The Evidence of the Beautiful: Aesthetic Returns to Education
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Education is an experience marked by time. As a human endeavor, it is framed by the finitude that characterizes life and the time individuals and communities devote to it. In this theoretical article, we turn to Gadamer’s hermeneutic notion of the beautiful as an event of understanding that is both shaped by time and timeless to deconstruct how education, its evidence, and its measurement are interpreted and enacted. Gadamer argues that understanding manifests with the evidentiary quality of the experience of the beautiful, that is, as an experience that is worthwhile for its own sake. In refolding aesthetics into meaning and experience, beauty rekindles the movement of understanding as one of interconnectedness with a world past, present, and yet to be, and holds the potential to counteract the instrumentalization of education. Accordingly, the beautiful challenges the separation that the perception of the passing of time creates, and the illusion of stillness that evidence and measurement create when dissociated from the continuous flow of time. Beauty restores the role of evidence as one of experience, the role of measurement as one of interconnectedness, and, in doing so, the purpose of education as one of humanness, plurality, and freedom.
Source: Educational Studies
Institutions: University of Georgia, Smith College
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7158166147