El arte y la educación superior

Abstract

The paper defends the aesthetic-cultural need of professionals, who feed thought with the research and the intellectual life of nations especially in the so-called third world. It reflects upon how curriculum and artistic formation must be integrated at the universities they are graduates from. This integration must produce the development of sensitivity and the recovery and admiration of aesthetics in these professionals during their academic formation. It aims at rescuing the admiration in the professional as a human person, of the principles of unity, order and harmony proposed by the created nature as an invitation for man to continue its planning and design. Also, it intends to collaborate in the development of higher values such as beauty, solidarity, co-existence, justice and peace, distinctive of the human person.

The paper criticizes the position of some universities which form professionals in third world countries and yield, somewhat easily, to the pressures of international economic policies and to technological advances and exclude humanistic-artistic formation, resulting in an atmosphere of academic pragmatism, away from the person and from their transcendental domain, their cultural roots and their national identity.

It concludes by summoning universities, especially those in the third world, to understanding the meaning of art in the academic and cultural environment, highlighting the words of Pope John Pal II in his Letter to Artists, about their role in the culture and societies of their respective countries.