Idealism and some other “isms” in art education

a historical-critical approach

Abstract

The history of visual arts education in Brazil is permeated with moments of rupture or continuity, according to the aesthetic traditions and political reality of each period, denoting advances and setbacks from the colonial era to neoliberalism, while still reproducing the interests of the dominant class. The objective of this article is to demonstrate how the currents of thought that most influenced the teaching of visual arts since the last half of the 20th century reproduce idealist foundations that fragment the understanding of reality, contributing to the project of bourgeois domination, even when wrapped in a liberating discourse. Methodologically, categories from the thought of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Vygotsky, Lukács, Saviani, and other thinkers anchored in historical and dialectical materialism were used to provide a critique of the idealism present in the practice and theory of arts education in Brazil. By identifying and understanding idealism in art education, the teacher appropriates a foundation that will be the basis for critiquing the exclusion of the working class from the authentic artistic experience in school. By understanding aesthetic development as something that happens from the interior of the student to the social, there is an inversion of the reality of the facts, pointing to false solutions isolated from reality as a whole. Various constructivist, postmodernist, intercultural, and multidisciplinary discourses present in art education are also philosophically founded in idealism, and when uncovered, they enable a critique of capitalist interests within these foundations and in the training of art teachers.