Aesthetic Theory

Aesthetic theory in curriculum studies brings a world that is interesting, surprising, frightening, [Page 17]or beautiful together with students who meet that world through sensation, thought, and emotion. The world does not come to us hermetically contained in rational categories. Our thoughts and understandings of the world are thoroughly intertwined with the sensory experiences of our bodies, feelings, and emotions, as well as our habits of perception and applications of logic and analysis. Creative thought that generates new knowledge, as well as art, is drawn to the very edges of these categories that sort and organize our lives. Because philosophies of education, stretching from classical idealism through medieval scholasticism and the Enlightenment, celebrated the rationality of disembodied intellect, aesthetic theory in curriculum addresses the false ...