Everyday Beauty Will Save Education
According to Edutopia, to create the “ideal learning environment,” five principles should guide school construction and interior design: technology integration, safety and security, transparency, multipurpose space, and outdoor learning. School spaces not only house the students who enter them, the author argues, but shape and influence behavior. Seems like a logical set of principles to apply to a school, right? But there’s an essential principle missing, perhaps the essential principle: beauty.
On this topic, I turn to Sir Roger Scruton, whose slim volume entitled Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, captures the essence of beauty’s importance. The book contains chapters on human, natural, and artistic beauty, among others, but I’ll focus primarily on chapter four, “Everyday Beauty.”
Rather than defining “beauty” explicitly, Scruton offers a list of six “platitudes” against which he will go on to test a number of theories about beauty. The first two platitudes read as follows:
Beauty pleases us.
One thing can be more beautiful than another.
It’s nearly impossible to argue with the first statement; all of us have experienced the “pleasing” effect of encountering beauty—whether in nature, music, or the face of a loved one. But what about when it comes to everyday beauty? How often do we pause to consider the aesthetic aspects of the rather mundane “furniture” of our everyday lives and specifically, our classrooms? There are desks and chairs, bookshelves and boards, and that’s about it. And yet for most of us, our first instinct upon walking into an empty classroom is to “beautify” it in some way or other, even if only minimally.
How do we account for this natural instinct to beautify our spaces? It can’t be for the sake of efficiency or utility; posters and paintings and pet fish do nothing to make our classrooms more efficient, and may have the opposite effect. Neither can it be administrative: teachers have tremendous freedom in this regard. Nonetheless, a former colleague transformed her Latin classroom into ancient Rome while the teacher next door to me “decorated” his room with nothing but a single postcard of a sculpture of Plato’s bust.
The most likely answers tend to focus on the importance of student engagement and classroom community. Teachers want their students to feel welcome in the classroom, at home, excited to be there. While this is certainly true, Scruton challenges us to consider beauty in terms of the idea of “fittingness.” He asks whether “beauty is an ultimate value—something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given.” When it comes to everyday beauty: the way furniture is arranged, the artistic accent pieces that hang on the walls, the paint color palette of a room or the objects on a shelf, Scruton claims that people possess an instinctual desire to make things “look right.”
Scruton advances a notion of “minimal beauties,” the easily-overlooked ordering of our surroundings. Regarding the significance of minimal beauties, he notes that they are:
“far more important to our daily lives, and far more intricately involved in our own rational decisions than the great works which, if we are lucky, occupy our leisure hours. They are part of the context in which we live our lives, and our desire for harmony, fittingness, and civility is both expressed and confirmed in them.”
We justify all sorts of everyday actions based on our goals and efficiency, but Scruton recommends we also consider “what also achieves them in the most appropriate or fitting way.”
The notion of “fittingness” can help shape the way teachers think about their approach to the classroom space. When the objects in our classrooms “fit” together, they become “readable” as a kind of visual-vocabulary, creating a recognizable style by the “repeated use of shapes, contours, materials, and so on.” Individual styles will vary, but everything in our classroom should fit with everything else: from the furniture to the artwork; from the light fixtures to the window treatments. By working toward a harmonious classroom aesthetic, the classroom space itself begins to both accumulate and communicate meaning, which is to say: the classroom itself becomes a teacher. How?
First, everyday beauty can help shape the way our students think about their own small spaces within the larger school environment. Scruton notes that our judgments about the harmony and integration of things that occupy a space are “the unavoidable consequence of taking life seriously, and becoming truly conscious of our affairs.” In other words, attending to the everyday beauty of our classrooms can teach our students, albeit implicitly, about the idea of order, which translates to practical skills like responsibility, punctuality, and orderliness.
Second, because human beings are composed of bodies and minds, the maintaining of orderly physical spaces also contributes to the capacity for students to organize their thoughts. In the same way that we teach students to “eliminate unnecessary words” in their writing, we can implicitly teach the same concept by asking them to eliminate unnecessary “stuff” from their lockers or binders or backpacks. By extension, “fittingness” as it applies to everyday beauty can help us form our students in the ways of attentiveness, circumspection, and foresight as they become more conscious and considerate of their surroundings and how their actions affect the physical space.
Most importantly, however, when we aim for everyday beauty, students begin to recognize the “fittingness” of creation itself. As such, we see that the ordinary beauty of an ordered classroom can have a double effect: it is both instructive and pleasing. For it is through an encounter with beautiful things, even the simplest things, that the senses touch upon the larger truths of reality. Ordered, everyday beauty also provides for us and our students a sense of place, purpose, stability, and peace. And right up there with a sense of welcome and safety, teachers should work to make their classrooms places of peace. And peace, says St. Augustine, is found in the tranquility of order.
What happens when we neglect the fittingness of everyday beauty? When the arrangement of the physical environment in which our students pursue learning is dictated primarily or exclusively by the principles of efficiency, utility, or multi-usability? The cumulative effect of such an approach cannot help but impose on our students feelings of transience and ephemera, when what we want them to experience is a sense of belonging and permanence, that they and their school are more than a collection of instrumentalized furniture.
Now comes the list of grievances, absolutely legitimate grievances. “I don't get to pick the furniture.” “I'm not allowed to put paintings or posters on my walls.” “There's no money for it.” "My classroom is tiny! And I share it with another teacher.” "My students destroy everything!” All very real constraints.
So what can a teacher do? Here are a few small, practical, achievable places to start the transformation.
For the Teacher:
Model order and everyday beauty in and around your own desk and personal space.
Remove from the surface of your desk anything that you don’t physically use every day (unless it’s a small accent piece, about which you should be intentional).
Work on your own penmanship—whether on the board or when grading papers.
For the Classroom:
Furniture
Request that your classroom be furnished with matching desks or tables.
Align and evenly space desks/tables daily.
Ensure that the students tuck in their chairs every time they depart.
Don’t let the back of the room become a storage space for unused filing cabinets, broken chairs, or extra desks.
Replace metal/plastic furniture with wood where possible.
Whiteboards
Ensure that the whiteboards are installed levelly.
Clean the whiteboard daily with that Expo cleaner and rag.
Maintain a fresh set of whiteboard markers; toss them as soon as they start to fade.
Lighting
Remove/replace fluorescent lighting if possible; add desk/floor lamps.
See about replacing industrial light fixtures with domestic versions.
Decorations
We should avoid a kind of beauty that is superficial or blinding, one that promotes a kind of frantic inattentiveness. Aim for clean, neat, balanced; avoid bold, neon, shiny.
Consider drapes for your windows.
Resist the temptation to hang student artwork in random places at random intervals; instead, be intentional about planning a limited “gallery” or “installation.”
For the Hallways
Though the facilities team has a regular cleaning schedule, communicate early and often to the students that they are expected to keep the area around their lockers clean at all times. The goal is to have clean, neat, and organized hallways all school day long, not merely in the morning when students arrive.
Ensure that students close their lockers after accessing them; nothing makes a hallway look messier than a random handful of half-open lockers. If the lockers don’t latch or stay latched, work with the maintenance team to make proper repairs.
Weekly locker clean-out is a must!
Scruton argues that, insofar as we neglect everyday aesthetics, and instead find that our choices — both individually and as a collective community — are dictated more and more by utility and economic efficiency, we will also find ourselves increasingly forgetful of every other kind of beauty; we’ll become more and more content with being surrounded by ugly buildings and ugly signs and ugliness. The increasing mechanization of our spaces inevitably leads to the mechanization of life itself, as we neglect and ultimately abandon those things that don’t contribute to greater efficiency. Of all the quotable Scruton, perhaps his most famous is most instructive: “Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.”
