A few weeks ago, in a combative mood, I gleefully posted an attack on “tacky craft activities” as the enemy of aesthetic education. Today, in a more contemplative mood, I am wondering what is it specifically about these activities that make them so perennial?

As a total Wikipedia addict, I often encounter the term “disambiguation”, which frequently appears at the top of Wikipedia pages.  Here’s the definition : "The process of resolving conflicts in article titles that occur when a single term can be associated with more than one topic, making that term likely to be the natural title for more than one article.

Despite valiant efforts by arts education advocates over the last several decades, and real gains in arts education policy and practice, the current reality is that the visual arts education that most American children receive in schools consists primarily of tacky craft activities presented to them by classroom teachers. I actually have a great fondness for many of these activities, but that has more to do with lingering nostalgia for childhood than it does with aesthetic education.

While on a trip to Washington, D.C., I paid a visit to the offices of the U.S. Department of Education. Special structures had been built around the entrances to the building- replicas of the archetypal “Little Red Schoolhouse”. I later found out that these had been installed to protect government employees from falling masonry, but why were these particular wooden pieces of nostalgia chosen to grace the doorways to these large, gothic, stone buildings?

Next week, I have the distinct honor of attending a Stanford Graduate School of Business seminar; Strategy for Nonprofit Organizations.  In preparation for the course we are assigned homework (something I tried not to do that much of in school let alone now that I have a real job), and the homework consists of several books, articles, and case studies all exploring the concepts of strategy and its multiple parts.