ABSTRACT
Established scholarship in arts education has become, over many decades, closely informed by theories of human development founded on notions of multiple intelligence and experiential learning. Partly because of the speciality and the peculiarity of arts practice, and because of the assumption that creativity is regarded as somehow linked to forms of learning that come about “through the arts,” scholars like Jerome Bruner, Victor Lowenfeld and Howard Gardner have been instrumental in shifting educational theory away from the idea of received knowledge, while moving closer to experiential learning where intelligence and knowledge are recognized as plural events within a variegated process of creativity, growth and development. A sense of learning that is predicated on growth and experience positions the arts within education as a discipline that is expected to fulfil a distinctly creative engagement with the world. Disinterested education is a dialectical space where autonomy is confronted by its other.
