DBAE Literature Project

The idea of disciplined-based art education that was associated with the Getty Center for Education in the Arts (later renamed the Getty Education Institute for the Arts and eventually discontinued) during the 1980s and 1990s can be understood as contributing to a major effort by writers in the field of art education since mid-century to recast the aims and teaching of art in the schools. The Getty initiative, in other words, was not novel or revolutionary; it took its lead from existing ideas in the field which held that the teaching of art in the schools should be more substantive and demanding. Recognizing the error of past efforts to reform art education that attempted to bypass the field, Getty policymakers understood the wisdom of involving the field in significant ways. It was perceived that the field was moving in the direction of increasing the intellectual content of aesthetic learning by engendering in young people a well-developed sense of art that is precondition for the intelligent and sensitive engagements of works of art and other things from an aesthetic point of view.

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