Critical Summary Assignment

For my critical summary assignment, I will be focusing on the scholar Maxine Greene and specifically on the topic of aesthetic education. Maxine Greene was an amazing educator, pioneer for women in the workplace and advocate for the arts in education. Maxine often spoke about ‘wideawakeness’ in the classroom. She argues that classroom are stuck in their habits and rituals and do not encourage students to be fully conscious emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. She is basically saying that is many ways a lot of people in education are asleep. She believes that we must actively engage students in class, and the arts is a great way to do that.

Maxine was also very critical of standardization, especially in arts education. In her article The Turning of the Leaves: Expanding our Vision for the Arts in Education, she writes that “we must give up the kind of standardization that wipes clean the diversity, richness, and humanness that infuses the arts as well as human beings’ individual – and sometimes collective – responses to the arts”. Standardization in a lot of way tries to make people all the same. This really opposes the core of arts education, which is to celebrate and inspire individual creativity in each student. When you try and standardize the arts, you take away the beauty and magic of people’s responses to art and turns them into cookie cutter answers.

As a future art educator, I am super passionate about the topic and I’m very inspired by Maxine Greene. She was truly ahead of her time in the way she thought about education and she had a very successful career in a time when women were not valued in the workplace. My next steps for this assignment is to continue writing. I have collected other articles that I will compare to Maxine’s article. Basically I’ve done the research and now I have to write out my thoughts.