Educating children to Beauty
Education to Beauty is an idea increasingly difficult to understand. Nowadays we are invaded by “trash”. It is not easy to deviate from what society trims us, without our consent. The city, our nutrition, our lifestyle moved away from the absolute concept of Beauty and the sense of disorientation towards everything increased. That’s why educating children to Beauty is very important.
Find Beauty in simple things
This sense of disorientation compared to the idea of Beauty is felt mostly by children. In fact, they live this period of changes opposed to those values and life rhythms that were the foundation of the community few years ago. I’m talking about simple things like experiencing nature in daily life; to know the cluck of chicken, not because seen on TV or in a cartoon; also understanding milk doesn’t not magically materialize in the supermarket, but has a history that starts from a cow; to know that smell of a sheep’s “poo”. It is about to get dirty and simply be part of nature. Today we go to the parks, to the bio parks, which actually are “places non-places” as Italo Calvino would say. They are built and not natural spontaneous places.
We have to carve out some time to the search for Beauty in everyday life, in the simplicity of nature. Then it will be easier to recognize everything beautiful around us. In fact, there is no recipe to understand and find Beauty. It is first of all a sentiment, an innate feeling that starts from our hearts. Our heart has the innate talent to recognize the pure truth of things, and to recognize Beauty. But we need practice to recognize it. So it’s very important to help our children develop and educate this “sense.”
How to educate to Beauty
From the educational point of view it is not about the identification of a sterile aesthetic sense. But it is more about tracking positive qualities in real life. This leads to experience and live Beauty, allowing children to acquire fundamental skills such as critical sense on things, people, and situations. This enables an objective and subjective sense, which enables children to make sense of anything.
Beauty accompanies art which acquires thus its main feature and therefore recognizability.
Educating to Beauty does not mean to dwell on physical objects or things, but it pushes the child to experience a personal interpretation towards the world, increasing a sense of reflection. Art creates questions often opposed to reality: this is a fundamental element in a child’s education, guiding him towards awareness and recognition of what is real and what is fantasy and abstraction.
As Georg Simmel stated, what fascinates us of an artwork is not its shape, but above all the process that takes “life” within the work itself, a path that each of us carries out distinctly. Artistic experience is a powerful tool that can generate in us deep emotions, sensations, something able to communicate through the expressiveness.
Stimulate children to the Sense of Beauty
The aesthetic sense, the Beauty, especially the consciousness of Beauty are important elements in a child’s education. The human aesthetic impulse is innate, but practice helps the child to discover their own abilities, their own limits and dreams. Therefore we encourage you to educate them the Sense of Beauty through the stimulation of the five senses, making the artistic activity a moment of free expression, discovery and experimentation, a way to tell the outside world.
Make simple free activities with children like drawing, coloring or painting without constraints impositions. Engage them into multi-sensory activities like listening to music. Create with them noise and sounds, with any available object let them express with your body freely, perhaps with the help of music.
Build “useless machines” such as Bruno Munari call everything without following necessarily finite instructions. Let logic and instinct work together.
Explain kids the world through metaphors and easy examples to educate to abstraction.
Be immersed in nature, the real one! Try to explain and experiment without fear, all those things that seem obvious to adults like animals, the grass, the rain.
But above all listen to your children and recognize their wisdom during these moments. In fact, they have the ability to recognize Beauty everywhere in the world, and above all to make Beauty very contagious.