Abstract
Every child needs planned, aesthetic education in order to influence the experiencing, feeling and enjoying of beautiful things as a counterbalance to our currently rationalized world. Since the contemporary school strives for the development of professional knowledge and skills on the basis of intellectual actions, while (at the same time) neglecting other dimensions of the child’s personality (emotions, feelings, etc.), it is one of the most important tasks of the education of children and young people to develop the ability to enjoy art and beauty, and in one’s inner and outer life to act in accordance with a sense of proportion, harmony and beauty. The purpose of the article is to highlight the significance of aesthetic education in the development of the personality as a whole, to shed light on the aims of aesthetic education, to define the aesthetic dimension of experience and to ascertain the reasons for the neglect of aesthetic education in theory and practice.
Highlights
The idea of aesthetic education has been present in pedagogical theories as an essential element of the theoretical debate on the role of art and the beautiful in the shaping of the individual: Plato regarded aesthetic education as an indispensable composite part of the upbringing or education of the free man; Schiller says that it is possible to realize pedagogical goals only through aesthetic education and emphasizes the educational functions of the aesthetic in art, those which enrich man, cultivate him and develop within him a sense of genuine humanity; Herbart points out the danger of rational unilaterality in education and is of the opinion that
Denac harmony and balance in the child’s personal integrity can be maintained through aesthetic culture; Read finds that the basic error of all educational systems and their methods lies in their focus on rational thinking, which can have a negative impact on the individual’s inner harmony, since he has to be trained to be able to live in a creative and natural manner-and the latter can only be achieved through aesthetic education (Gilbert & Kuhn, 1967)
Individual types of artistic education are not determined on an aesthetic-theoretical basis; frequently, special didactics of artistic subjects draws on artistic techniques and does not include either the goals or processes of the aesthetic dimension, such as aesthetic perceiving, experiencing, creating, evaluating and developing aesthetic sensibilities (Denac, 1994, 1999)
Summary
The idea of aesthetic education has been present in pedagogical theories as an essential element of the theoretical debate on the role of art and the beautiful in the shaping of the individual: Plato regarded aesthetic education as an indispensable composite part of the upbringing or education of the free man; Schiller says that it is possible to realize pedagogical goals only through aesthetic education and emphasizes the educational functions of the aesthetic in art, those which enrich man, cultivate him and develop within him a sense of genuine humanity; Herbart points out the danger of rational unilaterality in education and is of the opinion that. All of the critical periods in the past, and partly in the present, see the escape from the dominance of rationalism in emphasizing the importance of aesthetic and artistic education; at the point when the child’s or young person’s development of integrity becomes unbalanced, this education is seen as the “last resort” in the reestablishment of harmony among the individual areas of the child's personality. As a means of preventing the scientism of the curriculum, Lenzen suggests an orientation toward the aesthetic He claims that only can we consider the educational process an artistic act and not a production process and, correspondingly, man a work of art and not a product (Lenzen, 1992). Artistic experience can guide the individual to become the humanistic ideal of personal perfection (Koopman, 2005)
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