The Question of what ‘aesthetic education’ is, or might be, is often a source of incomprehension. This book opens up discussion of a complex, difficult, but highly important topic, and offers an introductory survey of the whole area. In examining the relationship of the concept of the aesthetic to that of art, it challenges the persistent linking by many educationists of ‘aesthetic’ with ‘creative’ and the consequent neglect of critical reflection and appreciation.

The first part of the book discusses aims, who should determine them and how they might be determined. The second part discusses some more specific topics of learning and teaching, such as learning how to learn, the integrated day and the use of competition. The author distinguishes three broad levels of thought in looking at schools: the details of choice and decision; the general principles which are, or ought to be, guiding that detailed practice; and the theoretical commentaries on the guiding principles available from the various disciplines which constitute the study of education.

This volume reaffirms the indispensable place of the arts in any coherent curriculum. The author hopes that the specific arguments formulated in the book will advance the conservationist post-Modernist aesthetic.

When originally published this was the first book to offer a collective history of all the arts – Art, Drama, Dance, Music, Literature and Film – in the curriculum. It also offers a coherent framework for the teaching of arts which is in line with the best current trends since the Gulbenkian Report of 1982. It insists that the arts, seen together should be an essential part of the national curriculum.

Teachers and students are frequently confused as to the relevance of abstract philosophical theorising to the reality of the classroom and this book is distinctive for the attention it devotes to philosophy and its potential contribution to practical matters, and education in particular. The author is critical of many current views of the philosophy of education and argues the validity of philosophy as an integral part of education in its own right, against the creation of a ‘new’ branch of philosophy, the ‘philosophy of education’. The book stresses that relativist ethical theories are no more ‘known’ to be valid than the absolutist theories they have replaced, and in the second section the author argues for a modified utilitarian position. The final section enables the reader to relate the general argument of the second part to several specific issues.

This introduction to Plato’s philosophical and educational thought examines Plato’s views and relates them to issues and questions that occupy philosophers of education. Robin Barrow stresses the relevance of Plato today, while introducing the student both to Plato’s philosophy and to contemporary educational debate. In the first part of the book the author examines Plato’s historical background and summarizes the Republic. Successive chapters are concerned with the critical discussion of specific educational issues. He deals with questions relating to the impartial distribution of education, taking as a starting point Plato’s celebrated dictum that unequals should be treated unequally. He examines certain methodological concepts such as ‘discovery-learning’ and ‘play’ and also raises the wider question of children’s freedom. He looks critically at the content of the curriculum and discusses Plato’s theory of knowledge and attitude to art. Finally Robin Barrow discusses Plato’s view of moral education and the related problem of what constitutes moral indoctrination

This volume emphasizes the necessity for arts teachers to nurture the personal development of their students by expanding their artistic understanding and creativity. In aiming to provide a broader understanding for the effective teaching of the arts, the author provides powerful reasons for seeing the arts as agents of learning, understanding and development. The volume also demonstrates that whilst the arts are centrally concerned with feeling, they are as fully open to objective reasoning as any other subject discipline such as science, but the dichotomy between ‘scientism’ and ‘subjectivism’ is all-pervading in a curriculum which marginalises the teaching of the arts.