The arts-education relationship, from the point of view or pedagogy, is not primarily to do professional artistic education. Educating "with" the arts means educating " throught" the arts and educating "for" an art
Authors: Touriñán López José Manuel 
Published: March 2023

The objective of this work is to contribute to form criteria about arts-education relationship, from the point of view of Pedagogy, in the generic sense of understanding the arts as a field of education. This is an objective that is only resolved from Pedagogy, because, in Pedagogy, the relationship between ‘arts’ and ‘education’ means that the primary is education and therefore the relationship is substantively education. And that means that in the arts-education relationship, whose objective is to educate, it is necessary to integrate the traits of character and meaning which belong to the meaning of education. For this, the area of cultural experience “the arts” must be constructed as a field of education, whether it is a general field of education, a field of general education or a field of vocational and professional education.

If we interpret and understand the arts from the perspective of education, the knowledge of education provided by Pedagogy is meso-axiologic, because what Pedagogy does is value the cultural area “arts” as education and build it as “field of education”.

Pedagogy is necessarily specified as mesoaxiological pedagogy (medium-valueunderstanding) because the knowledge of education enables us to understand, in the intervention, each medium for its educational value. The objective of pedagogy is to transform information into knowledge and knowledge into education, building fields of education by means of the various cultural areas; and the arts constitute a cultural experience area which is knowable, teachable, researchable, and attainable that can become an instrument, object, and goal of education.

The arts-education relationship can be analyzed with pedagogical criteria, and this means that the relationship is substantively education; it is first “education” and it is therefore an educational relationship.

Thus, if we want to educate with the arts, by means of the area of cultural experience “Arts” we must achieve in the educatees (people who are being educated and are educated) values linked to the proper meaning of education just like any other school subject with which we are going to educate (it is what corresponds to common education through the arts).

In addition, the arts-education relationship is adjectively “arts”, and this means that it provides education with the specific contents of the area of cultural experience “arts”. On the one hand, it provides specific educational values linked to the conceptual sense of the area of cultural experience ‘arts’: what does artistic experience means? how do I become sensitive to arts? How do arts improve me as a person, et cetera (this is what corresponds to specific education through the arts). On the other hand, it provides specialized educational values linked to the theoretical, technological, and practical knowledge of the arts as an area of professional and vocational development (it is what corresponds to specialized education in an art; it is specialized education for an art).

The objective of this work is to contribute to understanding the arts as a common, specific, and specialized field of education. In pedagogical perspective, it is possible to distinguish, according to the arts-education relationship, the difference in meaning of the expressions “know arts”, “teach arts”, “educate with the arts”, “educate through the arts” and “educate for an art”. This distinction is relevant to make the educational design of the field of education ‘arts’.