As the courts ponder the proposed move of the Barnes Foundation from Merion to Center City, we examine where the world-renowned art institution stands.

Second of three parts.

Because of its world-famous art collection, the Barnes Foundation in Merion is customarily described as a museum. But the Barnes functions as a public gallery only three days a week. On the other four, it's a school.

Naturally, the institution teaches art, but in a way and in a setting that makes it unique, and exciting just to sit in class. The Barnes also teaches horticulture, which makes it one of the most unusual schools anywhere.

Do art and horticulture really mix? At the Barnes, they do so effortlessly, because beauty and creativity are intrinsic to both disciplines.

On both sides of the curriculum, the Barnes' educational experience transforms students and alumni into passionate advocates for the foundation.

In all the controversies that have enveloped the institution over the last 15 years, including the current proposal to move the art collection to Center City, students and alumni have argued vociferously to preserve the learning environment that opened their eyes to the glories of art.

And with good reason. There probably isn't another art school, anywhere, in which students are immersed week after week in one of the world's great collections.

They sit on folding metal chairs in the foundation's galleries as the instructors teach from celebrated paintings by Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso, and dozens of other modern masters.

It's hard to overstate the value of such exposure. Learning about art from slides, printed reproductions or CD-ROMs can't begin to compare with being surrounded by paintings - even mediocre ones. Spending two hours with the Barnes' collection every week is an education in itself.

Barnes students aren't taught dates-and-names art history or studio art. Rather, they're encouraged, though formal analysis and psychological insight, to decipher the visual information that all art contains.

This approach is variously characterized as "visual literacy" or "visual communication," and it's not unique to the Barnes. But the foundation is an incomparable place to experience it.

Numerically, the Barnes is a small school. During this academic year it enrolled only 159 students - 102 in art and 57 in horticulture. As a museum, it attracts about 56,000 visitors annually.

It's also becoming more expensive. In a move that reflects the Barnes' precarious financial situation, yearly tuition for both programs is going up to $1,000 next fall from $650 (for art) and $850 (for horticulture).

Yet, despite its size, upscale Main Line location, and elegant building, the Barnes isn't exclusive. Anyone can enroll for day or evening classes. Students are no longer expelled if they miss a single class, as was the custom when Violette de Mazia was in charge of education.

The art curriculum covers two years, or four semesters. Classes meet once a week for two hours. A third year is optional for students who want to pursue independent study. Horticulture students attend once-a-week, daylong classes for three years.

While the courses don't require examinations and term papers (although horticulture students are given assignments), they are rigorously structured. Horticulture students can earn a certificate of completion if they choose, an option not available to art students.

Since it opened in 1925, the Barnes Foundation has always defined itself as a school. It was a school exclusively until 1961, when a legal challenge forced it to admit the public to its galleries several days a week.

Founder Albert Barnes and his first director of education, the philosopher John Dewey, based their teaching process on their belief that all art reflects aesthetic ideas that can be be discovered through critical thinking. Barnes wanted his students to see art and respond to it as artists do. Not coincidentally, all five art instructors are practicing artists.

Barnesian philosophy is much more apparent in the art classes than in horticulture instruction, which stresses hands-on practicality. These students learn such things as how to identify plants, plant structure and physiology, common gardening practices, plant culture, and landscape design.

For the all-important digging, potting and pruning, horticulture students work in the 12-acre aboretum - which includes a fringe of woods on the east - and in the foundation's greenhouse.

The Barnes-Dewey method is supposed to be student-centered. As education director Robin McClea explained: "Barnes wanted teachers to be facilitators who engaged the students in a process of discovery."

But, she cautioned, he didn't intend art instruction to be dogmatic. "I don't think there is a Barnes method, per se," she said. "I think Barnes' and Dewey's ideas are so broad and far-reaching that they allow lots of approaches."

For instance, in his first-year art classes, John Gatti exposes his students to compositional principles such as the function of line and shape, color theory, and spatial dynamics. He also encourages students to look at paintings from the inside, by imagining themselves to be particular characters or even landscape features, such as the sky. These classes generate considerable teacher-student dialogue as he encourages them to trust their own opinions and judgments.

This may be the most valuable lesson art students can absorb: To rely on their eyes and intuition rather than on received wisdom in the form of wall labels and texts, which the Barnes collection intentionally lacks.

Second-year students study art traditions, especially as they're transmitted through the work of individual artists over centuries.

Barton Church and Harry Sefarbi, both 50-year veterans at the foundation, favor a more traditionally professorial approach to this material. Church, in particular, is fiercely deconstructive in the way he analyzes paintings.

Regardless of how individual teachers use the extraordinary collection as a resource, a Barnes education constitutes a valuable alternative to other forms of art training.

Trusting one's instincts about art - what it might mean, whether it's good, bad or mediocre - is a difficult skill to learn. It requires confidence that can best be developed through looking and thinking. Barnes students, uniquely situated as they are, can't avoid doing a lot of both.