Divided into four sections, the first examines the ends of education and outlines a conception of education as an initiation into critical enquiry and the personal art of learning. The middle sections consider aesthetic education. The final section offers appraisals of figures in the arts field.

Our Present Predicament. Section 1: On Education as Socratic Enquiry: The Nature of Socratic Learning; Intellectual Research as Socratic Activity. Section 2: On the Philosophy of Arts Education: The Arts in the Public Realm - New Foundations for Aesthetic Education; The Primacy of the Aesthetic - on the Nature of Aesthetic Response and the meaning of the Aesthetic Field; The Generic Community of the Arts - Its Historical Development and Educational Value; From Babble to Rhapsody - On the Nature of Artistic Creativity. Section 3: On the Practice of Arts Education: Educational Drama as Cultural Dispossession; The Teaching of Literature as an Arts Discipline; The Place of Creative Writing in the Development of Teachers. Section 4: Tributes and Evaluations: Herbert Reid, Modernism and the Dilemmas of Self-Expression; Peter Fuller as Art Critic and Educator; David Holbrook, the Tradition of Poetic Humanism and the Teaching of the Arts.