From Passive to Active Citizenship

A Role for Education and for the Arts

This paper argues that Ireland, and Europe, needs a ‘new economy’, one which is inclusive of social and cultural capital in ways the ‘old economy’ was not. To achieve and sustain such an ecology of interdependence will take new thinking, new understandings and new knowledge, essentially new competencies which education, in general, must deliver and the paper argues that art and design, and the arts, have a substantial contribution to make to this ecology but as forms of knowledge rather than simply forms of entertainment.