Reflection response of reading
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V I S I C N S A N D V E R S I O N S OF ARTS EDUCATION
AWAY OF SEEING IS ALSO AWAY OF NOISEEING
Visions of the aims and content of arts education are neither uni- form nor discovered simply by inspection. What is considered most important in any field-the aims to which it is directed-is a value, the result of a judgment, the product not only of visionary minds and persuasive arguments, but of social forces that create condi- tions that make certain aims congenial to the times.l Yet we often assume that the aims to which a field is directed are given by the field itself: mathematics has aims defined by mathematics, Scien- tific studies aims defined by science, historical studies aims defined by history, and so forth. This is only partially so. Mathematics can be taught in order to accomplish various ends; science can be used to teach scientific modes of inquiry to students or it can be taught, for example, to advance their understanding of the content of a chemistry course. Similar options exist in the arts. There is no single sacrosanct vision of the aims of arts education. Examples of this di- versity abound in the broad field of arts education today and in the past. Let me describe some of the visions that direct the aims and content of arts education today. In describing these various visions I do not imply that they are likely to be found in their "pure" form. I describe them separately to make each vision vivid; in practice, however, there is likely to be a mix of these visions in any school or classroom.
DISCIPTINE-BASED ART EDUCATION
one of the important visions of art education is represented in what is called discipiine-based art education.2 Especially in the vi- sual arts, the art form in which this conception is dominant, DBAE addresses four major aims. First, DBAE is intended to help stu- dents acquire the skills and develop the imagination needed for high-quality art performance.r Such performance requires, it is ar- gued, sophisticated forms of thinking. In this vision, art educarors should design curricula that deverop such skills. To acquire them, students need to learn to think like artists. This means they will need to develop their sensibilities, foster the growth of their imag- ination, and acquire the technicai skills needed to work well with materials.
second, DBAE is aimed at helping students learn how to see and talk about the qualities of the art they see. Seeing, a form of cognitive achievement, cannot be taken for granted. Nor can one assume that experience in the creation of art will, by itself, be suf- ficient to develop the ability to see the qualities that collectively constitute visual art or any visual display from an aesthetic frame of reference. Seeing from an aesthetic perspective is a learned form of human performance, a kind of expertise. DBAE programs are intended to foster its development. Being able to see from an aes- thetic perspective requires an ability to focus on the formai and ex- pressive qualities of form rather than solely on its utilitarian func- tions. It requires the ability to slow down perception so that visual qualities can be inspected and savored. It requires one to search for qualitative relationships and ro note the quality of experience they engender. Such dispositions and modes of attention can be fos- tered through teaching.
In addition to developing students' ability to create and per- ceive art, DBAE programs have two other aims. One of these per_ tains to helping students understand the historical and cultural context in which aft is created, the other to questions regarding the values that art provides.a The former is closely tied to art his- tory, the lamer to a philosophical field called aesrherics, which ad- dresses questions pertaining to the justification of claims about the
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value and function of art. Historical and cultural understanding is believed to help students grasp the relationship between the social context in which the arts are created and their content and form. Understanding this context can significantly influence the kind of meaning students are likely to derive from the work, Addressing questions related to aesthetic theory is believed to help students become a part of a deep and enduring philosophical conversation. Is there an objective basis f or justifying judgments of quality in art? Does art provide knowledge? Can works of art lie? Can everything be art or only some things? How important is beauty in a work of art? Can a work of art be ugly?
Advocates of DBAE claim that it provides a more comprehen- sive approach to art education than other approaches, that it ad- dresses the four sorts of things that people do with art: they make it, they appreciate its qualities, they locate its place in culture over time, and they discuss and justify their judgments about its nature, merits, and importance. The four major curricular components of DBAE parallel these activities.
I indicated earlier that ideas about the aims of a field are in- fiuenced not only by visions of educational virtue promoted by charismatic leaders, but also by their congeniality to the times. These two features, visions of what is important and its accept- ability to a community at certain periods in its history, apply to DBAE. The theoretical basis of DBAE was first advanced by Jerome Bruner through his ideas about the relationship between curricu- lum and the structure of the disciplines.5 These ideas were devel- oped in response to the Soviets'launching of Sputnik 1, the first manned spacecraft to circle the Earth, on October 4, L957. That event prompted the U.S. government to try to improve science and mathematics education in the schools to help our nation catch up. Preparation in the sciences and mathematics seemed crucial to national interests. Bruner's argument that students learn best when they experience a discipline in a form similar to the form of inquiry used by scholars in that discipline appealed to anxious ed- ucators seeking to meet new expectalions for more rigorous and s u b s t a n t i v e c u r r i c u l a . 6
Supported by large-scale federal funding, curriculum reform in
science and math was soon under way. No comparable funding was available for curriculum development in the arts. But to art educators too, Bruner's ideas seemed to make good sense. The re- sult was the development of a conception of arts curricuia that ex- amined the arts in terms of their component disciplines. Art edu- cators found these disciplines in the art studio, in art history, in art criticism, and in aesthetics. It was a vision of curriculum that art educators believed would restore substance and rigor to what was broadly perceived to be a "soft" subject. Since the t 990s DBAE has been the dominant model for curriculum development in the vi- sual arts in the United States. This approach owes much not only to Jerome Bruner but also to the work of Manuel Barkan, an im- portant figure in art education in the 1960s and I970s.7
VISUA.L CULTURE
A second vision of art education has a distinctly different cast. It fo- cuses on using the arts to promote an understanding of visual cul- ture.8 By promoting visual culture I refer to efforts to help students learn how to decode the values and ideas that are embedded in what might be called popular culture as well as whar is called the fine arts.e
Since the early 1960s there has been a great interest in matters of cultural, social, gender, racial, and economic equity. Ours is a nation in which everyone eligible can vote, but not everyone has equal influence regarding who gets elected. Money and position make a difference. Those who control images, those who influence decisions about which images will be shown, those who manage the media control a disproportionate amount of power in the soci- ety. The arts, some claim, can and should be studied through a pro- cess of critical analysis designed to help students learn how people are influenced through the mass media. In this view any art form can be regarded as a kind of text, and texts need to be both read and interpreted, for the messages they send are often "below the surface" or "between the lines." Learning how to read the mes- sages of a visual text is thus a way of protecting personal rights. It
is also a way of determining whose interests are being served by the images that surround us.ro
Reading images as texts in order to reveal their political and often covert purposes is one form of reading. Another is develop- ing the student's ability to use the arts to understand the values and life conditions of those living in a multicultural society. In this view, art education becomes a form of ethnology. Graeme Chaimers, one advocate, writes:
We in ort educotion listened to psychologists when they provided ort re- loted informqtion obout child grov*h ond development . . . more recenily we hove listened to ihose psychologists who hove become concerned wilh left qnd right hemisphere brqin reseorch. Bul we need informotion obout groups os well os obout individuqls. ltwould seem thot the tribql ortist is se- cure so long os he or she is with the tribe ond shoring their volues. An eth- nologicol opprooch is o woy of looking ond o meqns to help us understond these volues.
Anthropology provides knowledge of the nqture of people, ond cul- turol onthropology finds its relevonce in the contribution it mqkes to under- sionding culture. Educoiors in their roles qs odministrqtors, supervisors, curriculum developers. reseorchers. ond teochers need ond cqn moke use of relevont sociol informotion. Any understqnding of the role of oris edu- cqtion in the public schools requires thot we exqmine the vqlues ond beliefs of society ond its chonging institutions, communilies, ond group relotion- ships, os well qs the potterns of smoll groups or "tribes" within the schools. Any delinition of "educotion" must include reference to teoching, leorning ond setfing. lt would seem thot culturol onthropology, being concerned with holistic understqnding, involving the collection ond description of culturol ortifocts moy be o rewording study for onyone concerned with estoblishing o foundolion for orts educotion, by ossisting us to see both educotion ond ort in their iolol settings.ll
In Chalmers's view art needs to be studied in its social contexl, and it is here that anthropology can help. Art education, in this view, becomes a means for understanding and improving the culture.
Now one may very well argue that in a society with as many social and economic inequities as our own, it is appropriate that at-
V I < I ' I N < A I ' I T V E D < T ' I N C A I A D T C E h I I ' A ? I N I ' I ' ' A I I ' T N h V E D C I A N C A E A D I C E N I I ' A ? I A N
tention to such inequities surface to a level of priority. A1ter all, if
the society is hurting, perhaps our first priority should be to try ttr
alleviate the pain. If the study of the alts can provide such relief,
why not? This general orientation to afi education is consistent with a
number of other developments in the society. I speak here of the impact of multicuhuralism, feminism, and postmodernism, for
all these movements represent efforts to bring about substantial
change in how the world is viewed. virtually all of them challenge foundationalism and opt for a perspectivalism thar is skeptical
about "intrinsic" values; what is artistically good is what people
value, and what people value is the result of the social forces I
described earlier rather than qualities inherent in the work. The
tastemakers working through a controlled medium influence pub-
lic taste, including what museums purchase and display. The Greek
verities of truth, beauty, and goodness are relics of the past; it's one's
perspective that matters. Art education, focused on the visual world
within this frame ol reference, is interested in helping students be-
come astute readers of visual images and sensitive, politically in-
formed interpreters of their meanings. The interprelation of mean-
ing, in this view, is in large measule a matter of social and political
a n a l y s i s .
CREATIVE PROBLEMSOLVING
A third vision of art education is related to creative problemsolv-
ing, particularly the kind used in the field of design. one of the best
examples of this approach to art education was the program of-
fered at the German Bauhaus from l9l9 to the early 1930s. The
German Bauhaus functioned as a school of design, first in wei-
mar and later in Dessau, Germany, until March I932, when it was
closed by the Nazis. It attracted some of the foremost artists, archi-
tects, and designers working in Europe at the time, including wal-
ter Gropius , L6szl6 Moholy-Nagy, and Wassily I(andinsky' Its aim
was to address problems having social import in technically e{fi-
cient and aesthetically satisfying ways.I2 The task as its members
saw it was to use the machine as an ally in order to create a clean aesthetic that exploited the natural characteristics of the materials with which the designer worked. But pethaps above all, the Bau- haus was interested in preparing designers who could conceptual- ize and analyze well, who could problematize existing assump- tions and challenge traditional expectations when a better way to solve a problem could be found.
The program that the faculty of the school created employed an approach that invited students to become creative problemsolvers. For example, the foundation program, which was offered to stu- dents during the first year of their work, would ask them to build a structure out of water-based clay as tall as possible and with no part of the structure thicker than the thin side of a coin. Furthermore, the aesthetic quality of the product they designed was very impor- tant. Its form, not only its function as a designed object, mattered.
To accomplish this task, students had to understand and de- velop a feel for the material and its structural possibilities. Learning to address such tasks, tasks that have an infinite number of possible solutions, prepared students for other, more socially important tasks in a variety of fields such as product design and architecture.
The Bauhaus tradition is currently alive and well in many schools of design and especially in departments of engineering in- terested in developing the problemsolving capacities of their stu- dents and refining their aesthetic judgment.rr Most such schools are oriented to meeting social needs; to do so they focus on inven- tion, foster analytic abilities needed to figure out what will work, and develop skill in the use of machine tools. The aim is to enable students to think like designers, and designers have problems whose solutions are empirically testable-as General Motors, Sony, and Apple know quite well. This tradition has its counterpart in sec- ondary-school art programs that ask students to deal with practical problems-the design of a new container for CDs, for example- in which both practical and aesthetic criteria are important' Such tasks are intended to help students become aware of a wide vari- ety of considerations-economic, structural, ergonomic, and aes- thetic-in the design Process.
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CREATIVE SELF-EXPRESSION
A fourth vision of art education aims in a very different way at the development of creativity. The approach is articulated by two of the world's most influential art educators, the Austrian Viktor Lowenfeld and the Englishman Sir Herbert Read.la Both Lowen- feld and Read were influenced by World War II. Lowenfeld emi- grated from Austria to the United States in 1938. Read spent the
war in a besieged England. Both saw the conditions in Germany that led to the war as partly the result of an educational system that suppressed the normal human urge to express creative im- pulses. As a result, that urge found an outlet in aggressive and re- pressive tendencies; the culture set up the young for the dictator- ship that emerged in GermanY.
Both Read and Lowenfeld believed the arts to be a process
that emancipated the spirit and provided an outlet for the creative impulse. For Lowenfeld, the expression of this creative impulse had not only an educational benefit to offer, but a therapeutic one a s w e l l :
The child who uses creotive octivity os qn emotionol outlet will goin free- dom qnd flexibilif.y os o result of the releose of unnecessory tensions. How- ever, the child who feels lrustroted develops inhibitions ond, os o result, will leel restricted in his personolity. the child who hos developed lreedom ond flexibility in his expression will be oble to foce new situqtions without diffi- culties. Through his flexible opprooches toword the expression of his own ideos, he will not only foce new situotions p.operly but will odiust himself to them eosily. The inhibited ond resiricted child, occustomed to imitoting rother thon expressing himself creotively, will prefer to go olong sel potterns in life. He will not be oble to odiust to new situotions quickly but will rother try to leon upon others os the eosiest woy out. Since it is generolly occepted thot progress, success, ond hoppiness in life depend greoily upon the obil- ii"y to odiust to new situotions, the importonce of ort educotion for person- olity growth ond development con eosily be recognized.l5
Read shared similar sentiments: "Generally speaking, the ac- tivity of self-expression cannot be taught' Any application of an
external standard, whether of technique or form, immediately in-
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cluces inhibitions, and frustrates the whole aim. The role of the
teacher is that of attendant, guide, inspirer, psychic midwife."r6 Given the times-the 1940s-the views of the child that
Lowenfeld and Read promulgated fell on receptive ears and eyes. When a nation is fighting a war to banish totalitarianism, it is not
surprising that a conception of art education that gives centel stage to the cultivation and protection of what was most individual about the child would find a receptive audience.
Both Lowenfeid's and Read's ideas about human nature had a psychodynamic quaiity. In Read's case the influence came from
Carl Jung, in Lowenfeld's {rom Freud. Both thought the artistic impulse resided in the unconscious and that it was the business of teachers, especially afi educators, not to interfere with this natu- ral process. For Read, art was not so much taught as caught' The teacher was to be a kind of midwife to the child's creative natule. For Lowenfeld, the arts were a corrective to school practices that
were repressive. Both men regarded the alts as a means of human development.
Although the orientation of the Bauhaus also put a premium
on promoting creativity, creativity in these two views sprang from different sources and served different ends. The Bauhaus focused on practical problem solving using various materials; a classroom reflecting the ideas of Lowenfeld and Read engaged children in painting and sculpture to foster creative expression of their per-
sonal experience, including their fantasy Iife. Teacher intervention was very limited, with little or no attention paid to historical con-
text. But the dominant idea in both approaches is that children and their art develop largely {rom the inside out rather than from the outside in.
ARTS EDUCATION AS PREPARATION FOR THE WORLD OF WORK
A lifth vision of art education is a very pragmatic one, using the arts to develop the skills and attitudes needed in the workplace. Much of the rhetoric concerning school improvement centers on the importance of schooling to increase our competitive economic
Derformance in the world economy. According to some critics, as
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o u r s c h o o l s g o , s o g o e s o u r e c o n o r n y . l 7 G i v c n t h i s p o s i t i o n r c g a r d - i n g t h e e c o n o m i c f u n c t i o n o f s c h o o l s , w h a t i s i l t h a t t h c a r t s , w h o s e {orms of performance look quite different from those with practi- cal work-related outcomes, can offer to the work world? Are there practical consequences to arts education, and if there are, do these consequences relate to the world of work?
The rationale proposed by some is that experience in the arts develops initiative and creativity, stimulates the imagination, fos- ters pride in craft, develops planning skills, and in some arts fields helps the young learn how to work together. AII these personal at- tributes are vocationally relevant. Thus, even though the projects students work on in an art ciass might not look as if they have much to do with the workplace, they are very much a part of the "skill set" students need to become productive workers.
Listen as the chief executive officer of a large corporation de- scribes the importance of the arts to the world of work:
Students must be grounded in the bosics. Bosic reoding. Bosic moth. Bosic composition, Aren't those the only skills students reolly need? Everything else is icing on the coke, right?
Wrong. Todoy's students need orts educoiion now more thon ever. Yes, ihey need the bosics. But todoy there ore fwo sets of bosics. The first-reod- ing, wriiing, ond moth-is simply the prerequisite for o second, more com- plex, equolly vitql collection of higher-level skills required to function well in todoy's world.
These bosics include the obility to ollocote resources; to work success- fully with others; to find, onolyze, ond communicote informotion; to oper- ote increosingly complex systems of seemingly unreloied ports; ond, finolly, to use technology. The orts provide on unporolleled opportunil.y to teoch these higher-level bosics thot ore increosingly criticol, not only to tomor- row's work force, but olso todoy's.18
For many, the practical workplace justification for the arts in the education of the young is its most persuasive rationale. Aes- thetic experience might be nice, but it can be secured outside of school. Preparation for work is something every student will some- day need. If the arts can contribute to success in this realm, it will have something really important to offer. As I said earlier, when
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t l r t ' r c i s a s o c i a l n c e d , p c o p l e l o o k f o r w a y s t o m e e t i t . S i n c e t h e worlrl is bclievccl to be becoming increasingly competitive, the cluality of the workforce is increasingly important. Art, those whtr embrace this view believe, will find a secure home in our schools if it can contribute to the creation of such a workforce.
THE ARTS AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
A sixth vision of arts education emphasizes its cognitive conse- quences; work in the arts contributes to the deveiopment of com- plex and subtle forms of thinking.re Ironically, the arts are often thought to have very little to do with complex forms of thought. They are regarded as concrete rather than abstract. emotional rather than mental, activities done with the hands not the head, imaginary rather than practical or useful, more closely related to play than to work. Yet the tasks that the arts put forward-such as noticing subtleties among qualitative relationships, conceiving of imagina- tive possibilities, interpreting the metaphorical meanings the work displays, exploiting unanticipated opportunities in the course of one's work-require complex cognitive modes of thought. Exam- ined analytically, work in the arts provides an agenda rich in such opportunities.
At a time when the development o{ thinking skills is particu- larly important, at a time when schools are expected to prepare people to work in more than a single occupation during their life- time, the presence of a program that fosters flexibility, promotes a tolerance for ambiguity, encourages risktaking, and depends upon the exercise of judgment outside the sphere of rules is an especially valuable resource. Although the cognitive consequence of engage- ment in the arts has been advanced since the first quarter of the twentieth century, and despite the fact that it has ardent followers, it is a way of thinking about the aims of art education that is still trying to secure a firm foothold in the larger educational commu- nity. The arts have long been perceived as being "affective" rather than cognitive, easy not tough, soft not hard, simple not complex.
Among the major proponents of the cognitive character of artis- tic activity is Rudolf Arnheim, a scholar whose work bridges the
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fields of art history, psychology, and art education. In his book 7i- sual Thinking, he argues that perception itself is a cognitive activity:
By "cognitive" I meon oll mentol operotions involved in the receiving, stor- ing ond processing o[ informotion: sensory perception, memory thinking, leorning. The use of ihis term conflicts with one to which mony psycholo- gists ore occustomed ond which excludes ihe octivity of the senses from cognition. lt reflects the distinction I om trying to eliminote; therefore I must extend fhe meoning of the terms "cognitive" ond "cognition" to incluoe per- cepiion. Similorly, I see no woy of withholding the nome of "thinking" from whot goes on in perception. No thought processes seem to exist ihot con- not be found to operote, ot leost in principle, in perception. Visuol perceP- tion is visuol thinking.20
Arnheim is not alone in this view Ulric Neisser, a leading cogni- tive psychologist, regards perception as a cognitive event, and Jean Piaget was loath to make a sharp differentiation between the cog- nitive and affective sides of our thought processes.2r My own con- ceptual work regards all forms of awareness as cognitive events.22 Surely the arts, which traffic heavily in acts of perceptual differen- tiation, meet such a cognitive criterion.
The cognitive character of the arts is recognized not only by psychologists but by philosophers. Nelson Goodman, a former lo- gician who in the I960s became interested in the arts, has this to say about the relationship of the arts to the process of inquiry, a process fully cognitive in character:
A persistent trodition piciures the oesthetic ottitude os possive contemplo- tion of the immediotely given, direct opprehension of whot is presented, un- contominoted by ony conceptuolizotion, isoloted from oll echoes of the post ond lrom oll threots ond promises o[ the future, exempt from oll en- terprise. By purificotion-rites of disengogement ond disinterpretotion we qre oble to seek o pristine, unsullied vision of the world. The philosophic foults ond oesthetic obsurdities of such o view need hordly be recounied until someone seriously goes so for os to mointoin thot the oppropriole oes- thetic ottitude toword o poem omounts to gozing ot the prinied poge with- out reoding it.
He goes on to say:
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I moinioin, on the controry, thot we hove to reod the pointing os well os the
poem, ond thot oesthetic experience is dynomic rother thon stqtic' lt in-
volves moking delicote discriminqiions qnd discerning subtle relotionships,
identifying symbol systems ond chorqcters within these systems qnd whot
these chorocters denote ond exempliFy, interpreting works ond reorgoniz-
ing the world in terms o[ *orks qnd works in terms of the world. Much of
o,-ir. ""puri"nce
ond mony of our skills ore brought to beqr ond moy be
trqnsformed by the encounter. The oesthetic "ottitude" is restless, seorching,
testing-is less ottitude thon oction: creotion ond recreotion'23
What would arts programs look like if they emphasized the
cognitive consequences of work in the arts and wanted to exploit
such work for educational purposes? In some way such programs
would not be very different from the programs that are now avail-
a b | e , a s l o n g a s t h e o r i e n t a t i o n s l h a v e d e s c r i b e d w e r e h i g h - q u a l i t y e x . amples of their species. After all, all good work in the arts requires
subtle and sophisticated forms of thinking. Yet there are some fea-
tures of arts activities that seem particularly appropriate for pro-
moting cognitive development' For example' programs that ask
students to conceptualize their own aims in the art form they are
t o w o r k w i t h , p r o g r a m s t h a t a r e p r o b l e m s o l v i n g i n c h a r a c t e r ' p r o - grams that invite students to be metacognitive about their own
work-that is, reflective about their own thinking processes-
and that encourage them to be articulate about their judgments
about art. C o g n i t i v e d e v e l o p m e n t C a n b e f o s t e r e d a s s t u d e n t s a r e a s k e d t o
compare and contrast works that became increasingly similar-
say, comparing and contrasting original works to Iakes and forger-
ies-and then to select the original and to provide reasons for their
choices. There is a host of ways in which curricular tasks could be
formed to practice and to assess the development of specific forms
of cognition. Such curricula need not focus exclusively on art production'
although they could. They could also make it possible for students
to engage in forms of thinking that helped them see connections
between the form and content of works of art and events occur-
r i n g a t t h e s a m e t i m e i n t h e c u l t u r e i n w h i c h t h o s e w o r k s w e l e
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created. In so doing students would practicc synthetic lorms o1 thinking. For example, understanding the content ol sevcnteenth- century Dutch painting requires some understanding o{ the geo- graphic location of Holland, its dependency on commerce, and the rise of a wealthy merchant class. The student is at once engaged in geography, history, and economics as well as aesthetics.
. The key to this approach to art education is to design curricrtla around the forms of cognition and understanding one wants to de- velop. This is much like the tasks designed for students attending the German Bauhaus. They wanted to train designers who under- stood the social context their work was to serve and who could approach design problems mindful of that context. A similar ap- proach could be taken in creating programs for elementary-school children.
USING THE ARTS TO PROMOTE ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE
Related to the cognitive orientation to art education I have de- scribed is a seventh vision, one that justifies the arts in the schools through their contribution to boosting academic performance in the so-called basics. As I have indicated, society's receptivity to the aims of a field of study is closely related to the extent to which its members believe a field will promote the realization of what it val- ues. This is certainly the case regarding the attractiveness to some of using the arts to increase the academic performance of students. The claim is that the more arts courses children and adolescents take, the better they will do in school. In the area of music, we have what is called the "Mozart efIect."2a Infants and preschoolers ex- posed to classical music several times a week do better on a test of spatial ability than their peers who have not been so exposed. The result, some claim, is that, in effect, music makes you smarter.2s
Other data, from large-scale surveys, show that students who enroll in art courses in high school get significantly higher Scholas- tic Achievement Test scores than students who do not take art courses; the more art courses, the higher the SAT scores. However, more courses in any field are positively associated with higher SAT scores. In fact science and math courses are most highly correlated
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with SAT scores. Putting aside for the present the adequacy of the rescarch design and therefore the adequacy of the research, the aim in this orientation is to use aft as a way to achieve what some believe are more important ends, higher test scores in math and science.26
The reasons for wanting to do so seem ciear enough. So many efforts have been made to improve school performance that some citizens are at wit's end about what to do. In the 1980s the reform effort, Ied by President Ronald Reagan, flew under the banner of "A
Nation at Risk." Eight years later President George Bush launched "Goals 2000." Five years after that President Bill Clinton led the way with "America 2000," a new version of the earlier effort. Clearly, U.S. policymakers have made numerous attempts to turn the educational system around; and yet there is a strong feeling that these efforts have not really been successful. Under such cir- cumstances, people ask, "Why not try the arts?"
For some arts educators, especially those who feel profession- ally marginalized, this newfound utility seems like a life raft. But can a field make its most important contributions through seeking outcomes that other fields might achieve at least equally well? And, more fundamentally, will the data support the claims made about effects on student performance in academic areas? Will the design of the research support the data? What happens to the reasons for a field's place in the schools if research shows that such claims are overblown, or that evidence to support them is weak, or that other approaches to boosting academic test scores are more efficient?
INTEGRATED ARTS
Another vision of arts education conceives of the arts curriculum as being integrated into other arts and other nonarts curricula. This conception, sometimes described as "integrated arts," is often used to enhance the student's educational experience. The inte- grated arts curriculum is typically organized into one of,fogS,tl- ricular structures.
First, the arts are sometimes used to help students understand a particular historical period or culture. For example, study of the
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o
Civil War might include the photographs of Mathew Brady or the
music and architecture of the period. It can explore the forms ot
dress worn by people of different social classes and can illumi-
nate the period through literature. The objective is to broaden the
means through which the student's understanding is advanced by
consulting not only academic historical accounts of the civil war
but also other materials of the period, materials that may in the
end speak as eloquently as any written history. Thus art, music, lit-
erature, and history come together around a particular historical period.
A second form of integration, this one within the arts them-
selves, is intendeil to help students identify the similarities and the
differences among the arts. For example, all the alts are concerned w i t h t h e c r e a t i o n o I e x p r e s s i v e f o r m , b u l t h e m c a n s e m p l o y e d t o
achieve such a work are not identical. Indeed, although one can
experience rhythm in a visual work of art as well as in music, the
meaning of rhythm in music and the meaning of rhythm in the vi-
sual arts are different. Students, in this vision of the arts curricu-
lum, have the opportunity to discover what the arts have in com-
siderations, developmental considerations, physical features of the rnaterials, Iayout, and aesthetic matters would be taken into ac- count. In other words, the problem itself is one that begs for mul- tiple perspectives, and these multiple perspectives need to be inte- grated into a whole that makes it possible for the play lot in this case to function successfully. Thus, curricula can be designed that a r e p r o b l e m c e n t e r e d a n d t h a r r e q u i r e t h e i n t e g r a t i o n o f s e v e r a l disciplinary perspectives, including the arts.
Today these and other functions of arts education are put for- ward as reasons to include the arts in school programs. Among the things we can learn from the descriptions I have provided is that the grounds for including a subject of study in the school curricu- lum change with the times. We can also learn that it is unlikely that there will be a consensus that there is only one enduring func- tion for arts in the schools. What matters most in any field of study depends on the context, and the context is influenced by the eco- nomics and politics of the time.
I have been speaking about the sources of direction for a field and have emphasized what members of a society believe its needs to be and the ways in which they believe a field might meet those needs. But the direction in which a field travels emanates not only from perceived needs, but also from imagined desired possibilities. For example, the development of computer technology has sug- gested to many that the computer can become a technology of un- paralleled importance in the arts. What does such a vision imply for the creation of school programs in the afis? What does a com- puter allow students to do with images that other technologies don't, and what might such a resource mean for the development of cognitive skills? What we have here is the creation of opportu- nities through the development of a tool that was Little more than dreamed of filty years ago. The lesson here is that the future is af- fected by inventions that we cannot now foresee.
But the aims of a field depend upon more than either the con- text or the time; they also depend upon a view of education and human nature and upon beliefs about how schools and schooi pro- grams might function given those views of education and human
mon but also what they have to offer that is distinctive'
f t) A rhird approach is to identify a major theme or idea that can \:/ be explorcd through work coming not only from the arts but from
other fields as well. The concept of metamorphosis, for example,
can be illustrated through the way in which a melody is altered in
a symphony, by the ways in which the demographics of an area
change the terrain. and by changes in a sequence of images in film
and photography. Metamorphosis is a biological concept, but its
manifestations can be located in a host of other domains and dis-
ciplines. An integrated curriculum can help students see the con-
nection between biological meaning and other meanings, artistic
and nonartistic, that pertain to the concept. A fourth structure for integration of the afis is related to the
practice of problemsolving. Students can be invited to define a
problem that requires that it be addressed through several disci-
plines, including the arts. For example, if high school students
were asked to design a play lot for preschool children, design con-
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nature. Put another way, conceptions and convictions about edu- cation need not be abandoned, which is not to say that context should be disregarded.
What one has when one looks at the current picture of art ed- ucation is a field, like all fields in education, whose aims vary over time and whose current aims are diverse. We find a field whose justifications for support rest most often upon a medley of reasons and beliefs. some clear, others not; some grounded, some not; some the result of habit and tradition, some not. As I said, the aims of a field are not determined solely by the field's subject matter. And in all human affairs in which matters of importance are to be decided, there is often a lack of uniformity of view.
In some ways, the diversity of views regarding what art educa- tion should be may represent a tension between principle and prac- tice. Principles that cannot bend are rigid. And what is rigid often breaks. Practice that is not principled has no compass; it does not know where it is headed. We need to be both practical and princi- pled, creating the appropriate mix for the particular occasion.
SOME PRINCIPLES TO GUIDE PRACTICE
What, at this point in time, should art education try to achieve? Taking into account the considerations of context I have just de- scribed, I present my view of art education in terms of five prin- ciples.
Principle One. In justifying its case, art education should give pride of place to what is distinctive about the arts. Art education should not get sidetracked or attempt to justify its primary educa- tional mission by focusing its efforts on outcomes that other fields can claim to serve equally well. Nor should art educators make re- search claims about the effects of art education on, say, academic forms of performance for which there is little or weak research ev- idence.
The primary reason for fealty to this principle is that what is distinctive about the ans is itself of value. Few members of a school faculty are as concerned with the education of vision as are teach- ers of art. The visual arts make visible aspects of the world-for ex-
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ample, their expressive qualities-in ways that other forms of vi-
sion do not. The abiiity to see the world in this way is no small ac-
complishment. It engenders meanings and qualities of experience
that are intrinsically satisfying and significant' P r i n c i p i e T w o ' A r t e d u c a t i o n p r o g r a m s s h o u l d t r y t o f o s t e r t h e
growrh of artistic intelligence. The conjunction of art and intelli-
gence is not colnmon. Ability in art is assigned to talent' ability in ,,intellectual" subjects like mathematics and science to intelligence'
For all the reasons I stated earlier, there has been a separation of art
from intelligence. Yet as John Dewey pointed out in the William
James Lectures he gave at Harvard in 1932, intelligent reflection
is a fundamental condition in the creation of art.27 Arts teachers
help, or ought to help, their students get smarter about art in all its
manifestations, including the arts in popular culture' Being able to
compose the qualities that constitute a successful work is no triv-
ial intellectual accomplishment. There is no good theoretical reason to assign exclusive rights
regarding the exercise of intelligence to those who use language or
numbers well, or who shine on traditional academic tasks. Human
intelligence takes many forms, and each of them serves important
social and cultural purposes.28 Such achievements should be ac-
k n o w l e d g e d , i f f o r n o o t h e r r e a s o n t h a n t h a t n o t d o i n g S o C r e a t e s significant educational inequities for those whose proclivities are
in the arts. In the broadest o{ terms, art education might be said to
have as one of its major missions the development o{ altistic intel-
ligence, a concept rooted in Dewey's theory of art and qualitative
thought. principle Three. Art education proglams should help students
learn how to create satisfying visual images, how to see and re-
spond to what we call the arts and other visual forms' and how to
understand the role the arts play in culture' Put simply' art educa-
tion should help students learn how to create and experience the
aesthetic features of images and understand their relationship to
the culture of which they are a part' In identifying these domains for curriculum development there
is no implication that they need to be addressed as independent
units. They can, and probably in most situations they will, be ad-
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dressed in an integrated fashion, but that decision is one that is best made in light of the situation itself.
Principle Four. Art education should help students recognize what is personal, distinctive, and even unique about themselves and their work. There is so much in our schools that pushes for uniformity of response-standardized testing, for example-that one of the important contributions that art education can make to students is to help them become aware of their own individuality. The arts, if they are about anything, are about the creation of a per- sonal vision. The teacher of spelling, assuming the same words are given to a class, seeks unity of response from his students. The same is true for most teachers of arithmetic. Even the teaching of writing puts a premium on teaching students to imitate prototypes. In fact the dominant climate of the early grades of schooling is one of highly rule-governed tasks and standardized expectations. For many tasks, such as spelling and arithmetic, uniformity of outcome is necessary. To communicate we impose and observe common rules regarding how words are to be spelled. We heed convention. Yet because the school curriculum is so heavily weighted toward rule-governed fields of study, what schools seem to teach best is nrle following. The arts, however, march to a different drummer. In most of the arls we seek diversity of outcome. We are interested in the ways vision and meaning are personalized.
Outcomes of this kind are subtle. They require interpretation. They express themselves in the way forms are nuanced. Recogni- tion of personal distinctiveness requires an ability to notice sub- tleties about one's own work. Noticing subtleties is something art teachers can teach. I believe we ought not to abandon such aims.
Principie Five. Art education programs should make special ef- forts to enable students to secure aesthetic forms of experience in everyday life. As one Chinese scholar is said to have commented, "First I see the hills in the painting, then I see the painting in the hills." After a while it is not art that imitates life; it is life that imi- tates art. The outcomes of art education are far wider than learn- ing how to create or to see the objects populating museums and galleries. The world at large is a potential source of delight and a rich source of meaning if one views it within an aesthetic frame of
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rcfe rcnce. It can be said that each subject studied in schools affords the student a distinctive window or frame throueh which the world can be viewed.
To see the world as matter in motion, the way a physicist might, provides a unique and telling view. To see it as a historian might is to get another angle on the world. To see it from an aes- thetic frame of reference is to secure still another view. Each of these views makes possible distinctive forms of meaning. Educa- tion as a process can be thought of as enabling individuals to learn how to secure wide varieties of meaning and to deepen them over time. The outcomes of education can thus be said to diversify and deepen the kinds of meanings people know how to construct and to provide them with the appetite and ability to shift frames.
I expect that each of these principles will have different de- grees of prominence in different settings. This is as it should be. But each commends itself as an important part of the overall agenda for arts education. A well-taught program that paid atten- tion to these principles in its construction would enhance the ed- ucation of the students it serves.
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