A Different Way of Knowing through Aesthetic Education

by Joan Baum, Ph.D.

Maxine Greene, the summer-session guru of the Lincoln Center Institute, has been at her inspirational fount for over 25 years, an admired and eloquent advocate of aesthetic education. She has quite a reputation for both metaphysical rumination as well as poetic personal comment. It is unfortunate, therefore, that her book cannot talk, for the lectures assembled here—many published for the first time—would benefit from her voice. On the page, in chronological order and pressed into groups, her ideas can seem a bit too abstract and repetitive—desirable enough in a workshop, but tending toward the diffuse in print. Still, it is gratifying to have such a passionate enthusiast exhort on the subject of the arts and their integration in the curriculum. Given the still prevalent habit of regarding the arts as curricular add-ons, and thus the first to go in budget cuts, the lectures are timely and significant.

This is clearly a work that belongs in graduate schools of education and centers devoted to culture and the arts. Greene is an ardent proponent of sustained, interdisciplinary exchange in the classroom.

Aesthetic education is not art education or art appreciation, but a different “way of knowing.” She wants people to make new connections, “to feel from the inside what the arts are like and how they mean.” In too many schools, she reminds her audience, the arts are still looked upon as “self indulgence,” Maxine Greene is richly allusive, quoting with ease and frequency from literature, painting, music, philosophy, history, mathematics and science. Some recurring favorites are Mozart, Dewey, Picasso, Hannah Arendt, Wallace Stevens and Shakespeare; her range is wide and deep, embracing both low and high culture, as they reflect and stimulate the imagination. In fact, “The blue guitar,” her symbol for aesthetic education, was Wallace Stevens’ “metaphor for imagination and the image of the man with the blue guitar who will not play things as they are.”

Aesthetic education, through awakening the imagination (“uncoupling” us from the familiar), can “save lives” as well as change them, free children from feelings of hopelessness, and curricula from obsessive attention to standards and outcomes. What aesthetic education might do for the adults who attend her Institute sessions is more than amply demonstrated in these lectures. #

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