Dr Laura D’Olimpio, University of Birmingham
Chair: Dr LIN Cong Jason
Schooling should support students to live meaningful, autonomous lives, filled with rich experiences. To the extent that people lack aesthetic experiences, their lives are impoverished, or not ‘fully human’. The arts and aesthetic education are vital to such flourishing lives in that they afford bold, beautiful, moving experiences of awe, wonder and the sublime that are connected to the central human functional capability Martha Nussbaum labels Senses, Imagination and Thought. Everyone ought to have the opportunity to learn about art, to appreciate and create art, to critique art and understand how we are connected to the culture of our society. Given that the distinctive value of art objects is that they afford aesthetic experience, it is upon this foundation that an argument ought to be mounted as to why schooling needs the arts and specialised arts teachers, and why all students deserve aesthetic education.
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