THE AESTHETIC DIMENSION OF A CLASS OR THE PLACE OF BEAUTY IN EDUCATION

Abstract

Why talk about beauty, and for what? And why do it when the proposal is talk about education? What do both subjects share in common, if any? Exposing such theme which suggests that beauty and education should walk together in a time when the contemporary man is living desensitized, unaware of his surroundings, and unwilling to react is an effort to look beyond what presents itself as the only available and viable path. To view alternate paths beyond the already known, and looking upon them with fresh eyes, recognizing that man has a need of beauty and that this need must be satisfied, “we would rescue the soul, perceiving that which happens to it is more done than given – done by our work with it in the real world, in making the real world reflect the soul’s need for beauty” (HILLMAN, 1993, p. 127). If in upon the real world one will act, education – which forms the human being – is one of the loci of this action, and the class – the habitat of the teacher (PEREIRA, 1996, p. 59) – a moment in which beauty can be experienced. Because to experience the world, sensible to it, is to allow something to occur to ourselves, and not simply to the world (LARROSA, 2001). Education should be the place where an ode to beauty would be possible, in which experiences would not be destroyed or mechanized, but incarnated in ourselves.