ABSTRACT
Aristotle was one of the fIrst to propose in his Poetics that the arts belong structurally together (though the idea would seem to be implicit in Plato's Republic). In his account, Aristotle lists dance, drama, music, literature and art, the five arts that with the exception of film (arriving as a dramatic addition to the arts in our own century) have remained the art forms central to western culture, the fme arts, as they have often been called. Aristotle's work could be justly deemed the fIrst structuralist account of the arts. While mostly concentrating on
The
R.S. Peters and in the US, the work of Philip Phenix and Howard Gardner. Much of the thinking about the arts in education, as we have seen in earlier chapters, has had to struggle against the grain of the pre-selections and pre-locations of subjects, and, beyond that, against the profound apathy of the English towards all sensuous cultural manifestations, all eruptions or revolutions of compelling thought and feeling, whether foreign or indigenous. These initiatives have been badly hampered by a lack of a philosophical tradition in both educational thinking and in aesthetics. They have been overdependent on psychology and sociology. In particular, they have worked alone in a kind of hermeneutic isolation, sometimes forging an uncongenial language, often unwittingly repeating what had been done in some other pocket of isolation before them. It is becoming increasingly clear at the end of the twentieth century that they were also too deeply influenced by the most questionable assumptions of modernism and progressivism (and, one must add, Marxism), all of which turned mindlessly away from the past, thus seriously neglecting the vital cultural continuum transmitted down the generations. These major ideologies led to either an elevation of contemporary and ideologically relevant work or of the self-expressing, self-emoting solitary individual.
