ABSTRACT
Children are often invited to express themselves, but adults often do not wish to accept the self expressed, for example, because it is 'immature'. For many thinkers, art is a distinctive medium or form of self-expression, which is distinguished by its capacity to enable us to reach parts of ourselves which other activities cannot reach. But 'making evident one's deepest feelings' is a rather more sophisticated conception of self-expression than that which has sometimes been articulated and practised in arts education and which is criticized in other volumes of the Falmer Press Library on Aesthetic Education, for example, in Living Powers. In the long term, the limited and limiting notion of self-expression could only lead to impoverished practice, the endless reproduction of the same minimal gestures, formulae, notations, brush-strokes, possibly original but not for that reason of any artistic worth.
