the arts in general education

National Art Education Association

The Arts in General EducationAuthor(s): Arthur W. FoshaySource: Art Education, Vol. 26, No. 6 (Sep., 1973), pp. 2-6Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3191792 .

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The Arts in

Gener~al Education

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Arthur W. Foshay don't know of any group in education that is more strongly affiliated with itself than are the art educators. In a way, this is strange. Characteristically, people in the arts have a stronger sense of themselves, and are more inner-directed

than others. Why should they affiliate so strongly? The answer, I think, is that they feel themselves somewhat isolated from the other teachers in the schools. They have a special mission to perform, different from the general mission of the schools. In a sense, they are institutionalized rebels against the society-centered, exclusively intellectual emphasis that dominates most of the schools' program. The more deeply involved they are in the arts, the more atypical their view of the world and the people in it.

This isolation has its penalties. We live in a society in which our tradition says that the arts are to be carried on only after the serious work has been done. The arts are play, in a work-oriented world. But if the serious work of the world is its main business, then play is a kind of decoration, or release from that which is serious. It is not to be taken seriously itself. The problem is that the rest of us don't know how to take the arts seriously. If we are to take the arts seriously, it is necessary that the special way of viewing the world characteristic of the arts be made known and be brought into the regular day-by-day activities of the world. The purpose of this paper is to examine that possibility. I call it, "the arts in general education," because the regular business of the schools is to carry on general education. If the arts are to be understood by most of us for what they really are, a special way of viewing the universe and man's activity in it, then the arts have to be seen as a part of the general education of students.

This will be difficult to do for several reasons. One I have men- tioned: that the arts are viewed as play. To the conventional mind, play is a purposeless, relaxing activity, engaged in full-time only by those who have no serious function to discharge in the world-play- boys. Our Puritan tradition says that play is on the whole a debili- tating thing to do with one's efforts and time; one would do better to work. The personality that our tradition honors is the dour, even grim archetypal New Englander-a strain which, it is worth remind- ing ourselves, never developed a unique dance, theater, music, or school of painting. The great New England art was in prose, especially political, philosophic, and theological prose. Now this prosy, hardworking, God-fearing serious character built the country and infused it with his conscience. He also infused it with his attitude toward the arts. We live with that tradition to this day, though we have of course modified it considerably, especially as we have acknowledged non-New Englanders in our national life.

The public schools, however, are a largely unaltered product of this essentially New England tradition. The aspect of the tradition that concerns us here-that which pertains to the place of the arts in the

curriculur--continues unchallenged in the main. When we seek to examine the place of the arts in general education, we have to recognize that we are running counter to a very deep, very powerful tradition.

Beginning shortly after the First World War, the tradition was chal- lenged by that great New Englander, John Dewey, and those who followed him. One of the consequences of the challenge was the in- troduction of the arts into the elementary schools on a widespread scale. We made room for the arts, but we didn't change our attitude. The attitude toward the arts that persists to this day is truer to old New England than it is to the twentieth century. We continue to re- gard the arts as play, to be undertaken after the serious work is done, or by those unable to do serious work. We have a whole array of euphemisms for this attitude. When we, the general public, speak of the arts, we tend to lower our voices and utter certain mystic phrases: "self expression," "creative. " We often belive that efforts in the arts are private, and that they must not be discussed lest they be destroyed. Even in its more modern and liberal guise, the attitude we general educationists take toward the arts is that they partake of

Presented at the National Art Education Association Conference in San Diego, April 1973.

magic. One must never criticize a child's art product, lest he be cis- couraged or lose his creative spark. But we do discuss what we take seriously. It never occurred to anyone that a child's attempts to formulate "scientific" propositions should not be open to examination, or that his attempts to write clearly should not be criticized and corrected, or that controversial matters of the social studies should not be subject to analysis. Only the arts remained beyond the pale of examination in the ordinary ways.

For all of these reasons, the teacher of the arts carries on a constant fight for time, for space, and even for materials of instruction. In the competition, the arts teacher does not seem to be winning now. Ihe great national thrust now in the curriculum is toward career education and reading, not toward the arts. The teacher of the arts, because he has his own view of the world and of what is important in it, is something of an alien in the faculty. The others don't quite un- derstand why he does what he does, and they rather envy him his playful existence.

Perhaps I have said enough now to leave you confirmed in your desperation. Before we all throw up our hands and go home, however, let me hasten to add that in the face of all of this, it is possible to make a counter proposition that may hasten the end of this now sterile tradition.

All the reasons for the arts being as they are in the schools arise from the misconception of the nature of the arts. Our tradition does not help us with this: we who are interested in the arts have to correct this situation for ourselves, aided only by certain major statements which come, not from the New England tradition, but from the broader tradition of Western civilization. We have to proclaim the nature of the arts as relevant human experience.

The Nature of the Arts

The first thing to be said about any art work is that it is a statement about the human condition. It is the artist who is the greatest human- ist of us all, for he comes at the nature of man directly, unimpeded, fully. Children grow up not only intellectually, but also socially, emotionally, aesthetically, spiritually, and physically. Our preoccupation with the intellectual has yielded us a school tradition that portrays man as less than he is. It is in the arts that we have an opportunity, precisely because there is no inhibiting pedagogical tradition to stand in our way, to deal with all the aspects of what it is tobe a..---- human being. Indeed, to fail to recognize this is to fai:to4J6gnirze, the nature of our heritage in the arts, as well as the hturkdf•rtists and of teachers of the arts. The difference between fe14gft-he arts and other teachers is that he makes the nature of m'ir his full- time preoccupation-the nature of the whole man. Other disciplines, because of their traditions, do not.

Let us consider as a central proposition that teachers of the arts de with the deepening of the aesthetic response--whether to one's o art products or to those of others. It is the aesthetic response that concerns us. I wish to examine here the possibility that the aesthetic response to the world offers a framework within which we can bring the arts and general education into one fabric. Let us therefore begin by examining it.

I like Harry Broudy's formulation of the aesthetic response. The response, he says, has four aspects: it is formal, technical, sensuous, and expressive.

By the formal response, Broudy means only that we recognize the form that we are confronting. If it is a still life, we recognize that it is a still life. If it is a fugue, we recognize that. If it is an aria, that is what we attend to. And so on.

By the technical, Broudy means to refer to a recognition of how the statement has been made. It is here that we become interested in matters such as brush work, surface, composition, tension, rhythm, and the like.

By the sensuous, Broudy means to refer to the nature of the appeal to the senses made by the aesthetic object. There is nothing high- falutin about this; the sensuous appeal is conveyed through color, surface, sound, sometimes odor, movement, and so on. To view an

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object aesthetically means, among other things, that one be aware of one's own perceptual processes.

Broudy's fourth category of the aesthetic response is what he calls the "expressive," and what I will call "interpretation." While the formal, technical, and sensuous aspects of an aesthetic object may be studied, and one may deepen one's knowledge of these aspects, the expressive is an act of one's own. One draws meaning from the experience. Broudy's illustration is that one says of a painting. "The artist has painted an angry sea." One knows that the sea is not angry, the sea is simply the sea. It is not of great consequence whether the artist intended it to be an angry sea, or to portray anger. This is one's own interpretation, supported by evidence. The aesthetic response is not complete unless one has interpreted it. To be formal, technical, and sensuous, and those alone, would be to be "merely academic." It is at the point of interpretation that the meaning of the response becomes apparent.

It is worth noting that this formulation of the aesthetic response im- plies that one may decide to view any object from an aesthetic point of view. Take my pen, for example. Formally, it is what I have named it-a pen. Technically, it is put together so that it has a supply of ink and a point to write with, and a shaft that makes it easier to hold. It is made partly of metal, partly of plastic, and has a clip so that it will stay in my pocket. Sensuously, it feels smooth and hard and cool, it is silver and black, and if I don't watch out it will make a dirty mark on my finger. Expressively, it could have rich symbolic meaning to anyone who writes a good deal, but it happens not to have for me since I do most of my "writing" by means of a dictating machine, and my typewriter is my principal writing tool. The function of the pen is largely as a device for signing letters and writing checks. So the pen doesn't have very much meaning for me. Thus ends my aesthetic response to a pen. On the other hand, I have been

captivated for long periods of time by Bach, or by the scene of Persepolis, or by Michelangelo. My aesthetic transaction with these objects is far deeper. All of this is to say something quite simple: that some objects repay an aesthetic decision more deeply than others. But the decision to view something aesthetically has to be made, or it is not viewed that way. If the arts are to move into general education, it will be necessary that we explore the possibility that an aesthetic response is fruitful in the domains that characterize general education now.

The Nature of General Education

Which brings us to general education. Once more, let me try to present a brief formulation of this complex term.

General education includes those domains of knowledge and experience which deal with what it is to be a human being. I have bor- rowed from the research in developmental psychology six categories of human development which, taken together, seem to me to portray how human beings grow up. I shall present them in the decreasing order of the richness of the research bearing upon them. We will proceed from the most familiar and best understood aspects of growing up to the least familiar and least understood aspects of growing up.

First, people grow up intellectually. This is the best understood aspect of human development. It has been the most elaborately re- searched, and is most familiar to us here. I shall not elaborate upon it, but shall instead refer you to the Bloom Taxonomy of Educa- tional Objectives, The Cognitive Domain, for an elaboration. To grow up intellectually is to grasp symbol systems, to interpret them into principles, to carry on analysis, synthesis, and finally evalua- tion.

The emotional domain is understood somewhat less than the intel-

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lectual domain, but it has been the object of intensive study for several generations. To grow up emotionally includes, among other things, overcoming infantile egocentrism. One must separate oneself from what one does, and oneself from one's environment, early in life. The infant who runs into a door blames the door. The child who runs into a door blames himself. This ability to take oneself as the object of attention is a crucial aspect of emotional development. There are many others, more or less familiar to all of us.

The social domain is less well understood than the preceding two, but again it has been studied a good deal. To grow up socially includes, among many other things, the development of social mechan- isms that achieve conflict resolution without spiraling up into a physical encounter. I myself studied this a generation ago, and found that young elementary school children blunder into social crises because they don't know any better.

Next we come to aesthetic development. This is far less well understood than are the preceding aspects of human development, but no less essential to any picture of what a human being is. To grow up aesthetically, I will say here, is to deepen one's aesthetic responses as described earlier. The difficulty with the Taxonomy of Educa- tional Objectives, The Affective Domain, is that it collapses what I will call aesthetic response into what they call affective or emotional response. The writers of that book have misled us, in that they have no concept of the aesthetic independent of the affective response to aesthetic objects. The decision to view objects aesthetically is real, not necessarily mainly affective, and a significant part of the human experience in its own right. Education must therefore deal with it. Even less well understood is spiritual development. I do not mean here to refer to religion, but to that which gives rise to religion. The human being is an astonished, awestruck creature, who is capable of raising ultimate questions which must be confronted, but which can- not be answered. Questions such as "What is the meaning of life?" of death? of infinity? of the sublime? of evil?"-all these ultimate questions and others must be faced if one is to grow up spiritually. One confronts them; one does not answer them intellectually. The confrontation ordinarily takes place as one responds to the arts. Who can listen to the St. Matthew Passion without having an experience of the sublime? Who can see Tristan without having some experience of the continuity of life? However, we have institutionalized our spirituality also; we often respond to these ultimate questions with worship. It is no accident that the arts play such a large part in religious observances, for it is through the arts that one can confront. these ultimate questions most validly.

Finally, we come to physical development. The physical development I mean to refer to here is not that of the pediatrician, but that of the psychologist. Psychologically, physical development consists of coming to terms with one's changing body. It changes throughout life, of course. Those who don't recognize that fact try to deny it, and appear grotesque. The middle-aged person who tries to dress and appear like a twenty-year-old is denying the changes in his own body, and is in that respect undeveloped.

Now, historically we have attempted to deal with these aspects of human development through separate school subjects, and separate human institutions. We have said that the arts deal with the aesthetic, mathematics the intellectual, social studies the social, and (sometimes) poetry the emotional. We have left spiritual development to the religious institutions, and have legislated ourselves out of con- cern with this aspect of human development.

Our history does not serve us well. If these six aspects of what it is to be a human being are sufficiently comprehensive, then any institution or experience that fails to deal with all of them portrays a false version of what a human being is, and thus does not serve general education. While mathematics is mainly an intellectual pursuit, there's no reason to suppose that it is exclusively so. While the arts deal primarily with aesthetic response, we here know very well that aesthetic response confronts all the aspects of what it is to be human. While the social studies deal primarily with certain aspects of social development, they again are not exclusively social, because man is not exclusively social.

Indeed, human beings are not exclusively any one of these properties, every one of us is a combination of all of them. They constantly interact within us. To provide a general education would be to provide for such interaction. I have said that our tradition does not serve us well in this respect. It does not, indeed. Our tradition in general education consists of treating everything as if it finally were intellectual. We are prisoners of the 18th century, intellectually; we act as if we thought that reason were the final and ultimate and complete property of the human existence. Samuel Johnson didn't have a definition of emotion in his dictionary. He did define passion as a disturbance of the reason, thus non-defining it. We act as if this were still the case, though in this century we know very much better.

This has been a consistent thrust in our history as educationists. Most recently, it has taken a vital new direction, represented perhaps best by Bruner's Process of Education statement on the struc- ture of the disciplines, which summarized the rebirth of lively intellectual processes in the pursuit of academic subjects. But I must repeat that if we try to reduce all of the human being's properties to the intellectual, we will finally misrepresent him to himself. Historically, we have done this: our pedagogical, or academic, version of man is what we call a pedant. To be a pedant is to try to reduce everything to formal intellectual analysis. To be a pedant, and that alone, would be to be childish emotionally, socially, spiritually, aesthetically, and physically. In a word, to be a pedant is to be misshapen. The tradition will not do.

I will insist here that it is in the arts, and the arts alone in our present tradition, that we have an opportunity to deal with the wholeness of the human being. For the arts deal with all six of these properties of the human condition. They deal with them directly, as I have said, unimpeded by a formal analytic tradition. Since our teaching in the arts does not arise from the 18th century, it is free from its preoccu- pations. While the arts enlighten, they do not arise from the En- lightenment. Our best opportunity for escaping from the 18th century view of man into a 20th century view is through instruction and experience of the arts.

So viewed, the arts are general education, and all disciplines share the definition of the arts as statements about the human condition. Like the arts, the academic disciplines seek to deal with the formal (e.g., what is matter?), the technical (e.g., how does the government work?), the sensuous (e.g., how make a product marketable?), and the expressive (e.g., what is meaning of the Federalist Papers?). That is, it is possible to use the aesthetic response as a formulation for confronting the humane meanings of formal academic pursuits.

The traditions of the arts, and of the academic fields, separate the two to the disadvantage of both. To view the arts as playful and private, and the formal academic pursuits as work-oriented and serious, is to separate them and to rob general education of its humane meanings. In the final analysis, it is to rob education of any serious meaning--it is to make it merely academic.

The Arts in General Education

To deal with the problem that is thus presented is to conceive not only of the arts in general education, but of general education (especially academic education) in the arts. An adequate view of the problem takes it as an interlocked whole. Let us attempt to deal with it that way.

Since the arts deal with the world from an aesthetic point of view in the main, let us consider how an aesthetic approach to subject matter might affect it. Let us, that is, consider how the arts might affect what is now considered general education.

First, let us recall Broudy's four-fold formulation of the aesthetic response: the formal, the technical, the sensuous, and the expressive. If we can apply this formulation to what is ordinarily thought of as academic subject matter, the arts will have entered into general education. Remember, please, that the first three--the formal, the technical, and the sensuous-involve formal knowledge, and may be studied and information gathered round them. The fourth, the expressive aspect of the aesthetic response, involves synthesis and judgement. Our question is, can the aesthetic stance inform general

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education? To answer it, let us try an example. A few months ago, I had the opportunity of working with the director of social studies for a certain state department of education. We examined this very proposition. The results of the, examination seemed fruitful. I shall present them to you here.

We first asked the director of social studies to supply us with a topic in social studies that is widely taught in his state. His suggestion was Conflict Resolution. This, he said, is a favorite topic in a number of the high schools in this state. We resolved to apply Broudy's categories to this topic.

The first of the categories is the formal. What would "the formal" bring to mind in the case of conflict resolution? First of all, we

thought, it would acknowledge that conflict exists. It would seek to bring students face to face with the phenomenon of conflict. Con- flicts take many forms--from academic disputation to war. In between are people shouting at each other, "angling," indulging in fist fights, destroying one another's reputations, and so on. The formal led us to a confrontation with the phenomenon of conflict itself-something, it turns out, that is usually left out of the treatment of this subject in the schools. For the topic was not conflict, but conflict resolution, and our aesthetic confrontation with it forced us to alter the nature of the topic so that students would realize what was going on. Thus the formal.

Second, the aesthetic analysis requires that the conflict be faced technically. It is here that the usual treatment of this topic and the aesthetic treatment match, for to treat it technically is to deal with the content, or the issues, that can be discerned. Here, students would be called upon to do the typical academic job of reading and thinking about what was involved in the conflict-not only that it is manifestly a conflict (that is, "formal") but that it involves some sub- stance.

The third element in the aesthetic analysis of conflict resolution is the sensuous. Here, we recognize that the conflict involves feeling. People sweat, and become exhausted. They summon up the last ounces of their energy in the conflict, or they don't. To acknowledge the sensuous aspect of conflict resolution is to acknowledge that it involves people in ways that go beyond the issues; to study how they go about perceiving it.

The last, the expressive, leads us to consider what conflicts mean, and how they can indeed be resolved. It is necessary to recognize that they are ordinarily not resolved intellectually. A victory in war, or a non-victory, or a defeat, is not an intellectual exercise. Many domestic conflicts are resolved, not through formal intellectual analysis, but by a kiss, or the decision that the conflict should simply be stopped, or by exhaustion, or by withdrawal from one another. These ways of resolving conflicts are not ordinarily dealt with under the rubric, "conflict resolution." In general, conflicts may be resolved intellectually, socially, or emotionally. To solve them socially is to appeal to mores and rules, or to conscience. But such appeals are not appeals to the intellect.

The effect of the aesthetic analysis of this topic was, we thought, to flesh it out-to tell the whole truth about conflict, not just to portray it as an affair that reasonable man can solve reasonably-a version that is less than the whole truth.

We thought that we had passed the test so far as this one social studies topic was concerned, and that in this case the arts had entered general education. For in portraying conflict, it is possible, and even desirable, that it be danced, portrayed graphically, portrayed dramatically, portrayed through polemics and poetry, and so on. To do less than this is to fail to recognize the way conflict actually ap- pears when it is in process. Neither Tom Payne nor Abraham Lin- coln-the one portraying conflict, the other resolving it-sought primarily to appeal to the intellect. They appealed to the heart-that most profoundly humane of the human attributes.

Let us try another example. This time, let us observe general education penetrating the arts, having just considered an example of the arts entering general education.

I have a friend on the teaching staff of the town where I live and am

on the board of education. She teaches movement, and she was the one who first told me of the existence of a Whittle. Whittle equipment is an array of climbing apparatus, consisting of trestles, bridges, stools, rope climbing devices, ladders, and so on. These pieces of equipment may be put together in a great many different ways, to provide for various kinds of movement by children.

It was decided in this school system to buy the Whittle equipment and offer it to the children on a tryout basis. An interesting thing happened.

The children (these were in the first three grades) who confronted this apparatus had been studying science through one of the modern elementary science programs-the Science Curriculum Improve- ment Study. In their science classes, they had learned that anything may be considered an object, and that objects have properties. Note: to say this is not the same as to say that objects have functions. The children are asked to postpone their judgements about the functions of objects, since objects act upon other objects by virtue of their properties. This generalization is learned in this program quite success- fully by six-year-old children. They learn to look at an object in terms of its heft, its texture, its shape, its color, its rigidity, and so on. A little later, they learn that different objects may interact according to what properties they have, and how they are caused to interact with one another. Thus, a pen might be used to poke a hole in a piece of paper. The evidence of interaction would be the hole. Some sugar could interact with some water. The evidence of interaction would be that the sugar seemed to disappear. All such interactions exist by virture of the properties of the interacting objects.

Having learned this, the children approached the Whittle. They did not begin by climbing on it. They began by lifting the equipment, moving it about, trying combinations (interactions), stroking it, look- ing at it, and so on. In a word, they applied the way they had learned to examine objects in their science class to their class in movement. The children poked, lifted, pushed, felt, and looked at the Whittle before interacting with it. Movement education became an aspect of general education.

So you see, art in general education can work both ways. To bring the arts to general education, it may be fruitful for us to use the aesthetic analysis of the topics and experiences that characterize general education, thus filling them out and telling the whole truth. To use the learnings developed in other fields in the arts, we need to become aware of what those learnings are, and to make it obvious to the children that it is legitimate to transfer them. In the degree that we can produce these two kinds of interaction, the arts will have entered general education, and general education will have entered the arts, and we will have the seamless web we all desire.

Social studies involves human interactions. Instead of illustrating social science projects with the graphic arts, consider the possibility that through an aesthetic stance we can examine the quality of the human interactions, and try to make human interactions into aesthetic statement.

Science involves, among other things, analysis and close observation. Let us consider trying two levels of scientific statement: the literal scientific statement and the aesthetic statement.

The language arts involves objects we call books. Let us look at a book not only as a place where meanings are printed, but as an aesthetic object-an arrangement of print-a visual experience. Let us, in a word, pursue the matter of the aesthetic stance to its ultimate applications within the traditions of the school, thus changing the traditions.

General education and the arts are, or ought to be, a seamless web. The isolation of the arts serves neither the arts nor general education nor the students very well. The initiative for a remedy can be taken by arts people who will begin to help children give aesthetic expression to general educational themes. The other side of it-that side in which general education enters into the arts-will appear as a neces- sity.

Arthur W. Foshay is professor of education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, New York.

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the arts in general education

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