Learning to See: Art, Beauty, and the Joy of Creation in Education

This essay claims with Plato that learning to see and to love the beautiful is the fundamental impulse underlying education, leading to self-transformation. In Plato’s educational theory, we discover the intimate connection between beauty, creativity, and art--a connection that today’s education fails to emphasize, leaving us with the idea of creativity as mechanical or dull, if not totally irrelevant, and with art as marginalized--a discovery that is a journey of the self, or soul, into the world of transcendent beauty made visible in art as integrity, harmony, and radiance. Through these qualities, art can release us from our everyday experiences, so that we become an expression of something that is not of ourselves accompanied by a revelation that no words can describe but which can be expressed in the state of attentive silence , of looking , or of seeing . Therefore, this article advances a pedagogy of seeing or of looking or of attentive silence that can illumine one’s way to what Plato calls “that place which is a rest from the road . . . for the one who reaches it.”