The Arts

Abstract

This chapter defends the importance of education in the arts, and offers specific proposals for how this part of the curriculum should be expanded. For many people, encounters with the arts have a special vitality—they are episodes in which people are most vividly alive. Moreover, the effects of our engagement with the artworks we love are not transitory; they affect, sometimes profoundly, the course of our subsequent experience. The arts can also teach us. These valuable contributions are elaborated through considering a range of examples, and, on this basis, the chapter proposes an extensive program of art education. The envisaged curriculum is aimed at making valuable engagements with the arts as widely available as possible, attending to the different individual predilections and tastes people develop.