Educating ‘Local Cosmopolitans’: the case for a critical regionalism in art education?

Abstract

This article seeks to encourage further debate about the value of a critical and regionalist approach to art education; one which would explicitly link such education to both environmental and architectural concerns. It is currently the case that, in large measure, the agenda in art education is rooted in the unquestioned assumption of a ‘cosmopolitan’ orientation as the ‘natural’ basis for a contemporary art education. This assumption of the pre-eminence of ‘cosmopolitan’ attitudes to art and art education needs to be questioned, and from a basis which is neither reactionary nor provincial. This is a matter of some urgency as British art education becomes increasingly oriented by a European Union in which sophisticated concepts of regionalism play an important part. In what follows I will define the basis for an alternative approach to that of the ‘cosmopolitan’ mentality, one based on an explicitly critical regionalist thinking.