Ralph A Smith – författare

As art educators consider the relevance of a wide range of disciplines to the teaching of art, Aesthetics and Arts Education (a successor to the 1971 volume Aesthetics and the Problems of Education) offers an international look at the role aesthetics can play in teaching all the arts. Thirty-two articles by American and English scholars address the philosophical and educational theories underlying aesthetics, aesthetics as a field of study, curriculum design and evaluation, and the problems and purposes of aesthetic education.

Recommending that art be taught as a humanity, this volume provides aphilosophical rationale for the idea of discipline-based art education.Levi and Smith discuss topics ranging over both the public and privateaspects of art, the disciplines of artistic creation, art history, artcriticism, and aesthetics, and curriculum proposals featuring five phasesof aesthetic learning.While there is no consensus on how the various components of aestheticlearning should be presented in order to accomplish the goals of discipline-basedart education, the authors point out that progress toward those goalswill require that those who design art education programs bring an understandingof the four disciplines to their work. The introductory volume of a five-volumeseries, this book will appeal to elementary and secondary art teachers,those who prepare teachers at the college level, and museum educators.

Ralph A. Smith provides a theory of aesthetic education that addresses the need to revitalize the capacity for genuine judgment in society, reaffirm the ideal of excellence in culture, and reorder our thoughts about teaching the arts in schools. The book presents an image of the curriculum as itinerary, preparing the young to traverse the world of art with adroitness and sensitivity.