Beauty is an uplifting experience! Beauty transforms life! Experiencing beauty opens and awakens one's heart and unfolds one's inner life. Experiencing beauty through the arts—for instance, contemplating inspiring works of art, opening oneself to the charm of music or theatre, or creatively expressing music, dance, drama, poetry, painting or sculpture - discloses beauty in moments of complete presence without thoughts, moments of forgetting oneself, of true freedom, moments of oneness that uplift one's spirit. Consciously or unconsciously every one of us seeks beauty. Contemplating on scenes in nature, the delicate hue of the sky at sunrise or sunset, a meadow in bloom, or contemplating on the infinity of space when gazing up into the expanse of a starry sky, expands one's heart, awakens one's healthy sense of self and makes one feel good about oneself.
Beauty helps us to approach the wholeness of life with greater vitality, creativity and joy.
Beauty transforms education! Beauty has the power to inspire all aspects of education! Starting in the primary grades and then continuing throughout all the years in higher education, every opportunity needs to be taken to invoke beauty, the spark of our inner life, our source of creativity, inspiration and wisdom. Stimulating both the mind and the heart, the source of beauty is innate in all of us and educators need to take special care to safeguard this precious gift.
All school curricula need to encourage the love of the arts, whether by the expression of the pen or the brush, or seeing the fundamental spirit in nature. All these develop students' self-expression and creativity through reflections of that which is aesthetically pleasing. It is this that then develops students' inner vision, the profound wisdom out of which the nature of things itself speaks.
Waldorf Schools, as a good example, integrate the arts not just as a subject but also as an integral part to almost everything in the curriculum. Seen as essential to the unfolding of the inner person, the arts develop students' capacity to observe and distinguish vital forces in nature and in themselves. Expressing creative idea, such as watercolor painting, self-portraiture, line drawing, carving, calligraphy, working with glass and sculpting, is experiencing self-expression and self-development and is more essential than the art product itself.
Different subjects can be learned with and through the arts. Scenes and life cycles in nature, actively observed and expressed in landscape painting, can then become part of such subjects as science, social studies, language, music and dance. Integrating drama, creative writing, poetry, dance and music into the life of the classroom connects students' own experience with their own transformation. (This idea incorporates material from Education and the Soul by J.P. Miller.)
Taking Waldorf education as an example, educators themselves need to be sensitive to beauty and then encourage and enlighten students to become more aware and sensitive to beauty. Educators themselves need to experience beauty and assist in developing and cultivating sensitivity to beauty in students and invite its essence to permeate the classroom. Educators need to be agents of beauty, conduits of joy.
There is no evolution without the assimilation of beauty. Beauty is a state of interconnectedness, a state of wholeness. The nature of beauty is the expansion of consciousness and is an essential component of the foundation for the unity of mind and heart, knowledge and wisdom. Beauty needs to become an integral part in the creation of harmony, balance and unity in education and everyday life. Our task is to create and develop education and way of life that honors, embraces and integrates the essence of beauty toward experiencing and living a life of wholeness.