Rediscovering Beauty in the Classroom: Going Beyond Educational Standards

By: Kevin Gary

Kevin Gary is a professor at Valparaiso University, where he teaches theology, education, and in the Christ College Honors Program. His book Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.

The educational standards movement has cast a spell over teaching for the past half century. According to this movement, learning must be framed in terms of measurable outcomes. As a new high school teacher, I recall receiving feedback from my Associate Principal at a curriculum workshop at the beginning of the year. Attempting to fashion my course objectives, I had written something like the following: “Students will appreciate the transformative power of stories.” The words, “appreciate” and “transformative,” she demurred, are too vague, subjective, and difficult to measure. Instead, she advised me to use verbs like “compare,” “analyze,” and “evaluate.”

New to the teaching profession, I dutifully embraced this orthodoxy, carefully re-constructing my student learning outcomes (or SLOs), and then making sure they were correlated with my course assessments. At the end of my first year I received additional feedback. My outcomes and assessments, the Associate Principal noted, were largely at the lower end of Bloom’s taxonomy. She urged that my students be challenged to apply, analyze, and evaluate what they have learned. Overall, I found this feedback to be both helpful and constructive. It improved the quality of my teaching. My students learned more, as I challenged them to rise to higher levels on Bloom’s taxonomy (applying, evaluating, and synthesizing, etc.).

Nevertheless, I felt that something was missing, especially when I recalled my best teachers. Dr. Morty Fuchs–my college biology teacher–stands out in particular. Teachers like Dr. Fuchs seem to defy or transcend the logic of the standards paradigm that I was introduced to. Dr. Fuchs spoke with a booming Brooklyn-accent and would occasionally stammer and stutter, struggling to get words out. Thoughts and insights, caught within his stammer, would burst out with even greater force. I recall one class, as Dr. Fuchs diagrammed the parts of the human cell (the nucleus, the mitochondria, the plasma membrane, and so forth) underscoring their incredible inner workings, he exclaimed with dramatic power, “IT’S…IT’S…IT’S…IT’S A SYMPHONY!” Dr. Fuchs’ knowledge of biology was exhaustive, but what stood out most was his unapologetic love for his discipline–his rapture as he delighted at its sheer beauty and wonder.

This course was required for pre-med. Yet more than making sure we checked a pre-med requirement box, Dr. Fuchs’ invited us to contemplate the beauty of nature. In his tenth and final book of his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle holds up contemplation as the supreme telos of human life over and above the practical life of virtue. More than action, Aristotle characterizes the good life as constituted by a certain kind of beholding. It was this kind of human flourishing that Dr. Fuchs embodied and invited us to join.

I am certain that the fledgling outcome that I shared above, which includes words the verbs “transform” and “appreciate,” was directly influenced by my encounter with teachers like Dr. Fuchs. His course addressed the full taxonomy of learning objectives but it did so much more than that. More than knowledge, analysis, or evaluation, Dr. Fuchs sought to inspire his students to become beholders of beauty–to be wonderstruck at the marvel of life. He sought not simply to impart knowledge about biology but to inspire in us a love for biology, and I found Dr. Fuchs’ passion infectious.

Yet Dr. Fuchs’ approach is out of step with the standards movement. As noted, I was nudged (actually pressured) to remove affective verbs from my syllabi, and this change shifted my evolving vision as a teacher. Instead of aspiring for my students to be lovers of literature or deeply appreciate the texts we were reading, I aimed for intellectual competence. It is telling to review the dominant and most recurring verbs across educational standards. Young minds are largely tasked with assessing, critiquing, comparing, analyzing, interpreting, integrating, demonstrating, applying, and so on. Verbs we might associate with “subjective” evaluation or emerging preferences such as appreciate, enjoy, contemplate, admire, savor and so forth (the verbs I initially gravitated towards) are conspicuously absent. This may seem like a trivial point, but it is these later verbs that pertain to our ability to behold beauty.

I have come to see that the more I try to satisfy the objectives of the standards movement, the less I teach the way Dr. Fuchs and other great teachers who inspired me taught me. In doing so I am unwittingly marginalizing beauty. To be clear I’m not talking about the beauty of the content. We still read beautiful prose and amazing stories, but what receded from view was my attempt to guide students to be beholders of that beauty. So why is this the case? Why are student preferences (their likes, their desires, their emotional responses to curriculum ) and teachers’ pathos for their subjects side-lined?

Why, to put it directly, is there a conspiracy against beauty in education? Two reasons stand out: one pragmatic and the other philosophical. Pragmatically we want students to acquire certain tangible skills and habits of mind that are needed in the workplace. Whether students enjoy or like acquiring such measurable competencies is secondary. On a related note, our affective states (our loving, liking, enjoying, etc.), as my Associate Principal noted, are difficult to measure.

The second and more fundamental reason is the reigning fact-value distinction. According to this logic, facts are observable statements about the world that can be verified with reason. Values, by contrast, are our emotive responses and reactions to the world. The key point, however, is the sharp separation between the two. Facts are empirical givens; values are whimsical, subjective emotional states that do not reveal anything about the world.

In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis problematizes this distinction with the following example. Suppose someone, admiring a waterfall, declares it to be sublime. At first glance, it might appear that she is saying something about the waterfall, but the person who believes in the fact/value distinction claims that she is merely saying something about her own feelings. Lewis notes two key propositions here. One, all “sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.”

This example clarifies the work of teaching. Teachers are charged with imparting facts and habits of thinking. They can reasonably expect to direct students in how to solve math problems, conjugate Spanish verbs, or understand the causes of the industrial revolution, but they are not in the business of shaping or directing the affective mood states of their students. Moreover, students’ and teachers’ feelings about such matters–adhering to this fact-value logic–are irrelevant to the knowledge at issue. The upshot is that teaching students to view subjects (biology, math, chemistry, literature, history) as embodiments of extraordinary beauty goes against the pragmatic ideology of the standards movement.

This ideology is misguided. Dr.  Fuchs’ passionate exclamation about the wonders of the human cell is not simply a statement about his own feelings, but is the right reaction in response to the magic of organic life. To the extent that I do not share Dr. Fuchs’ passion reveals not that I simply have a different subjective response, but that I am deficient. I should strive to be moved by the miracle of the human cell. The person, Lewis argues, who “called the cataract sublime…was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions.” There are, it turns out, true and false sentiments. The best teachers, like Dr. Fuchs, do not simply educate the mind, but also the heart.

Until the 20th century, Lewis observes, people “believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congrous or incongruous to it–believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.” This is no longer the case, and, as a consequence, the recognition of beauty is absent from the classroom. More problematic, however, is that while education has jettisoned cultivating our desire for beauty, except perhaps by accident, we are saturated every day with media that attempt to shape our desires–to predetermine where we should find beauty. We remain lovers of beauty, but what is or should be the proper object of our desires is beyond the purview of education–relegated to the space of pure subjectivity. While teachers are compelled to hide or ignore their own and their students’ loves, marketers assiduously cull information about the preferences of young people, relentlessly seeking to shape and direct them.

How do we reclaim beauty in the classroom? First, teachers need to remember and hold up the beauty that attracts them to their field of study. The demands of the teaching endeavor, the institutional drag, and the daily confrontation with indifferent students can chip away at the pathos that first inspired a teacher’s love for her discipline. Second, rather than remaining on the periphery, the cultivation of sentiments (both the teachers’ and students’) needs to be front and center. The right formation of student sentiments should be held up as the most supreme telos for learning.

These sentiments also reveal students’ capacity or incapacity to behold beautiful things. More than knowledge, a teacher’s deepest hope is that her students might appreciate her discipline and maybe even come to love it. This love is more than the standards movement can provide, or can even promise. Yet without this love at the center of our education we fall perilously close to Lewis’s warning that we are forming students “without chests” who no longer have the “organ” to do things like love knowledge and behold beauty. These squishy, affective verbs, while finding no place in learning outcome lists, are too important to leave outside the classroom.