Developing Values for Secondary School Students through the Study of Art Objects

The paper begins with some issues related to aesthetics, aesthetic education, art and axiological education. The empirical research has the general assumption that secondary school students and youth have difficulties in selecting values. The objective of the research was three fold: to design, to organize and to carry learning activities from which students shall acquire educational values through the study of art objects. The exploratory research was conducted on a sample of 50 students (25 in experimental group and 25 in control group). The content sample included fairy-tales and short stories ("Beauty and the Beast; The money earned" by Alexandru Mitru) and artistic topics on several well-known art objects (The Endless Column, Table of Silence, The Gate of Kiss, Peles castle, Voronet monastery, and St. Michael's Cathedral from Cluj-Napoca). The tested hypothesis stated that "if secondary school students are involved in learning contexts where they perceive, analyze and explain artistic objects then they develop aesthetic and ethic values." The learning context students were exposed to represents the independent variable and the outputs--the educational values themselves--represent the dependent variable. In order to test for the hypothesis we planned a formative didactic experiment. In order to test the hypothesis the pre-test/post-test design was used.