We are instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many keys that are struck by the nature that surrounds us and that often strike themselves.
—Denis Diderot
It came to be called the Age of Enlightenment, the era of reason and rationalism, when philosophers and intellectuals such as Denis Diderot and his compatriot, the seminal thinker on education Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were questioning traditional institutions and assumptions. One of the works that established Diderot as an original thinker was called Letter on the Blind, in which he argued that a person depended on his senses to develop his ideas. Diderot made his argument by examining the case of the blind who, he proposed, could be taught using the senses they still possessed, notably touch.
Diderot's ideas were too enlightened for his contemporaries, and his essay earned him a three-month stay in prison. Two and a half centuries later, the belief that we develop our intellect through our senses is unlikely to land its adherents in jail, but it is still a radical idea in most learning environments. While we allow preschoolers to use their bodies, their hands, their noses, their ears and sometimes even their tongues to explore their worlds, by primary school most students are sentenced to spend their school days in settings that are either bland or chaotic, settings where little thought has been given to sensory education. Concrete schoolyards, locker-lined corridors, fluorescent-lit classrooms, cacophonous cafeterias where kids would rather lob french fries than eat them-no wonder schools turn out students who are over-stimulated and under-sensitized.
The senses are the gateway to the mind, particularly the developing mind. School cooks, parents, educators and designers demonstrate how, from the kitchen to the schoolyard, the auditorium to the library, there are myriad opportunities to integrate food, light, color, and material into the learning landscape and create teaching moments that will resonate with students on a visceral level. It is high time that we built schools reflecting Diderot's 260-year-old insight that our environments orchestrate our senses.
