Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

education, aesthetic The idea that education should attend carefully to the development of aesthetic capacities and experience has a long and distinguished history. Different accounts of the nature of the aesthetic, and in particular of its relationship to the arts, has, however, resulted in radically different notions of the significance of aesthetic concerns within education. In the past, the term ‘aesthetic’ has at times been used to distinguish a particular aspect of all experience or thought resulting from the exercise of some general capacity such as the imagination, the ability to discern unities, or even, following Dewey, the ability to resolve discrepancies in thought. On such a view, aesthetic education is understood as covering activities that promote the development of the relevant general capacity, perhaps particularly through attention to the arts as exemplifying its paradigmatic use. Such a wide interpretation of the aesthetic within experience, however, has relatively little support in modern educational theory, where the term has instead come to be used much more specifically for a particular, distinctive category or domain of experience particularly associated with experience of the arts. Two major approaches to aesthetic education can be readily distinguished in modern accounts, though elements of both can be seen in numerous much earlier writings, perhaps notably ... log in or subscribe to read full text