Given the culture of compliance produced at the intersection of standardization, high-stakes testing, and punitive measures for all who deviate from the hyperrationalized frenzy of accountability that currently prevails, how is it that I have the audacity to offer teacher-learners space to exercise their imaginative capacities, to envision and enact more democratic ways of being in the world--in short, to think of how things might be otherwise? Greene's work on freedom and the use of imagination figure largely here in terms of remembering-imagining-anticipating as a suitable critical pedagogical approach to the educational problems of our times. (Contains 4 notes.)