The duty of education is to cultivate and support the human abilities of imagination and empathy, but the prevailing values of culture today tend to discourage fantasy, suppress the senses, and petrify the boundary between the world and the self. Consequently, education in any creative field in our time has to begin with the questioning of the absoluteness of the lived world and with the re-sensitisation of the boundaries of the self. The main objective of artistic education may not reside directly in the principles of artistic making, but in the emancipation and opening up of the personality of the student and his/her self-awareness and self-image in relation to the immensely rich traditions of art, and to the lived world at large.

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Art and Architecture