For some time it has been widely believed by many art educators that most curriculum schemes devised for use in general education do not adapt well to the visual arts. For a number of different reasons, frequently centered around the verbal bias inherent in such general schemes and the emphasis placed almost exclusively on cognitive learning, art educators have not found existing plans particularly useful. Although attempts have been made to alter some of these schemes (Wilson, 1971; Brouch, 1973), art educators have not embraced these redesigns wholeheartedly because many of the weaknesses inherent in the original designs are retained in the altered and adapted schemes. For these reasons, it would seem fruitful to offer a model for consideration which responds to the non-verbal and intuitive character of learning in the visual arts and which is framed to deal specifically with content in the visual arts. This author has previously (1979) categorized content for study in the visual arts, reviewed and criticized several major schemes for categorizing learning (or knowledge), adapted a scheme from among those reviewed which appeared most responsive to the concerns of visual arts educators for use in visual arts higher education, and developed a model for considering the interaction of content and learning for the purposes of developing and evaluating curricula. It is the purpose of this article to generalize several of these ideas and to present them in a manner and context which may prove useful to art educators at a variety of levels. While the ideas when first developed were aimed at studio art programs, they appear to have an inherent utility which renders them potentially applicable beyond the limited scope of the original study. Accordingly, the author will attempt to suggest ways in which the ideas set forth herein may be adapted for situations other than studio programs in visual arts higher education. Method