This volume emphasizes the necessity for arts teachers to nurture the personal development of their students by expanding their artistic understanding and creativity. In aiming to provide a broader understanding for the effective teaching of the arts, the author provides powerful reasons for seeing the arts as agents of learning, understanding and development. The volume also demonstrates that whilst the arts are centrally concerned with feeling, they are as fully open to objective reasoning as any other subject discipline such as science, but the dichotomy between ‘scientism’ and ‘subjectivism’ is all-pervading in a curriculum which marginalises the teaching of the arts.

'Best tackles all the major themes in the arts, aesthetics and arts education. Students in Arts, Philosophy or Education Departments would pick [the book] up and read it with fascination and enthusiasm...Best provides throughout a most useful guide to all the major controversies...and a veritable cornucopia of further questions for students to take on in their own study and group seminars.' David Aspin, Monash University