Is Beauty an Archaic Spirit in Education?
by Howard Cannatella
O! Father and mother, if buds are nip d and blossoms
blown away, and if the tender plants are strip'd of their joy in the spring
day, by sorrow and care's dismay, how shall the summer arise in joy, or
the summer fruit appear?
—William Blake, "The School Boy"
This article discusses the unfashionable and taboo idea that beauty matters.
A sign of the esteem in which beauty is held can be gauged by the fact that
so few articles significantly address any conception of beauty in education.
Yet outside a purely educational regime, matters are treated somewhat differently
albeit confusedly. In contrast to a virtual silence on this issue, a defense
of beauty is modestly made in this article—one that claims that education
is considerably ineffective without beauty and would be a poorer and unjust
system of practice if beauty were merely seen as an irrelevance, a distraction
from the serious stuff of management practice. What is broadly pursued is
an attempt to portray an educational praxis that involves the suggestion
that an active being in the world is someone who shows themselves to be
in some exhortation of its beauty. An attempt is made to map out a few of
the reasons why the sense of beauty is an important condition of being,
a position few educationalists, so the arguments go in this article, can
choose to take lightly. In what can be seen at times as a rather tasteless,
aggressive, and doctrinaire educational climate, an education that is culturally
alive and buzzing with the sounds, smells, images, rhythms, freedoms, play,
knowledge, and rationalities that accompany and are inseparable from social
and individual existence at intimate levels of being can revitalize teaching
practice in more sensitive and magical ways. By exploring some of the reasons
why we should not desensitize ourselves to beauty in education, it is possible
to counter-argue for a greater retention and conviction of this experience.
My supposition is that beauty as a poetic force should be regarded as one
of the defining characteristics central to pedagogic practice. In making
this claim I draw upon a few of Charles Dickens's and William Wordsworth's
ideas in support of the importance of beauty in education.
|
|
