Aesthetic experience and creativity in arts education: Ehrenzweig and the primal syncretistic perception of the child

The pertinence and worth of arts in Quebec primary schools vary considerably from one institution and school administration to another. In this paper it is argued that well-integrated arts education would bring a large array of pedagogical benefits to students, not the least of which is the preservation and the development of aesthetic perception and creativity. Actually, teachers can rely on the syncretistic and amodal perception of the young child, a learning mode that is analogous to the aesthetic experience and fostered by art practices. The paper draws notably on Ehrenzweig and Winnicott to advocate that the school, through arts education, should preserve and make use of this precious perceptive faculty, and temper the educational bias that largely favours the logical or analytical mode of the child. It advocates for an essential developmental balance between the child's intuitive and analytical faculties, a healthy equilibrium that arts education has the potential to instil. Children and society both have much to gain from the school's fostering of arts education and aesthetic perception: children from their balanced development and society from future creative citizens' contributions.