Nothing really original here, but I've been reading lots of Abraham Maslow recently and came across this, which has really gotten me thinking:
I think there's a slightly larger project in the works here based on this and its intersections with some other things I've been reading. Stay tuned...
[C]reative art education, or better said, Education-Through-Art, may be especially important not so much for tuning out artists or art products, as for turning out better people. If we have clearly in mind the educational goals for human beings that I will be hinting at, if we hope for our children that they will become full human beings, and that they will move toward actualizing the potentialities that they have, then, as nearly as I can make out, the only kind of education in existence today that has any faint inkling of such goals is art education. so I am thinking of education through art not because it turns out pictures but because I think it may be possible that, clearly understood, it may become the paradigm for all other education. That is, instead of being regarded as the frill, the expendable kind of thing which it now is [n.b. 1971], if we take it seriously enough and work at it hard enough and if it turns out to be what some of us suspect it can be, then we may one day teach arithmetic and reading and writing on this paradigm. So far as I am concerned, I am talking about all education.Abraham Maslow, "The Creative Attitude," in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. New York: Penguin Books, 1971. 55-68.
I think there's a slightly larger project in the works here based on this and its intersections with some other things I've been reading. Stay tuned...