THE AIM of this special section of Kappan is to change way you think about arts in American schools. The dominant of arts is one that distances them from complex and subtle forms of thought. Abstraction, so this common goes, is a process that belongs to sciences and to mathematics. The arts are more engaged with matters of feeling and with use of hand, and they rely more on imagination than There is some truth to that arts traffic in feelings and that they employ hand--or foot or voice or gesture--to do their important work. But it is a mistake to believe that such characteristics remove arts from matters of mind. The essays in this section--written by scholars steeped in music, visual arts, dance, and cognition--make another case and provide another of educational functions of arts. The importance of understanding this view is critical for making wise judgments about content and aims of school programs and place of arts in those programs. No decision is of greater importance than determining what to teach and toward what ends. Subjects whose educational value is misunderstood are often marginalized in curriculum, thus robbing students of opportunities to learn what these fields have to offer. But what someone doesn't know or have an opportunity to learn may be as important as what someone does know. Thus, when we make decisions based upon faulty conceptions of features or functions of a field, we risk creating a null curriculum, a curriculum whose significance resides in what it leaves out rather than what it puts in, one that diminishes students' opportunity to experience world through lenses that excluded field provides. Indeed, I would say that current context in American education, a context focused on measurement of achievement with respect to discrete standards, provides most compelling reason for arts in our schools. When education policy emphasizes display and achievement of uniformity, when it diminishes opportunities for imagination to flourish, when it considers metaphor and ambiguity to be problematic, both argument and need for arts become even stronger. The central theme of this section of Kappan is the arts and intellect. We don't normally relate intellect to arts. The intellect typically connotes something that is both profound and abstract. Models of intellection are created mainly by scholars working outside of arts. Insofar as schools strive to be intellectual rather than merely academic places--a rare but important aspiration--the models that are routinely appealed to are, as I indicated above, mathematics and sciences. Where does such an idea come from? How did it become a part of our perspective on content of school programs? The roots of such beliefs hark back to Plato and his conception of realms of reality. One of these realms Plato called intellectual world, other visible world. The visible world encompassed things that human beings made with their hands. It also consisted of shadows and reflections of things that one encountered in life. Both were vague and fugitive reflections of what is real. The intellectual world, on other hand, was concerned with ideas about things and, even more profoundly, with ideas about ideas, latter being purview of philosophy. For Greeks, reasoning had little to do with matters of feeling and much to do with matters of rationality. Rationality itself was conceptualized narrowly to refer to relationship between reason and language. Reason needed language to flourish. Given this perspective, it is not surprising that arts took on a marginal position. They were conceived of as imitations that did not depend on reason. They still are. In describing Plato's hierarchy of knowledge, which Socrates discusses in Book Six of The Republic, I do not wish to give impression that reason for marginalizing arts has anything to do with a rational analysis of contributions that different subjects make to educational development of young. …