The Arts and Design in 21 st Century Education: Towards a New Synthesis by Dain Olsen “Design” would be assumed to be included as a distinct component in art education, or more specifically “visual arts education”, and, to some degree, it certainly is. Design has gained great prominence in global culture in recent decades, due in part to the rise of the “creative economy”, as well as to the ever-increasing sophistication of products and consumer tastes. Visual arts education, already well established as a “fine art” among four arts disciplines (dance, music and theatre), has not necessarily kept pace with these cultural shifts. Thus, there have been growing concerns over design’s limited presence in visual arts education and education as a whole (Lozner, 2013). Recently, there have been a few significant developments within both disciplines with implications for their ongoing and complimentary relationship. In addition, the emergence of “media arts” as a digitally based “fifth arts discipline” (Olsen D., Burrows R.W., Jensen, A., McCaffrey, Paulson, P., Rubino, N., Wilkerson, C., & Hill, E., 2014), adds support for design in a promising reconsideration of arts education for the 21 st Century. “Design Education”, as a distinct arts content area with a breadth of practice, has not had a prominent position in traditional visual arts education for the latter part of the last century. There has been some longstanding bias within the “fine arts” against the so-called “crafts”, and “applied arts”, which have been defined as primarily technical subjects with practical intents and commercial purposes (Kim, 2014). The far end of these areas, known as the “folk arts”, such as woodworking, weaving and calligraphy, have largely vanished from the arts education lexicon. The various commercial arts such as interior and fashion design, and illustration are considered vocationally oriented. This underrepresentation of design would also be due in part to the sparse and diminishing time available within the limited offerings of the arts as “electives” in school schedules. One of the primary challenges with design is its extreme diversity and amorphous presence, which has made it difficult to develop as a focused K-12 practice within the 2-D visual arts curriculum. “Graphic design” is the one exception as a 2-D form, and is a more common offering, but even its specialization is difficult to encapsulate within a generally focused course. Visual arts, which has its own broad range of sub-categories, is challenged in just conveying “the basics” of a few artistic methods, historical precedents and visual culture in a typical, year-long secondary course. Also, the arts in general have tended to emphasize their academic profile in order to maintain parity with other “core” subjects, as well as to aspire to the “highest” expressions of their forms. It is these distilled forms in the visual arts, dance, music, and theatre that have had the greatest popular recognition and support as “the arts”, primarily based within a canon of Western historical masters, and representative ethnic artworks and styles. This legacy has earned widespread respect, and is connected with major civic and higher education institutions, with the foundations necessary to sustain and promote them, and to develop curricula around them. The compelling arguments for the increased inclusion of arts education, from Dewey to Greene and Eisner, have centered around these premier references, with an emphasis on free expression, experimentation, diverse points of view and alternative forms of cognition. The more recent evolutions of visual arts education have continued to emphasize philosophical propositions, albeit with postmodern twists, into new directions, audiences and expanding diversity in representation (Gude, 2007). Design, which must primarily service the established environment, has not been a key factor in these arguments, but has been gaining greater inclusion with the advent of “community-based” engagement in visual arts education, where visual arts catalyzes a beneficial social or civic impact (Bergmark O’Connor, 2014).