Cities are not only a ‘setting’ but – more fundamentally – a peculiar form of experience. In his epoch-making The Metropolis and Mental Life Simmel mentioned the intellectualistic character of mental life as one of its main features. I propose to re-interpret Simmel’s reference to the intellectualistic character in the sense that what happens in cities is a mediated experience of the world. In order to capture what is meant, it is sufficient to bring to our minds an urban scene inthe XXI century: Times Square in New York. There, passers-by experience the context through wall-screens which project images of the people looking at the wall-screen (and they often take picture of themselves looking at the wall-screen). It is a kind of narcissistic mise-en-abyme in which what counts is not to be there, but to watch ourselves being there in the medium of a screen.

A screen, however, is more something that conceals than something that reveals and watching ourselves being-in-the-world in the medium of a screen is, as a mediated experience, a form of concealment of our original being-in-the-world. The urban type as (s)he is exemplified in the passer-by in Times Square is someone who experiences the world in a mediated way: that seems to be the updated version of Simmel’s reference to an intellectualistic character of urban life. Of course, the Times Square scene is here taken as an epitome of a range of experiences: think of how young people more than others seem to experience the world as a picture or, putting it differently, to have the feeling of experiencing it only if they can take a picture of it (and then upload it onto their Facebook page!).

How can educators approach this ‘urban’ condition (which as a kind of experience can occur also in a non-city context)? The main challenge seems to be to promote a more original experience of the world and to permit young people to re-discover a more authentic relationship with reality. This paper argues that the aimed-at promotion of a more original experience of the world can happen through an education of perception as the primordial opening to world. Education of perception is education through art as a way of attaining an im-mediate relationship with  reality. To the Simmelian oscillating experience of urban life has to be opposed a shock [Stoss], that of the work of art as Heidegger describes it. It is interesting to remark, as Vattimo sagaciously emphasized, the connections between Heidegger’s view of modern experience and Simmel’s essay. In this sense, with an exegetic twist which thinks with Heidegger beyond Heidegger, we can say that education of perception through art as a counter-shock  restoring an original relationship with the world does not consist in creating an ‘elsewhere’, an ‘escape route’ from urban reality (which is, in a way, our inescapable condition as (wo)men of the XXI century) but in fostering a different attitude to it, in switching the kind of experience we have of it to a more im-mediate mode.

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