In her book And It Was Good, Madeleine L’Engle explains that when she goes to a museum, she is “not going just to look at an exhibition of painting or sculpture in order to be au courant with the latest cultural fashion; I am going in order to look for that reality which will help me to live my own life more fully, more courageously, more freely” (p. 45). In much the same way, this paper argues that aesthetics in education function as transformative encounters that invite students into realities capable of opening new possibilities for perceiving and inhabiting the world.
To live “more fully, more courageously, and more freely” in the world means to seek beyond the limits of inherited social realities and toward more just ways of being—that is, to promote social justice. Here, social justice is understood not just as the equitable distribution of rights or resources, but also as the ongoing work of recognizing and challenging socially conditioned forms of exclusion, invisibility, and limitation. In order to explore how the philosophies of Elaine Scarry and Maxine Greene illuminate the ability of aesthetic experiences to transform our capacities for perception and imagination in ways that orient us toward social justice, this paper adopts Greene’s (2001) definition of aesthetic education as a framework:…an intentional undertaking designed to nurture appreciative, reflective, cultural, participatory engagements with the arts by enabling learners to notice what there is 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. Persons see differently. (p. 6)
This definition will guide the paragraphs to follow, shaping the understanding of aesthetic education as a transformative process by which people are led to a more capacious regard for the world. Another theoretical underpinning of this paper is the “Social Reconstruction” ideology outlined in Michael S. Schiro’s Curriculum Theory: Conflicting Visions and Enduring Concerns (2013). Within Social Reconstruction, the intent of teaching is to reconstruct society through empowering students as social agents of change who are capable of contributing to the creation of a more just, satisfying, democratic, and egalitarian world.
To understand aesthetic education as “an intentional undertaking designed to nurture appreciative, reflective, cultural, participatory engagements with the arts…” (Greene, p. 6), we must first consider the constitutive moments of aesthetic experience. In Scarry’s view, the experience of being in the presence of beauty “is the starting place for education” (p. 31) because of its ability not only to arrest attention, but also to convict the errors of one’s existing perceptions, prompting the perceiver to correct their understanding of the world and their place within it. For Greene (1995), aesthetic experiences are conditions for both education and justice—the unique power of the arts to release imagination is what makes possible the empathy, relationality, learning, and democratic vision upon which both depend. Both Scarry and Greene identify the value of aesthetics in guiding the perceiver to break with inherited ways of seeing—an integral step in Social Reconstruction envisaging.
I am particularly interested in how the landscape of the English classroom—with its intrinsic emphasis on story—may further illuminate the “intentional undertaking” for which Greene advocates, specifically through particularization and replication. Scarry and Greene both draw attention to the need for “particulars” in cultivating ethical ways of being: without attention to particulars, our attention to beauty—and, therefore, to justice—diminishes (Scarry, p. 18), and it is our imaginative capacity that allows us “to particularize, to see and hear things in their concreteness” (Greene, 1995, p. 29). Stories are vessels of particularities; they invite readers to inhabit realities different from their own, giving tangible character to abstract human experiences and visible form to elusive ideals, thereby cultivating the imaginative dispositions required to perceive others more fully and justly. Fundamental to Scarry’s understanding of the relationship between beauty and justice is replication, or the act of creating in response to beauty. In the English classroom, replication takes shape through acts of interpretation, writing, discussion, and imaginative participation. As students encounter stories and respond by creating new meanings and connections, they enact what Scarry describes as beauty’s tendency to “[bring] copies of itself into being” (p. 3). Scarry also explains that “[because] beauty repeatedly brings us face-to-face with our own powers to create, we know where and how to locate those powers when a situation of injustice calls on us to create without itself guiding us, through pleasure, to our destination” (p. 115), suggesting that aesthetic experiences exercise the muscle of creative capacity necessary to respond to injustice.
While replication demonstrates aesthetics’ generative capacity, analogy illuminates its corrective one. When justice is absent, beauty “calls out” for its missing counterpart in order to restore symmetry and self-similitude, acting as a “lever in the direction of justice” by pressing us to notice absences, asymmetries, and unrealized possibilities (Scarry, p. 100)—precisely the kind of perceptual awakening Greene describes when she argues that aesthetic education enables “learners to notice what there is to be noticed” (p. 6). If Scarry’s thinking reveals the gaps where things ought to be otherwise, Greene’s thinking reveals how aesthetic experience enables individuals to look at things as if they could be otherwise (Greene, 1995, p. 19). This imaginative capacity tied to noticing emphasizes the centrality of attunement in aesthetic education, as these encounters heighten our awareness and raise our consciousness: as Scarry describes, “Beauty seems to place requirements on us for attending to the aliveness…of our world, and for entering into its protection” (p. 90). As aesthetic experiences impress upon us a sense of obligation not only for noticing, but also for preserving beauty and justice in our world, these experiences also sharpen our sense of “wide-awakeness,” breaking open our “awareness of what it is to be in the world” (Greene, 1995, p. 35).
Attending to the world’s aliveness and our own wide-awakeness means students must be willing “to lend works of art their lives in such a way that they can achieve them as variously meaningful” (Greene, p. 6). A student is able to discover the complexities of human experience embedded within a work by lending to the work “the aliveness of the person’s own consciousness” (Scarry, p. 89). As aesthetics in education invite students to enter into the stories made manifest by poems, paintings, dance, and literature, they are beckoned to widen their awakeness as they explore new meanings and inhabit unfamiliar perspectives. Greene writes, “Our classrooms ought to be nurturing and thoughtful and just all at once; they ought to pulsate with multiple conceptions of what it is to be human and alive” (Greene, 1995, p. 43). When classrooms pulsate with experiences and stories that reflect the aliveness of many, students learn to de-center their situated perspectives and begin to achieve art as “variously meaningful.” Meaning is not fixed or singular, and the multiplicity of aesthetic experiences is invaluable in education, in ethical imagination, and in social reconstruction. Therefore, in education, the goal of increasing students’ “wide-awakeness” is accompanied by the task of creating contingencies out of their inherited, socially-positioned understandings. Such contingency becomes possible through what Scarry describes as the “very pliancy of beauty—hurtling us forward and back, requiring us to break new ground” (p. 46), as imagination allows students to build bridges across their aesthetic encounters so that “new connections are made in experience” (Greene, p. 6).
When teachers seek to realize Greene’s ideal of a classroom that is "nurturing and thoughtful and just all at once” (1995, p. 43), the classroom transforms into a community in which “new patterns are formed” (p. 6). These classrooms become models of the communities students should seek to replicate in the world outside of those four walls. Greene explains that community is more than mere social contracts—it “is a question of what might contribute to the pursuit of shared goods: what ways of being together, of attaining mutuality, of reaching toward some common world” (1995, p. 39). Here, the English classroom uniquely offers aesthetic modes of reaching toward this goal, as the collective study of literature offers a space of shared exploration, providing the constraints within which students can probe for iterations of those “shared goods.” Even in schools where the curriculum demands the old literary canon (i.e., the “classics” rooted in male, white, western-centric perspectives), and therefore does not necessarily reflect new, just realities into which students can be invited, teachers can still create room for Social Reconstruction (Schiro, 2013) framing. These readings can create opportunities for students to encounter presentations of the world as named and defined by someone else, but not having to accept it as fixed. Through the collective study of a shared text, students come together to navigate multiple perspectives, negotiate new meanings collaboratively, and imagine more humane and just ways of being in the world. The “conjoint experience” Greene draws from John Dewey therefore becomes possible through the communal work of aesthetic interpretation, as students participate in the formation of “shared meanings, common interests and endeavors” that cultivate the interconnectedness and mutual regard necessary for democratic community (Greene, 1995, p. 33).
What makes these encounters truly transformative is their capacity to invite students into imaginative horizons in which “new vistas are opened” (Greene, p. 6). Aesthetic education becomes an act of social reconstruction, opening imaginative spaces in which students may envision realities beyond those they have inherited. The ability to envision new options for being together in the world also cultivates agency, empowering students to recognize themselves as social agents of change, with envisioned possibilities and the power to decide. Greene (1995) notes how these opening vistas and burgeoning connections are “experiential phenomena" (p. 18), emerging through lived encounters with stories, images, voices, and perspectives that reshape how individuals perceive themselves and others. For example, the study of Beloved by Toni Morrison invites students into the particularized experiences of memory, trauma, motherhood, and the enduring psychological violence of slavery in ways that resist the abstraction of historical distance. Rather than learning about slavery as a set of historical facts, students are asked to attend to the interior lives, relationships, and humanity of Morrison’s characters, transforming students’ imaginative capacity for empathy and for understanding lived human experiences of suffering that reverberate into the present. This transformative, imaginative potential is not limited to fiction—similarly, Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night asks students to grapple with the lived realities of dehumanization and suffering through Wiesel’s intensely personal narrative of the Holocaust. Rather than primarily inviting imaginative inhabitation of fictional interior worlds, Night urges readers to confront what it means to remain human in the midst of systematic atrocity. In both cases, aesthetic experience expands students’ capacities to perceive and respond to the suffering of others more fully and humanely while also imagining the forms of moral responsibility and care necessary to resist such conditions. Here, the English classroom becomes not simply a site of literary analysis, but a communal space in which “Persons see differently” (Greene, p. 6).
Ultimately, what aesthetic education resists is not merely ignorance, but helplessness. As Greene writes, “It may be…that a general inability to conceive a better order of things can give rise to a resignation that paralyzes and prevents people from acting to bring about change” (Greene, p. 19). The greatest threat to social justice is the sense of inevitability that allows injustice to persist unquestioned. We cannot march toward a more just world if we cannot envision the possibility of that world—by making alternative ways of being imaginable, aesthetic experiences offer an antidote to this resignation, complacency, and paralysis. Greene argues that “to tap into imagination is to become able to break with what is supposedly fixed and finished,” allowing individuals to glimpse “what might be” and “what is not yet” (1995, p. 19). With this in mind, aesthetic education becomes essential not only for students at the margins, but also for those privileged enough to accept an unjust world as it is.
The central claim of this paper has been that aesthetic education matters to social justice because it transforms the ways individuals attend to, inhabit, and imagine the world. Through the philosophies of Scarry and Greene, aesthetic experiences become not passive interactions with works of art—mere enrichment, peripheral to learning—but rather conditions necessary for the transformative cultivation of ethical attentiveness and reconstructive imagination. Thus, aesthetic education is essential not only for helping students to make sense of the world as it is, but also for enabling them to imagine—and actively participate in creating—the world otherwise.Greene, M. (1995). Imagination, Breakthroughs, and the Unexpected (pp. 17–31) and Imagination, Community, and the School (pp. 32–43). In Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. Jossey-Bass.
Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education. Teachers College Press.
L’Engle, M. (1983). And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Scarry, E. (1999). On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton University Press.
Schiro, S. M. (2013). Curriculum Theory: Conflicting Visions and Enduring Concerns (2nd ed). SAGE Publications, Inc.
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