theory and practice of art education. It contributed to subsequent interest in aesthetic education and anticipated one of the major developments in art education during the 80's and 90's, the approach known as discipline-based art education that emphasized grounding instruction in the four interrelated disciplines of art making, art history, art criticism, and aesthetics. The opening section explains the meaning of aesthetics, sets out the structure of knowledge in the arts, indicates how subject matter in the teaching of art is manipulated by a number of characteristic verbal operations, and discusses the relevance of aesthetics to research. Three of these operations -- defining, explaining and evaluating -- are then examined in later sections of the volume. If teachers and students are to understand the issues that arise in describing, explaining and evaluating works of art, then it is clear that greater attention must be paid to the language used in the classroom.

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