Michael John Kooy. Coleridge, Schiller, and Aesthetic Education.(Book review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Boston University

Michael John Kooy. Coleridge, Schiller, and Aesthetic Education. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. 241. $89.95.

Schiller and Coleridge: talismanic names to invoke when hacking one's way through the thickets of modern aesthetic discourse, particularly if the object of quest bears the name "aesthetic education." Schiller literally invented the term and to some extent the notion of aesthetic education in his seminal Uber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795); and Coleridge, though he favored a different idiom and never referred directly to Schiller's treatise, was writing in a broadly Schillerian tradition as he developed his notions of "cultivation" and the "clerisy" in the Lay Sermons (1816-17) and On the Constitution of Church and State (1829). Both writers loom large in debates about aesthetics, and it makes sense to pair and compare them as exemplary figures--figures around and through whom many of the most significant debates and issues of the field we now call "romanticism" have circulated.

The phrase "aesthetic education" is something of a pleonasm, insofar as all post-seventeenth-century aesthetic discourse (as I have argued at length elsewhere) bears within it a pedagogical element. One can think of Schiller's theory of aesthetic education, therefore, as a decisive early manifestation of modern aesthetics per se in its skeletal purity. Though Schiller's treatise was of course only one of many late-eighteenth-century German meditations on the desirability and possibility of a non-coercive, aesthetically-inflected education or Bildung, it merits consideration as an exemplary text not just because it was widely read and became a classic, but because it stressed, after its own idealistic fashion, the socio-political role that aesthetics was to assume over the subsequent two centuries. Thanks to developments that occurred over those two hundred years, we now take it for granted that the state should support public museums and the arts, and fund public schools at which students are administered dollops of "literature" as part of their general civic training. University departments of "English" (to the extent that they teach literature rather than rhetoric and composition) and professional organizations such as the MLA have depended throughout the century or so of their existence on the idea of aesthetic education for their public justification. Anyone likely to be reading this page owes her or his career or program of study to the institutional success of aesthetic discourse, which is to say the institutionalization of aesthetics as pedagogy. And any conceivable contemporary reader of this page, without exception, has been shaped socially...

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