The educational imperative

The Educational Imperative is an open, positive and accessible book on education, written with both the current cultural crisis and the challenge of the next century in mind. The author opens by examining the true and fitting ends of education. He contends that the ends of education are seldom discussed, only the means. This has led to a profound loss of purpose and to the identification of education with certification and training. He outlines a positive conception of education as an initiation into critical enquiry and the personal art of learning. The two middle sections of the book consider the most neglected part of the curriculum, the teaching of the arts. In place of the current progressive and prescriptive approaches Abbs proposes a further paradigm. He argues that the creativity of the individual and the creativity of the culture must be brought into a permanent, exacting and living fusion. The final section examines some of the intellectual forces shaping current arguments, and offers critical appraisals of some influential figures in the field: Herbert Read, Peter Fuller and David Holbrook.