Aesthetic Education

¶ … Aesthetic Education: Book Review of Maxine Greene's Lectures encompassed in her Variations on a Blue Guitar. The paper that follows is an overview of the style, content, and core philosophy of one of the seminal works on arts education during the 1980's by one of the seminal educational theorists of the late 20th century, Maxine Greene.

This review of Variations on a Blue Guitar consists of three sections, first a report on the text itself and the philosophy of the author, followed by a reaction to the author's philosophy on the part of the writer, and ending with by some response and reflection questions for the reader, so that the reader may actively engage with the text, as is commensurate with the philosophy of active learning of Maxine Greene discussed and analyzed in the paper.

Book Review: Maxine Greene's Variations on a Blue Guitar The educator and educational philosopher Maxine Greene's thoughts, in the form of lectures she gave during a summer session at Lincoln Center, have been compiled in the text entitled Variations on a Blue Guitar. Greene's lectures, conducted while she was still in residence at Columbia University's Teacher's College, centered around on the topic of aesthetic education and how the principles of imagination could be infused into the standard academic curriculum.

Greene's ideas, as expressed in these lectures and throughout her life, encompassed both the general principles of human transformation and variation and fused them in a spirit of what she called scholastic rebirth. Education, she believed, could enlarge the human spirit and its capacity for potential, as well as the human mind's capacity for intellectual excellence.

Greene hoped to accomplish such ambitious objectives by combining reforms with a core curriculum that still upheld traditional standards of excellence but fused them such modern concepts as multiculturalism and ethnic diversity, as well as encouraged individual creativity. "We are interested in openings, in unexplored possibilities, not in the predictable or the quantifiable, not in what is thought of as social control," she noted. (Greene 7) By creating new art, students can better understand the art of the past, she suggested.

Key to Greene's philosophy was teaching students to think critically and experientially about art, training their minds and their eyes to simultaneously become the best critical thinkers and artists they could be, rather than to appreciate art from a respectful distance, which discourages their own artistic excellence and stultifies real enjoyment of the creative process. "We are interested in education here, not in schooling," she notes early on. (Greene 7) In other words, a true arts education grounds students firmly in the present and the past.

Students must look at the world around them for inspiration and with a living, critical eye rather than to simply become inculcated in the images of the past.

Art is not about simply appreciating 'great works,' as stagnant and frozen in time, it is a living process, "a special kind of reflectiveness and expressiveness, a reaching out for meanings, a learning to learn." (Greene 7) Greene was a strong advocate of multicultural and diverse education, less because she subscribed to a particular political agenda, but because she believed such an emphasis enhanced arts education as a whole and made it more relevant for students of color and diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds.

She stated that educators were duty bound to provide "increasing numbers of opportunities for tapping into long unheard frequencies, for opening new perspectives on a world increasingly shared.

It seems to me that we can only do so with regard for the situated lives of diverse children and respect for the differences in their experiences." (Greene 187) Greene's location in the diverse environment of New York City's school system and the multicultural environment of Columbia's Teachers College perhaps reinforced such notions, but her stress that the beauty of art lies in difference as well as cultural sameness, and mutual sharing between educators and students as well as learning from authority, is well taken.

Greene urged her audience that they "think about the wonder of multiple perspectives in your own experience. I hope you think about what happens to you when it becomes possible to abandon one-dimensional viewing, to look from many vantage points and, in doing so, construct meanings scarcely suspected before." (Greene 189). The end towards one-dimensionality in art and one-dimensionality perspectives in education is seamlessly fused in Greene's philosophy and rhetoric.

Any reader would be hard-pressed to not be affected by the enthusiasm of Greene for the ability of education to inspire individuals a love and to uphold standards of excellence in art. However, despite her emphasis on diversity, it is interesting that so many of the quotes she uses are from authors of the literary cannon such as T.S. Elliot and Elizabeth Bishop. Moreover, her distrust of technology, particularly from a 21st reader's perspective seems misplaced.

Green believed that computers and new technology, rather than creating connections, merely created a sense of distance between students and teachers. In a 1982 lecture "Making the Petrified World Speak, Sing and, perhaps, Dance," she stated that educators wanted to "accentuate reality and to bring persons in contact with the many ways there are or might be of being alive," rather than merely show them how to use different technological innovations. "We want, if you like...to expand the range.