1969/10/01 by Michael Parsons · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Art Education and Development #Exposition (narrative) #Aesthetics #Prestige #Value (mathematics) #Painting #Education theory #Sociology #Epistemology #Theory of art #Politics #Visual arts education #Point (geometry) #Psychoanalysis #Psychology #Art #Philosophy #Art history #Visual arts #Higher education #Literature #Law #The arts #Political science
paper · doi:10.2307/3331428
openalex publication_date 1969/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
What does Herbert Read say about theory of education, and what are we to think of what he says? He has been influential in education in a number of ways. He has, for instance, been partly responsible for our interest in the aesthetic value of children's paintings and for our increased reluctance to force adult or realistic styles of art on children. To this, and to many other points, he has lent his prestige as a critic and a historian of art and, what is more interesting from the point of view of this analysis, he has also claimed to support them with a theory. It is this theory that I shall be concerned with here. The exposition and defense of the theory comprise the major parts of his books on education. Though he offers many kinds of empirical evidence on its behalf (for example, evidence from psychology, psychoanalysis, the history of art, anthropology), it is apparent that it is centrally a theory in philosophical aesthetics. Aesthetics, it may be said, is always the starting point of any serious discussion, whether of society, psychology, politics, or education; and the heart of aesthetics, in his view, is the attempt to discover the nature of art. To understand his views on education, therefore, one has to understand what he thinks art is.