Serbian public opinion on child imagination and its correlates

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Child imagination is considered in developmental theories as a desirable precondition for later creative production, though in everyday use, imagination is viewed as fantasy, unreal, not practical and not important. The topic of interest in this paper is public opinion of imagination as the quality that can be encouraged to learn at home and the factors which influence this opinion. The data for the analysis were collected from the Third and Fourth Wave of World Values Survey. The findings suggest that imagination has a very low status among other child qualities which have to be supported. The increase in interest for imagination in the world and in Europe between the Third and Fourth Wave of the survey can indicate larger compliance with the actual demands of educational reform for democratization of education and encouragement of creativity of the young. Stagnation of child imagination status in the opinion of Serbian respondents is understandable in the framework of social crisis which happened at the time when the survey was conducted. The preference of imagination is positively correlated with respondents' postmaterialist orientation and educational level, but negatively with their age. The implications of findings for nurturing creativity in formative period are discussed. It is concluded that the school is invited to offer special programs to compensate for public opinion effects.