National Art Education Association

Trends in Secondary School Art Emphasis: Senior HighAuthor(s): Guy HubbardSource: Art Education, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Feb., 1976), pp. 12-13Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3192099 .

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Guy Hubbard When a single individual undertakes

to write about art in American secon- dary schools, the result can be ex- pected to be like that made by a blind man on inspecting an elephant for the first time and declaring its over-all character to be snake-like, or tree-like, or rope-like depending on where he happens to be standing. The elephant of secondary school art appears in 28,000 schools, in 18,000 school districts, enrolling over 20 million stu- dents. The reader of this article should also recognize that any statements about trends must involve an assump- tion that facts have been collected over a period of time, the comparison of which reveals these changes or trends. The only thing definite that can be claimed, however, is that no compre- hensive body of data exists either about the past or the present condition of secondary art education. What fol- lows, therefore, is of necessity a very personal interpretation.

Secondary art education has been less well supported than other areas in the curriculum, and yet a slow but gen- eral growth has been evident over the last quarter century. Art now has a se- cure place in the secondary curriculum after many years of scattered and uncertain status. In recent years, regu- lations have appeared in state after state to ensure that these gains will be maintained. Some states require a min- imum period of art study in secondary schools-usually in grades7 or8. More often, the decision regarding required or elective status has been left to local school districts to determine. Among all trends in secondary art, this gradual increase is the one that has been most encouraging.

The reasons for this growth do not rest simply on state regulations. The process of school district consolida- 12 Art Education, February 1976

tion has played a most important part in this change. Hundreds of uneconomic school organizations have united to create settings where enrollments war- rant the employment of one or more art teachers. The consolidation of rural population is an old story; the "metro- politanization" of suburban systems to urban centers is currently being dis- cussed in many parts of the country. The merging of suburb and inner city is viewed primarily as a social solution to stem "white flight" and as a means of facilitating the integration process. This will have repercussions in many art rooms which are presently insu- lated against the problems of the city.

The explosion of school populations in the 1960's contributed through to the construction of new school buildings and the corresponding demand for teachers to staff them. The social experiments introduced by the federal government have also affected secon- dary art by providing fundsforsupervi- sory leadership at the state and local levels. Secondary art has also benefit- ted from the great popular surge of in- terest in the arts, although the boom in art museum construction, the nation- wide appearance of state and local art councils, and the spiraling consump- tion of arts and crafts materials have not reflected the interaction between school and community which one might have expected. Perhaps the con- servativeness of academic traditions in education are too strong for art to be al- lowed to find its own level of prosperity. Alternatively, the situation still reflects those traditionally American values where education is thought of predom- inantly as utilitarian and vocational.

The kinds of art that are taught in se- condary schools and the ways in which it is taught seem to suggest that as schools employ.more art teachers, the subject matter of art becomes more

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specialized. Although strong state- ments appear in the literature regard- ing the need to teach art history and criticism of art, subject matter con- tinues to follow divisions based on stu- dio work-often to the neglect of the more intellectual studies. Where two art teachers are employed, the most likely division is for one of them to fo- cus on the fine arts and the other on the crafts. With the addition of more art teachers to a staff, the subject matter preferences of the teachers themselves are most likely to color the curricular offerings. As a consequence, high school art programs have become pro- gressively more like college art depart- ments in the way they are organized, while the teachers have increasingly behaved as artists. Subject areas that have markedly grown in popularity in recent years include jewelry, ceramics, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and drawing. The "Basic Design" or generalized Art I courses are disap- pearing in favor of the specificity de- sired by both students and teachers. Different viewpoints are expressed re- garding the appropriateness of this pattern of behavior, but it does exist and especially so in large senior high schools. The middle school is a com- paratively new organizational concept, and with it has come more innovative approaches toward secondary art teaching than is typically found in jun- ior high and high schools. The separa- tion between disciplines seems to have been less rigidly defined in middle schools, and as a consequence, inno- vation as regards arts interrelation- ships has been more likely to flourish. As in the case of American elementary education, art teachers in middle schools seem to be attending more to the general educational needs of stu- dents than to the professionalism that marks much high school and college

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art instruction. Certain trends may dominate the ed-

ucational scene for many years, while others come and go. Some of the pres- ent conditions have been felt for sev- eral years; others are barely discerna- ble even now. Perhaps the most apparent shift has been the reduction of federal funding for the schools. Re- sourceful art teachers and art adminis- trators continue to advance their pro- grams with federal and state funds by means of equipment purchase and ap- pointment of artists-in-residence. But in general these resources have been diminished or have vanished-and with that loss, numbers of innovative pro- grams have disappeared. To this withdrawal of support can be added the effects of recession in business and in- dustry, rapid economic inflation, and financial crisis in state and local go- vernment. Education is financed from taxation, so any reversal in the prosper- ity of the nation can eventually be ex- pected to bring about corresponding reversals in education-including art education. The declining student pop- ulation on the elementary level will doubtless have its effects on the secon- dary level. This will, in turn, affect the staffing of art programs and require ex- isting art teachers to build student in- volvement beyond the current esti- mated 10% of school enrollment in art.

If the present financial predicament proceeds to unfold, then secondary school art will continue to be chal- lenged. No open challenge has yet been made, and on the face of things secondary art programs are enjoying greater prosperity than ever before. But the conditions already exist to threaten that prosperity.

A beginning of such a challenge has been felt in recent years with what has been described as the "accountability movement" and, while art seems to

have escaped the excesses of this movement, it seems also to have suf- fered by confirming the beliefs of some critics that achievement in art cannot be assessed with any degree of accu- racy. Some vigorous leaders in art edu- cation have responded to the accoun- tability bogey by developing their own, much better organized, curriculums and by making alliances with other arts areas. The wealthier suburban districts have shown the greatest productivity in this effort, but special curriculum plan- ning guidelines are being developed and distributed at some state levels to assist those with more modest resour- ces.

The challenge to curricular effective- ness is now being joined by confronta- tion between school boards and teacher organizations. Art teachers are notoriously individualistic. In fact, they are often unaware of what their col- leagues are doing at other schools within the same district. Curricular continuity may be a problem as a con- sequence. They tend not to be joiners-in fact, that is evident from the small proportion of art teachers who belong to the NAEA.1 They tend to be immersed in their immediate jobs, and this is supported by the growth of highly specialized art programs and the considerable attention given to ex- hibitions and prestigious art competi- tions. These qualities have often in the past been assets rather than liabilities, because art teachers were half ex- pected to behave like artists. But as the bargaining between employers and employees proceeds, art teachers will find themselves drawn more and more into educational issues which persist beyond the art suite. For example, the continuing decline of performance in basic educational skills is leading to all teacher education programs in certain areas requiring courses in theteaching

of reading. A related concern that could have serious repercussions on elective programs, such as art, is the plan in one state to permit students to leave school without waiting for high school graduation if they can pass a proficiency examination in basic skills.

Attention is also being drawn to the declining Scholastic Aptitude Tests, and this in turn may be interpreted by guidance counselors as a need for more academic courses at the expense of art electives.

Lest the picture appear too bleak, one should conclude with some posi- tive changes worth noting. The Ad- vanced Placement program now pla- ces art on an equal plane with academic subjects.2 Advanced Place- ment in Art History has created new courses in museums,3 and the open- ness of the studio art course has im- pelled many teachers to re-think both methodology and content of their work. More students than ever are tak- ing additional course work- particularly life drawing-in local mu- seums and art schools. The continued growth of university and art school en- rollment attests to the success of our senior high teachers in developing the special capabilities of the talented while fulfilling the needs of art as a vital dimension of general education.

Guy Hubbard is head, Department of Art Education, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

REFERENCES 1 The Music Educators National Con- ference has over ten times the member- ship of the NAEA. 2 The A.P. courses, of which one can be art, can admit a student into the so- phomore year at Harvard. 3 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Cleveland Museum.

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