This article provides excerpts from "The Four Ages of Poetry" (1820), by Thomas Love Peacock; "The Defence of Poetry" (1821), by Percy Bysshe Shelley; and "On Milton" (1826), by Thomas Babington Macaulay. Although Shelley is the main focus, the essays are arranged chronologically. Brackets indicate editorial asides; original spelling and…

This author contends that it is sometimes difficult to construe exactly what the visual culture movement really involves. To use the kind of lingo that its spokespersons favor, we are seeing a conflict between transfigured factions surviving from the 1960s. During that fevered era, it appeared to academic liberals that America was becoming…

Proponents of expanding art education to address visual culture sometimes mean by this no more than the idea that unconventional kinds of imagery may productively be treated as art. Sometimes, however, the goal is to replace the appreciative and interpretive stances that are conventional in teaching and learning about art with a polemical…

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…

"A primary task ... is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience."--John Dewey, "Art as Experience" (1934)Dewey's primary task has resurfaced in the visual culture movement and is a…

In this paper, the author concludes that the lesson for music educators is that every musical experience that is offered to students affects their brains, bodies, and feelings. In short, it changes their minds permanently, and, if educators are conscientious, it does so progressively. Such a process is called "learning." That capacity to learn, to…

Arts advocacy is on the minds today of many who are involved in theatre education, and the arts in general. This author offers an interesting perspective on the movement by focusing on understanding who engages in arts advocacy, what they are advocating for, how they approach their efforts, and why they undertake arts advocacy in the first place.

This article is adapted from "The Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education," Elliot Eisner and Michael Day (Eds.) [c] Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, Mahwah, NJ 2004. The author contends that two fundamental premises drive arts education advocacy as it is currently coined and circulated. The first premise is that all arts programming is…

In this paper, the author explains why programs or potential programs designed to serve education in music and the other arts should be evaluated on the basis of breadth of coverage of standards-based skill and knowledge, of depth of coverage of that skill and knowledge and on the proportion of a given student population that they reach. Those who…

Over the past two decades, education in the United States has undergone phenomenal change. Fueled by both internal and external forces, challenges arose to previously held paradigms. Political, economic, social, cultural, and technological concerns all combined to drive the changes. Waves of educational reform precipitated by publication of…

High school theatre productions can have broad beneficial effects. In addition to helping students, they can bring a sense of unity and focus to a school in ways most often associated with higher-profile athletics. The community in which the school resides often benefits from the entertainment and the visible expression of student achievement.…

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which general music teachers teach songs of the American children's folk heritage. It appears that teachers are failing to do this, less because of any deliberate intent than for very complex reasons, such as different priorities that go beyond art and music, lack of curricular direction,…

Ongoing arts education issues for dance educators concern the role of elementary school classroom teachers as dance facilitators in their classrooms, the parameters of such a role, and whether or not university dance departments can prepare them to fill it. This article presents both the author's perspectives on meeting this challenge and the…

This essay is the eighth in an occasional series on past treatments of major issues in arts education policy from antiquity through the twentieth century. The essay on which it is based, David Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste," originally published in 1757, is too extensive to be reprinted here, but it is easily accessible in the public…

This is the second installment of Chapter 1, "The Assessment Context," by F. Robert Sabol, from "Assessing Expressive Learning: A Practical Guide for Teacher-Directed Authentic Assessment in K-12 Visual Art Education," edited and written by Charles M. Dorn, Stanley S. Madeja, and F. Robert Sabol. [c] Lawrence Erlbaum…