Soft Boundaries: Re-Visioning the Arts and Aesthetics in American Education

(Hardback)

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American education and culture are suffering from a terrible, soul-numbing imbalance, in which there is an overemphasis on basic, quantifiable skills and knowledge and a de-emphasis of more creative areas of the humanities, especially the arts and aesthetics. Detels indicates that the marginalization of the arts and aesthetics in American education has been caused by a hard-boundaried paradigm that has come to dominate American education. According to this paradigm, the arts are wrongly viewed and taught as separate, unconnected disciplines of music, visual arts, dance, and theater, while their intimate connections to each other and to aesthetic experience and life in general are completely unrepresented. The way out of this crisis is to change paradigms, from a hard-boundaried, single-minded valuation of specialization to a more soft-boundaried curriculum that allows for specialized education in individual art forms as well as widespread interdisciplinary integration of the arts with each other and with general education at the K-12 and college levels. Without such a change, we will be unable to equip our students with the necessary skills to understand and communicate about the increasingly complex, sensually immersive artistic media and forms of the future.

Reviews

"A compelling, communicative, penetrating book. It will engage wide audiences across different disciplines, the different arts, the humanities and the educators, both scholars, practitioners, and all those who care about the arts, about being moved, stimulated intellectually, and inspired."-Liora Bresler Associate Professor Curriculum and Instruction University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
"Detel's paradigm relaxes arbitrary academic distinctions to show how we can educate our young citizens to comprehend new dimensions of sensory knowledge. This book will stimulate important thinking."-Anita Silvers Professor of Philosophy San Francisco State University
"Here, Claire Detels dares to rattle the cages of the status quo in music education and presents her own broader and integrated vision, replete with practical examples."-Estelle Jorgensen Editor, Philosophy of Music Education Review
"This compelling analysis of the academic autism' that results from the over-specialization and, hence, the fragmentation of musical study and education in public schols and universities will be read profitably by anyone concerned about the weak state of music in schools and society. It is especially valuable for musicians in academe whose favored paradigms, the author argues, have wrought unintended and unfortunate consequences. The issues raised are important but are seldom addressed with such comprehensiveness and forthrightness. The critique is clearly articulated, even-handed and well-argued. The proposed softening' of boundaries between specialties within music, between music and the other arts deserves discussion, especially in terms of the practical models suggested from the author's own teaching experiences."-Thomas A. Regelski, Ph.D. Distinguished Professor of Music SUNY Fredonia, NY

Author Bio

CLAIRE DETELS is Professor of Music, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.