Introduction
When the French revolution turned from a movement intended to free people into a regime of terror, the German writer Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) was wondering how this was possible. He considered one important reason to be the fact that people were not prepared to have power and to use it in the best interest of all. They were rather driven by emotions and prejudices which overpowered balanced reasoning. For Schiller, there was only one solution to this problem: to find a way for balancing people’s inner drives and to “humanize” them. The arts offer this opportunity in terms of aesthetic education. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Briefe ueber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen), written between 1793 and 1795, Schiller presents his famous concept of aesthetic education as a way of humanizing people through the arts. Until today, this concept has been an important point of reference for various approaches of education through the arts.
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Kertz-Welzel, A. (2019). Aesthetic Education: Anglo-American and German Perspectives. In: Peters, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_678-1
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