The Theory of Aesthetic Education and its Perspectives

This paper follows a discussion about the contemporary situation in our pedagogy and shows how present-day theory and practice of aesthetic education, too, is marked by lack of clarity and unity. This concerns especially the basic aesthetico pedagogical categories. It is obvious that it is just the area of aesthetics that is more strongly than any other connected with domestic traditions and domestic sources of culture and art, social culture and domestic aesthetico-pedagogical sources. The nineteen-fifties mean the orientation of our pedagogy on the Soviet school and Marxist pedagogy, but they caused the breaking off of contacts with the new pedagogical thinking in the West. In the integration and differentiation tendencies, as they have manifested themselves lately both in art and in pedagogy, aesthetic education is characterized by a prevalence of differentiation efforts. This fact results not only from the contradiction between the preference and the influence of the instructional methodological literature in relation to the general pedagogical literature, but also from the specific situation of education and school administration. Using the case of theoretical works and meetings of educationists with the workers in the field of art and aesthetics, the author demonstrates how pedagogical and aesthetic theories are getting closer together at present and how this rapprochement helps to deepen the thought and practice in both these disciplines. This rapprochement has a special significance from the viewpoint of the development of artistic kinds in our national cultures and from the viewpoint of generalizing modern art and making it understandable to the broadest sections of the people. In the structures of theoretical disciplines the structure of aesthetic pedagogy and psychology is still missing. The paper ends by a demand for a systematic development of theoretical work in specific departments whose work would be research into the aesthetic relationship to art and everyday reality. It is just nowadays that this demand is of urgent significance in our cultural conditions.