What schools can offer art: towards an avant-gardist conception of gallery education

What benefits can art bring to schools? This is a particularly urgent question today when changes to the structure of compulsory level education in England have not only severely diminished the provision of art in secondary schools, but threaten its survival as a comprehensively available subject. There is no doubt that art in schools needs defending. However, against the prevailing tendency that looks at the benefits art, and in particular 'contemporary art‘ can bring to schools, I want to consider instead what schools can offer art. How might it be that a genuine encounter between art and compulsory level education influences not just what occurs in school, but affects the values and functions of art itself? By taking the categories of social effectivity, the new, and institutional transformation as definitive of avant-gardist art, I consider how each of these pertains to art in a gallery education context, in order to explore what lessons it has for critical art practice in general.