Abstract

This study aims to develop the concept and practice of aesthetic education. The basic thesis is that education succeeds to the degree that it becomes an aesthetic experience; consequently, the work of art creates a rich context for schooling. The problem today is that schooling often degenerates into an "an-aesthetic" activity that numbs the natural enthusiasm for teaching and learning. Moreover, the anaesthetic quality of education can contribute to the larger social problems of delinquency, drop-outs, and drugs. Thus, there is an urgent social need for reconstructing the method and aim of aesthetic education. ;As a form of philosophic and qualitative research, the study attempts to clarify the topic by first examining the specific social and logical problems that it carries. This includes the conceptual confusion concerning the meaning of "art" as well as the "aesthetic," the moral problems of its purpose and value, and the logical--and even psychological--difficulty of dualism whereby the aesthetic is reified, split off from, and then opposed to science, reason, and intelligence. An isolated or incomplete conception of art often is misapplied to education, demonstrating that the theory of the aesthetic greatly affects the way it is put into practice. ;The philosophy of John Dewey is used as a corrective to the problems of aesthetic inquiry. Dewey's organic, nondualistic method resolves the difficulties that continue to plague the development of aesthetic education. Moreover, the study as a whole embraces the Deweyan attitude that unites philosophy to pedagogy by cultivating the connection between the philosophy of art and the art of schooling. Although Dewey himself did not connect his philosophy of art to his philosophy of education in a systematic way, the logic of his thought leads naturally to that connection; hence, it is the aim of this study to develop it more fully. The final part of the study builds upon a Deweyan conception of art as experience in order to reconstruct a contemporary aesthetic education that uses the work of art as a practical intellectual resource, while also developing the inherent aesthetic potential within the traditional "basics" of language, mathematics, and science