The Future of Education

According to the Seoul Agenda, which synthesizes the conclusions of the 2th UNESCO Conference, 2010, arts education must be considered ‘as a fundamental and sustainable component of a high quality renewal of education’, in order to ‘contribute to resolving the social and cultural challenges facing today’s world’. It looks like a quite engaging task: I think that in order to accomplish it we need an epistemological shift. We must take into consideration what the recent developments in neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and creativity studies can tell us about the nature of the arts education. They can help us to understand how relationships and exchanges that take place in the learning environment of the arts education can be examples of a new way to conceive education as a whole. I have synthesized my approach in the I CREATE Paradigm, which means the Intersubjective, Creative, Reflexive, and Enactive Approach To Education. In my latest book (Educazione all’arte/Arte dell’educazione, Milano, FrancoAngeli, 2017) I maintained that intersubjectivity, reflexivity, creativity, and enaction are key concepts to understand the processes of arts education, and that they can provide us with tools to guide them, in order to foster creativity and empathy, which can be major forces to face the challenges of the 3th Millennium. In this paper, I will briefly explore these concept, starting from the research fields where they have been developed. I will show how they can inform a new approach to arts education theory and practice.

Keywords: Arts Education, Creativity, Intersubjectivity, Reflexivity, Enaction;