earticle

영어

Art, and contemporary art in particular, has played a complex and paradoxical role in education. On the one hand it can offer unique modes of expression that provide learners with the means to explain and understand their identity and their life-worlds; on the other hand, art can confound and disrupt ordinary education practices, not lending itself easily to assessment or curricula routines, and furnishing learners with a critical voice that may be unwelcome within mechanistic educational processes. Using some examples drawn from primary school pupils’ conspicuously contemporary artworks, I argue that the presence and viability of these critical and idiosyncratic art practices in schools may be an indicator of the health of an education system as a whole.