Aesthetic Inquiry in Education: Community, Transcendence, and the Meaning of Pedagogy

by Hanan A. Alexander

What does it mean to understand education as an art, to conceive inquiry in education aesthetically, or to assess pedagogy artistically? Answers to these queries are often grounded in Deweyan instrumentalism, neo-Marxist critical theory, or postmodern skepticism that tend to fall prey to the paradoxes of radical relativism and extreme subjectivism.1 This essay offers an alternative, communitarian account of education as an art and a neo-Kantian approach to aesthetic inquiry in education that avoids these difficulties.