The Educational Imperative: A Defence Of Socratic And Aesthetic Learning

by Peter Abbs

Overview

Written with both the cultural and moral crisis and the challenge of the future in mind, Peter Abbs's book charts an open, clear, and positive way forward for education. Divided into four sections, the first examines the true and fitting ends of education and outlines a positive conception of education as an initiation into critical enquiry and the personal art of learning. The two middle sections consider aesthetic education. Abbs confronts government approaches to arts teaching and offers an alternative dynamic paradigm within which the creativity of the culture transmitted down the ages and the creativity of the individual seen as biologically given must be combined. The outcome of this is explored, in detail, in relation to the teaching of literature, creative writing and drama. The final section offers critical appraisals of influential figures in the arts field:; Herbert Reid, the late Peter Fuller and David Holbrook.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781136364518
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/13/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Peter Abbs

Table of Contents

Our Present Predicament. Section 1: On Education as Socratic Enquiry: The Nature of Socratic Learning; Intellectual Research as Socratic Activity. Section 2: On the Philosophy of Arts Education: The Arts in the Public Realm - New Foundations for Aesthetic Education; The Primacy of the Aesthetic - on the Nature of Aesthetic Response and the meaning of the Aesthetic Field; The Generic Community of the Arts - Its Historical Development and Educational Value; From Babble to Rhapsody - On the Nature of Artistic Creativity. Section 3: On the Practice of Arts Education: Educational Drama as Cultural Dispossession; The Teaching of Literature as an Arts Discipline; The Place of Creative Writing in the Development of Teachers. Section 4: Tributes and Evaluations: Herbert Reid, Modernism and the Dilemmas of Self-Expression; Peter Fuller as Art Critic and Educator; David Holbrook, the Tradition of Poetic Humanism and the Teaching of the Arts.