Arts Education as Leisure Education

Virtually all expressive practices existing under the banner of the “arts” have become “disaggregated” in Western societies today, to the point where learning and teaching in the arts are not thought of holistically but, rather, in terms of discrete knowledge domains. One learns and specializes in a “subject” or “discipline,” such as visual art, dance, drama, music, and so on. The term arts education, then, is in many contexts a convenient catchall but is empty as a descriptor of a particular practice. One might attempt to engage in philosophical issues related to arts education in a broad sense, but the level of generality involved renders such discussions benign and uninsightful. In this entry, music is taken as a point of focus and analysis, not as pride of place, but as a “case study” from which considerations of other arts disciplines may be applied. The historical-political-geographic context for this entry’s discussion is Anglo-North American, especially of the dominant white...