Studies on education and art: the consolidation of an endless field

Abstract

The aim of this article is to expose some thoughts on education, art and the connections between both of them, thus exposing the endless essence of this field of study.
Since teacher training is ultimate goal, we will put special emphasis on the connection between subjective processes and aesthetic understanding: the aesthetics of existence as a classic topic in the history of humankind, and training as a complex and rich process of subjectivity production -to train the others and to train oneself as the difficult art of existing.
The place of art in education, the relation between art and education, the place of art in life, the purpose of education, the connections between life, art and education: which one comes first, which one comes last, which one depends and which one is depended on, which one uses the other. What is important is not the content of this problem, is not the answers. It is the very action of questioning that we are interested in questioning.
The corpus of this research is composed of four texts by prestigious Brazilian art teacher Noêmia Varela, teacher at Recife Art School: «Creativity at school and teacher training» (1972) «Movement at Art School: images and ideas» (1973). «The challenge of training human resources for education, through art» (1977) and «Art teacher formation in Brazil» (1984). For this purpose we will compare this material with contemporary papers from the field of education and art, in an attempt to speculate on its infinite research potential.