Against the Flow: Education, the Arts and Postmodern Culture

I found this title on Questia and thought the author's agitation over the diminishing creative and ethical dimension in education is worth considering.



"Against the Flow: Education, the Arts and Postmodern Culture"
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=107641900#





Against the Flow



At once provocative and inspiring, Against the Flow is a work of polemic from an internationally respected writer and thinker on arts education. Peter Abbs argues that contemporary education ignores the aesthetic and ethical as a result of being in thrall to such forces as the market economy and managerial and functional dictates. He identifies the present education system as being inimical to creativity and authentic learning and, instead, narrowly focused on the quantitative measuring of results. This absence of a creative and ethical dimension in education has implications for art making in wider society. Art is shown as emerging from, and appealing to, the ironic, postmodernist sensibility and mass media-led culture, while being devoid of philosophical significance.



Against the Flow opens up a fresh and timely debate about the vital power of creativity in modern education. Drawing on examples from modern poetry, literature and visual art, it is an eloquent and passionate argument for the need to develop ethical and aesthetic energies to confront the growing vacuity of contemporary culture.



Peter Abbs is Professor of Creative Writing, and formerly Professor of Arts Education, at the University of Sussex. He is an established poet who has written extensively on the role and importance of the arts and creativity in education.