ABSTRACT
Frederick Douglass famously observed in 1855 that, “knowledge unfits a child to be a slave” (1987, p. 92). Decades later the musicians Michelle Shocked and Fiachna O’Braonain made a similar claim when they named their 1996 album Artists Make Lousy Slaves. Art, they seem to be saying, provides a kind of education that particularly unfits its practitioners for a constrained life. A wide range of theorists and practitioners of the arts and education have expressed similar ideas, noting how art stimulates participants, including both viewers and makers, against complacency and toward possibility. For example, in Art as Experience John Dewey (1934) claimed for art a central place in education, describing how “imaginative vision” and “the first intimations of a better future are always found in works of art” (pp. 345-346). Philosopher Maxine Greene has also written eloquently and often about the relationship of the arts to social transformation. “[T]he arts,” she says, “will help disrupt the walls that obscure . . . spheres of freedom” (1988, p. 133). This chapter explores this and other ideas about the role of the arts in education and for social justice.
