Philosophers of education as well as philosophers, sociologists and other theoreticians are searching for new models and interpretations of teaching, using new concepts, "transversality" being one of them. Some treat the new ways based on transversal competence as an augmentation of neoliberal power and its influence at school, some, on…

The paper seeks to unpick and examine a number of related claims for the role of the arts or, more specifically, the creative arts, in educational research. It considers and evaluates ways in which artistic creativity might itself be thought of as either based on research or itself a form of inquiry which might claim to be research. Such claims…

The Black Lives Matter campaign has led many people around the world to reassess monuments that are installed in public spaces to commemorate historical figures. These reassessments raise questions about what it means to attack the statues of the past, what the rights and wrongs of such actions are, what this teaches us and how all this is passed…

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,…

Stacy Boldrick is a Lecturer in Art Museum and Gallery Studies at the University of Leicester, where she conducts research in iconoclasm and its significance for social groups and institutions. She is the author of "Iconoclasm and the Museum" (Routledge, 2020). In 2013, she collaborated with Tabitha Barber to curate Art Under Attack:…

I focus on J.M. Coetzee's contribution to philosophy of education by examining his most recent novels, "The Childhood of Jesus" (2013) and "The Schooldays of Jesus" (2016). These novels appear to narrate the formative education of the child, Davíd, together comprising a contemporary bildungsroman. Coetzee's transformation of…

These are broad and expansive themes and so what we wish to do is to provide a perhaps dramatic case study example of state engagement with the arts for political and security purposes. Our critical case is that of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) engagement with the arts during the Cold War and newly uncovered archival evidence of the CIA…

In the "Poetics" of Aristotle there is a definition of the human being that perhaps has not yet been well considered in educational theory and practice. This definition calls into question a dynamism that according to Plato was unavoidable for an appropriate understanding of the educational process that turns a human being into a…

This paper revisits how late 20th-century attempts to account for conceptual and other difficult art-work by defining the concept "art" have failed to offer a useful strategy for educators seeking a non-instrumental justification for teaching the arts. It is suggested that this theoretical ground is nonetheless instructive and provides useful…

This article analyses the nature of an educational experience by taking as its starting point Dewey's "Art as Experience" in order to identify what it is that counts as a significant or worthwhile experience. Dewey suggests that an experience needs to have an integral character in which the different phases of the experience are related and which…

Nick Peim has recently revisited the work of Walter Benjamin; specifically his famous essay on art and mechanical reproduction. In this reply, I too draw upon the inspiration of Benjamin to extend the argument to the question of experience and what might count as knowledge, both in a philosophical sense and also in terms of the curriculum. To…

The moral potential of works of art, for good or ill, has been recognised from philosophical antiquity: on the assumption that the moral effects of art are invariably negative, Plato advised the exclusion of artists from any rationally ordered state. Arguably, however, the problem of the moral status of art has become yet more acute in contexts of…

This article explores the contrasting arguments for the place of the arts in education made by the two distinguished arts educators--the American Elliot Eisner and British dance and physical education theorist Graham McFee. Both scholars begin with the premise that the arts should be central to a liberal education and then diverge. McFee argues,…

This paper considers a key text in the field of Cultural Studies for its relevance to questions about the identity of knowledge in education. The concept of "aura" arises as being of special significance in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" as a way of understanding the change that occurs to art when mass reproduction becomes…

This article draws on the conclusion of the Commission on the Humanities in "The Humanities in American Life" that the aim of a liberal arts education is to foster critical reasoning through the use of language or discourse. This paper maintains that the "critical method" is in itself insufficient to achieve its purpose. Its failure is in its…