Soft Boundaries: Re-Visioning the Arts and Aesthetics in American Education

American education and culture are suffering from a terrible, soul-numbing imbalance, in which there is an overemphasis on basic, quantifiable skills and knowledge and a de-emphasis of more creative areas of the humanities, especially the arts and aesthetics. Detels indicates that the marginalization of the arts and aesthetics in American education has been caused by a hard-boundaried paradigm that has come to dominate American education. According to this paradigm, the arts are wrongly viewed and taught as separate, unconnected disciplines of music, visual arts, dance, and theater, while their intimate connections to each other and to aesthetic experience and life in general are completely unrepresented.

The way out of this crisis is to change paradigms, from a hard-boundaried, single-minded valuation of specialization to a more soft-boundaried curriculum that allows for specialized education in individual art forms as well as widespread interdisciplinary integration of the arts with each other and with general education at the K-12 and college levels. Without such a change, we will be unable to equip our students with the necessary skills to understand and communicate about the increasingly complex, sensually immersive artistic media and forms of the future.

CLAIRE DETELS is Professor of Music, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.