Unlearning at the École des Beaux‐Arts de Paris

Art education is an apprenticeship in differentiation. In a maieutic process, the student enters a dialogue, sometimes silent, with the works and artists studied, which leads to a reformulation of the aesthetic problems studied. This chapter shows how the traditional French model of art education, rooted in the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, became confused with the very mental image of art and its practice. The institutional crisis that led to the 1972 reforms was rooted in the paradoxical nature of art education. In the early 2000s, European directives opened a new chapter in the reform of art schools, calling for their adaptation to the Bologna process. As a consequence of the students' distrust of an education suspected of having too many influences, positivism began to disappear among teachers.