Editors' introduction
THE ART OF THE MATTER

This CIRCA supplement focuses on education in and through art. Prompted by on-going frustrations across educational institutions, North and South, CIRCA first published a special supplement on over ten years ago. This current collection is part of that continuum. The issues addressed here are diverse. They include contested approaches to museum education; interdiscipinarity in the arts; pedagogic practices; research and indigenous design; critical issues in drama education as well as a more closely-focused emphasis on specific areas of curriculum design in the primary and post-primary sectors. All these articles suggest that there is yet much to be done.

As a starting point, this collection of essays sketches some of the questions which it is hoped and intended will contribute to continued, sustained and comparative debate regarding developments in in both parts of this island and elsewhere. And although the Republic's art curriculum is the focus of discussion in a few of the articles, the issues those articles address are fundamental.

In the wider frame of reference, does not stop at the school door or the college gates. Critical thinking enters public discourse, interrogating and intervening in different areas, and its capacity to extend and transform the public sphere needs to be addressed. Crucially, what is already emerging from these explorations is the need for to be resourced to accommodate complexity rather than compartmentalisation or intellectual isolationism. It is about the development of critical spaces where practice develops and ideas ferment and circulate. There is a need to counter certain preferred versions of art and culture pedalled by those who see culture as part of the service industries, to be packaged and dished up as a standard, tourist menu.

Another aspect of contemporary rhetoric surrounds new technology and education, where there is an uncritical haste to convert educational experience into shiny discs and whizz-bang screens. There are other interfaces besides that of the computer, ones which are basic to understanding the impact of digital developments on making and responding to art.

One alternative vision of the role of the arts in shaping and stretching newer technology suggests that "Technology creates tools for a specific purpose responding to a specific demand. The artist finds other uses for those same tools by making them do things beyond what they were constructed to do, and in doing so, advances the human application of the technology. [The artist] socialises machines and technology by discovering an aesthetic use for them." (The New Space of Communication, the Interface with Culture and Artistic Creativity, Council of Europe, 1995) The social, cultural and intellectual demands posed by technological developments are set to be pivotal in educational activity in the next century. should be primed and resourced, in order to confront these challenges with critical rigour and creative investment, if is to be a central and determining force for the future.

Stephanie McBride
Niamh O'Sullivan
Co-editors, Education Supplement