美与自由教育

Aesthetic Fields of Beauty and Liberal Education

全人教育的目标是培养自由而全面发展的人,自由是其首要价值,亦称自由教育。审美教育是自由教育的核心环节。美具有自由的一切精神品质。审美是一种体验自由的活动,审美的愉悦就是体验自由的愉悦。审美活动可以涵养自由而充实的灵魂,提升人生境界。审美教育主要有两个任务,培养欣赏美的能力和培养创造美的能力。艺术的意义在于为参与者——创作者和观赏者——营造了某种体验自由精神的“审美场”,艺术品则提供介入的媒介。艺术教育是审美教育最为基础的内容。借助对艺术修养或鉴赏能力的培养,艺术教育引导生命个体营造精神自由所必需的审美场,不仅丰富了个体生命的愉悦体验,更拓展了精神的纵向空间,甚至最终将个体生命与宇宙生命融贯为一体。

Because freedom is its principal value,whole-person education,otherwise known as liberal arts education,aims at cultivating fully developed and independent personalities,and aesthetics represents one of its core areas.Beauty,as it is usually taught in liberal arts education,embraces all the spiritual characters of freedom.Aesthetic participation allows people to experience freedom,and aesthetic pleasure is the pleasure generated in the experience of freedom.Aesthetic activities can cultivate free and rich souls and lift them to a new realm of life.Education in aesthetics incorporates two prominent missions:to improve the capacity for appreciating beauty,and to create beautiful things.As this paper discusses,at stake in the meaning of art is the human ability to build up aesthetic fields in which participants(artists and audiences)can experience the spirit of freedom,and artworks are offered as the medium of aesthetic engagement.Art education is the most important part of aesthetic education.Through building the capacity to create and appreciate beauty through art,aesthetics guides individual lives to create their own fields of beauty that are necessary for spiritual freedom.These aesthetic fields of beauty not only enrich the pleasure of aesthetic experience for every individual life,but also lift the experience of life and broaden the vertical space of spirit,and even integrate individual lives within the whole life of the universe.