Reflections on Excellence II

Abstract

xcellence II (1995) is a new version of in Art Education: Ideas and Initiatives, published by NAEA in 1986 and slightly updated in 1987. The book was in its third printing when Mark Hanson assumed the NAEA presidency and selected Excellence and Its Recognition as his theme. The original version of IIhad been invited by then NAEA president Nancy MacGregor as a response to the excellence-in-education movement stimulated by the publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission, 1983), a movement on which we are now gaining some perspective. In the original version, in addition to responding to A Nation at Risk, I also discussed a number of reports and studies (Adler, 1982; Boyer, 1983; Goodlad, 1984; Sizer, 1984), and several works by educational writers who lacked a media connection and thus were denied a large audience for their ideas, for example, Broudy (1981). These works were important for their criticism of conditions detrimental to learning in the schools and for the remedy they proposed: a program of basic, general education composed of conventional subjects as well as literature and the arts. Most of the attention centered on reforming secondary education because it had been neglected in previous discussions of educational reform. II differs from the original version, which stressed the secondary years, in outlining a K-12 art education curriculum. It contains expanded discussions of aesthetic experience and the