What happens to art education when the national school curriculum in Israel follows a ‘core subjects’ policy? Allocating only two hours for all five art subjects (visual arts, music, drama, dance and ...cinematic arts) that remain outside the core curriculum increases the social‐economic gap between children whose parents can fund their art education privately and children whose parents cannot afford this. This also has worrying consequences for art teachers (most of them women) deprived of job security.
Abstract Susanne Langer sees the ‘the public importance of art’ as one of ‘the ultimate questions in a philosophy of art’. Indeed, Langer is often referred to as an authority on the justification of ...art education and is cited as providing good reasons for incorporating the arts in the curriculum. It is therefore surprising to note, as Elliot Eisner does, that Langer’s theory has had little influence on actual art education. For while many theoreticians in the social sciences and education have found Langer’s contribution to the understanding of the arts highly significant, Eisner laments that ‘alas, the lesson Susanne Langer was trying to teach … in her remarkable book, never took hold in … American public schools’. It seems that policy-makers outside of art education circles remain sceptical regarding the need for art education. The substantiation of art education requires firm ground against scepticism. It is therefore important to understand the ways in which Langer’s project fails to fulfil its promise. In examining Langer’s aesthetic theory, I will show that despite its philosophical acuity, Langer’s argument fails to persuade the art education sceptic who believes that art occupies a minor role in education and should therefore remain marginal in the school curriculum.
Herbert Read's Education through Art (henceforth ETA) is a pioneering attempt to provide empirical evidence for the need for art in the public school system. Rooting for art education, Read applies ...the conclusions of the newly evolving psychological research to his thesis on education, which he holds to be a contemporary revival of Plato's educational theory. Psychological research proves, Read believes, that art is required for the healthy cognitive and emotional development of the child, thereby creating a stable and productive society. ‘Education through art’ nurtures each individual's potential, so that every professional direction one would later take would be ‘art'. Since its publication in 1943, art‐education enthusiasts seem to hold that Read was on the right track, but that ETA suffers from a lack of evidence – a mere technicality that can be amended when research advances. Contrariwise, I argue that Read's thesis is inherently problematic, rather than empirically inaccurate. Psychological research may never suffice for the justification of art education, if ‘art education’ is both substituted for ‘creativity’ and expected to produce testable – immediate and quantifiable – results. My interest is not only in Read's theory per se, but in this form of justification. To wit, the discussion examines ETA as a case study in the empirical justification of art education.
From the perspective of art education, the worst‐case philosophical scenario is the hedonist‐subjectivist account of art. If we measure art by the pleasure we gain from it, it may seem senseless to ...attempt teaching the reception of art. David Hume's ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ provides an argument for the art‐education enthusiast, explaining that—even on a subjectivist account—art education crystallises our own preferences.
While I refer to a historical debate and provide a close reading of an 18th‐century essay, my goal is to offer a philosophical solution to an ongoing dilemma; I use Hume's essay to ground the justification of art education.
In their discussion of the interpretation of the literary work of fiction, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen explain that: “Literary appreciation is the appreciation of how a work interprets and ...develops the general themes which the reader identifies through the application of thematic concepts. … The thematic concepts are, by themselves, vacuous. They cannot be separated from the way they are ‘anatomized’ in literature and other cultural discourses” (Lamarque and Olsen: 399). The subtle unravelling of the work’s thematic concepts relies on the context of its reception, with its idiosyncratic sensitivities and cultural sensibilities of that time and place. However, cultural sensitivity also has a dark side as it may occasionally ignite a sort of allergic reaction to a work, identifying it as a threat that must be eliminated. My paper examines the case of literary censorship in Israel. Three partially banned works of fiction reflect three aspects of the Israeli right-wing anxiety concerning the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict: The futility of sacrificing Israeli soldiers’ lives, the acknowledgement of the Palestinian perspective, and, fi nally, the possibility of deflecting the animosity between the two nations to a point of allowing for mutual love.
Universities and colleges around the globe struggle to find ways to improve students’ academic writing skills. With the goal of tackling students’ writing skills on an institutional level, we set out ...on a 6-year journey to seek ways of enhancing the teaching of academic writing on a wide selection of courses. Here we describe and analyze the challenges entailed in implementing an intervention in a teachers’ college in Israel. We found that as the implementation process evolved, a shift from a top-down approach to a bottom-up approach resolved three different challenges: (a) The management challenge, which comes into play when leading any type of change; (b) The challenges specific to the academic work environment; and (c) The challenges of providing effective pedagogical tools for the implementation of the change. The one-on-one advising system, constituting the final stage of the process brings about the desirable change in broader terms. Based on the Tpack model, we offer AWpack (Academic Writing—pedagogical and content knowledge) as a strategy for implementing an institutional pedagogic change in the case of academic writing. Moreover, we show that as a working strategy within an academic institution it may facilitate other sought-after pedagogic changes.
This paper describes an experimental course in the preparation of art teachers. The goal of the course was to engage final‐year art students in thinking about the fundamental questions in aesthetic ...education and in considering various views of their roles as teachers of art. The classes presented a dialogue between two teachers: a philosopher of art and an artist. We discussed the social justification of art, the place of art in education and more generally the portrayal of visual culture in philosophical thought. The bibliography for the course comprised a list of basic texts in aesthetic education, from Friedrich Schiller to Nelson Goodman. In class we linked the range of philosophical views examined to the artistic exploration of themes (mainly in contemporary and local art). The course also incorporated guest speakers who presented their own projects relating to different meeting points of art and education, including social‐activist artists, curators, philosophers of education and school architects. The article presents the rationale for the course, its method and a sample of its content.
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