“(...) Even if education is by right the instrument through which every individual, in a society like ours, can have access to all sorts of discourses, it follows, however, in its distribution, in what it allows and what it prevents, the lines that are already marked, by distances, by oppositions and by social struggles. [Every educational system is] a political way of maintaining or modifying discourse appropriation, with the knowledge and powers they carry within” (Foucault, 1997: 33, 34).
This statement helps us to identify the two spaces where “art education” can be embodied: in the interiority of the educational system it will answer those lines that the political framework will determine, independently if they are liberal, republican, dictatorial or democratic; in the exteriority it will represent the acceptance of an innate talent that must be perfected, as individually as possible, being this posture, several times, an abdication as well of the political power intervention, for ideological or financial reasons or simply because it considers that is not its obligation.
The historical time allows us the immediate identification of an idea that claims the importance of school and education for human development, whether it is individual or collective. Here we inscribe the question of arts education and why we need it for an harmonious development of children and youngsters, i.e., why it is indispensable for the personal education of every citizen, useful to society. In the opposite side, it is also possible to diagnose a genealogical history of what has been the pedagogical discourse about art(s) that looks into “arts learning outside that desire for radical changes [social, political…] that has limited itself to struggles that rarely question the conceptual construction on which they stand” (Martins, 2009: 45).
Within this double entry, we can consider Thomas S. Popkewitz and Kerry Freedman (1988: 387) who by writing on arts education and the social interests in the American school development underline the several purposes that have been accompanying its development within the curriculum. On one hand, a vocational training in the sense of preparing the student with technical tools able to being used in the nation’s industrial development. On the other hand, the artistic subjects that find justification as part of a moral education understood as illustration of a world of virtues and truth. These principles would be related with the possibility given by arts of a natural children development through free expression, but also the idea that we could reach a state of equality in daily life through an arts education for all citizens.
Depending on the source, the time or the kind of teaching, its semantic meaning helps us to identify pedagogies, political options, artistic conceptions or individual and social expectations. When we refer, for example, to Music, Plastic Arts, Theatre or Dance teaching, we will always be closer to the individual ability, the talent, the family investment or, whenever it is a state initiative, specific goals and social expectations that appear normally clarified in the preambles of enactments or reforms.
Bringing into focus a basic school context – ages between 4 and 10 years old – we will approach the “pre-history” of “doing”, that necessarily appears through “fruition” on this stage. It was with the goal of unleashing and embodying this process that the Arts and Aesthetic Education Programme (PEEA) was born, in Portugal. In 2014, we are the protagonists of its evaluation and with the analysis of all the available data we will seek to make explicit the main tensions between theory and practice, identifiable in a temporal arch that goes from 2010 to 2014.
