If visual art is to be taught as a substantive part of the public school curriculum, then it's content and structure need to be translated into a curriculum that provides continuous cognitive and psychological growth and development. While discipline based art education (DBAE) acknowledges the values of art production, the content of art should acknowledge other forms of engagement with art that respond to art, to historical and philosophical inquiry, and that pervade students lives such as architecture, pragmatic arts, and contemporary media. The art education profession should arrive at common understandings of purposes and content. An examination of the structure and dynamics of art education reveals that it has three dynamics: content, engagement, and education. Contact is provided by the creation of art (studio, art criticism, art history, and aesthetics). Disciplines refer to the four professional fields of the artist, critic, art historian, and the aesthetican. Dimensions refer to four aspects of engagement with art that are possible for one individual: creating, responding, historical inquiry, and philosophical inquiry. The characteristics of the four dimensions are described followed by indications of the ways that they can enrich and illuminate each other in an individual's engagement with form. Three domains of learning, cognitive (knowing), affectives (values), and psychomotor (skills), are particilarly relevant and useful for considering the kinds of thinking and operating in each of the four dimensions of engagement. More active and independent engagement in learning, as characterized by upper levels of operations (cognitive--synthesis and analysis; affective--characterization and value complex; and psychomotor--naturalizing and articulation) need increased attention. (KM)