Aesthetics for Young People

Another pitfall for precollegiate teachers is the misguided equation of aesthetics with intellectual history, with an unseemly preoccupation with obscurity. [...]teachers (and students) understand why Plato or Kant or anybody else would care about certain issues, aesthetics is too readily seen as a set of thumbnail sketches of theoretical stances in twenty-five words or fewer. Arguments that aesthetics is an essential element of art education are confirmed by impressive national programs, from the Discipline-Based Art Education program (DBAE) developed by the Getty Center for Education in the Arts (now the Getty Education Institute for the Arts) to Project Zero at Harvard University. Moore argues persuasively against critics both within and outside of the academy that aesthetics is indeed appropriate for children, drawing from everyone from Plato and Rousseau to John Dewey, the philosopher who did the most to awaken our awareness of art integrated into all aspects of human experience, including the classroom.