Reclaiming the Arts: Thoughts on Arts Education and Cultural Diversity

This chapter is an attempt to wrestle with terms and concepts of arts education and cultural diversity. It seeks both to ask questions and to provide direction. It revolves around five topics: Arts and Appreciation; Arts and Education; Arts Education and Cultural Diversity; Range of Research; and Reclaiming the Arts as a Building Block in Cultural Diversity for the sake of Arts Education. The growing tendency to find ‘one language’ by clarifying and defining terms and concepts is replaced here with questions. Questions as tools to serve the conceptual basis for understanding, analysng and designing ways to investigate and work with an idea. A ‘research guide’ consisting of three key questions, followed by ten questions asking what and how, is proposed here to equip its user with open options to stimulate the mind. The main effort in this chapter tends towards finding an answer to one profound question: Why is it that the arts have a major role in cultivating culture and education, and yet, at the same time, amongst the four fields, The Arts, Education, Culture and Diversity, arts receive the smallest consideration? The answer is anchored in understanding that arts in education must rest upon their capacity to develop a better and more joyful life which brings into being humanity, and not necessarily their possible usefulness. The spirit of arts meets ideas of tolerance in the intersection of education and diversity, in the playground where thought should be translated into practice. Reclaiming the arts into arts education and cultural diversity is a quest for humanizing and thus improving the quality of our lives.