Aesthetic Awakenings

I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. With these words, Henry David Thoreau evokes a crucial formative ideal. It is not enough to sleepwalk through life. To live fully, we must cultivate wide-awakeness, a stance of attentive responsiveness to reality. And yet our schools--like strange temples devoted to monotony, conformity, and conventionality--seem almost designed to sedate. John Dewey observed that much of what we call education is "anaesthetic" and therefore actually miseducation. In this course, we will take up Dewey's challenge to explore the transformative power of aesthetic experience--that which awakens and enlivens--including, but not limited to, engagements with the arts. Through aesthetic experiments, encounters with artworks, and discussion of writings on aesthetic education, we will explore questions such as: Why have the arts been relegated to the extracurricular margins of schooling? What would education look like if our aim was to release the imagination, to cultivate emotional depth and honesty, to acknowledge the beautiful, sublime, tragic, and absurd? How might we evolve if we learned to think through materials, reuniting head and hands? How might society change if education were dedicated to challenging received ideas, deepening attention, and nurturing wide-awakeness?