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 fundamental and distinctive power of image making by the imagination. It furnishes the raw material for concepts and ideals, for creating a world of possibility. (2) The source of meaning and its exfoliation into ideas, theories, values, visions, plans, and invention is the imagination. (3) The case for arts education depends on what art can do to clarify and enrich experience that the other subjects in the curriculum cannot. (4) Art orders feeling by giving it an expressive form perceptible by the senses--an image. Finally, the aesthetic response is indispensable to all experience and instruction in the aesthetic response is both possible and necessary. (JD)