Book Description

In the words of M.K. Gandhi, "By education I mean an all-round drawing out of the best in child and man-body, mind and spirit." - [Harijan: July 31, 1937]. The ultimate aim of any education process across the globe is to bring out the holistic development of children by drawing out their inherent potentials. The same was reiterated by Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore in a book titled “Art-The Basis of Education” by his student Devi Prasad (1998) where he emphasized the how arts and learning are related and how they together bring about holistic learning and development of children. Integration of arts in teaching-learning process encourages creativity, develops problem-solving abilities and improves the ability to handle mental imagery, as well as an understanding for using spaces creatively. (AIL guidelines NCERT, 2019). Over the past 10 years prominent theorists and practitioners such as Catterall, Eisner, and Gardner argued that the arts are integral to the education of the "whole child" (Catterall, 1998; Eisner, 1998; Gardner, 1999a) as cited in (Gullatt, 2008).