Aesthetic Education

The aim of aesthetic education is to enhance people's ability to grasp meanings provided to them through various expressive forms; that is, their ability to understand and respond to meaningful forms. Potentially, everything in the world could be seen as a producer of such meanings, that is, as an instance of a meaningful form, or, in other words, as something that can be experienced aesthetically. The arts, however, are exactly those intentional form-creating acts that allow such meanings to emerge. Consequently, the teaching of the arts is aesthetic education’s pathway to the fulfillment of its purposes and goals.

Aesthetic education and its goals may best be served by comprehensive arts education programs. Such programs, focusing on the unique character of the arts as meaning-givers, permit the cultivation of students’ ability to develop complete aesthetic responses, while, concurrently, revealing the complex (experiential-emotional and cognitive) nature of aesthetic perception overall.