Life Lessons Learned
This brings me to the second reason I made the above statement; from birth we develop life-learned lessons, which are taken in steps and journeys and dependent upon each other, as does education. For example we learn to crawl before we walk and to speak before we read.
Nevertheless, I agree with Egan that prior knowledge and imagination are coexisting spontaneously. For if a child cannot imagine walking first he would not do so, it takes some degree of thought for the child to figure out that using the chair to stand up first would help him walk this creativity comes the testing and gaining of knowledge.