In this paper, the author asserts that current efforts to transform art education into visual culture studies (VCS) constitute a deeply disturbing educational trend. She asserts that, much like the now largely discredited developments in literary studies of recent decades (whose bankruptcy it apparently ignores), this movement aims quite explicitly at a radical transformation of American society and is, therefore, primarily social and political in its intent. Its influence is not only likely to dull the next generation's aesthetic sensibilities and thereby coarsen the general level of culture but may also extend far beyond the arts themselves. The author defends her beliefs that such studies have no place in art education, the proper focus of which is the visual arts. (Contains 19 endnotes.)