The title of this paper comes from Aristotle's "Metaphysics." It appropriately captures how he understood art education. In what follows, a considerable amount of the author's thinking is indebted to Plato's and Aristotle's understanding of art education as mimetic education. On first view, an art mimetic educational approach may appear worryingly…

The seventh annual Sloan Foundation Study of Online Learning revealed that one in four college students took at least one online course in the 2008 academic year--a 17 percent increase from just the previous year. This rapid growth seems to be fueled mainly by a perceived need by universities to be more convenient and accessible for students. This…

An attempt is made to demonstrate if not the dispensability of Gardner's (1983) theory of multiple intelligences, at least that it is not foundational, to understanding what motivated Picasso's creative development. Gardner used the theory of multiple intelligences to account for the extraordinariness of various figures, including Picasso, who is…

Berys Gaut has recently defended a theory according to which a moral defect of a work of art represents an aesthetic defect of the work itself. This theory, called ethicism, has been criticized by Matthew Kieran, who argued that, on the contrary, in certain cases moral defects can increase the artistic value of artworks. In this essay I clarify…

Referring to the work of Richard Sennett, this article puts forth the proposition that art production is possible only when there is a correct relation between theory and artistic practice. An effective artistic praxis can only be realized by incorporating theory in artistic practices. Based on empirical research, the author elaborates on the…

Recent decades have seen a flattening of the playing field in terms of the arts. The rise of popular culture programs in universities is one of the by-products of this attitude, which rejects the traditional hierarchical status of arts by genre. However, something vital is lost in that little attention is paid to the experiential aspects of…

The grammar of creative practices is described by George Steiner as the "articulate organisation of perception, reflection and experience, the nerve structure of consciousness when it communicates with itself and with others." Steiner's description of creative grammar is consistent with Lev Vygotsky's comment that "art is the social within us, and…

When Albert Barnes established an art education program at the Barnes Foundation in 1924, he asked John Dewey to become the first president and director of education. Barnes and Dewey enjoyed a sustained and fruitful relationship with regard to aesthetic experience and scientific theory as applied to education. Barnes and Dewey shared a serious…

The author's focus in this essay is to advocate for the arts by bearing witness to their power during times of great trouble. If art can help children exist under conditions of irrational hatred, racism, terror, and mass murder--under conditions so dire that life's fundamental necessities of food, shelter, and family love are withheld and…

Notation systems for the arts were developed to educate students in performing the art form. Soon notation systems were used in research and archiving performances and skills that could have been lost to the following generations. Virtual travel through the written notations brings experts to students rather than having students go to the…

In essence, biophilic design acknowledges urban living as a reality but proposes to integrate nature and natural forms into the built environment, with the goal of inducing biophilic responses and thereby fostering human well-being. The central goal of this paper is to highlight the possibilities of and challenges for biophilic design and discuss…

Advocating for improvisational pedagogy in the arts, this article argues for the incalculable benefits of a teaching style that refuses to adhere strictly to orchestration planned in advance; it propounds a pedagogical practice that welcomes cadenzas and that situates itself in the here-and-now of classrooms taken as sites of adventure, discovery,…

Drama/theater education lives in the tension of being a discipline rooted in the fine arts and humanities that has been transplanted into the social science of education. This paper suggests that a more aesthetic and philosophical reflection on what drama/theater does and can do in educational settings frees us from the scientized and instrumental…

Questions regarding the proper role of the arts in education have occupied many thinkers throughout the ages, no less than the likes of Plato and Rousseau. Like them, several have argued that paintings, for example, are mere re-presentations of and certainly not, to borrow a term from Kant, the "thing-in-itself." From a Platonic and Rousseauian…

Meaningful interactions with works of art are often absent from education. Across the country, art museums are intent on changing this situation. But to incorporate art viewing into an educational milieu that does not value art, art museum educators are constantly forced to justify the educational value of their programs. One common argument to…