art and the mind || why johnny can't draw

National Art Education Association

Why Johnny Can't DrawAuthor(s): Larry GrossSource: Art Education, Vol. 36, No. 2, Art and the Mind (Mar., 1983), pp. 74-77Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3192668 .

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Why Johnny Can't Draw Larry Gross

"An artist, as we understand the word today, is someone who does by nature what we should all do by education."

(John Fowles, The Aristos)

owever noble the aims of education with respect to the "arts," the results seem in-

variably the same: the vast majority of schooled adults regard the arts with feel- ings of inadequacy, incomprehension, and indifference. In brief, most members of our culture view the arts as foreign territory they have no passport to, and little inclination to visit. Why should this be so?

One explanation of why the "output" of our educational process seems so bleak in the realm of the arts might be that the "input" was unsuited for

transformation into a better product. If few people come out of school inclin- ed or able to participate competently in artistic enterprises, it may simply reflect the fact that few children arrive there in the first place with the potential to acquire competence in the arts. Pos,sibly it is the nature of things that qfnly a lucky few possess the es ential ingredient-talent-that will permit them to scale the walls and play in the garden, and the best we can hope from schools is that they not erect any further barriers that might stifle this talent in its rare appearances. Artistic competence and performance by this view are the province of the gifted, and the rest of us can only aspire to join the audience and benefit from their achievements.

There is, however, another possible

explanation. Perhaps it is the case that the capacity to acquire competence in the symbolic modes we associate with the arts is not rare but widespread, but that it withers for lack of nourishment. Might it not be possible that most children are born with sufficient potential to develop substantial competence in these modes, but encounter them in a fashion which discourages most children through self-fulfilling assump- tions of incapacity? On what basis could one support this view?

First, there is the point made by John Blacking: ". . . because there are some societies whose members are as competent in music as all people are in language, music may be a species- specific trait of man" (1973:34). Although it might be argued that such

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musical societies represent concentra- tions on inbred talent, it seems as likely, to quote Blacking again, that "The functions of music in society may be the decisive factors promoting or inhibiting latent musical ability . . ." (1973:35).

In all societies, all adults are competent in the lexical and social/gestural modes; those few who are not invariably defined as deficient-retarded, disturb- ed, or foreign-and treated according- ly (Gross, 1974). While not everyone will be equally skillful or creative in their speech, all members of a culture by early childhood will have acquired substantial competence in this highly complex sym- bol system. Why does this not occur in the case of other symbolic modes-in our culture at least?

There is a common pattern in the way children encounter music, say, in those societies Blacking was referring to, and the way children encounter language in all societies. In both cases they are born into contexts where (1) it is assumed that everyone will acquire music/speech, (2) they are surrounded by competent per- formers, and (3) those they encounter treat their early performative efforts as potentially meaningful, and respond to them encouragingly as such.

In contrast, in our society children encounter the arts mostly in contexts in which most others (1) are themselves in- competents who (2) assume that only a chosen few will acquire competence and, in a judgmental fashion, at least tacitly convey the message that the child is not necessarily expected to get anywhere, and/or (3) are incapable of responding to the child's efforts in any discriminating fashion (as they do in the case of speech), thus dampening any sense that these modes are vehicles of shared meaning. Imagine the conse- quences if we assumed that only those possessing special talent would learn to speak.

The genetic theory of artistic ability is further reinforced by the observation that artistic competence does seem to run in families-parents who actively engage in music seem more likely than others to have children who manifest musical ability. But notice that such families also manifest the pattern characteristic of "musical societies" and speech communities: these are contexts in which everyone engages in a symbolic mode, and it is probably conveyed to children that they too are expected to join in.

Viewing the arts as the province of the exceptional gives them the attributes of value associated with scarce resources. In this case that means that we concen- trate heavily upon those characteristics of artistic performances and products which most clearly manifest scarcity: the unique contributions of the individual artist which, almost by definition, will be innovative (else how could they be unique?). Thus we put a premium on novelty, and make our concept of creativity synonymous with originality (in the post-Renaissance sense of new, not the Medieval sense of "from origins"-as in 'original sin').

These core notions of what art is, or should be about, often show up in discussions of early education. For example, in the first chapter of her text- book, Teaching Art to Children, (which must have been fairly successful-I am quoting from the 2nd printing of the 3rd edition), Blanche Jefferson of the University of Pittsburgh explicitly and insistently connects the individuality and uniqueness she associates with adult artists to the approach she advocates for art education in primary schools:

In their studios, artists work independently. This high degree of independence has been identified with art since time began. Each creates works of a highly personal and original nature, and this gives us the tremen- dously varied and interesting world of art. For example, Picasso works alone in his studio following his own ideas and knowledge, and applying his own critical judgment to his work. These same working conditions are a fundamental aspect of high quality art education ... Art is based upon the individuality of the per- son doing the art. In fact, every child is re- quired and expected to work differently from every other. Therefore, if each child is not working in a personal and original way, it is not art. (1970:1, 28)

There is a serious problem with this approach, if we believe that the arts are media of communication through which members of a culture create and share knowledge, belief, and feeling. Name- ly, the very essence of communication is that it is grounded in shared ways of articulating-conventions and codes- and can not easily cope with radical in- novation. In Levi-Strauss' phrase,

We would never manage to understand each other if, within our society, we formed

a series of coteries, each one of which had its own particular language, or if we allow- ed constant changes and revolutions to take place in language, like those that we have been able to observe now for a number of years in the fine arts ... (In contemporary art) we are left with nothing but a system of signs, but 'outside language', since the sign- system is created by a single individual, and he is liable to change his system fairly fre- quently. (Charbonnier, 1969:60, 87)

Encountering the arts in these circumstances-where few adults manifest competence or the expectation of it in the child, and where the arts do not function as common carriers of cultural knowledge-guarantees their continued marginal status. The realm that is loosely identified with the um- brella term "art" is a "reservation" on the border of our culture. "Real people" do not live on this reservation; they visit it in their leisure, spare time; the reservation is inhabited by fringe, spare, not quite real people.

Who are the people who live on the reservation, and how do they get there? The answer can be approached by noting that the arts were not always con- fined to that peripheral reservation; the institutions and participants that we associate with the arts were once found much closer to the cultural center (geographically they are still often cen- trally located). But over the past few hundred years, at an accelerating rate, they have moved to the periphery. And they are not alone. There is an adjoin- ing reservation occupied by another institution that has also drifted to the cultural margin: religion. In fact, as is well known, art and religion were in- timately associated when they were more central, and their removal from the cultural core may be related.

At one time what we call religion was the institution that served to explain the way things were, and why, and how people were to behave in this world; the means used to articulate and disseminate these explanations were often those of the arts. As religion ceased to be for most people the prime source of basic knowledge and value, the arts ceased to be the vehicle of the symbolic functions that integrate and maintain social reali- ty. They became a specialized province of largely meta-communicative creation and appreciation; in a fundamental sense they don't matter.

The qualifications for living on these

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reservations are similar: one needs to have special qualities, what is called sometimes in both cases, a vocation. One is called; motivated by a sense of inner necessity to give up the world of "normal" people and follow a different path. In the case of art the calling is defined by the mysterious spark of talent, even genius, that sets one outside (above?) the mainstream. Children are quick to absorb the contradictory

*n a time of rapid cultural and technological change it is important that we give serious attention to the question of what we choose to have our children learn, how we choose to teach them, and why."

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messages they encounter about the arts: valued and scorned at the same time, treated with respect yet vagueness, fundamentally alien to the real business of life. Encounters with art take on a pass/fail overtone, in which one's innate potential is being assessed, and not sur- prisingly, most give up and relinquish any claim to membership in the communicative community of the arts.

Parents, schools, and peers convey in a variety of forms the message that art isn't quite "real" and that its am- bivalent peripheral status is appropriate to those who are "called" to it. For those children who do manifest a strong interest and ability in art form, it is often quickly apparent that others are not able to offer them much help. Parents and others tend to respond to children's art with generalized, nondiscriminating support (or, in some cases, indifference) which clearly undermines any communicative component. It didn't take long for me, at the age of six or seven, to realize that my parents' response did

not differentiate between work I thought was good and work I knew wasn't; it all went up on the refrigerator door art gallery. In the same way, I understood very well my father's sym- pathetic comment that, while being in- volved in art was nice, I did not need to understand that it wasn't possible to make a living at it (I was about seven at the time, and not very pressed to make a living just yet).

Similarly, children probably draw cer- tain conclusions from the contrast between the almost obligatory "in- dividualism" expected by art teachers like Blanche Jefferson, and their peers' views about performance in sports (something clearly important). When something really matters, there is a right way to do it, and the boundaries of the permissible are clearly marked. Yet, it is in such contexts that children are likely to experience the satisfactions of ac- quiring a socially valued skill through repetitive practice and interaction with skilled practitioners.

Sports are far more likely than art to provide children with the aesthetic experience of mastery and competence in a shared endeavour. Certainly, some children will quickly achieve a marked- ly greater level of skill, but differentials in performance need not condemn the less skillful to passivity and exclusion (although in our mass society most peo-

ple are now cast in the role of passive receiver in sports as well as in the arts).

The picture seems bleak indeed with respect to art education as successive generations of children encounter the barriers placed around the reservation and lose interest in gaining entrance for more than brief, perfunctory visits.

The solution to the problem would lie in radical changes in the ways our culture conceives of both art and education. Some of these changes are discuss- ed by other papers in this volume. But, in another perspective, we may be un- necessarily narrow if we focus only on the limits of art education. Most of what our children encounter in their schooling fails to engage them in a very meaningful way. To create the conditions for real education in art would likely require a radical restructuring of our educational priorities and methods. A pro- gram for early education that focused on the acquisition of competence in primary modes of thought and action- lexical, iconic, musical, logico- mathematical-understood as commun-

cative systems, could make possible a fuller employment of human potential than we now achieve.

In a time of rapid cultural and technological change it is important that we give serious attention to the question of what we choose to have our children learn, how we choose to teach them, and why. We may have little to say about the overall nature of the culture of which our children become members, but the aspects that are part of formally institu- tionalized processes of education can and must come under severe scrutiny. Schooling is a mechanism by which societies direct much of the culturation of their members, and we must ask whether our present modes of education are producing a citizenry that is willing and capable of striving for a just and full employment of its human potential.

We have inherited a concept and a system of education that grew out of the need of an industrializing society for a populace that possessed a minimal set of literacy and arithmetic skills; the arts were then as now a decorative frill.

The basic structure of American education had been fixed by about 1880 and ... it has not altered fundamentally since that time .... (Its) purpose has been, basically, the inculcation of attitudes that reflect domi- nant social and industrial values .... The result has been school systems that treat children as units to be processed into particular shapes and dropped into slots roughly congruent with the status of their parents" (Katz, 1971).

The fact that the nature of our society is changing and that this limited focus of educational objectives is no longer ac- ceptable to a significant proportion of parents, students, and teachers is what gives us hope that we can utilize the new possibilities provided by social change and technological progress in order to create the conditions for a humanizing educational system. In order to achieve such a grand ambition we must recognize that our current definitions of human potential and intelligence need to be re-examined and recast. We can no longer settle for a system in which,

... it seems very likely that the intelligence which the schools reward most highly is not of the highest type, that it is a matter of in- complete but docile assimilation and glib repetition rather than of fertile or rebellious creation" (Waller, 1965).


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We must realize that the narrow and restricted view of intelligence and the exclusion of vast realms of human ability and feeling from the educational en- vironment is functional for a system of social control and domination that is en- dangered instead of enriched by the full realization of human potential. Restruc- turing our concepts and modes of education is a requirement for a social liberation on a meaningful scale.

The repression of aesthetic and moral needs is a vehicle of domination .. To the degree to which liberation presupposes the develop- ment of a radically different consciousness (a veritable counterconsciousness) capable of breaking through the fetishism of the con- sumer society, it presupposes a knowledge and sensibility which the established order, through its class system of education, blocks for the majority of the people" (Marcuse, 1972).

We must attempt to capture the opportunities offered by our present state of change and transition because, if we do not, these same opportunities will be turned against the tide of humanization and merely increase the power of our system to limit and confine the potential of a majority of its members. It is hard to view the prospect for beneficial and creative change with undaunted op- timism. In hard times-and these are hard times-the best do not always show conviction, and the worst do indeed seem full of passionate intensity. Societies are rarely willing to support modes of education that threaten their basic values or their definitions of what it means to be a member of their culture. The only hope for such improvement is through the growing realization that there is much that needs to be changed, that change is possible, and that the potential for improvement outweighs the frustrations and defeats along the way. U

Larry Gross is professor, Annenberg School of Communications, and editor, Studies in Visual Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadel- phia, Pennsylvania.

References

Blacking, John, How Musical is Man? Seat- tle: University of Washington Press, 1973.

Charbonnier, Georges, Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss, London: Jonathan Cape, 1969.

Gross, Larry, "Modes of Communication and the Acquisition of Symbolic Com- petence," in D.R. Olson, ed, Media and Symbols: The Forms of Expression, Communication, and Education, The 73rd Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Jefferson, Blanche, Teaching Art to Children: Content and Viewpoint, Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 3rd edition, 1970.

Katz, Michael B., Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools, New York: Praeger, 1971.

Marcuse, Herbert, Counterrevolution and Revolt, Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.

Waller, Willard, The Sociology of Teaching, New York: Wiley, 1965.


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