Maxine Greene was the mother on Aesthetic Education. She spent most of her career at the Teachers College at Columbia University in NYC. Additionally, she taught and lectured at the Lincoln Center Institute as its philosopher in residence. Greene continued and extended the educational philosophies of John Dewey concentrating on pragmatism and democracy. She lived from 1917-2014. She taught teachers and extolled the importance of imagination to true teaching and learning. She championed the facilitation of students’ seeing new possibilities and awakening to embody becoming a part of community while embracing the integrity and worth of all people. She lectured and wrote about the importance of keeping arts central in education. She spread the importance of aesthetic education as THE way to foster imagination and awakening in the classroom and beyond.
“If the cultivation of imagination is important to the making of a community that might become a democratic community, then the release of imagination ought now to be one of the primary commitments of the public school.”
I will look into the thesis that art is important and generative for the teacher, student and democracy if it is done in a way to cultivate imagination. Aesthetic Education is the way. Art and teaching art is not a waste of time. Let us awaken to the possibilities.
Aesthetic education and art education in public schools
Teaching art can be more than teaching how to make art or how to understand the historical importance of art. The experience of making art can become an aesthetic experience if the maker is noticing the act of making and applies the experience to interactions with other artworks and to being a human experiencing the world. According to Greene, “Aesthetic education is an intentional undertaking designed to nurture appreciative, reflective, cultural, participatory engagements with the arts by enabling learners to notice what is there to be noticed, and to lend works of art their lives in such a way that they can achieve them as variously meaningful. When this happens new connections are made in experience: new patterns are formed, new vistas are opened.” The pressures of high stakes standardized testing and high stakes teacher evaluations are not conducive to teaching for liberation, aesthetic education is. Public education is based on antiquated systems that had the goal to create file clerks and factory workers. In the past this could have been argued to at least have helped the students to get a job after graduation. Now low level, low skill jobs are replaced by machines or outsourced to areas of less expensive labor. Imagination is the key to creative and entrepreneurial jobs. Mass education has an oppressive power structure built into it. The teacher lectures to all students they repeat/ memorize facts. Facts can be looked up in a second now. Now we need to discern truth from deception (a critical act) we need to make things or use things in new ways.
Oppression in education is the nature of the institution. Much like Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed, the students and teacher take on the role of the dominating authorities whose aim may not to educate but to maintain superiority and a base of cheap labor.
Imagination poetic visual and social imagination
Habitual routes create loss of vision. The habitual acts are unthinking acts. If you are unaware you are unquestioning/ unthinking. Rote learning is a way of making new information habitual. Aesthetic education is a way of making the everyday meaningful, beautiful, or enraging. If you pass empty houses or boarded up houses everyday but do not notice them you would not be moved to outrage. But if you notice the empty houses and bring experience with the windows in the art of Ben Shahn and Romare Bearden. If you see the empty windows a metaphor for empty eye sockets then the noticing may awaken outrage. What is causing these buildings to sit empty while people live on the street or are doubled up in overcrowded apartments? You may imagine a different, better possibility.
You may be capable of indignation through engagement with paintings or novels. You may awaken to see feel and act!
Ben Shahn(up) Romare Bearden (down) 
Aesthetic education helps enable a disgust for the status quo and an awakening to what is possible, to social dreaming. Paulo Freire spoke to the interest in art and imagination- “if peasants do not have a notion of a pleasanter world they will not be moved to create a different situation” When people feel insecure they do not allow themselves the risk of dreaming or setting lofty goals. This relates to something I recently heard; locations hit by natural disasters experience a twofold contraction of growth. First through the initial destruction and the use of resources to rebuild but also in the limiting of goals by people who do rebuild. (NPR Maria coverage)
Sartre: 19th century French Factory, Union- begins better way of life makes current situation unbearable. The Utopian thrust of imagination. Rare today- knowing now to the past feeling that there is a cause worth working for that something we could do can change. Thinking of things as if they could be otherwise. To look at things as if it could be otherwise.
Poems unleash new perspectives on old words, put together so to provide a queer order and novel meaning. Maxine Greene referred to this poem by Adrienne Rich in one of her many lectures available online.
WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.
Only once you can accept yourself, once you accept another person for who they are-even if you do not agree with what they do, then you can see life as it is and then real change can come. You have to be willing to not know, to discover the answer and know that it will be incomplete, change and forever be in an act of becoming.
Just because you are aware that there are those that want to make it disappear doesn’t mean that you will not dream of something different, something better. There are different types of dread. Chicago is dragging with dread. Lives are unvalued and meaningless. People feel drawn to protect their own survival and interest by use of a gun. Young folk are plugged into a squawk box that yells insistently, provides live feeds of fights and lascivious pleasures. Young folk are high. The sweet feel of oblivion is potent and available where real world comforts are not.
If you feel this way why do you create?
Why do we bother to fight. Why do we dream of something beyond what we have already seen?
If poetry/art survives at all it is the combination of the belief in some possible happiness combined with feet planted in the common sense of dread. It is not escapism to imagine. It is reaching for the edge of the yawning chasm, letting your eyes adjust to the dim but remembering the brightness of a new day and knowing the sun will rise again.
“It is a sense that there is always more to experience and more in what we experience than we can predict. Without some such sense, even at the quite human level of there being something which deeply absorbs our interest, human life becomes perhaps not actually futile or pointless, but experienced as if it were. It becomes, that is to say, boring. In my opinion, it is the main purpose of education to give people the opportunity of not ever being, in this sense, bored; of not ever succumbing to a feeling of futility, or to the belief that they have come to the end of what is worth having.
Can we work toward a civil society in the future of education?
“Teacher educators and school administrators do not think speculatively despite all the work towards fruitful conceptions of active learning, critical questioning, and the construction of meanings. There is almost no mention of imagination or of its relation to notions of the possible. No attention is paid to Dewey’s idea of the incompleteness of meanings when not rounded out by the imaginative projection of possibilities.”
Can we engage students in constant effort to improve community? Taking responsibility to improve community is understanding other’s worth and integrity. Other people's potentiality. Each person is on the way. Regard people who have a different aesthetic. I may not like it but I know that the person is trying to express something. I can expose myself to this different viewpoint and understand the integrity of this unknown. This other answer may not be my answer and my answer may be evolving.
It is frightening if someone thinks they have the answer. Tyranny is an authority that prevents you from thinking for yourself.
Can’t control everything. Interacting with art enable the understanding that we see things differently. We do things differently. There are many correct answers. “There are no single views of the possible, any more than there are ways of measuring what it signifies in anyone’s imagination. Imagination summons up visions of a better state of things, an illumination of the deficiencies in existing situations, a connection to the education of feeling, and a part of intelligence.”
Education can be an emancipatory act. “We (and those who are our students) must be given opportunities to choose to be persons of integrity, persons who care.”
Have a ‘we experience’ and connect to community. Education is not something to do it is a means to unlock the potential of possibilities. After unleashing the imagination then there needs to be the next step of working together. As Deweyan democracy in education, “Through the building of a community the ground may be laid for an articulate public empowered and encouraged to speak for itself, perhaps in many voices, within classrooms (and corridors, and school yards) people look forward to seeing, across spaces where there can be dialogue and exchanges of all kinds in which persons can speak in their own idioms, avoiding the formulaic, the artificial and the `sound-bite’.”
Aesthetic education helps unleash social imagination! Attempting to make sense of the world through experiencing something new. A glimpse of the sublime allows for frustration at the current state of education and a call for something better. “Art can’t change the world, but it can change someone who can.” - Greene is quoted to say. This thought alone can save creators from the paralysing self doubt that can arise through questions such as: Why am I doing this? Is this the most important thing during challenging times? Isn’t this art production self-indulgent? Is this art product merely a decoration or plaything for the rich?
Looking into the work of art educator and philosopher Maxine Greene is like taking a cool sip of water: clear, simple and good for you. Is it possible to practice aesthetic education in urban public schools?“There are, of course,” Greene wrote, “young persons in the inner cities, the ones lashed by ‘savage inequalities,’ the ones whose very schools are made sick by the social problems the young bring in from without. Here, more frequently than not, are the real tests of ‘teaching as possibility’ in the face of what looks like an impossible social reality at a time when few adults seem to care.”
Why art? Why teach?
Art because it may be the thing that can inspire the imagination to see things as they could be, not how they are. The hope the kindness and the creative power of America the great is built on imagination. To teach for liberation to offer authentic experiences aesthetic education the teacher must be highly trained but even more importantly highly ethical. She need to believe in the integrity of all of her students. To understand the limitations of the administration’s understanding and work toward something better even with her feet planted in the dread of high stakes testing and evaluations.
“It is not that the artist offers solutions or gives directions. He nudges; he renders us uneasy; he makes us (if we are lucky) see what we would not have seen without him. He moves us to imagine, to look beyond.”
Can public schools build a community of aesthetic education or are they doomed to be a tool of the oppressor. Can teachers in their classrooms and administrators in their offices imagine something beyond the tyrannical dictates they have little control over? They may be doomed, but maybe they can be open to the possibility of imagining- becoming the thing that does not yet exist- something better!
- Baldacchino, John. 2012. Art's way out: Exit pedagogy and the cultural condition. Vol. 81.;81;. Rotterdam;Boston;: Sense Publishers.
- Baldacchino, John. 2013;2012;. Willed forgetfulness: The arts, education and the case for unlearning. Studies in Philosophy and Education 32 (4): 415-30.
- Baldacchino, John. 2017. Freedom, aesthetics, and the agôn of living in maxine greene's philosophy. Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies 39 (1): 18.
- Colwell, Richard. 2015. A challenge from bennett reimer. Philosophy of Music Education Review 23 (2): 117.
- Greene, Maxine. "The Artistic. Aesthetic and Curriculum." Curriculum Inquiry 6, no. 4 (1977): 283-96. doi:10.2307/1179650.
- Greene, Maxine. 1988. Imagination. From the Museum of Education’s Reader's’ Guide to Education exhibition [http://www.ed.sc.edu/museum/Guide.html] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9pwAi8-bZE
- Greene, Maxine. "Art and Imagination: Reclaiming the Sense of Possibility." The Phi Delta Kappan 76, no. 5 (1995): 378-82. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20405345.
- Greene, Maxine. 2000. Imagining futures: The public school and possibility. Journal of Curriculum Studies 32 (2): 267-80.
- Higgins, Chris. 2008. Instrumentalism and the clichés of aesthetic education: A deweyan corrective. Education and Culture 24 (1): 6-19.
- Rich, Adrienne "What Kind of Times are These" from Collected Poems: 1950-2012. Copyright © 2016 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 1995 Adrienne Rich. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51092/what-kind-of-times-are-these
- Teachers College, Columbia University, Maxine Greene, TC's Great Philosopher, Dies at 96. Published Thursday, May. 29, 2014 http://www.tc.columbia.edu/articles/2014/may/maxine-greene-tcs-great-philosopher-dies-at-96/
- Thayer-Bacon, Barbara. 2008. Democracies-always-in-the-making: Maxine greene's influence. Educational Studies 44 (3): 256-69.
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