This chapter looks to the history of art education in a networked era, generally focusing on North American scholarship. It looks to what post-internet art, as a distributed structure of knowledge formation, might mean to formal art education. It will present an overview of some of the ways that art educators helped to theorize the artistic possibilities found in the early internet, through what was termed ‘Web 2.0.’ and leading up to a post-internet condition.

Post-Internet art represents a challenge to previous artistic concepts that tended to view the utilization of networked digital technologies as either the fulfillment of utopian fantasies of ego destruction, or the dystopian realization of a posthuman nightmare. Post-Internet art oscillates between these two extremes, making use of numerous interrelated networks that are decentralized in nature. Formal schooling is generally centralized, and art education tends to operate in a similar manner within this system, regardless of attempts to substantially change the structure of the field. A comparison of these two different systems might offer art educators opportunities to rethink practices that have been virtually unaffected by decentralization.