a revision of purpose for art education

National Art Education Association

A Revision of Purpose for Art EducationAuthor(s): Guy HubbardSource: Art Education, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Feb., 1966), pp. 7-11Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3190774 .

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A REVISION OF PURPOSE

FOR ART EDUCATION

GUY HUBBARD

GREAT IDEAS have continually spurred people onward to great achievements. Without great ideas nothing can be achieved. Our own nation is the out- growth of a great idea: our education today re- mains the instrument of that idea. And art education is a part of a total educational enterprise that is designed to serve the American people and the American idea.

Of course it is true that art education also goes on through parents, churches, community traditions, college art programs, 4-H Clubs, and Madison Ave- nue advertisers; but without being unduly presump- tuous, we can say that only in the schools is the task likely to be done dispassionately; in the most socially responsible way; and for the greatest number of people. It is within the schools that this power of great ideas may be felt on a massive scale.

Most of us realize the inspiring quality of ideas like these, but most of us are equally aware of how sadly words of inspiration compare with the hard facts of art in public schools. Art teachers have to live and work in a world where their subject is often repressed, or disregarded, or not appreciated and valued as it should be. They know what it means to be rarely, if ever, adequately rewarded for their extra efforts. It is not surprising, therefore, that the morale of art teachers is often low. They lack the inspiration that can come only from leadership-leadership in people and leadership in ideas. People and ideas are inseparable: people generate ideas and ideas stimulate people to great achievements and to more and better ideas.

Art exists in the schools but not healthily-this much is evident from two recent studies'; but studies like these do not account for the whole sorry picture. What proportion of art teachers, for example, are members of their own professional associations? How many of these people play an active part in their associations? How many read the pub- lications devoted to art education? How many art teachers tolerate written curriculums in their school districts which are unusable? How many are working on curriculum committees to improve the present situation? We must conclude sadly that art educators possess no great ideas in common except

those which sound important but which no one can define with the approval of the profession: we re- sort to slogans such as "love of beauty," "self-expression," "the whole child," "process or product."

The only solution to the predicament is for the membership of this profession of art teachers to review the bases of their thinking and to do so against the broad screen of social and cultural needs. Human cultures will always be imperfect, but ad- vances are most likely in those which possess well defined, common goals. We may not like Russia, and yet since the Bolshevik Revolution that nation has leaped from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Communism is repulsive to us but it is an idea -an inspiration-and it demonstrates the effective- ness of ideas. The vigor of our labor unions during the early years of the century, the present strength of the American Medical Association, and the power of our form of government are all indicators of the irresistible force of ideas in the hands of people with common purposes.

Ideas bind people together and give them the strength necessary for collective action. A well or- ganized, well informed, militant group of intelligent people is invincible. Unhappily, these things have rarely been appropriate statements with reference to art educators.

America today is passing through a period of grave crisis. She is being challenged on all sides. And so are we being challenged! But we do not possess the political and economic resources that are everywhere apparent in the nation as a whole. The nation may or may not need an intensification of common goals, but we in art education need not merely to intensify our goals: we need to define them. We have not done this with reference to the contemporary scene.

Do we have a model to help us? Can we invent one? Probably the best one to follow is that which is most basic. Human beings are all individuals: they all possess unique qualities. People are also molded by the environments in which they live to a considerable extent. The contact between the individual and his environment thus occurs through his various senses. In fact we are able to give mean-

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ing to things only through the use we make of our senses-the senses of sight, touch, hearing, taste, and smell. Both individually and collectively we cannot advance ourselves if we are visually illiterate. The manipulation of symbolic forms in reading and mathematics is important: and we all agree that this is so. But to restrict education in this manner is to kow-tow to a traditional practice which is not as efficient as it needs to be. To cling to tradi- tion however, is a constant weakness among human beings. We may call it economy of effort, al- though such words as inertia, fear of change, or even laziness are more appropriate. It is true, never- theless, that teaching an old dog new tricks is difficult: and educational traditions are, indeed, deeply entrenched and often have about them the air of old dogs.

We need to direct our thinking, our search for purpose, to what American society needs now, and not only for what it needs now but for what it will need in the forseeable future. The fundamental question here is not one of asking how we can do things better than we are now doing them: we need to ask ourselves about what is needed. In order to overcome this dilemma we must first look directly to the nation and to its educational needs rather than to current practices and to traditional habits of thinking about art teaching. We must also define those endeavors in which we are eminently suitable to work and create an appropriate set of ideas to guide us. And finally we must recognize that if this is not done and if art teachers do not act forcefully and in union, they will eventually lose all right to be given any time in the school curriculums of the future: they will not be worthy of any public money.

The Need for an Educated Vision:

All of us have to meet the circumstances of life in a given society, and the purposes of education are to enable people to do this effectively. One of our most fundamental means of having contact with any events outside the individual is, as we men- tioned earlier, through our sense of sight. Deny us our senses of sight and our lives change irrevocably. Is the task of developing vision handled at all systematically in schools-or anywhere else for that matter? No, it is not. Except, that is, if we think of the art teacher and the work he does. Do we find any explicit, detailed statements coming from the art education profession as a whole to the effect that art teachers are dedicated to the goal of systematically developing visual maturity and visual efficiency? No, we do not. The art teacher's curriculum may be focussing, in part, on perceptual awareness but we can only know to what degree if it is explicitly stated. But then, art curriculums themselves are not even commonplace occurrences.

The visual aesthetic indicates a high point of visual excellence or critical judgment relative to a

particular way of life and most art teachers are likely to place great value on this in their private and professional lives. This, also, implies that the lower levels of development which lead to what we might describe as the visual aesthetic have been reached first of all. But we have no grounds for this assumption from what may be observed among our students in the public schools.

Our way of life today, for example, is now too complex for some children simply to begin at the beginning of the educational stream. Culturally deprived children frequently lack many basic visual abilities. Instruction is needed here. But this work is not art for self expression so much as "adaptive art"2 for more efficient thinking: it precedes the development of the visual aesthetic to which we made reference above; or at least it proceeds con- currently with aesthetic development.

Such an approach as this one need not, however, be limited to unfortunate children. Future classroom teachers usually have some work in the practice of art and some work in art appreciation; but these studies are in art as a study that exists in its own right. This experience is both necessary and excellent, but by itself, it is not likely to meet our needs today in the elementary schools of this country. The sad but true condition is that these young teachers are perceptually disadvantaged themselves in spite of being intelligent and relatively well informed in the common academic areas. They may have learned to handle the techniques and termi- nology of art modestly, but they have no conception of a much more basic general competency, that of perceptual maturity itself. What is true for students majoring in elementary education is, furthermore, all too often true for those who are planning to work in the secondary schools.

We may believe that teaching art as a subject in its own right is important since art is part of our way of life, but it is every bit as important to teach people to see more effectively; and within this broad context of visual education to include, as one ap- proaches a peak of visual excellence, the concept of art. This is not to suggest neglecting the study of art until the senior high school or college years. The matter is one of emphasis only and this matter of balance should be considered at all levels. From what we know about the transfer of learning, teaching the practice of art will not necessarily do more than sharpen visual perception in those kinds of art that are studied. And for this to be the goal of art within the public schools does not seem to be an efficient use of taxpayers' money.

Art education or perceptual education-or what- ever our area of responsibility might be called- employs behaviors. These behaviors are typically described as artistic or creative. Unless we decide to transform our field completely, we have an obli- gation to know them and to use them to enhance

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the maturity of our students. We may hope that we shall improve what is often called the aesthetic sensitivity of the students; but no one yet has been able to define aesthetic sensitivity with sufficient clarity to satisfy more than a handful of people. Such an objective sounds pleasant to our ears, but it is not very practical and teachers have to try and be practical: schools are imperfect enough without com- pounding the condition. We cannot begin to plan a curriculum for something we cannot describe sat- isfactorily, and we should not be trying to do so until we have resolved some more fundamental questions about our professional obligations. These obligations include the subject we call art, but at a more fundamental level they include the development of the senses of vision and touch. Art educators are the only people in the schools who are potentially capable of developing these senses in order that students may learn how to use them pro- ductively.

The first and the broadest conception we need to establish for a revision of purposes in art education is, therefore, that of perceptual efficiency. To make this known publicly could enhance the status of art instruction and it could point to an undeniably valu- able area of human potential which has never yet been considered seriously by educators, possibly be- cause educators themselves may not have been asking the right questions in education. At a time in history when we cannot know exactly what human potentialities will have to be developed in order to meet the demands of the future we dare not neglect any one of them. This work lies at the very root of all of our objectives and, furthermore, lies at the heart of education and not at the periphery-which is where we so very often find art education today.

The Need for Cultural Identity: The first of the guiding ideas to be considered in

a redefinition of art education is directed toward vision in general: the second one is narrower but is every bit as crucial. A major concern in all educational enterprises is that those who are subjected to instruction will be loyal to the system which established the education. American schools represent American society-the American way of life. Edu- cators devote themselves to many goals but they must, above all things, try to ensure that their students identify themselves with the standards and values that are central to life in this country.

Once again, it is clearly evident that we live in a society that we can see and touch. One of the functions of the Social Studies curriculum is, for example, to cement these allegiances; but no single curricular area is able to do this alone and social studies teachers are not generally likely to possess the interest or the knowledge to do this work in a consistent manner-and we are.3 And aesthetic values, so anthropologists inform us, are invested in

things and ideas by a people-that is, by a way of life.4

Some readers might suggest, however, that this is not an important issue compared with our social and political history. If all people-or even a majority of people-possessed a scholarly competency in hand- ling abstract verbal conceptions then it might be true that visual, tangible learning was less important than that which is verbal. But if that were truly the case, then we should find ample prestige granted to scholars and we should also have a plentiful supply of teachers. In fact, the opposite is all too often true. Moreover, we know that among people in this country whose cultural identification is very weak the major means through which they can be reached tends to be through visual, concrete, and physical devices.5

In addition, and by no means least, we find those people who are least tolerant of all are the ones who disregard aesthetic values most of all.6 Tolerance is a priceless quality of civilized man, and we are dis- tressed at the absence of tolerance that has been reported during recent years in this country.

These two topics may seem to be far removed from each other and equally far removed from art education and yet they may be considered as part of the same problem. The fact is, that in order for the people to be emotionally affiliated with a way of life, they have to be educated to it; and that education calls for exposure to the visual aesthetic of that culture for the simple reason that vision is a primary means of interpretation and communication. This is not to imply that students should be exposed to extended historical studies. History has, of course, played an important part in determining our visual culture. More importantly, students need to know what this culture looks like and feels like now in all its sensory elements: for the art teachers this will include the arts of painting and drawing and also the arts of freeway engineering and automobile styling.

This country is impressive in its visual symbols, and yet native Americans may be blind to them unless they are systematically informed about them. To some extent people are sensitized through every day exposure but this may often be unbalanced and in- effective. Only through careful instruction can a person be made to feel the impact of American visual culture and not merely have a fuzzy feeling of know- ing something-something which so easily drifts into ethnocentric sentimentality.

We do not now do this job at all well in the schools. But if anyone is to do it that person is the art teacher. We need to use every means at our dis- posal to ensure that students in school are made consciously aware of their visual environment. For many people the abstractions of the American Con- stitution and the laws of the nation are enough; for others they are not. Educators dare not neglect any means of reinforcing the cultural identity of students

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and not merely of those who elect art. In all proba- bility those who do not elect art are among those who need this exposure most of all: this is not a pursuit for a few sophisticated individuals but rather the opposite.

Regardless of the obstacles we cannot disregard the challenge of a population that is undergoing catastrophic social change. Large companies move families from point to point like pawns in a game of chess, crime is increasing, hard physical labor is de- clining and leaving people time and energy for thinking and acting. Extended unemployment is offering fertile conditions for unrest. Clearly no panacea will be found in any one place. These problems, never- theless, point directly at the vital concern of cultural identification in the visual domain. It is a challenge art educators have to face and it extends beyond the boundaries of what is conventionally described as art teaching.

The Need to be Prepared for Leisure:

The next purpose has to do with the commodity of time. Our days are divided into manageable parts of hours and minutes. For the first time in the history of mankind a dream is about to be realized where everyone will be able to enjoy a life of plentiful leisure. It may never be realized, however, and George Orwell showed us one alternative in his well known novel, 1984. Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and Mao Tse Tung in this century also have demonstrated how easily tyranny can ruin the possibility of mankind achieving his dreams.

Here in America the electronic age is upon us and with it is emerging a revolutionary re-distribution of time in the lives of people. Strangely enough, however, many people today are "moonlighting" in less than desirable work at illegally low wages. In spite of the fact that they frequently receive poor payment for this work, sociologists believe that one of the real reasons for this activity is that these people have not been prepared for the leisure time they now possess. In their dilemma they turn instinctively to what they are used to doing-working.

Education in that mythical age of American history when all that was needed was instruction in the three "R's" has long since passed. Every other aspect of our society has become increasingly complex so it is reasonable to expect that education should also have advanced. The fact is that education has not kept pace in some areas of vital national concern. Two areas have already been described in which art education has a particular investment. A basic prem- ise of the art educator must now be to help equip all people to use time well. Part of this commodity of time will be consumed by gainful employment. Part of it will be taken up with the acts of living-with sleeping, eating, bathing, purchasing clothes, and so on. Researchers who have been studying the distribution of time in people's lives have been predicting

that working time will diminish rapidly. But some of the early predictions have been achieved long before they were anticipated. Some people already work less than thirty hours a week.

Will people naturally know what to do with their newly acquired leisure? We might ask whether anyone knows naturally what to do with anything. When people are left to themselves with time on their hands they become unpredictable: why else were the peace- time armies of the past saddled with interminable chores such as polishing brassware. What happens in a classroom at school if a teacher leaves the students to their own devices for an hour? He wouldn't dare do so unless, that is, the students were educated to that level of trust.

Dare we, as educators, leave an entire population to its own devices when it is not gainfully employed? Can we automatically conclude that the unused en- ergies of men will be directed in socially acceptable ways? School drop-outs, for example, have time- it is not leisure time, of course, so much as idle time. James Bryant Conant is well aware of the explosive danger among this group of people who are poorly prepared for living in the world of today.7 Such people are often not very intelligent and not well or- ganized; and yet they create considerable trouble and could become a social menace of serious proportions. If this is what time can do for one group, what can be expected if an entire population has an abundance of time but does not know how to use it; or more properly stated, has not been educated to use time well. Beside this problem a great many social problems seem to be of minor significance. Some readers may say that this is not the task of the schools. But what other social agency is there that either is doing something or is likely to do something? We can be sure of one thing and that is that the problem cannot safely be ignored; and wherever and however it is handled the professional art educator will be needed to play an important role.

Since leisure time is increasing dramatically we must plan to educate people to use it wisely. One richly rewarding way of using leisure is through artistic expression-as Winston Churchill and other outstanding men have known very well. The rewarding use of leisure, however, does not come naturally: it is learned. And only the public schools have been established to teach things on a state-wide or national scale. The schools of the future may, of course, change their identity; and in some respects this might be very good: but as things are this challenge lies in the lap of all art educators since among other things they are the representatives in the schools of this important leisure time pursuit.

The Need to Develop Talents:

The fourth and final idea that must be included in any revision of purpose in art education relates to the nurturing of talent. In their 1963 study of sec-

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ondary school art, Reid Hastie and David Temple- ton of the University of Minnesota reported that pre- professional objectives were of first importance in the eyes of art teachers from the larger secondary schools.8 We also know that the larger schools are more likely to offer art than the smaller ones for a number of reasons.9 In spite of this mood among art teachers this objective has in the eyes of this writer, the least right to be considered primary in a public school-or for that matter the least right to be primary in most college art programs.

Some readers may conclude that this is an attack both on artistic talent and on those who help develop this talent. This is not true. In all areas of the school curriculum, teachers must do all they can to develop student potentials-potentials of many kinds. The art teacher's responsibilities center on visual matters. He will encounter creative talents of many kinds and many levels of quality among his students, some of which may be aesthetic. Students may, on the other hand, be visually creative but not in the conventionally artistic ways. By all means, when an art teacher discovers a student whose talents are in the image of his own he should nurture them: he will naturally do so. It is infinitely more difficult, however, to discover and to nurture those talents which fall within the broad area of his teaching responsibility when these talents are unlike his own. Art teachers, as we know, tend to be art practitioners in one or more of the fine arts or the artistic crafts; but this is a very narrow interpretation of the visual arts not to men- tion the twin focuses of visual maturity and creative development which underly art instruction in the schools.

Art educators have a profound responsibility to help the future art professional but if that goal holds the center of the stage then they are losing the op- portunity to take a proud position in the schools. The art educator needs to recognize the breadth of his task in the area of developing talent as being one that calls for art to be used in the future less as an end in itself and more as an instrumental means of developing the kinds of creative, visual behavior that are in demand in all spheres of life including the world of the Fine Arts.

Four Purposes in Review.

Briefly we can summarize these revisions of purpose in art education under four headings. They are as follows:

First, it is imperative that all people should see efficiently. Alternatively they are likely to remain underdeveloped for many human functions-artistic and otherwise.

Second, it is imperative that all people appreciate their common visual values; otherwise they cannot be said truly to belong to this nation.

Third, it is imperative that at a time in history

when the dream of leisure for all is about to be realized that people be educated to the point where they can use this time in satisfying ways; and one of these ways is through art. Idleness or passiveness are not simply undesirable; they are social hazards. In the gift of leisure, then, may lie our dream of the good life-or our undoing.

Fourth, it is imperative that all of those whose unique medium of expression is visual should be helped to make the most of their potential and so enhance both their own lives and our way of life in general.

This conception of art education is proposed as one to guide and to unify our profession. Art education lies at the center of the education that all people need, but until art educators clarify their own objectives and work toward their realization, nothing is likely to be done. And American life will be the poorer for it!

This paper has been an attempt to present a conception of art education which may serve us well in an uncertain present and in an even more uncertain future. Some readers may reject these statements as fundamentally unsound and also dangerous to the continuing identity of art and of art education. We should sympathize with the feelings of those who are suspicious of ideas which might lead to an overthrow of an established order. We need to remember-and the history of art illustrates this very well-that those ideas which are condemned as outrageous in one generation are commonplace in the next; and the greatest strength lies with those who can anticipate future needs and demands and are prepared to take risks to realize their objectives.

Guy Hubbard is Assistant Professor of Education at Indiana University.

REFERENCES 1. National Education Association, Music and Art in the

Public Schools, Research Monograph 1963-M3, Wash- ington, D.C., 1963. Hastie R., and Templeton, D., Art Education in the Secondary Schools, Department of Art Education, Re- search Report 1-63, University of Minnesota, 1963.

2. Hodges, W. L., McCandless, B. R., Spicker, H H., (Indiana University), "The Development and Evaluation of a Diagnostically Based Curriculum for Psychologically Deprived Pre-school Children." A research proposal supported by the U.S. Office of Education, P.L. 88-164.

3. Hubbard, Guy, "Art in the Schools: No Fork in the Road," Art Education, vol XVII, (December, 1964), pp. 10-12.

4. Keesing, Felix, M., Cultural Anthropology, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962, p. 348.

5. Reissman, Frank, The Culturally Deprived Child, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962, p. 73.

6. Evans, R. I., "Personal Values as Factors in Anti-Semi- tism," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol 47, 1952, pp. 749-56.

7. Conant, James Bryant, Slums and Suburbs, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1961.

8. Hastie, Reid, and Templeton, David, "Profile of Art in the Secondary Schools: Report of a National Survey," Art Education, vol. XVII (May, 1964), p. 7.

9. "Music and Art in the Public Schools," Art Education, vol. XVI, (December, 1963), p. 10.

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a revision of purpose for art education

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