ABSTRACT
Aestheticism as a mode or quality of life is distinct from aestheticism as an attitude to art, though both are matters of degree. The chief danger of aestheticism in schooling, however, is not that stimulating children’s imagination will make them more prone to misinterpret expression, or any other kind of merely individual error, but a political danger, more sinister than the more immediate danger Miss Meager envisages. If Imagination is the power by which we make immediate interpretations of expressions, then again we owe imagination a very great deal, and it is hard to grasp how strange and difficult life would be if we could not normally rely on its immediate judgements. Soren Kierkegaard describes imagination as a faculty instar omnium, a faculty for all faculties. Miss Meager says that schooling ought to be more concerned with canalising imagination along the pathways of righteousness than with encouraging it to take flight.
