Artistic Education and the Possibilities for Citizenship Education

Overview & Synopsis

Citizenship education and education in the arts are not usually regarded as related. In this application of normative political theory to the nature and purpose of creative and arts-based education, the authors argue that they share some of their basic features and can complement each other in practice. Distinguishing artistic education from aesthetic education, the authors take Iris Marion Young's defence of communicative democracy as a framework for exploration and critique. This enables the authors to apply Young's reservations about deliberation--understood as rational discourse that leads to the best argument winning--as an appropriate description of interaction between citizens and as a model for learning in citizenship education. Through selected examples, the authors show how Young's notions of greeting, rhetoric, storytelling and gift-giving can foster forms of democratic citizenship, through the arts, which escape the dangers of the neo-liberal forms of citizenship implicated in an economy of exchange.