It’s Friday morning in the school attended by both my kids: the little hall is packed with small children (singing), parents of small children (wiping the odd tear from the eye) and teachers (knackered). The song comes to an end and it’s time for the real action: the headteacher is about to hand out the treasured wristbands, little bits of sticky paper that will remain for weeks on the wrists of a select few pupils, surviving playground scrapes and bathtime scrubs before, we suspect, changing hands for a fortune on the black market.
How do you get a wristband? Let’s find out. Charlotte in Reception Class is awarded one for being good – her behaviour has once again been exemplary to the class; meanwhile in Year 1 Luke can always be relied upon to be honest, he’s learnt the difference between right and wrong and he deserves his wristband for always telling the truth; finally, Freddie is selected from Year 2 because he’s produced another of his beautiful paintings, and here it is, held up high above his head. Look everyone, says the headteacher, it’s beautiful.
Hovering somewhere above this pleasant scene is a figure clothed in robes and taking notes. It’s Plato, and he’s pleasantly surprised to find that, almost two and a half thousand years after he put the finishing touches to his Hippias Major (What is Beauty?), his influence lives on (at least, as far as infant school assemblies go). Plato was among the first philosophers to reflect on the nature of beauty and believed that beauty, truth and goodness, the Platonic forms, were the essential entities that existed beyond the world of the senses - everything on Earth was, in comparison, second rate.
We would expect young children to be familiar with concepts of truth and goodness. Children frequently encounter these words at home and in school and can assume a shared understanding of their meaning: we’re good when we do as we’re told, we try hard with our work and are kind to others, and the truth is what we should always tell.
But what does beauty mean? Should we agree on what is and what is not beautiful? Or is beauty, as the phrase goes, in the eye of the beholder? Parents tell their children that they are beautiful (it goes alongside loving them) and teachers tell us our work is beautiful (it encourages them to produce more work) so presumably children must have some notion of what the word means. But how would they define it if we asked them? And do they have a notion that it can mean different things to different people?
This is, essentially, what I want to find out through my research over the next couple of years, and this blog is a source of informal updates on recent progress. It’s not intended to be anything academic - just a record of thoughts, ideas and anecdotes about a range of related issues – to which responses would be welcome.
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