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...

'Against The Flow' is a provocative and eloquent argument for the need to reconsider the role and nature of arts education so that education as a whole is liberated from a narrow focus shaped by the market economy, and for education to become an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.

Written with both the cultural and moral crisis and the challenge of the future in mind, Peter Abbs's book charts an open, clear, and positive way forward for education. Divided into four sections, the first examines the true and fitting ends of education and outlines a positive conception of education as an initiation into critical enquiry and the personal art of learning. The two middle sections consider aesthetic education. Abbs confronts government approaches to arts teaching and offers an alternative dynamic paradigm within which the creativity of the culture (transmitted down the ages)...

Alongside Living Powers and A is for Aesthetic this book is intended to establish a conceptual frame for the Arts in Education series. The first and primary aim of this symposium is to put teachers of all the arts in touch with some of the most recent and the best writing on the nature of art by art-makers, educationalists and seminal critics. This in itself is to foster generative conceptions and to promote a sense of connection between the arts. Such an intellectual forum is vital, particularly at the present time when, with the waning of Modernism, there is a real need for new...

Alongside Living Powers and A is for Aesthetic this book is intended to establish a conceptual frame for the Arts in Education series. The first and primary aim of this symposium is to put teachers of all the arts in touch with some of the most recent and the best writing on the nature of art by art-makers, educationalists and seminal critics. This in itself is to foster generative conceptions and to promote a sense of connection between the arts. Such an intellectual forum is vital, particularly at the present time when, with the waning of Modernism, there is a real need for new...

A collection of anthologies, resource and reference books, including titles from Oscar Wilde, Mary Shelley, Alex Madina, Jo Phillips and Adrian Barlow.

When originally published this was the first book to offer a collective history of all the arts - Art, Drama, Dance, Music, Literature and Film - in the curriculum. It also offers a coherent framework for the teaching of arts which is in line with the best current trends since the Gulbenkian Report of 1982. It insists that the arts, seen together should be an essential part of the national curriculum.

This volume reaffirms the indispensable place of the arts in any coherent curriculum. The author hopes that the specific arguments formulated in the book will advance the conservationist post-Modernist aesthetic.

When originally published this was the first book to offer a collective history of all the arts - Art, Drama, Dance, Music, Literature and Film - in the curriculum. It also offers a coherent framework for the teaching of arts which is in line with the best current trends since the Gulbenkian Report of 1982. It insists that the arts, seen together should be an essential part of the national curriculum.