the transferable benefits of music education and the well-attested research which has found that learning to play a musical instrument can dramatically enhance human intelligence.

The best schools will also use the power of drama to enrich the learning experience. Through dramatic enactment in theater, the student explores the many guises of what it is to be a human being, using a rich array of skills—music, movement, rhetoric, expression, and feeling—to tour the landscape of human experience. What is more, what is enacted is more readily remembered.

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