A Modern Art Education

This chapter examines modern art’s educational legacy and finds both a continuum of values and the fractured ideals of half realized endeavors. Atypically it crisscrosses boundaries between art education for children and the education of artists exploring moments of conjunction between modernism, progressive education, avant-gardism and alternative forms of pedagogy. The impossibility of doing justice to a chronology of modern art education in a single chapter is circumvented by instead responding to Brian O’Doherty’s invitation to narrativize selective “tales” of modernism in an evocation of Aesop’s fables. Modernism’s enduring parables of charismatic teachers, personal freedom, and radical democracy may have come under scrutiny and been found wanting, but they also remain remarkably persistent. As significant social values once attached to art education continued to be erased the value of these parables as mnemonic antidotes to twenty-first-century neoliberalism should not be underestimated