A playwright in a dictatorship was visited by the thought police, who told him that he and his company could not present the play they had created, because of its anticipated content.

To emphasise the point, the police dumped on the floor the remains of the posters they had torn down. Knowing that, in this case, the sword was mightier than the pen, the company conceded ground, but negotiated permission to present an alternative piece, so as not to disappoint their public.

Posters duly appeared advertising their production of a Shakespeare play and, on the opening night, an actor announced to the audience that they were proud to present William Shakespeare's The Tempest, as interpreted by the playwright and his company. They then proceeded to present the play they had originally planned!

Sometimes telling the truth requires subversion. The Tempest was not The Tempest. Ceci n'est pas une pipe. The arts are not the arts. And this is not an article describing the educational significance of the arts.

For why should such an argument detain decision-makers in education, whether their sphere of influence be in the home, the school, the college of education, the NCCA or the Department of Education and Science itself?

Advocates like me have failed dismally to alter significantly the place of the arts within the formal education system because we have failed to tell the truth about the arts. It's well past time to take down the old posters and put up the new, proclaiming the truth that the arts are not the arts, but the imaginative sciences.

As such, they may be described variously. They are, for example, highly disciplined modes of enquiry into the human condition. They are also immensely complex and formal symbol systems, with branches of knowledge which specialise in areas like image, sound, story and ritual. They explore and experiment with the properties of essences like light and sound; of physical materials like wood, stone, chemicals, even the human body itself; and of more conceptual materials like word and gesture.

They are sciences which, sometimes by fission but more often by fusion, pursue a commitment to transformation, to making new meanings. One of their distinguishing traits is a comfort with ambiguity. Accordingly, they foster ways of thinking and of problem-solving that are enriched by the values of divergence and relativity, more often associated with the philosophic sciences.

However, the imaginative sciences are not branches of philosophy. They are praxes, undertaken in real or virtual materials and informed, but not governed, by the ever-evolving traditions of the symbol systems within which they operate. Often in these sciences, form and content are indivisible and the meanings distilled in the imaginative laboratories are symbiotic with technology.

The last century, for example, was distinguished by the dynamic between image and technology, which gave us film and its various sub-disciplines. And it has always been thus: from the Stone Age to the Information Age these sciences have been pursued - and in different parts of the world, for reasons as diverse as belief systems and climate, they embrace distinctive fields of study.

Cultures we call these, though they are much too large and exciting to be contained on any petri dish!

Most branches of the imaginative sciences have practitioners who specialise in different areas. Sometimes the scope is private and minute (the longing Yeats invested in lake water lapping), and sometimes it is public and grand in scale (Sibelius's Finlandia). Sometimes the outcomes are ephemeral transformations which recall alchemy (voices as different as Maria Callas, Luke Kelly, Ella Fitzgerald), while other outcomes, whether ancient like Newgrange or more recent like Ouro Preto, defy all notions of human time.

Some of the work is precisely wrought in the pursuit of deep psychological truths (Jane Austen's intensely carved inches of ivory or Beckett's retreat into the head and mouth), while other work confronts larger and often more brutal truths. (Picasso, asked by the thought police if he had made Guernica, replied "No, you did".)

Commitment to truth

Parents, those who act in loco parentis and certainly those who set the educational agenda, should understand that, while the imaginative sciences conduct their experiments in the physical world, moving regularly from the laboratory (more commonly known as studio) to public presentation (variously described as exhibition or performance), their primary, though not exclusive, concern is to enquire into what it's like to be human.

The imaginative sciences have developed processes for exploring key areas of the interior landscape we all inhabit: dreams and feelings, for example; prescience and retrospection; the desire for personal autonomy and for social collectivity. They have also developed modes of virtual transport to other times and places, sometimes with a particular commitment to accuracy, at other times to verisimilitude, but always to truth. And the imaginative sciences, despite their reputation, have no predilection for the beautiful. Their commitment is to truth. This includes, of course, a commitment to birth, joy, abandonment, colour and to the drunkenness of things being various, but it involves also a commitment to explore the dark side of human nature and of the human condition. And all of that without the certainty of redemption.

The laboratories of the imaginative sciences conduct experiments in cruelty, violence, nihilism, betrayal, loss and grief in both the public and private domains of human experience. Their comedies are sometimes barbaric, however much the thought police might wish it were otherwise.

When we define the imaginative sciences as music, art, drama, literature, dance, film and architecture, we are doing no more than listing them. It advances our understanding of them not a whit more than would telling someone the names of your children describe their natures and needs. And it is those very natures and needs which are at the heart of the responsibility educational decision-makers bear in deciding what's best for children.

Not to offer the imaginative sciences a central, indeed defining, role in our schools is to limit children's access, as lookers, listeners, makers and doers, to one of the most important branches of human knowledge and human achievement.

Previous advocacy in this domain has bemoaned the loss sustained by the arts as a result of inadequate arts education. However, when we understand the arts as "not the arts", but as "the imaginative sciences", it becomes clearer that the real loser is education itself.

Martin Drury is director of the Ark, a cultural centre for children in Dublin.