The Aesthetic in Education and in Life

This chapter discusses the aesthetic in education and in life. Aesthetic considerations relating to stature and style play an important and might even play a preponderant role in one's appraisals of other people, whether it be those of the contemporaries with whom one has direct contact or, even more, public and historical personages. One feels differently toward a rogue on the grand scale than one feels toward a timid, mean, sly, slinking petty criminal. One might even experience a sort of reluctant admiration for a heroic and exuberant transgressor. The exercise of aesthetic sensibility is a skill to be cultivated and trained. It is common form to emphasize that aesthetic attention is a form of perception-for-its-own-sake, freed from the practical interests that dominate perception in ordinary life. The importance to society, and indeed to mankind as a whole, of cultivating and maintaining the aesthetic faculties is best understood within the framework of an evolutionary picture.