The article presents the 50-year history of the Theory of Aesthetic Education Unit established in 1967 within the Chair of General Education at the Faculty of Education at the University of Warsaw. In those days, the issues studied at the Theory of Aesthetic Education Unit were innovative, connected with the quest for the restoration of education and the formation of the integral man. They also expressed the expectations and hopes that were widespread in Poland after 1956. Moreover, those issues correlated with the revelation of the idea of “education for the future”, consolidating the meaning of the “inspirational duty of education”. The Unit’s activities were reflected in research studies, doctoral dissertations and publications, as well as in the practical experiences, in terms of university and school education and cooperation with teachers and institutions involved in the diffusion of culture. The article shows how, in difficult and historically variable circumstances, an interdisciplinary theoretical structure was shaped, simultaneously with an integrated pedagogical process. This concept, inspired by the classical thought of Polish and foreign authors, reveals a wide range of educational opportunities for art in an interdisciplinary perspective, as well as in the form of distinct artistic disciplines. Art education is understood as education towards and through art; it is the foundation of the humanistic orientation of educating the integral man, enriching general education.

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Editor in Chief of “The Pedagogical Quarterly” discourses with Irena Wojnar, employed at the University of Warsaw since early post-war time. Her intellectual evolution (l’âge où l’on grandit) occurs in changing dramatic periods of our history, optimism of elementary school before the World War II, painful time of clandestine education during the Nazi occupation in Warsaw, hopes and illusions of the post-war epoch. In these periods, the essential inspirations for Irena Wojnar were successive books of Bogdan Suchodolski, with symbolic titles: Love life – be valiant (2nd ed. 1930), Whence and where are we going to? (1943) and Education for the future (1947). In the Polish school before the WWII, pupils were educated in the spirit of patriotism and civic duties, sensibility to the surrounding world and the service of humans. Tragic heroism of the WWII became the proof of those values. In the conditions of constant aggressive and permanent threat, quasi “against the night”, the fight with the occupant becomes the essential moral duty. For young people, pupils and students, when secondary and tertiary schools were closed by the Nazis, this duty signified participation in clandestine education supporting hope to preserve future order in the world and preparation of the future activity in the free Poland after the WWII. The end of the WWII created a chance for the future shape of the world in line with our humanistic values. It was the period of the reconstruction of Warsaw, destroyed during the WWII, becoming a city of “sorrow and dreams”. In the final part of the conversation there appears the general opinion that every individual life–story, beyond its individual aspects, reveals a more general educational idea. Human life runs across destiny and personal consciousness. Independently of our destiny, we have a chance to choose values important for us, to realise the “poetics of the self” (poétique du soi) based on our capacity to overcome own limitations and to increase goodness in the world.