The bottommost line of the Rainbow of Why is beauty. It’s on the bottom because it’s the least obvious in most secondary classrooms. We’re quick to tell our students the utility of today’s lesson or its relevance to their lives, but precious few of us ever get around to sharing the beauty of our subjects with our students.
I’ve elsewhere defined beauty as follows:
Beauty is this aesthetic sense of goodness. It's a moment where you feel like a small but connected part of a large and wondrous picture. It's where you long for the thing you're beholding, and so you keep beholding it.”
Beauty seems like an easy reach from disciplines like art or theatre or English or band. But what about those colder-seeming subjects, like science or math?
Well, according to the experts, the truest word in that previous sentence is seeming. That we see science as a cold, austere thing belies not the lack of beauty in science but the lack of understanding in us. David Brooks writes, “The world is full of beautiful things and moments of wonder. But sometimes they pass by without us realizing their importance” (The Second Mountain, p. 98).*
To experts, the beauty is as obvious and as necessary as breathing. Do you know what drove Einstein? An emotional attachment to the beauty of science.
Brooks writes,
Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneering work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work…can issue. The scientist’s religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law.”
From David Brooks' The Second Mountain, p. 98
There we have another way of defining what it means to experience beauty: “a rapturous amazement at the harmony.” It can be the harmony of sound, of poetry, of formulae, or of natural law.
The point is, it’s all over the place, in all of our classes.
It’s our job as teachers to unbury it for ourselves, clean and polish it with our attention, and show it to our students.
Best,
DSJR
*Thank you to David Brooks for this book, which served me well during a teaching season in which I felt like I was losing my sense of purpose in the work.
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