CULTURAL POLICY AND ARTS MANAGEMENT CURRICULUM IN SOUTH AFRICA'S EDUCATION SYSTEM: LESSONS FOR GOOD GOVERNANCE

Cultural policy and arts management studies as a field of public inquiry is relatively old and have generated much literature worldwide. It has gained strong currency as an educational and research concept for the humanities and social sciences. To date, research journals and academic courses in the field proliferate, especially at tertiary education levels, for the benefit of scholars, government officials, arts managers, policy makers and so forth. South Africa is lagging behind in this regard in that many of the country’s institutions of higher learning do not offer training in cultural policy and management. This is symptomatic of poor crafting and positioning of arts education within the broader education system in South Africa. This article discusses the importance of broadening the scope of arts education in South Africa to include cultural policy and arts management studies, as well as related subjects, and placing them at the centre of academic inquiry, from school to tertiary education levels, so as to bring about or create conditions of good cultural governance across the broad institutional spectrum. Keywords: arts education, arts curriculum, arts management, cultural policy, education system, and good governance

Leukemia Inhibitory Factor Promotes the Neuronal Development of Spinal-Cord Precursors From the Neural-Tube

Recent evidence from our laboratory has shown that leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF) can act early in peripheral nervous system development. We have investigated a potential role of LIF in the developing spinal cord. In explants and dissociated cultures of spinal cord primordium, LIF stimulated a profuse neurite outgrowth. To determine if these effects were related to neuronal differentiation, cells were plated at low cell density and stained for neurofilament. LIF stimulated an increase in the number of newly differentiated neurons, without inducing proliferation of the precursors. Given that LIF has previously reported effects as a cholinergic switching factor for sympathetic neurons, we investigated whether LIF had similar effects in these spinal cord cultures. LIF increased the number of cholinergic neurons in proportion to its overall effect on the stimulation of all neurofilament positive neurons in the culture. These data show that LIF stimulates the generation of spinal cord neurons from their precursors and further implicates a role for LIF in nervous system development