ABSTRACT
An historical study of the arts in British education discloses their isolation from each other and their general state of fragmentation. Dance was seen as part of physical education and has been forcibly returned there by the 1988 Education Reform Act; drama for the best part of fifty years has presented itself either as form of enactive psychotherapy or as a learning medium. Music and the visual arts, in contrast, established themselves early on as autonomous arts disciplines but were seldom envisaged as part of any larger aesthetic enterprise. One of the first books to propose something resembling a concept of a common arts community in an educational context was the volume The Arts in Education, edited by James Britton. In The Intelligence of Feeling Witkin struggled to forge a common language for the arts in the context of the secondary curriculum. The effects on the arts were dramatic and contrary to the direction of dominant argument inside education itself.
