Aesthetics in Education

Education as Aesthetic Experience

Education that is aesthetic utilizes multiple interpretations, unexpectedness, spontaneity, and ambiguity. Such education embraces students' and teachers' own interactions with the object of study as students and teachers move beyond assumptions that the body must be separate from the mind's engagement in learning. This approach makes use of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's exploration of subjective and bodily experience as establishing one's knowledge of the world. Merleau-Ponty's articulation of the phenomenological harkens to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's project of “the cultivation of the body” with its ability to perceive the world through its senses, which is discussed below.

John Dewey explicitly addressed aesthetics in his persistent concern for experiences within education. Much of his work explored experiences, mapping their terrain and describing what makes them complete. For Dewey, an experience is a complete, bounded, unified event that is achieved through the aesthetic. It is not a repeatable event, as each experience depends upon its context, history, composite factors, and a particular satisfaction (which is by definition aesthetic) that must exist for an experience to be complete.

This conception of the aesthetics of experiences explains Dewey's concern that all educational experiences be aesthetic, that is, consciously constructed and perceived by the intellectual, emotional, and [Page 23]physical self. Educational experiences are aesthetic when students engage directly in the making, whether it is the production of an artwork, a historical investigation, or scientific exploration, rather then merely learning about what others have done. While students are involved in their learning, they are also actively aware of what they are doing, and reflect upon it.

An aesthetic experience occurs when the doing of something, and the perception of what is being created, are wholly in harmony. Students' engagement in real literature, active learning about the environment through a school garden, and solving real community problems exemplify potential aesthetic learning experiences. In contrast, the nonaesthetic experience is routine, mechanized, and conventional. Worksheets, standardized exams, and basal readers exemplify such routinization. According to Dewey, an aesthetic experience is intellectual, emotional, and physical; it connects to students' past and future activities in meaningful ways. These connections occur when the learner is aware of the real context of the experience. Aesthetic experiences occur in artistic creation, but can also exist in daily life when events are undertaken with consciousness and perception. Such everyday aesthetic experiences characterize a fulfilling life and should be the hallmark of educational practice.

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