Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to introduce everyday aesthetics in education. First, it presents everyday aesthetics as a subdiscipline within philosophical aesthetics, that revisits sensory perception as the backdrop of all experience, claims ordinary life is a proper venue for aesthetic inquiry, and problematizes the impact aesthetic preferences have on habitual decisions. Second, the paper argues that among the diverse matters students learn in school, they learn—explicitly or implicitly—what and how to perceive, as well as the pedagogical purposes of daily perception. School models the relationships that students will develop between what they perceive, what they think about it, and how they act accordingly. Next, the paper elaborates on the notions of “school aesthetic matrixes” and “space and place in school”. School aesthetic matrixes refer to perceptual patterns that allow characterizing relationships between daily perception and the pedagogical project of a school. They manifest through expressions such as prison school, home school, mall school, etc. Space and place in school allude to concomitant experiences, of corporeal basis, that allow describing how we inhabit the world. What distinguishes them is the approach each one gives to the senses and the body. The paper concludes by calling attention to the comprehension and role of perception in education, urging to mind the aesthetic-pedagogical character that students develop throughout 12 years of schooling. Ultimately, the key relationships we develop with ourselves, others, and the world, entail a basic perceptual dimension that can be educated to become more purposefully and integrally present in life.
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Notes
In this sense, it is worth reminding that Aristotle’s treaty On the Soul, Περὶ Ψυχῆς, affirms the continuity between external senses (sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell), and internal senses (common sense, imagination, memory, estimation), as a necessary complement to intellectual activity. Perhaps, habitual sensory associations such as seeing and imagining, or hearing and remembering, or smelling and liking seem so obvious, that we seldom reflect on the way in which perception officiates as a guide and mediator to all explorations in the world.
For a current epistemological discussion on this topic, I recommend Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor’s (2015) Retrieving realism, particularly Chapter 2 where they argue that the development of our sense of self depends on the ways in which we attune -or not- with the world through our senses.
As I will discuss in the “Space and Place in School” section, another argument in favor of paying attention to the way in which ordinary sensory experiences condition our decisions, is that these experiences show how proximal senses and bodily engagement are not secluded in an irreflective or mechanized compartment of our lives. What is more, they can be educated to become more purposefully and integrally present here and now.
For instance, this is the rationale to include ‘building aesthetics’ as an analytic variable within school climate research (Thapa et al. 2013).
A discussion about the world of perception according to Merleau-Ponty is beyond the scope and possibilities of this paper. However, it is worth stressing that he refers to a world that engulfs us, that is not there but rather all around; that precedes and nurtures all our mental and practical schemes like the experience of the landscape precedes the science of geography; a world that allows for no pure sensations but rather perceptual interpretations of our bodily relationships.
In addition, although we seldom reflect on this, the emptiness of a school wall is a perceptual image that we build based on the convergent work of more than one sense. Even if its description seems to rely fundamentally on visual traits, the possibility of noting the lack of other aspects that are supposed to be there on the wall, or of listening to the lack of noise around it, or of imagining an organizational effort to leave room for it, show how the senses naturally overflow five discrete paths and integrate into the whole experience of knowing. While a neurological account of synaesthesia refers to an extremely rare phenomenon, the coming together of two or more senses, in a porous and dynamic process, may be more frequent than we are used to noticing (Howes and Classen 2014).
This is an exercise in the etymological sense of an attempt, a rehearsal practice, a hands-on inquiry that aims at relating ordinary perception with education.
Certainly, there are well-established pedagogies such as Reggio Emilia, Montessori, and Waldorf, that masterfully embrace the potential of space and place, modelling how to take advantage of school materials and surroundings in favor of richer educational experiences. However, it is fair to acknowledge that they are not popular initiatives, especially beyond Pre-K and the first years of Elementary School.
Everyday aesthetics may also contribute to revisit the notion of inclusive education. For instance, it is not enough to have braille signs next to the restrooms, or tactile sidewalks connecting all rooms, or schedule pictograms displayed on the class and playground, to make school facilities functional for special educational needs and disabilities students (SEND). When these symbols are not seen, properly located and updated, or students, teachers and administrators do not learn how to read them, they can lead to exclusion, division or impassiveness.
The question regarding other modes of perceptual inquiry is as fascinating as scarcely explored. While scholars like Prosser (2007) have led the field of school visual culture, investigating the polysemic and pedagogical senses of school images from the viewpoint of sociology and visual anthropology, philosophical interest regarding this dimension—including the smells, textures, sounds and tastes that build up school—seem frankly desert.
In this sense, the description that Tuan (2014) makes of illiterate people who developed forms of communication which typically included the construction of their own residences, is fascinating (p. 116). Among other reasons, these types of communal constructive experiences demand the cultivation of multisensory perception.
As a way of confirming the relevance of the names that owned places receive in schools, it may be interesting to reflect on the conceptual tension that the bare idea of a nameless school causes.
As an example of the relevance and different ways of conceiving the notion of space within architecture, I believe this citation of Herman Hertzberger from his book Space and Learning (2008) is utterly illustrative: “So making the city as instructive as can be should be the key spatial condition for urban planners and architects; this is what they should be focusing on. This spatial condition is all about leaving space and making space for ambiguity, room to move and freedom of interpretation, allowing a more sophisticated, layered image of society to emerge. This is quite unlike uncritically helping to refine and confirm half-truths on behalf of a fearful population in search of peace and quiet” (p. 251).
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This work was supported by the Chilean National Agency for Research and Development through the Grant ANID FONDECYT Regular 1210808.
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Marini, G. An Introduction to Everyday Aesthetics in Education. Stud Philos Educ 40, 39–50 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-020-09740-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-020-09740-x