Education as Aesthetic Experience

Abstract

This article examines the characteristics marking human beings engaged in aesthetic experience as envisioned by John Dewey. Of interest is the interaction between self and other distinguished by emotional self-investment, intellectual hospitality, vulnerability to loss, and existential responsibility. Such interaction opens spaces where human beings experience and provide opportunities for transformation. In this sense, aesthetic experience is a continual source of reciprocal transformations and thus a ceaseless unfolding of growth. If one conceptualizes education as aesthetic experience, it becomes manifest in human interaction as opposed to passive reception. Education becomes an existential constant instead of a solitary school-based activity. A classroom narrative is offered as exemplifying such an educational conception and then analyzed for the marking characteristics of aesthetic experience. Readers arrive at a conception of education that counters current educational policies alienating human beings from one another and thus from interactions that may provide and sustain growth.

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