Aesthetic Teaching

I think aesthetic teaching is the highest of all teaching because it deals with life in its highest complexity. But if it ceases to be purely aesthetic — if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram — it becomes the most offensive of all teaching.¹

George Eliot asserts that "the highest of all teaching" which "deals with life in its highest complexity" is essentially aesthetic in character for it has features of the "picture" or work of art rather than the more straightforwardly instructional "diagram." Yet, George Eliot not only ascribes greatest worth to teaching that is aesthetic but considers teaching that is merely diagrammatic to be "the most offensive of all teaching." Evidently, there are similarities between pictures and diagrams but essential features present in the former are conspicuously absent from the latter. The current obsession with effectiveness in teaching and repeated attempts to reduce that which should be aesthetic and inspired to the wholly rational, diagrammatic and instrumental make George Eliot's views remarkably pertinent. Consequently, features of aesthetic teaching will be explored in this essay. In doing so it will be suggested that Martin Heidegger's ontology (theory of existence) offers a philosophical foundation for conceiving teaching in the arts as a form of engagement with students which is unreservedly aesthetic in character. As such, Heidegger provides us with a valuable position from which to counter forces that militate against the aesthetic in our schools and also provokes us to eschew all that is diagrammatic in our approach to that which is rightly aesthetic.

Teaching: Drawing the Diagram or Painting the Picture?

Teaching is currently being construed, in both the United Kingdom and the United States, as a technology with which to get something done or as a vehicle which "delivers" a subject in an efficient or effective manner, or even as a science where the analytical approach is the method for problem solving. Even as I write, I find myself part of a proposed "delivery team" for literature education. It appears that this is the sort of language policy makers in a rational economy like to hear. Any dissenting voices, those subscribing to a view of teaching as an art itself, are considered dangerous as they jeopardize progress in our brave new world. For example, in their introduction to Effective Teaching — Evidence and Practice, Daniel Muijs and David Reynolds articulate the view that construing teaching as an art rather than a technology may be responsible for the lack of excellent teachers in our schools.² In marked contrast to George Eliot, they suggest "the view that teaching is an 'art,' not a science" results in attention being devoted to "personal factors and qualities" which are "often idiosyncratic and difficult to influence by educational policies."³ Further, they suggest that the

placing of education within the humanities tradition — is clearly wrong and probably condemns societies where it is prevalent to having only those small number of excellent teachers who inherit the "art," rather than the larger number who could acquire the applied science of a teaching methodology.⁴

It is difficult to conceive of a position further removed from George Eliot's ideal of aesthetic teaching. There are, of course, a number of problems with reducing teaching to a technology, or an applied science, as Muijs and Reynolds prefer to call it. Such argument betrays the assumption that the world can be known in a rational, analytical and scientific way. The concomitant of this view is the misguided belief that teaching about such a world can be precisely planned, implemented and assessed. Elliot Eisner is surely more accurate when he explains that "teaching is a form of human action in which many of the ends achieved are emergent" and that these ends are often "found in the course of interaction with students rather than preconceived."⁵ Clearly, allowing "for the creation of ends in process" necessitates "a model of teaching akin to other arts."⁶ This is more...