Starting from this year's theme 'The Past, Present and Future of Educational Research in Europe', the paper will take the possibility of Michel Foucault's History of the Present as a methodological and theoretical tool to think about the present of arts education. It will take the field of European research and policy trying to identify the main themes and arguments in defense of the arts in education. Doing so, it will allow for the denaturalization of some ideas that appear to be unquestionable in the present, through its historical inscription. To ask questions about the questions we ask will be the main purpose of this presentation. For instance, itaims to provide a platform for thinking about the presence of the arts in education at the present as a practice of governing. Through a historical analysis of the incorporation of the arts in the school curriculum we can see how this was a subject able to promote a political subjectivation of each child as citizen of the future. Freedom and autonomy, considered as being the roots of art practice and creativity, will be put very close to police technologies.

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