Shadow and Light: Read, Dewey, Plato, and Aesthetic Education

Abstract

This essay examines the aesthetics of Herbert Read, John Dewey and Plato, and their influence on contemporary aesthetic education. The aesthetics of Read and Dewey have been extremely seductive to aesthetic educators for two reasons, the first of which is that they provide a “democratic” or inclusive aesthetic which appears readily integratible into school curricula. The other reason is that Read and Dewey are explicitly prescriptive and practical in their recommendations. Yet the democratic aesthetic is found to be philosophically untenable and inadequate to art. Plato's aesthetics, to which both Read and Dewey claim allegiance, are more philosophically astute and present the fundamental dilemma of aesthetic education: how to reconcile the intrinsically subversive nature of art with the conservative aims of education. The essay contends that aesthetic educators must abandon their traditional arguments on behalf of the arts. They must confront the dilemma of conflicting aims and move towards a new basis for the inclusion of the arts in education. Concomitantly, education will be required to broaden its purposes so that what has hitherto been perceived as subversive will now be recognized as essential to the examined life — knowledge of complexity, paradox, and conflict which extend beyond “right answers. ”