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Philosophy Index The following appeared in Volume 96, Number 2 (Spring 1997) of the APA Newsletters.
Erich Mistrík, Aesthetics and Civics (Cultural Dimension of Civic Education) trans Svatova Simková, Strelinger, Jarmila Drozdíková, HEVI Publishing House, Senica, Slovak Republic, 110 pp. +iii. Reviewed by Christina Slade, Harkness Fellow, 1996-7, Department of Culture and Communication, New York University
The publication of Mistrík’s volume, Aesthetics and Civics, was supported by a European Union program. According to the author’s introduction, "in 1993-6 [the program] attempted to advance new conceptual elements to civic education in Slovakia." The author’s aim is to show that aesthetic education has a role in civic education. Civic education is a matter of heated debate in the former eastern bloc. It is evident that new nations, such as the Slovak Republic, conduct the debate with high seriousness.
According to Mistrík, civic education in Slovakia is "moving from a monolithic culture....to a multivalued one, in which...various values hierarchies compete" (p15). What is needed is a form of civic education which includes not only political and legal knowledge, but also what he calls "cultural behavior" education. The role of cultural behaviour education is to foster a particular sort of cultural self identification. It should allow for multiculturalism and be, to use his words, "ecologically oriented," by which he intends to emphasize that human culture is just one among many forms of culture. The argument that aesthetic education provides the recipe for a suitably "multicultural" and "ecological" civic education is broad ranging and conducted in very abstract terms. Chapters deal with "The Importance of Culture" (1), "Aesthetics" (2), "The Nature of Civic Education" (3), "The Teaching of Aesthetics in Civic Education" (4) and "Civics Teacher Training"(5). Mistrík rarely gives concrete examples of his argument save in the final two chapters, which are more smoothly translated than others. They serve to summarize the rather diffuse intersecting lines of thought of the earlier chapters.
Mistrík discusses different approaches to aesthetics at some length. He advocates what he calls a Foucauldian approach, in which aesthetics moves in "the blank spaces between" (p 40) sciences of inorganic nature, sciences of society and philosophy. Aesthetics should deal with both high and popular culture, he suggests, and must also be "self reflective" and critical. He argues that high culture dominated models are not only overly simplistic, but also exclude marginal cultures and devalue flexibility. This is particularly important in Slovakia, he claims, where new cultural forms from the West are flooding the formerly closed market. However, the link between aesthetic education and flexibility and his conclusion that "at the university level...aesthetic education leads to conscious reflection" (pp. 86-7) are not supported by either close argumentation or empirical evidence.
Perhaps the most interesting section is the final chapter, in which Mistrík demonstrates how the model is to be applied in training teachers. The teacher, he suggests, must not only serve as a model for transmitting culture, but must also model the "flexibility" needed to promote "cultural diversity." Mistrík is convinced that aesthetic education is the way to introduce cultural diversity and hence foster a multicultural and tolerant society. Unfortunately, he rarely gives examples to explain this process. He says "By developing sensitivity towards art we....are creating in the students’ psyche favorable conditions enabling them to perceive changes of contemporary culture...he [the teacher sic] can transmit a richer....culture to children and....guide them.....to the understanding of just contemporary culture"(p101), but we are left uncertain of how the process works, and how the "just" culture will be attained.
Mistrík’s project is well intentioned. The argument that aesthetic education should be part of education for citizenship has force, as does the claim that discussing cultural products is an essential part of understanding contemporary society. Mistrík suggests we show children works of art, and discuss their reactions to them. Children, he says , should become "active seekers after value" (p105). If I properly understand his somewhat programmatic proposal, art is to be taught to children not in terms of art history, nor as an exercise in cultural relativism. Instead, children are to be encouraged to engage in the philosophical questions which arise from works of art.
This is a process which some involved in Philosophy for Children have advocated. Eulalia Bosch, at the University of Barcelona, has coordinated two projects in which contemporary art works by Catalan artists were used as the beginning point for children’s philosophical discussions. At the National Gallery of Australia, a team has worked with children discussing major contemporary art works such as Andy Warhol’s screen print, Electric Chair 1967 and Anselm Keifer’s Abend Land, 1989 (The Twilight of the West). Children of roughly middle school age became fascinated by questions of authorship (in the case of Warhol) and of issues of reality and representation when they looked at Keifer’s lead image of the railway line at Auschwitz. Philosophical issues do arise from discussion of contemporary art works.
It is not clear whether the sort of discussion Mistrík has in mind would resemble those of the Philosophy for Children classroom. At no stage does he demonstrate how to put his aesthetic model into practice, although he claims that the Slovak system CEMSAK "offers a complete programme for the development of citizens in their cultural dimension" (p58, cf pp. 107-8 for details). In a number of particularly baffling passages, Mistrík appears to argue that because a relatively idiosyncratic list of "key words" relating civic, multicultural and aesthetic education overlap, all three should be done together (pp. 61-72, 79-82). This is clearly a non-sequitur. The overlap of "keywords" identified by a relatively idiosyncratic list may be suggestive, but is not a conclusive argument that the fields have to be taught together, or that they are fundamentally closely related.
The problem is that without a detailed account of how aesthetics is to be used in cultural education, it is difficult to assess whether aesthetics will foster civic virtue. After all, chat about cultural products is going on all the time and is not always suitably enlightening. A discussion of last night’s soap opera, for instance, counts as discussion of a cultural product, given Mistrík’s catholic definition of cultural product. It is not impossible that a clear and critical discussion of last night’s soap opera could advances our understanding of society and contribute to civic virtue, but not inevitably. A likely conversation-’Did you see what ___ did last night? Wasn’t he evil? Ghastly show!’- is not an obvious route to civic virtue, in spite of being superficially critical and evaluative. Mistrík presumably expects aesthetic education to do more than chat about cultural products. But we need greater detail of how to foster the kind of aesthetic conversation which does lead to civic virtue.