Oh dear, what can the (subject) matter be? (combating schism in arts education)

In a world in which we seem to be increasingly connected by technology, there appears to be a concurrent institutional trend toward schism in some of our educational practices - schism that separates us from subject matter, from direct experience with content, and sometimes from the individual in the collective student body. It is ironic that in today's global community, in which advances in communication have given us instant access to each other, the explosion of data is sometimes driving us away from the individual, leading us to homogenize our official views of human activity. ...