National Art Education Association

Notes from the UndergroundAuthor(s): Nelson GoodmanSource: Art Education, Vol. 36, No. 2, Art and the Mind (Mar., 1983), pp. 34-35Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3192659 .

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Cf f ^ ognitive" has been a battle cry in psychology and philosophy of the

arts for some decades. The movement it stands for, one of the most liberating and productive in this century, is often decried by behavioristically oriented theorists as nonempirical and unscien- tific, and widely thought by writers on art to be bent on analyzing the arts to death.

The trouble arises, I think, from a complex of confusions: confusion about cognition, about education, and about art and science. The cognitive approach to education for the arts must surely be condemned if cognition is contrasted with perception, emotion, and all nonlogical and nonlinguistic faculties, or if education is identified exclusively with lecturing, explaining, and pro- viding texts and verbal and numerical exercises, or if art is looked upon as transient amusement for a passive au- dience while science is taken as con- sisting of demonstrations founded upon observation and aimed at practical pro- gress. From its beginning some fifteen years ago Project Zero', a program of basic research into education for the arts, has had to combat these confusions.

For the cognitivist, cognition includes learning, knowing, gaining insight and understanding, by all available means. Developing sensory discrimination is as cognitive as inventing complex numerical concepts or proving theorems. Mastering a motor skill in- volves making subtle kinaesthetic distinctions and connections. Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the

* Copyright ? by Nelson Goodman

work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add. Even the emotions function cognitively: in organizing a world, felt contrasts and kinships, both subtle and salient, are no less important than those seen or heard or inferred.

Accordingly, for the cognitivist, education includes all ways and means of preserving, motivating, fostering, developing such abilities as are involv- ed in cognition in the broadest sense; that is, in the advancement of the understanding. The need for transcen- ding stunted prevalent notions of educa- tion is underlined by Sherman Lee when he writes:

The art museum is not primarily an "educa- tional" institution in the current limited inter- pretation of the word . .. rather it performs a kind of educational function presently unrecognized by legislators and even educators. In showing or juxtaposing visual images, the art museum provides an educa- tion unfamiliar to a word- and sound-oriented society. For the most part visually illiterate, our society defines education in logical sentences-acceptable words and sounds ... however, the museum ... by existing-preserving and exhibiting works of art- ... is educational in the broadest and best sense, though it never utters a sound or prints a word.

Not only showing and juxtaposing visual images, though, but the varied means of improving performance of all kinds, whether in tuning pianos or engines or in dramatic acting or in athletics or in the practice of law or management, are means of education; and some may prove effective beyond their customary application.

Finally, the cognitivist rejects all the popular cliches that put the arts (as evaluative, subjective, emotive, passive contemplation yielding only pleasure) in opposition to the sciences (as factual, objective, rational, active inquiry yielding new knowledge). Rating works of art or scientific discoveries according to their greatness matters much less than comprehending and projecting them. Delight is a dividend that comes with the achievement of new insight by means of either science or art. Effective new ways of seeing or hearing or feeling as well as effective new scientific conceptions and theories are aspects of growth in the making and grasping of our worlds. The genuine and significant differences bet- ween art and science are compatible with their common cognitive function; and the philosophy of science and the philosophy of art are embraced within epistemology conceived as the philosophy of the understanding.

These major reconceptions call for massive reform of research into educa- tion for the arts. Recognition of kinship between the arts and the sciences re- quires investigation into their common features and their specific differences. Education for the arts, like education for the sciences, is seen as focused not upon 'creativity' or the production of geniuses but upon developing the skills involved in understanding and discovery, and upon providing motiva- tion and conditions for the exercise of these skills.

A study of how to develop the ap- propriate skills must begin with a study of how skills are to be identified and classified. Only in terms of some such initial conceptual apparatus can we ask pertinent questions about ways of fostering particular skills or about how

Art Education March 1983

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improvement in a given skill may enhance or inhibit another. Since both science and art consist very largely in the processing of symbols, an analysis and classification of types of symbol systems-linguistic, notational, diagrammatic, pictorial, etc.-and of literal and figurative symbolic functions-denotation, exemplification, expression, and reference through chains of these-provides an indispen- sable theoretical background. It enables us to deal, for example, with such cen- tral and neglected matters as the defini- tion of language and the significant dif- ferences between a description and a depiction and between a literary and a scientific work.

All such philosophical analysis is an anathema to most aestheticians but perhaps less abhorrent than the next step: bringing brain physiology to bear on research into arts education. Theoretical relationships derived from the conceptual framework need to be ex- amined in the light of conjoint or separate impairment of these skills under various brain injuries. That one among such apparently alike skills as reading words and reading numerals and reading musical scores may be lost while the others are preserved moves us to seek the relevant differences among these tasks. That two apparently disparate skills vanish together may

point to a kinship that requires formula- tion. Conceptual apparatus and clinical experience must be tested against each other, and often refined or reinter- preted. Differential impairment of seemingly like skills may, for instance, call for an analysis of "reading" into many component skills, some of them also components of the skill of understanding pictures or musical works. Furthermore, some skills involv- ed in the arts may also be involved in quite other activities; and some means of education familiar only in other fields may thus prove appropriate for the arts.

Research into arts education thus tends to expand into a general study of how human beings learn, know, unders- tand, but with this distinctive feature: that human abilities and activities in the arts are seen to be an integral part of that study.

Whether cognitively oriented or not, research into art education is widely disparaged on the ground that the prac- ticing educator in the particular arts- the master draughtsman, the coach of singers, the teacher of acting or danc- ing or architecture-knows very well how to get results, and is unlikely to pro- fit much from studies by those who are not artists. This claim, I think, is cor- rect but the condemnation mistaken. For one major deficiency in art educa- tion is in preparation for, and

in the Arts Project (LEAP). Photo by Wolfgang Dietze, w . .

maintenance of an attitude conducive to, work in any art. As the student undertaking serious study of a science needs to be able to read intelligently, calculate, and have some experience with experimentation and inference and with the excitement of inquiry and discovery, so the student undertaking serious work in an art needs to be able to see or hear intelligently and have some experiences with inquisitive perception and creative imagination and with the excitement of new insight and invention in the arts. On these matters the basic research I have been describ- ing can, even from its early stages, give the educator some guidance.

Moreover, because in our culture the arts are not really taken seriously, and their whole nature and function is wide- ly misunderstood and often misrepre- sented, even by their most vocal ad- vocates, the integration of the arts into our concept of cognition and thus into the overall educational process is vital- ly important for students who are not to become artists at all. Here even the initial formulation of the cognitively oriented program of research makes an urgently needed contribution. How works of art, and through them our worlds, and our worlds through them, may be comprehended and created must be part of basic education for the millions of us who will never be artists of any kind. Why? Because this will equip us better for survival and success? Rather, because advancement of the understanding is what makes survival and success worthwhile. U

Nelson Goodman is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Harvard University, Cam- bridge, Massachusetts.

Footnotes

Project Zero was founded in 1967 at the Harvard Graduate School of Education by the present author and directed by him for four years. Since then it has been directed by David Perkins and Howard Gardner. The research is conducted by a varying group of psychologists, philosophers, and others, paid and un- paid, and has been reported in a number of books and papers.

2in "Art Museums and Education," Art In- ternational, Vol. 21, 1977, pp. 48-51.

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