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Cases for kids: using puzzles to teach aesthetics to children

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@ University of Utah

Battin, Margaret P

Description

Journal ArticleNothing stupefies kids (I have in mind young people, though the same is true of many adults) as quickly as long-winded, jargon-filled, highly abstract theoretical discourse, especially when it seems to have no immediate utility. Kids like fun. They like play; they like games; they like challenges and puzzles; and they detest pompous academic abstractions. But if this is so, then it is easy to understand why aesthetics--this most abstract, theoretical, and sometimes pompous field of the art-related academic disciplines -- would seem completely unsuitable for teaching to children. After all, just picture yourself lecturing, say, on the aesthetics of Kant (skirting, of course, the full scholarly complexity of the Critique of Judgment), or on Santayana, or on Clive Bell, or any other major figure in the history of aesthetics--even if you try to buy relevance by jazzing it up with a couple of references to comic-book art or rap tunes--and you see a roomful of squirming, restless,
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Text
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College of HumanitiesPhilosophy
Rights:
(c) University of Illinois Press. From Journal of Aesthetic Education. Copyright 1994 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press. No part of this article may be reproduced, photocopied, posted elsewhere or distributed through any means without the permission of the University of Illinois Press
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University of Utah

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Mountain West Digital Library