Good taste, how to teach to appreciate beauty

The good taste of our children is educated through the words and the opportunities we give them to exercise their ability to appreciate the beauty and for the example we give them. Taste is the sense with which the taste of things is perceived and distinguished, but it is also the faculty of feeling or appreciating the beautiful, or the ugly.

Therefore, the Estetic Education it helps in the integral formation of the child, since it supposes putting into play the intelligence, the memory, the imagination and the feelings.

Already from classical cultures there was in the thinkers and educators an idea that good taste, the sense of aesthetics, the appreciation of beauty was essential for proper education, to achieve wisdom.


We can not lose sight of the fact that the various philosophical theories that have theorized about the meaning and education of aesthetics, have been displacing the term "taste" from the plane of objectivity of appreciation of beauty, to turning it into a subjective experience related more that with the external harmony of the objects, with the sensations and feelings that these objects provoke in the person. Thus, phrases such as the well-known ones arise: "for tastes the colors", "if you like it", etc.

Encourage your imagination, develop the good taste of children

The capacities of the imagination related to good taste are four, and it is we who have to help them put them into practice.


1. The sensitivity: helping them see reality as it is.

2. Refinement: inculcating good manners.

3. The correction: teaching them to know how to be.

4. The proportion: transmitting to them the value of prudence.

We must bear in mind that as any capacity of the person, they are progressively educated. As we have said before, everyone, because we are humans, we possess them to some degree, but it is the task of the educational task that they come to develop in their fullness. And that they are directed towards the good, because if we do not incite educationally in them they can easily derive in opposite sense.

Remember also that our children from 7 to 12 years old are in the "golden age" of their childhood. They already have a more thoughtful thought, but still our criterion is the most important for them. They begin to want to choose in more areas of daily life, but our advice has a lot of weight in their choice. And, above all, we are the mirror in which they constantly look at each other, they "scrutinize" us in speaking, in dressing, in walking and eating.


6 tips to stimulate good taste in children

1. Through art.

2. Through painting.

3. Through music.

4. Through the contemplation of a landscape.

5. Through different tastes at meals.

6. Teaching him with naturalness to discover the harmony that transmits that reality and the benefit that his contemplation provides.

Beauty enters through the senses of children

As Shaftesbury pointed out (1732), "the sense of beauty belongs to human nature." It means that the faculty to appreciate the aesthetic is universal to all men. We all have the ability to discover what is good and beautiful in what and in those around us. Remember that everything that reaches our brain enters through the senses. And those perceptions must be treated to be part of a higher process. For example, we can say with full sense that our son already knows how to read, when he is able to go from the mere visual perception of written signs to a more complex higher process that gives meaning, first to signs and finally to texts.

In the same way, the faculty of good taste happens at first by sensitive experiences. But it is the imagination, as a bridge between the senses and the intelligence, that is in charge of separating from the purely sensitive and elaborating the true aesthetic sense.

The ability to perceive the stimuli we receive is what we know as sensitivity. Well-developed and awakened senses will be prepared to grasp reality as it is. Already in the stages of early childhood (up to 5 years) we will have occupied ourselves in helping our children to mature the organs of the senses properly. If this is not the case, we may find that our son is not able to enjoy reading a good book for these reasons, or because he suffers from some visual difficulty that we will have to discard. In the same way a hypersensitivity of taste receptors or tactile receptors, can produce a sense of discomfort that makes it impossible to perceive the pleasant and good of a meal, the contemplation of a landscape or any other pleasant circumstance.

Mª Jesús Sancho. Psychologist Master in Marriage and Family. Teacher of the María Inmaculada School of Alfafar (Valencia)

Video: Aesthetic Appreciation: Crash Course Philosophy #30


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