Humans have a natural predisposition to appreciate and enjoy beauty, form, texture, color, line, movement, sound, and other aesthetic qualities of our environment. Thanks to our ability to perceive and recognize, experience emotions, receive sensations, and use our imagination, we possess an instinct for aesthetic experiences that support deep feelings, insight, and the creation of personal meaning. By harnessing this instinct or capacity in children and youth, then encouraging and teaching it, aesthetic education provides more opportunities for children to engage in aesthetic experiences. It does so by teaching them to appreciate art in terms of its form and to value the skills and techniques of the artist, as well as encouraging students to adopt an open and receptive attitude conducive to such experiences. These skills—learning to appreciate art and openness to beauty and the transformative perspectives offered by artworks—are likely to be most effective when taught, practiced, and encouraged.
Although one may feel awe and wonder when pausing to contemplate a sunset, this is not always the case nor applicable to everyone. Many artworks are likely to require some form of education before they can be fully appreciated or enjoyed. Art is deliberately created with the purpose of providing an aesthetic experience to its recipients; this is what makes it valuable in itself, not for its economic or other worth. For this reason, artworks are ideal as objects with which we should teach students how to engage in an open and receptive manner. Moreover, art is everywhere. While nature may also be all around us, not all urban schools have easy access to sublime landscapes.
Here, we link natural (human) perception with aesthetic experience, appreciation, and encounters. Art and aesthetic pleasure are natural and instinctive. Humans are born capable of creating and enjoying images. We can see evidence supporting Aristotle's view in children's traditional play: everywhere, children imitate adults, each other, animals, and even machines. Imitation is a natural element in individual education. From a creative perspective, and experimentally, humans enjoy the experience of imitation, whether in the form of images, sculptures, stories, or theatrical performances. Our ability to perceive the world around us enables us to appreciate the aesthetic qualities and features of our environment. Once we receive stimuli through the senses of sight, touch, and hearing, our mind interprets and responds to these stimuli. Our perceptions activate mental and physiological responses, including cognitive and emotional reactions that interpret what we have seen, heard, and felt. In this way, our mind draws on concepts, memories, categories, and ideas that influence our experience, and our imagination begins to play with these impressions and sensations, from which we derive meaning. Thus, our aesthetic responses are partly natural and instinctive but also socially influenced through meaning-making systems by which we learn to interpret and respond to the world.
Aesthetic response is a fundamental element of humanity. There may be biological reasons for this. Some evolutionary theorists believe that aesthetic preferences for certain landscapes (such as savannas or those with running water) developed and contributed to survival advantages. However, there is also a social factor that shapes how people aesthetically engage with objects or events.
If aesthetic responses are partly acquired, education plays a pivotal role in dealing with art and narrating aesthetic experiences. Like our emotions, aesthetic responses are learned, culturally constrained, socially imposed, and sometimes restricted. This is highly relevant to educational concerns because it demonstrates that people have a natural capacity to experience the aesthetic qualities of the world and artworks and that they can learn in ways that refine and support these experiences to allow for deeper, more precise emotional and cognitive responses. In turn, this provides us with the ability to create meaning and enrich our lives. Furthermore, there is a metacognitive element where education (and aesthetic education in particular) also enables critical reflection, not only on the artwork that elicited a particular response but also on the response itself.
This article aligns with the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Goal 4: "Quality Education."
Almustaqbal University, The First University in Iraq