According to John Dewey, author of "Art as Experience," science and other forms of knowledge are properly "handmaidens" to art, intellectual tools for enhancing the overall quality and value of human life and activity. Recently, scholars in education have began to examine the possible significance of Dewey's aesthetics for the practices of teaching and learning. This article explores the idea of aesthetic education--conceived in its broadest sense--using a mainly Deweyan lens. Moreover, it does so by examining everyday classroom practices as they are informed by the general social and philosophical culture of education. For it is here, Dewey has suggested, that the limitations of conventional thinking about the arts might take their greatest toll on students' prospects for developing a wide range of richly funded experiences. To make the discussion more contextual and concrete than Dewey's highly conceptual texts themselves permit, the author tries to imagine what this Deweyan alternative might look like--its problems and possibilities--through selected scenes from Robert Pirsig's autobiographical "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." In these brief scenes, Pirsig (the narrator) was working to recall some of his past successes and failures in making qualitative immediacy, as the primary media of aesthetic education, a working concept in the teaching of college freshman English. Like Dewey, Pirsig held to the primacy in experience of the immediate "Teaching Aesthetics and Aesthetic Teaching" qualitative world. He also saw himself as very much an exponent of the pragmatist tradition in philosophy. (Contains 20 notes.)