The "Properly Aesthetic" Classroom of the Future
A poster presented during the Canada Mathematics Education Study Group's 2025 Annual Conference, University of Lethbridge.
Ayush Mukherjee
That's me. You can find more about me here.
Coming soon...
Mukherjee, A. (2026). The “properly aesthetic” classroom of the future. In Mikulan, P. & Sinclair, N. (Eds.), Unschooled futures: Cross-disciplinary, pluriversal speculations. Bloomsbury.
The phenomenal landscape
The 2-D surface represents our experience: that which we actually live through and that which we potentially (will have) lived through. There are two underpinnings for this idea. First, phenomenology, which treats experience as the fundamental 'stuff' of reality; what is real is fundamentally experience. Second, an act-potency distinction, by which we come to admit that to talk of who we potentially are is something that makes sense.
Feser, E. (2014). Scholastic metaphysics: A contemporary introduction.Editiones Scholasticae.
Expectation
As we live in the phenomenal field, we come to possess certain representations, and using them, we come to expect certain events. You expect to drink coffee tomorrow, and if you know me, you expect me to drink coffee tomorrow. If you knew that I had switched to tea, you would come to retrospectively expect that too because your representations allow for people to change their preference for drinks.
Skorin-Kapov, J. (2015). The aesthetics of desire and surprise. Lexington Books.
Desire
But you do not have represenations for all that may happen; this immense 'planet' is not reducible to your expectation of it. You know... in fact you expect... that you will be brought up short. That one day the world will puncture your representations and get to you. This is desire, the yearning for that which is 'lacking' in our representations. This opens us up to psycholanalysis.
Skorin-Kapov, J. (2015). The aesthetics of desire and surprise. Lexington Books.
Thacker, E. (2011). In the dust of this planet: Horror of philosophy. Collective Ink.
Experiential stream
The path that life takes for us; what we experience as life unfolds. This is what we call 'history', and this is continuous so long as we have adequate representations to make sense of our experience.
Rupture
Where history breaks or ends. Our representations may no longer hold, and we lose 'geist'. What is left then but to count time and space? Perhaps speculation.
The rupture is a break in phenomenality; no longer does time 'flow'. It is irreducible, non-expect-able, beyond expectation.
Benjamin, W. (2004). Selected writings, 1: 1913–1926 (M. Bullock. & M. W. Jennings, Eds.). Harvard University Press.
Surprise
The other side of the rupture. Beyond history, we have new representations, but these are historically incommensurable representations. We cannot go back in time and say that this that we have now was to be expected all along. Time has happened beyond anticipation, beyond hypostasis; a future has been cleaved off from the present.
Levinas, E. (1987). Time and the other (R. A. Cohen, Trans.). Duquesne University Press. (Original work published 1947).
Augmented experience
Our experience as it gains more representations, an economic 'gain' in how we may relate with the world.
Skorin-Kapov, J. (2015). The aesthetics of desire and surprise. Lexington Books.
The "Properly Aesthetic" classroom
The only properly aesthetic gesture is that which creates conditions for heralding the future. The only possible gesture is speculation, and education that seeks the future may only be speculation about the future.
Tagore's classrooms
For Tagore, genuine education is aesthetic engagement. The colonized student is trapped in routinized, lifeless repetition; by interrupting this routine through acts of extraordinary creation, they are set free. Tagore mythicizes children's affinity towards a world that is substantially present, Education must introduce the child to 'thick' experience and urge them to create.
Under the density of children's extraordinary creations, history itself buckles and shatters. Confronted with beauty, the child no longer experiences time as the repetition of hours and days — something significant has now ruptured 'before' from 'after', past from future. The child re-constitutes herself and the world anew.
Tagore, R. (2011). Boyhood Days (R. Chakravarty, Trans.). Hesperus Press Limited. (Original work published 1940)
Tagore, R. (1917). Personality. Macmillan.
Ghosh, R. (2017). Aesthetics, politics, pedagogy and Tagore: A transcultural philosophy of education. Springer.
Past
A category of what has happened, for what representations exist. The past is not symmetrical with the future; time is experienced anisotropically.
Present
The thick now, for which representations are available. The past concretely persists in the present; we call this memory.
Future
That which is beyond the rupture, for which representations are not yet available. The future will have been possible eventually.
End of history
Where our representations end. That beyond which nothing we may exist, but we will not exist in any way that is significant, meaningful, representable.
Lear, J. (2008). Radical hope. Harvard University Press.
Cognitive-cultural rupture
The breakup of representation and phenomenality.
Lear, J. (2008). Radical hope. Harvard University Press.
Classroom in rupture
We want to create a math classroom exactly here, where we allow students to speculate the future.
Stream of expectation
The unfolding of our expectation.
Stream of experience
The unfolding of our experience.
Stream of desire
The unfolding of our desire.
Stream of augmented experience
The unfolding of our experience beyond the rupture.
Stream of surprise
The unfolding of our expectation beyond the rupture, such that the rupture always persists in the past.