Culture Is Dead. Long Live Culture!

Before saying what I think constitutes the most important contribution to policy for arts education, at least during the second half of the century, I will briefly discuss the cultural and educational atmosphere in which arts education finds itself today.

In his A. W. Mellon Lectures of 1973,(1) presented eight years after the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts and all the intensive efforts made on behalf of the arts that followed in its wake, Jacques Barzun, perhaps our most important cultural historian and Critic, assessed the value and drawbacks of art in ...