Historicising an Ocularnormative Future for Art Education

The future of art education is shaped by its past, yet the history of art education in special or segregated schools is largely absent from authorised histories of the subject. Previous historical accounts of educational policy and practice establish art and disability as parallel concerns. However, the emergence of educational institutions to promote the visual arts and the contemporaneous establishment of segregated education for disabled children and young people indicates the significance of capitalist industrialisation on the production of both. Beginning in the mid-19th Century, this paper examines parallel histories and the futurity they imagine via an exploration of two key texts; Arthur Efland’s A History of Art Education, published in 1990 and Michael Royden’s history of the Royal School for the Blind in Liverpool, Pioneers and Perseverence, published in 1991. An increased emphasis on observation and drawing as a means of enhancing quality in British design prescribed an ocularnormative future for art education at this time whilst education at the Royal School for the Blind shifted its emphasis from technical, craft and arts-based training to a literacy-based education. The paper discusses the relevance of these parallel concerns and the apparent inevitability of an ocularnormative future for art education