Children enter school brimming with imagination. They're masters of make believe and visualization, honed through five years of play. For the next decade, this essential cognitive faculty is benignly neglected by the institution called school. By comparison, the faculty of reason is explicitly and assiduously cultivated, reflecting the West's historical bias against imagination. However, a number of early 20th Western thinkers were greatly influenced by the alternative views of many non-Western societies wherein the imaginary and the real are interwoven and iterative. This shift in awareness is now in full bud, supported by advances in science and technology as well as by the arts. In this article, the author discusses how the role of imagination has become increasingly evident in learning and education, and how imagination is seen as intrinsic to all endeavors, including the arts, science, medicine, technology, industry, entertainment, and sports. (Contains 12 notes.)