ABSTRACT
The preceding examination of policy suggested that policy-making for aesthetic education can occasionally be guilty of bad faith and special pleading. As these notions are commonly associated with ideological thinking, it has now become appropriate to ask about the meaning of ideology and how ideological attitudes affect our deliberations about art and aesthetic education. The topic of ideology was briefly alluded to in Chapter 1 with a reference to the reduction of art to nonaesthetic values implicit in certain strands of Marxism. I now want to approach the subject more directly by looking at different senses of “ideology” in the literature of aesthetic education. First, however, a few observations on the meaning of the term and its use in discussions of the relations between art and society.
