Aesthetic Teaching

Evidently, there are similarities between pictures and diagrams but essential features present in the former are conspicuously absent from the latter. The current obsession with effectiveness in teaching has reduced that which should be aesthetic and inspired to the wholly rational, diagrammatic and instrumental. Heidegger's ontology (theory of existence) offers a philosophical foundation from which to counter forces that militate against the aesthetic in our schools and also provokes us to eschew all that is diagrammatic in our approach to that which is rightly aesthetic. The author argues that aesthetic teaching can make a spiritual as well as a distinctly aesthetic event possible. He concludes that aesthetic teaching is both spiritual and ethical for it can foster student's perception of the meaning of life.