This article presents an excerpt from a speech delivered by Dana Gioia, poet, critic, and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, at the Stanford University commencement on June 17, 2007. In this speech, Gioia communicates his concerns about the diminished role of the arts in contemporary North American culture and the failure of school…

Art education combined with the sciences can be a leading force in raising the consciousness of students and teachers to the needs of our fragile planet. By teaching environmental aspects to the visual arts curriculum, we will also be teaching that one of the similarities we all share is the need for beauty. The sciences have traditionally carried…

Synergistic psychology has been proposed as a meta theory for synthesizing different psychological theories into an explanation of how social, cognitive, and biological factors interact in human behavior. The basic theoretical assumption in synergistic psychology is that internalized social interactions become higher mental functions that regulate…

The case for the inclusion of aesthetic education with the traditional basic courses of reading, writing, and arithmetic is examined. The following points are emphasized in regarding arts education as a basic: (1) Aesthetic experience is basic because it is a primary form of experience on which all cognition, judgment, and action depend. It is the…