College of Fine Arts

The University of New South Wales

PO Box 259

PADDINGTON NSW 2021

Email <neil.brown@unsw.edu.au>

Claims of educational value in the arts are motivated by the realisation that, one way or another, the arts are more obliged than other subjects to spell out their wider educational relevance. The marginal position of the arts in education is largely a result of the unique kinds of knowledge they represent. For this reason redressing the marginalisation of the arts is often linked with attempts to redefine and broaden their cognitive structure. Recent evidence of transferability between knowledge in the arts and other curriculum domains is currently advanced as one useful approach. However, different ways of valuing the arts embrace different structural aspects of their knowledge. Thus the facts of transferability between knowledge in the arts and other domains vary according to their interpretation within different frameworks of artistic value.

This paper investigates the impact of three claims of artistic value on the facts of transfer in the arts. It emerges that the extent to which each value claim sifts out different properties of the evidence, weighed against the high levels of abstraction at which the transport of qualitative knowledge occurs, nullifies the usefulness of cognitive transfer as a stratagem against marginalisation in the arts.

The arts are part of a wider group of practices historically referred to as the practical arts. The practical arts include fields such as medicine and engineering. However, unlike medicine and engineering the visual and performing arts are the last of the established fields of practice to gain formal accreditation in Anglo Saxon universities. Nevertheless, it is rare to find any of the present day practical arts, other than music and the visual arts, represented in the curricula of primary and secondary schools. Because the practical arts are vocational they have been historically separated from the education of children. Their tradition of apprenticeship relegates them in most instances to post secondary education. Practical skills have to be rehearsed and coached. They are not easily reduced to the sequential rules and principles commonly found in school subjects. Although children learned pattern drawing and choral singing at school in the nineteenth century, singing and pattern drawing were regarded as general accomplishments at a time when mechanical means of reproduction were limited (Smith 1966). Before the advent of child psychology there was no tradition of acknowledging children's spontaneous expression in practical domains (Fletcher and Welton 1912). The psychological repositioning of the concept of childhood early in the twentieth century, however, changed the role played by subject matter in children's education (Cunningham 1995). Subject matter began to be chosen for its contribution to the development of the child (Thorndike 1914). This created a tension between psychological theories and standards of specialised knowledge in the arts which continues to resonate in the literature of arts education today.

There are three contemporary arguments supporting claims for the importance of education in the arts. The first claim argues that educating children in the arts exposes them to subject content, qualities of experience, conceptual structuring, ways of life, depth of participation, and forms of subjective reasoning that cannot be gained through other subjects or by accidental exposure to the arts in everyday life (Eisner 1972, Clark and Zimmerman 1978, Chapman 1978). However, the claim for the educational particularity of the arts is not enough to make their inclusion within the curriculum a necessity on its own. It requires the additional claim that children accomplished in making and understanding the arts transfer their abilities to everyday life in ways that enrich it uniquely. This view is referred to as the educational claim of inherent value for the arts. According to this strong claim the quality of life is diminished in children who are denied the opportunity for serious engagement in the different artistic modes. Incidental immersion in the arts through play, entertainment and leisure is considered insufficient. Because of their different expressive modalities and their disciplined history, full participation in the individual arts depends upon being schooled in their specialised techniques and expressive traditions.

The second claim argues that while the arts possess their own idiosyncratic modes of expression, provide unique kinds of experience, and offer children singular opportunities for participation they, nevertheless, call upon the use of mental skills and abilities that share a common structure with other subjects. The arts, for example, tend to share in the educational history of other disciplines. The arts had a high profile in the child-centred reforms of the nineteen thirties and forties, and were instrumental in redressing the plight of minorities in the social reconstructionism of the nineteen seventies and eighties (Geahigan 1992:14). While presented in the form of different visual, kinaesthetic and auditory conventions, instrumentalists argue that subject matter in the arts is mentally represented by children in ways that call upon similar frameworks of reasoning used in the humanities and sciences. It is claimed that the visual arts, for instance, place the same emphasis upon the need for literacy and critical thinking as other subjects do. However, when these general skills are adapted to the particular visual/spatial content of the visual arts, for example, they are converted into "domain specific" forms such as "visual literacy", and "visual thinking" (Arnheim 1974). Metaphors of 'reading' and 'communication', even the 'recital' in music, are commonly used in reference to the interpretation of artistic content in music, drama, literature and dance (Hodge and Kress 1988, O'Toole 1994). The educational justification of the arts underlying this claim is twofold. Firstly, the arts provide children with the opportunity to round out their universal repertoire of mental skills. Secondly, the arts are valuable insofar as they provide children with the opportunity to further exercise the general skills which underlie competent involvement in everyday life (Diblasio 1997:103). This view is referred to as the claim of instrumental value for the arts in education.

The third claim is a softer amalgam of the first and the second. It is agreed that the arts have inherent value but that this value is shared amongst the different art forms as a special quality of knowledge. According to this position the arts are a field in which the properties of individual member arts are unified under a number of over-arching epistemological concepts. It is these concepts that lend the arts their educational value. The two most important of these distinguishing concepts are the "creative" and the "aesthetic" (Reimer and Smith 1992: 25). For example, while many disciplines outside the arts place a high value on creative thinking their subject matter is not devoted to the production of creative artefacts to the same degree (Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi 1966). It is also commonly assumed that the arts are transacted educationally through aesthetic kinds of experience (Broudy 1972, Ecker, Johnson and Kaelin 1969, Aesthetic Education Program, Lincoln Center 1999). Despite the complexity of their underlying structures and their differing expressive modalities it is believed that art works, in general, are presented to children as a form of educational content prepared for immediate interpretation. Both the creative and the aesthetic are thought to correspond with native dispositions which allow young children to engage with artworks spontaneously. Under the unifying mechanisms of the creative and the aesthetic children experiencing one art form are understood to be sympathetically rehearsing another. In this way the arts are able to capture the creative and expressive agenda in school education under the one umbrella. Similar claims of unification among the arts are advanced under the theoretical and disciplinary umbrella of Cultural Studies and Multimedia. These generic positions can be referred to as claims of unified knowledge in the arts.

Subject disciplines are included within the curriculum in the belief that the knowledge they provide has a relevance to wider human competencies. Nevertheless it is also generally held that transfer of abilities between one group of specified skills and another only happens when these skills share a level of surface similarity (Hebb 1949).

It is important to point out, however, that some subjects have wider, even if not necessarily deeper, relevance for other disciplines. "Thinner" subject domains, for example, have less difficulty in demonstrating their application to other fields than "thicker" subjects (Geertz 1976, Goodman 1974). The thinnest subjects of all are mathematics and written language. Mathematics is based on a universally applicable system of notation. The rational syntax of mathematical notation is so transparent that it transcends cultural boundaries. Written language systems share common notational structures too, but unlike mathematics their systems have different notational conventions. Because of their semantic thinness mathematics and written languages can be used by other fields without imposing separate meanings upon their specialised concepts and ideas. This means that the wider application of maths and written languages in education is assured. However, it does not mean that mathematical calculation, reading, and writing are general skills. The skills of counting and spelling, for example are very narrow skills. It is merely that the subject domains in which they can be applied are very wide (McPeck 1992:204).

On the other hand, the thickest, densest and most notationally inflexible subjects are the arts (Goodman 1976, Geertz 1976). The arts trade in singular outcomes and original solutions that, while valuable in themselves are not so easily bent into use by other fields. In other words, the notational systems of the arts have more dedicated uses. The arts lack the wider application of the semantically thinner and more notationally articulate subjects. For example, there is little use for the second movement of Brahms Symphony Number Four other than in the playing, appreciating, and understanding of it. The same could be said of the meanings which artworks and performances represent. Artistic subject matter is largely self referential or fictional. While the arts rehearse significant personal and cultural values these values are satisfied in idiosyncratic ways through images and stories, rather than as general claims about reality and truth. Correspondingly the arts benefit less from the precise forms of explanation that notational languages provide. Extremists argue that this hyper-singularity of the arts, in particular the art forms of literature and the visual arts, makes them resistant to teaching because it isolates them from the advantages provided by linguistic knowledge. Teaching programs are inefficient in the arts by comparison with other disciplines, it is suggested, because the resources of written knowledge offer few guarantees of producing artistically valuable outcomes (Brook 1999: 34-36).

Elizabeth Steiner points out that for the reasons set out above the arts fit within the distinctive category of qualitative as opposed to quantitative knowing (1981:56). Darby and Catterall, for instance, cite work by the Galef Institute. The Galef is dedicated to testing the effectiveness of the arts when used by 'at risk' students as a way of coming to learn about social studies (1994:306). It is not clear, however, that the Galef project appreciates the holistic and interpretive potential of the arts as a way of engaging with the world. In this project the arts are used in the simple illustration of social issues rather than for their potential as a distinctively qualitative way of investigating social concepts.

The marginal position of the arts in education is thus as much an implication of the kind of knowledge they represent as anything else. The search for evidence of transferability in supporting claims of educational value in the arts is motivated by the realisation that, one way or another, the arts are more obliged than other subjects to spell out their wider educational relevance. The political use of transfer to redress the marginalisation of the arts is usually accompanied, therefore, by strong attempts to redefine and broaden their knowledge structure (Freedman and Wood 1999). For example, even A. Graham Down, the chief executive of the National Standards for the Arts Project in the USA, uses the commonalities of shared standards between the arts and other disciplines to promote the significance of the arts (Smith 1995: 1-2). Different ways of valuing the arts emphasise different aspects of their knowledge structure by highlighting either their cognitive uniqueness or their generalisability. Thus the facts of the transferability of knowledge and skills between the arts and other domains make little sense outside their interpretation within frameworks of artistic value.

Given that the arts are marginalised in the curriculum by the aesthetic density of their knowledge, to some extent, the deepest inroads into their marginalisation has been made by reconception of their cognitive structure. This reconception, eloquently supervised by the North American pragmatists Langer (1952), and Goodman (1976), and later by the psychologists Gardner and Perkins, has repositioned the arts alongside other disciplines as a representational system of thought. The distinguishing features of artistic thinking and thinking in other fields, is thrown into relief by the structural differences between the arts and by the challenges they pose for representational thought.

The result is interesting and worth elaborating. One of the main props of cognitive theory is the intuition, first set out by Franz Brentano in the nineteenth century, that when a person thinks they must be thinking about something (1973). From Brentano's point of view the 'intentional' processes of thinking are indivisibly united with the structure of the content being thought about. As a result cognitive theorists have begun to revisit the content of subject fields in order to survey the vast array of physical and mental performances, or "intelligences", involved in their mental representation (Perner 1991). The abstractions in which these different intelligences are couched make little sense, therefore, until they are expressed within the concrete modes of conventional artistic performances such as writing, drawing and playing the piano. What is emerging from this review of content is an inventory of more or less discrete cognitive "domains". For example, when children reflect upon and speculate about other people's motives it is figured that they are engaged in a vernacular kind of psychological reasoning. This 'folk' psychology takes on an identify as a new domain of thought (Bruner 1990). The search for these domains within cognitive science has helped to restructure the traditional fields of knowledge from which they are drawn.

Needless to say the arts are far from a discrete domain. Cognitivists argue that the arts are divided by their spatial, temporal and kinaesthetic modalities of expression. This diversity is matched by the view that all of the arts, despite their modal diversity, are underwritten by symbol systems of one kind or another (Gardner 1982, 1983). These systems serve to do two things. First they invest each modality with representational or symbolic content. When drawing, for example, children call upon mental resources to solve spatial problems in the graphic representation of real objects and imaginative ideas (Freeman 1997, Freeman and Brown 1998). Under this representational aegis drawing, for example, is perceived as a domain of spatial reasoning backed up by a repertoire of graphic notational strategies. Many of these notational devices in drawing are conventional, some are innate, others are worked out creatively on site in order to satisfy the localised needs of a particular drawing task. Some eventually emerge as a mature personal style. Music has a rigorous notational form supporting native intuitions within the temporal domain such as an ear for melody and tempo (Catan 1989). Dance has its own repertoire of kinaesthetic notations, and so on for language and the other arts.

Secondly children, with maturity, begin to expand their understanding of art beyond the horizon of technical control to reflect upon the 'hidden' agencies which collaborate in artistic production. They begin to pose questions, examine evidence, hypothesise answers, evaluate possible outcomes and debate the merits of what it means more generally to function as an artist. Thus, in tandem with a growing mastery of notational and technical skills in specific domains, children begin to understand what it is to use these skills in ways consistent with a concept of the arts (Freeman and Sanger 1995).

Cognitive analysis of the arts has consequently opened up a way of understanding how children come to grasp the relationships between different expressive modalities in the arts. These linkages only make practical sense if they can be understood against a solid background of experience within the traditional modes of artistic expression. Even in musical theatre, the cinema, and in multimedia, where multiple artforms are commonly synthesised, it is knowledge of the differentiated routines of the arts that enables their synthesised production. The reverse is not true, however, insofar as management techniques and higher order concepts in the arts are not able, in return, to generate conventional skills in particular domains. In general, then, it is from high levels of accomplishment in the specific skills of the arts that a more abstract and reflective conception of their artistic function emerges. Annette Karmiloff-Smith refers to this reflective ability as "representational redescription" (1991: 15-26). Until automaticity is acquired in a skill children's attention is too self consciously distracted by the complexity of the task to conceive of the skill as a whole and thus of the uses to which it can be put (Staines 1999:126). Perkins and Salomon refer to representational redescription as the "low road"-"high road" mechanism of transferability. Skills tacitly mastered in context, the "low road", are committed to memory where they are clumped into the "high road" of a generalised principle (1989:19). When confronted with a new but seemingly relevant context where they are alerted, for example, to a different musical interpretation by the teacher, the child is able to conceive of ways of redeploying their skills. It is with growth in this increasingly reflective or "metacognitive" ability, under relevant conditions, that the most fertile possibilities for transfer are to be found both in the arts and in education.

Nevertheless, this doesn't preclude the role of mental imagery in processes such as reasoning (Whitaker and Markovits 1992). Non-verbal mental models play an important role in the making of autonomous inferences such as the ability to reason from counterfactual or false premises (Johnson-Laird 1996). Reasoning, usually presented in the verbal mode, is located in the right hemisphere and can be enacted without the need for the verbal comprehension of premises. Imagery also appears to be enacted through the same mechanisms and located in the same centres as perception. There is strong evidence that perception of reality is forearmed by imagination. This suggests that perception is a kind of representational dialogue conducted between sensory information and imagination (Kosslyn and Sussman 1996:1040). The link between perception and reasoning implies that the mental mechanisms involved in the efficient processing of different subject matter in the curriculum entail executive forms of redirection and overlap that are far more subtle than the bald modal divisions among school subjects imply. For instance, just because the visual arts nominate a visual mode doesn't mean that an accomplished performer doesn't recruit complex layers of tacit and reflective mental processing.

Van Sommers is also keen to draw a distinction between the vernacular and artistic purposes of drawing (1984: 233). Artistically directed drawing is respectful of hidden conventions. These conventions originate outside the drawing context somewhere within the history of art. The values underlying the concept of "abstraction", for example, run counter to young children's search for graphic verisimilitude. The notion of abstraction is counter intuitive within vernacular drawing and therefore opaque within the drawing process. In other words even although children are quite able to learn how to make 'abstract ink drawings', and may stumble across them in the process of drawing spontaneously, they are unlikely to register the importance of their 'discoveries' without tuition. The message here is that the arts cannot claim a mandate on innate abilities such as spatial and temporal reasoning, since what the arts bring as complex content to children doesn't fit neatly into the boundaries of native intuition. Thus studies into the enhancing effects on general educational achievement through exposure to 'the arts' may suffer from taking insufficient account of the complex theoretical and historical relationship that art forms share with their various expressive modalities (Letts 1999: 24).

Catterall's claim that children's exposure to educational experiences in music correlate with enhanced performances in unrelated fields, are based on experiments in which the reflective involvement of the children participating is largely set aside (1998, 1996, Boston 1994, Weinberger 1998). There is little evidence that explain how skills originating at sub-automated levels in music generalise into other disciplines, let alone from instrument to instrument within music itself (Wolff 1978, Staines 1999). Even though mathematics and music share abstract notational systems Staines, citing recent, 1995 studies by Rauscher et al, sees little grounds for accepting claims that ordinary levels of musical experience correlate with enhanced logical reasoning (129). Weinberger argues, however, that there are good biological reasons why musical cognition has at least the potential to transfer across disciplines. The musical instinct is deeply embedded he says. Even animals demonstrate primitive musical awareness. Musical aptitude crosses cultural boundaries. Studies conducted in early childhood reveal the innate ability of infants to "chunk" melodies into smaller phrases and to recognise rhythms. At neonatal levels the mental faculties responsible for the discrimination of musical pitch are shared with those that underpin the phonemic stage in learning to read (Lamb and Gregory 1993). Weinberger claims that the "functional architecture of the brain honours music as much as it honours language" (37). Nonetheless, he all but concedes that transfer is as yet only a musical hypothesis of neuroscience (36). After all, the reciprocal advantages reading offers for the enhancement of musical understanding are enormous but for some reason barely rate a mention outside the literature of music education. This point is not lost on Burton et al who reflects on the difficulty of sorting analytically among those "indicators of learning [which] are situated within the arts alone and which are more generally implicated" (2000: 230-231).

Instrumentalist advocacy of the social benefits of the arts in education can be patronising, even maudlin if taken to extremes. Teachers in the arts must be irritated by the anthropological "... claims of sociological benefit of the arts" that stress advantages that only ever seem to flow to the poor, the academically challenged, and the unmotivated (Modrick 1998:4). The irony is that recent demographic studies continue to support Bourdieu's structural thesis that knowledge and interest, in both the high and popular arts, continues to be the preserve of professional elites in the community (Bennett, Emmison and Frow 1999). Political use of mural painting by William Kelly and the Bogside Artists in Belfast, and subsistence dependence on the production of 'cultural' artefacts in the third world, are more likely to be the products of social and cultural repression than a social benefit bestowed by the arts. Social benefit programs may also reinforce the myth that the arts are irrelevant to academically gifted children. Even Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences is sometimes defensively represented as a concession to academic underachievers.

The degree to which abstract reasoning can build a bridge of understanding between different levels of skill in the arts governs the extent to which children are able to consciously transfer artistic abilities to domains in other fields of study. Thus far it is accomplished virtuosity, rather than the simple practice of domain specific skills in piano playing, music reading, keyboard skills, drawing, 'visual' thinking, and theatrical role playing, that appears to influence children's ability to metarepresent and thus transfer these skills among other fields. In this respect the specialised skills of the arts do not have a monopoly on transfer. Skills in the arts become transferable at higher levels of reasoning in which the cognitive character of artistic involvement more closely resembles higher levels of reasoning in other fields.

Nevertheless, whereas most academic subjects respect but put aside creative freedom in their syllabi, the "creative" arts make it a priority and thereby claim something of a mandate on the creative and the aesthetic in education. Their mandate is entrenched in the popular belief that education in the arts plays a special role in the generation of imaginative ideas, in developing a respect for the idiosyncratic responses of participants, in being considerate of feelings, and on the toleration of a diversity of critical ideas (Broudy 1972, Boston 1996).

Unifying constructs in the arts have a tendency to favour art appreciation over performance in education. Generic approaches thrive best in their vernacular form within the primary school, general education, the community arts and under their superficial application within digital technology (DeNardo 1997). In these settings participation in the arts is shielded from the specialised rigours of technical competency and from the deeper conceptual understanding required of the actor, dancer, musician and visual artist. With steady increases in the demand for specialised knowledge in secondary school, the arts in education are forced to shed their generality and reaffirm their separate identities. Hargreaves describes this transition in music as "The distinction between generalist and specialist music education." The distinction has led to tension within the teaching profession (1996:167). Music education is polarised on the one hand by children's normative or native access to musical explanation, and by their access to specialist explanations on the other. Normative versus specialist sides of musical knowledge are accompanied by their own parallel vernacular and specialist theories of developmental reasoning as well. By contrast mathematics and writing, for example, manifest no comparable generic levels of spontaneous expression. Although learning to write depends on memory and other intuitive mental resources, literacy itself is a conventional routine that is only acquired through deliberate instruction. Literacy continues to allude many millions of people in possession of otherwise rich artistic traditions.

As the arts return to their disciplines in the later years of schooling the spontaneous contribution of the aesthetic, the creative and the cultural in the arts is reduced to an increasingly emblematic role within education where they survive as critical ideals. With the demand for greater specialisation the native support they lend to children's spontaneous artistic activity diminishes correspondingly. More challenging to the validity of umbrella concepts in the arts are the flawed psychological assumptions that underpin them, an issue taken up in the following section.

In the last forty years challenges to the validity of universal concepts in the humanities have resulted in greater contextualisation of knowledge in the arts. Actions, events, and facts in the visual arts, for example, are invariably contextualised in relation to the beliefs of particular times and places. Cognitive theories have been compelled to respect these changes and to find ways of accommodating to the historical embeddedness of knowledge. The notion of intelligence as a kind of generalised mental disposition embraces obsolete psychology that fails to portray intellect as a meaningful interpretation of content (Neisser 1976, Piaget 1970, Chomsky 1976). Since the early nineteen seventies the notion of intelligence has been described as competency in the use of different systems of symbolic meaning. It is accepted that the knowledge represented within these systems, although securely anchored within specific domains, is constantly being reshaped. Consequently reference to the aesthetic and the creative as stable, discrete mental abilities is unlikely to be found in contemporary art theory nor in the literature of cognitive science (Danto 1964, Goodman 1976, Gardner 1983).

Once conceived as autonomous acts of imagination, creative and aesthetic abilities in music, the visual arts, drama and dance are now described as forms of symbolic competency that are acted out within particular artistic, musical, and dramatic traditions (Fodor 1975, Perkins 1994). These artistic traditions are subject to unpredictable and catastrophic change. Nevertheless, it is the way in which children represent these traditions within their actions, and the way that changes in these traditions redescribe the representational demands upon children's' performances that defines the flux of knowing in the arts (Korosic, Short, Stavropoulos, and Fortin 1992). Gardner and Nemirovsky go so far as to admit that the influences shaping the world's most outstandingly creative achievements are so embedded within their historical contexts that their causes cannot be confined to the intentions of their creators (1991). Jerome Bruner portrays cognition as the ability of individuals to apply traditional folk narratives in the re-interpretation of knowledge (1990). Lev Vygotsky and his contemporary disciples such as Barbara Rogoff, see intellect as so profoundly bound up with the problems arising out of knowledge at hand, that local constraints upon knowing as much shape mental abilities as are shaped by them (1982). The generic stories of creativity and the aesthetic in the arts are thus being retold as small intertextual narratives (Burgin 1986:204). Local narratives provide the basis on which children are able to conceptualise what it is to function within the arts (Pariser 1997). They are what children use to give artistic meaning to what they make and see.

The doctrinaire cultural relativism of the nineteen eighties has given ground as well. Cultural authenticity is accepted as a more reflective appropriation of sources that "insist upon the mixed and displaced character of modern selves and cultures" (Thomas 1999:16). It allows indigenous cultures to participate in the art educational process at individual levels in ways that enable them to take from the modern experience of the Western arts yet retain their "radically different ground" (17).

Others are less generous in their attitude to generic concepts. David Best heads the list of philosophers who question the genus of the collective "arts" themselves, the grandest of all the umbrella narratives (1995:38). He states bluntly that "For example, the activities of playing the clarinet, composing poetry, creating a sculpture, performing or choreographing dance..." are not in the least similar, but nevertheless "...some defenders of the theory resort to the unintelligibly occult in postulating purely private "inner," subjective mental processes (37)". Grand assumptions unifying the arts are not only logically flawed, he insists, they are dangerous. They suggest that the

Best is careful not to denigrate integrated work among the arts but such ventures, he says, derive from "an adequate education in independent disciplines (38)." In placing this caveat on integration in the arts Best falls into line with Perkins' and Karmiloff-Smith's approach to transfer.

The tide has begun to ebb on the concept of 'talent' as a predisposition in the arts. Whereas, for example, tertiary institutions in the visual arts once believed drawing to be the universal predictor of giftedness, drawing has been replaced by tertiary entrance rankings as the basis for selection into programs of art and design (College of Fine Arts 2000) Many 'artistic abilities' including, for instance, a sense of colour, an extrovert personality, a creative disposition, a sense of rhythm and so on, are left stranded (Korzenik 1995). Music education has long accepted that musical giftedness is indivisibly linked with accelerated opportunities in musical training. This view is evidenced through its continuing support for conservatorium schools. Musical giftedness only makes sense as it is differentiated within the localised and changing practices of musical performance. This is not to overlook the fact that within the biology of music there is convincing evidence, at neonatal levels, of mental faculties responsible for the discrimination of musical pitch (Lamb and Gregory 1993). In sum, however, there are no thoroughly culture independent measures of mental ability. While there are mental skills such as 'critical thinking' and 'problem solving' that some educationalists believe continue to generalise across the subject matter of different fields, many arts educationists believe skills of this sort remain abstractions that possess little meaning outside the cultural details of artistic performance (Tunks 1992:444, Brown 1994, Parsons 1987).

Fields of practice are not the only focus of popular interest in the arts in education. That to engage in art in our hyper-individualistic world we have to do more than learn how to do art, we must learn how to be an artist. Rather than learning a set of qualifying techniques we must learn to behave as artists do. Is teaching art, then, based on a fundamental representation of what artists think and actually do, and in recording how they do it? It is common to generalise the personality of the artist as a paradigm of the autonomous and assured individual. Does this imply that the legacy of arts education to the wider world is the fostering of a particular kind of valued personality? Certainly the contract between educational preparation and artistic qualification is not as widely agreed upon as it was before the first half of the twentieth century. Joseph Margolis at the University of Pennsylvania thinks that avant garde-ism and the modernist cult of creative originality have deregulated the conventions of art (1999:12-13). The deregulation of technical and symbolic convention has made it necessary to study the visual arts as if hyper-individualistic practice was a coherent culture. Robert Hughes has remarked that Americans generally, and artists in particular in the late nineteen nineties, accept a sectarian division of "culture" almost to the point where they feel that one person's desires may constitute some sort of culture in themselves. It is not so surprising, however, that the venerated ideal of the autonomous artist and the bohemian actor is unsupported by the evidence (Carroll 1998).

Nonetheless, it is wise to treat the popular mythology of the arts with respect. Despite the opposing philosophical and cognitive evidence, there may be other very good practical reasons for letting the public down gently. Based on his review of the current academic literature Staines reports deep reservations about the educational transfer of musical skills (e.g., Spencer 1998:23). Yet in reference to current press reports into these alleged academic benefits, he observes wryly

The constant need for the arts in education to seek redemption through reading and mathematics appears to be a symptom of its own uncertainties. The earnest obsession with marginality in the curriculum gives the appearance of a field that is still unassured of its identity.

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