Dewey’s Aesthetics and Today’s Moral Education

Today we face many new issues in terms of technology, political and economic relations, humanities, and ecological environment. In addition, these complex interests are shaped by responses to globalization and multiculturalism; and they are becoming more infl uential to individual lives. Th is kind of era requires understanding of and sensitivity to diverse needs, communication, and collaboration. Th erefore, mere inculcation or transmission of knowledge has limitations in preparing students to live meaningfully in a changing world. Instead, students need embodied reasoning. A meaningful and harmonious life coupled with responding to one’s environment is always a goal of education, in particular, moral education. In a new century, we need to rethink the fundamental meaning of morality and moral education. As a few recent researchers claim,1 obeying a society’s rules, laws, and regulations or possessing certain virtues such as knowledge does not necessarily make us moral; it may just rather cause us to benumb the virtuous consciousness. In this view of moral education, we need to examine our current system of moral education. As a contemporary and systemic eff ort, character education dominates the fi eld of practice in moral education. Philosophers and practitioners of character education convince themselves and their students that books on moral theory will tell us how we ought to behave. However, recent thinkers interested in moral education have argued about the eff ectiveness of character education. It could be argued that defi ciencies in contemporary school-based moral education have led us down this path to narrowly cognitive, character trait, or general values list approaches. It should be also questioned whether it is possible to teach virtues directly and whether indoctrination as the method of such inculcation of virtues is an appropriate method of education.2 Th e overall problem is grounded in a misguided view of reason, following mind versus body dualism and neglecting the importance of aesthetic dimensions of experience. Consequently, moral reasoning has been regarded as consisting primarily of discerning the appropriate