a plague on all your houses: the tragedy of art education

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National Art Education Association A Plague on All Your Houses: The Tragedy of Art Education Author(s): Vincent Lanier Source: Art Education, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Mar., 1974), pp. 12-15 Published by: National Art Education Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3191938 . Accessed: 10/06/2014 02:50 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . National Art Education Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Education. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 188.72.96.180 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 02:50:45 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: A Plague on All Your Houses: The Tragedy of Art Education

National Art Education Association

A Plague on All Your Houses: The Tragedy of Art EducationAuthor(s): Vincent LanierSource: Art Education, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Mar., 1974), pp. 12-15Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3191938 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 02:50

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

National Art Education Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ArtEducation.

http://www.jstor.org

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Page 2: A Plague on All Your Houses: The Tragedy of Art Education

1 PLRGUC OH ILL YOUR HOUSE S:

Vincent Lanier From the perspective of twenty-five years of teaching art and art education, the story of the field unfolds as drama, part tragedy, part comedy. The subtitle of this paper empha- sizes the tragedy, but unfortunately, too much of it has been high farce. Nonetheless, it might be instructive to look at the story of art education seriously: where it has been- at least during those twenty-five years-where it is now, and where it might go. It will not be pleasant to write or enjoy- able to read, and it will probably be quickly forgotten.

In the late 1930's and the 1940's (I started college in 1937), art was a marginal curriculum area only recently liberated from "picture study" and the rather heavy-handed design exercises of Arthur Wesley Dow. It had been influenced in the classroom only slightly by those primitive environmental design advocates of the Owatonna Project and, despite the heroic efforts of Teachers College, Columbia University, and lesser schools of education, perhaps not much more by the incisive but global writings of John Dewey. The "stuff" of the curriculum, the activities of the pupils, was almost exclusively studio in nature. Although the preparing art teacher took, in most colleges, a reasonable number of educa- tion or art education (or both)-courses, the vast bulk of his studies were in the fine arts studio and to a lesser extent in the history of art. In a rough sense, this proportion is no dif- ferent today, though there are some minor changes-mainly additive-in the content of the major preparation.

Many of us whose education was interrupted by World War II (I started in architecture, changing to art education in 1946) returned to a field dominated in its thinking by a trium- vilrate of giants: D'Amico, Read, and Lowenfeld. Exploiting brilliantly existing threads of concept spun by the progressive edication movement, Cizek, Rothe, and Thetter in Vienna, both the growing involvement in educational psychology and Freudian psychiatry and the post war move towards the as yet unparalled freedom of abstract expressionism, these men produced hallmark volumes in 1942, 1943, and 1947 re- spectivel/. Ignoring for a moment some sizable differences in approach, all three men and their writings saw art education as the unlocking of psychological human potential through the unfettered creation of art works. World peace, the diag- nosis of maladjustment problems, therapy for neuroses, integration of various curriculum areas, psycho-spiritual self- expression, promotion of creativity in art and then later of general creativity-these became the benefits of art in the schools as they were unceasingly asserted in journals, confer- ences, and college classrooms. Still the curriculum with which art education engaged the children remained overwhelmingly studio.

Art education began to grow to about its present scope in the 1950's. Made almost academically respectable by scholarly writings heavily larded by psychological terms and con- cepts, the field was able to survive and grow during those years even without the assistance of the federal and founda- tion special monies it was later to enjoy. A host of perhaps lesser, but very influential writers carried the powerful ideas of Lowenfeld, Read, and D'Amico into every corner of scholastic life. People such as Barkan, Logan, Hastie, Munro, Gaitskell, Reed, Cole, de Francesco, Landis, Ivan Johnson, Schaefer-Simmern, Beittel, and many others worked hard enough and long enough to make us ready for the wave of concern with education resulting from Russian space successes in 1957 and later. Thus at that point art education had a ready response to justify its importance: that of

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general creativity, the transfer of creative capabilities developed through art to science (where it was thought to be a critical component) and all other areas of behavior. This is not to say that either science or other areas accepted our claims, but rather that we felt righteous and fulfilled as a working part of the predominantly "cold" war effort. Back in the elementary, junior, and senior high school classrooms, the curriculum remained virtually unchanged. We made fewer color wheels and value scales, but we still directed the behavior of our pupils as artists with studio materials.

Early in the 1960's the first grumblings of discontent with our total commitment to creativity appeared. At first, of course, such apostasy was indulgently ignored. I remember my own early questioning of both the validity and utility of the creativity concept in the essay "Schismogenesis in Contem- porary Art Education", (presented as a paper at the Committee on Art Education Conference in 1963 and published in Studies later that year). The vast bulk of my colleagues were amused by the elegant term in the title (I had borrowed it from an anthropologist named Gregory Bateson), but seemed to pay little heed to the content of the article. Nevertheless, with the powerful spearheading of Manuel Barkan and the collective productivity of generally younger and better edu- cated (particularly in the social sciences) people such as Feldman, McFee, Ecker, Eisner, art education began to adjust its thinking to a more contemporary viewpoint.

Added to this mov,ement was the considerable impetus of federally funded projects and researches, which, though they were extravagantly wasteful in some respects, did provide unusual opportunities for investigation, dialogue, and broad dissemination of information. This era also bred a new type, the political art educator, such as Dorn, Mattil, Hausman, and Hoffa, and saw the welcome proliferation of doctoral programs in art education, a function which had been up to that time quantitatively almost restricted to Pennsylvania State University, Columbia University, and New York University. Difficult as it should be to believe, however, the art curriculum of the public school class still remained almost completely studio, despite some experimentation in individual schools and districts and the wealth of new ideas such as aesthetic education, visual literacy, environmental design, structured and sequenced art content, related arts, humanities, and film arts which were written about and talked about by (mostly college faculty) people such as Templeton, Silverman, Lewis, Hubbard, Rouse, Conant, Saunders, Efland, Kuhn, Neperud, McWhinnie, Stewart, Wilson, Chapman, Lansing, and many others.

The most vigorous of these ideas has been and now is, beyond any question, the concept of aesthetic education. Described originally by Munro, Broudy, and Ralph Smith and broadened by Barkan, Ecker, Chapman, Eisner, Madeja, and others and funded by federal and John D. Rockefeller III money, aesthetic education has been seen as the art education of the future, with Barkan's colossal classic Guidelines as a model. CEMREL in the last few years has been developing and testing experimental curricula often far removed from Guidelines, but at least related. In the same context, Eisner at Stanford and Hubbard and Rouse at Indiana have built and experimented with new curriculum ideas which, perhaps, can be fairly accurately placed under the umbrella title of aesthetic education. Thus, we have come quite a way from the middle 1960's, when pontifical generalities were many but actual curricula-carefully and realistically prepared and often .tested in the classroom-uncommon if not

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Page 3: A Plague on All Your Houses: The Tragedy of Art Education

THE TRRGEDY OF RT DUCaTION

non-existent. As this is written, in late 1973, our situation in art education

seems to be the following: (1.) The dominant theory among the theoreticians and in the literature appears to be aesthetic education in its several varieties. (2.) This dominance may well be short-lived and reflects only the top echelon of "activist" art educators, those who seek and obtain special funds and those who account for a fair percentage of published writings in the field. (3.) The rest of the idea makers and disseminators-almost without exception college and university people involved in teacher education-are as fragmented and argumentative in their beliefs as politics in France used to be. (4.) Meanwhile the vast majority of art teachers, supervisors, elementary teachers, and many college art education teachers as well, not only have not and do not accept aesthetic education or the triumvirate model of the student (artist, historian, critic) or other new ideas (much less use them in teaching) but still maintain almost un- adulteratedly studio programs and justify them more often than not by invoking the icon of creativity.

If what I have written about the past and present of the field is not too far from fact, it is easy to see the comedy of art education. In my professional lifetime at least the intellectual gymnastics of the few have been-and are-a sort of pasteboard facade superimposed on the monolith of the real art education: studio art activities in the mode and manner of the artist. We have squirmed and fretted and fol- lowed every distant drummer we could find. We have invited (and paid) artists to tell us all one needs to be a good art teacher is to be a good painter-potter-printmaker; sociologists and educationists to tell us how wonderful we are; business leaders and politicians to tell us art (and by extension the teaching of art, of course) is the single greatest boon to mankind; and psychologists to tell us that we can with art cure the maladjusted right back into this best of all possible worlds. We have generated and verbally embraced a vast spectrum of ideas no matter how esoteric or mundane. We have played artist, scientist, priest, and poli- tician-all shadow dances lacking substance-while in the "real world" of art education, where the teacher meets the pupil, no significant change has occurred in the curric- ulum during the last forty years.

On the other hand, the tragedy of the field is that through the years it has failed to live up to its potential for the vast majority of children in the schools. Like most school subjects, art has been an academic exercise, sometimes enter- taining, often boring, occasionally irksome, but rarely if ever related to the world outside the classroom or important to the world inside. One must suspect (I know of no statistics to prove or disprove it) that this is our situation today. We remain a peripheral area of education, long on boastful claims and short on achievements-a condition which "you gotta have art" buttons will never improve.

However, this-need not be the case. Looking forward, it is conceivable that art education can change its direction and take its rightful place in the formal educational proc- ess. It cannot, in my opinion, take a place in the core or center of education since it does not possess those inherent qualities involved in the central issue of education, which is or should be the development of those concepts and skills necessary to understand and alter society. If schooling does nothing else, it must at least engage the student in that continuing dialogue and supportive study which clarifies the ways in which the social, economic, and political world

around him works and how that world might be improved. This dialogue and these supportive studies must be carried on primarily (though not exclusively, as we shall later see) through the medium of verbal language, the principal medium in which significant ideas about the world can be stated, examined, tested, and evaluated. Thus the central currency of the school is words, just as the central currency of living in a social context is words. But, it must be stressed that verbal adequacy for its own sake is not a goal of the educational process. Rather, it is a means to come to grips with significant ideas about society and, in particular, social change.

Unfortunately, it is necessary to dwell on this point at this time, since it has become fashionable to repudiate verbal language, linearity, and reason itself. The alternatives offered range from "grooving" (instead of thinking), a direct confrontation of a metaphysical truth (often through an art form), or an expanded consciousness (often by way of a particular drug). As entertaining as these activities may be on an individual level, they are literally worse than useless socially in that they obscure both the problems and possible solutions which are complex and cumbersome enough without further obfuscation. Those who cannot comfortably embrace this sort of anti-rationalist position, but who are also unwilling to concern themselves with the explosive and torturous problems of the world, retreat to an innocu- ous and barren middle position-rational, but mechanistic. In art education, for example, this middle position supports the development of aesthetic sensitivity, visual acuity or critical competence as ends in themselves, without concern for what is being responded to, perceived, or criticized. As in the case of verbal skills the content which is being handled is of vital importance. To be highly sensitive to or acutely perceptive of tawdry concerns is of little edu- cational merit. Indeed some in the field describe these behaviors almost as if there is no object (or subject) to be perceived or responded to, hence the mechanistic coloration so prevalent in our literature today.

A further and even more disastrous trend of thinking is reflected in the claim that visual perception (the patterns of which appear to be developing out of Gestalt psychology and information theory) can serve as a substitute for verbal language. Thus terms such as "visual language" or slogans such as "art is communication" give the impression- whether they were originally meant to or not-that the visual image transmits ideas and information in the same sense that words do. This is, in fact, untrue and the increasing misunder- standings in this area constitute a serious pitfall for art education. The visual image does not communicate at all in the proper sense of transmitting ideals and information from sender to receiver (from artist to viewer) with any hope of reasonable accuracy, nor if it did could it handle any but the least abstract ideas and the grossest information. No idea of any consequence outside the technology of art itself has ever been generated, developed or disseminated by the visual image alone.

Those who rant against the supposed verbal emphasis of our culture and our schools unknowingly inveigh against the wrong target. What they should really oppose is the cognitive stress of society and school for, in truth, they rarely quarrel with poetry, but rather with didactic prose; yet every single such argument is of necessity framed in words, sometimes with the assistance of pictures, but never with pictures alone. For the reader who wishes to pursue this side of the debate,

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Page 4: A Plague on All Your Houses: The Tragedy of Art Education

I can recommend E. H. Gombrich's "The Visual Image" (in the September 1972 Scientific American) and my "One Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures" (in Essays in Art Education, 1970, MSS Information Corp.). Gombrich puts it very nicely when he says, ". . . unaided it (art) altogether lacks the possibility of matching the statement function of language." Art has many functions, but no one of them is to replace language. To ask that of art seems almost to imply that what it can do is somehow less than worthwhile in its own right. I do not think this is the case.

Once we understand that the central operations of the educational process must be verbal and that the study, in whatever form, of the visual arts cannot be more than ancillary to that central procedure, it is not difficult to describe in broad outlines the potential contributions of art education to general education. As poetry does with words, art can invest the visual image and such content as we can find in it with affective power. For example, Goya's "Third of May" suggests that one aspect of its content has to do with the horrors of foreign invasion-a rather simple social idea (but not unworthy), not generated by Goya or any other artist and assumed to have been placed in the painting by the artist only because we know (in words) its historical setting and that Goya was a Spaniard. The vital contribution of the visual arts in this context is that they can draw attention to such ideas (invariably simple ones) and charge them-as it were-with emotive force through the technology of composition and paint. Indeed, this is no puny accomplishment in itself and while the process is not absolutely essential to the central responsibility of education, it is a valuable auxiliary it would be foolish to ignore.

For anyone who cannot easily visualize an art education which might contribute, as I have indicated, to an under- standing of human problems current enough to be social issues, I can strongly recommend a film entitled "The Journey of Fabio Pacchioni" made by the United Nations. A documentary this film illustrates vividly-though without unnecessary his- trionics-how one art form, drama, can be used to support the core concerns of education, or, to put it more accurately, what should be the core concerns of education. Pacchioni, a U.N. worker developing a national theater in Ecuador, realizes the necessity for and begins to prepare and present drama which shows the peasants how they can collectively combat the oppression of absentee landlords. Working towards this end, the theater in this film becomes what Eric Bentley calls "zeitstuck," theater of commitment and Paolo Freire, the Brazilian educator, calls "conscientizacao" or learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality.

It is this concern with social issues of the present which can make the work or art or its study humane. Neither the practice of nor the response to art, in general, makes one humane (or, for that matter, human)-another unfortunate misconception common among people in and around the arts. Surely if the former were true, history would present us with very different data about the lives of artists, who seem to be and to have been no more humane than any other group of people or than people at large. If the latter were true, history would not be replete with Cesare Borgias and Hermann Goerings. The humanities are properly humanistic only when they abjure lofty but abstract humaneness in general and address themselves instead towards a particular present situation. Generations of artistic exhortation to be humane, in general, seem to have had little impact on the human race. To know this vividly one need only stand in the piazza in Florence, in the midst of much exquisite art and near the 14

bronze plaque marking the spot on which Savonarola was burned to death-alive. It would appear that the aesthetic qualities of the physical environment or the arts in it have little influence on the affairs of men except, at best, when the work of art speaks directly to an issue of the moment.

It might be appropriate at this point to restate the concept of the social responsibility of the institution of education in the words of Jerome Bruner. In an article in the April 18, 1970 Saturday Review entitled "The Skill of Relevance or the Relevance of Skills," Bruner wrote:

... education must no longer strike an exclusive posture of neutrality and objectivity. Knowledge, we know now as never before, is power. This does not mean that there are not canons of truth or that the idea of proof is not a precious one. Rather, let knowledge as it appears in our schooling be put into the context of action and commitment .. .Gathering together the data for the indictment of a society that tolerates, in the United States, the ninth rank in infant mortality when it ranks first in gross national product-this is not an exercise in radical invec- tive but in the mobilizing of knowledge in the interest of the conviction that change is imperative. Let the skills of problem solving be given a chance to develop on problems that have an inherent passion-whether racism, crimes in the street, pollution, war and aggression, or marriage and the family. In addition to the moral consequences of art and art

education, there is the unique qualification of art in the school, which is that it can, if properly taught, help the young explore both the nature and range of their own visual aesthetic experiences, an undertaking of no mean dimensions if we wish to promote a cultured as well as self-directing citizenry. Even if art education could not-as I have suggested that it can-contribute to the core concerns of the school, it would be justified as part of a wholesome and rich cur- riculum by its intrinsic worth as one part of the good life expected by all men and owed by the school to the children of all men. However, in order to promote art's unique capacity as visual aesthetic experience, it must be taught far differently than it is taught today. It will not do to teach art as if the model of the student is the artist. To do something-even to do it well-is not necessarily to under- stand it, and it is that understanding as viewer rather than performance as maker that is the hallmark of the "educated" person. It will not do to teach art as if the model of the student is the historian, since historical knowledge, though useful, is far from vital to that understanding. It will not do to teach art as if the model of the student is the critic, since insightful criticism does not precede but follows understanding of aesthetic experience. The only proper model of the student is the aesthetician, for it is he who tries to clarify the processes of aesthetic response. With such clarification the student can command a wider range and greater depth of visual aesthetic experience. Without it he is limited (not that this limitation need involve deprivation in our mass media rich societies) primarily to easily accessible visual arts-easy of access in breadth and in depth as well, the visible top, as it were, of the iceberg.

At first glance, this concept might sound like what is now called aesthetic education, but today's aesthetic education is very much a misnomer since it is built upon the artist- historian-critic model. A proper aesthetic education would, in contrast, start by exploring the nature and function of all aesthetic response and in particular that response to visual art stimuli. That such exploration is difficult to pattern

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Page 5: A Plague on All Your Houses: The Tragedy of Art Education

is obvious, and its greatest difficulties stem from our having left aesthetic inquiry to the professional philosopher. This is something like leaving politics to the politician, though by no means as crucial. Thus a proper aesthetic education, built upon the model of the aesthetician, would require the develop- ment of a body of theory about response to art, viable in the classroom, and a vocabulary midway between popular ignoranc and the philosopher's expertise. A proper aesthetic education curriculum would focus on the question (in its crudest terms), "what happens to us when we react to art," arriving at this question by whatever direction is found to be the most effectively motivated within the specific educational context, and moving towards criticism and history when those insights are appropriate.

Madeja refers to the inapplicability of formal aesthetics as content in aesthetic education in "Aesthetic Education: An Area of Study" in Art Education, November 1971. He says:

This attempt in recent years to establish aesthetic content as an integral part of all education has brought about the necessity of defining the source or sources of content for aesthetic education. Philosophical aesthetics is recognized as a discipline in itself. It should be studied, revered, analyzed, synthesized, and theorized about. However, to use this as the sole basis for the content of aesthetic edu- cation within the context of general education would be difficult if not impossible: philosophical aesthetics would have little applicability to very young children and limited appeal for older students. That such a task-developing appropriate concepts and

language in aesthetics for young people-is difficult is undeniable. However, if we see this as desirable, it should not be impossible. It would seem to me to be more than a little reprehensible to reserve important areas of knowledge as "reverential" concerns of relevance only to the adult scholar. Perhaps, once again, we are underestimating the young.

In light of the total argument presented thus far in this paper, it remains to articulate what appear to be two contending theoretical positions-to use Eisner's terms-the contextualist and the essentialist. Can art in the school be seen as a study contributing to understanding and changing society and at the same time a study of value in itself? I believe that this is possible today, if not only, at least best, through the medium of the film arts. Photography, motion pictures, and television possess those attributes which make it possible to teach for both social and aesthetic insights as I have very roughly described them above. These attributes are:

1) A prior to classroom involvement of usually consider- able magnitude by pupils from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Most of our youth from a very early age have already had and are presently having legitimately aesthetic responses to a wide variety of popular arts stimuli, of which the film arts are, perhaps, the most pervasive and potent.

2) A now widely recognized and often qualitatively high level concern for and demonstration of the same kinds of artistic factors as those operating in the traditional fine arts of painting, sculpture, printmaking, etc., within the limitations appropriate to other media.

3) A capacity to handle complex, abstract and significant ideas and information-at least in motion pictures and TV- by virture of the addition to the single visual image of the mechanism of sequence and the communicative power of words. Unlike many misstatements by people in the visual arts and art education (including, at one point, myself), the film arts are NOT primarily visual art forms. They are fundamentally drama and, in fact, have more in common with

the novel than with painting or sculpture. Nonetheless, they are in part visual arts, and must be dealt with in those terms and can be exploited in those terms as well, as content for the art class.

A curriculum using the film arts as its content might follow these general guidelines: (1) Attempt to explore by description and discussion the present visual aesthetic experiences of the students, those in response to art to be found most com- monly in the popular arts (2) Focus on what will probably consistently be the most effective of those arts, the film arts. (3) Examine even more closely those still and motion pictures which represent Zeitfilm, or "film of commitment." (4) Analyze individually and collectively (by making or viewing film or both) the parameters of response to those films, manip- ulating both the social or moral and the aesthetic factors. (5) Expand gained insights to all the visual arts, of past as well as present, and social issues other than those confronted in those films.

Such a curriculum would be contributing to a properly conceived general education while it promoted the growth of a population friendly to and knowing about all the available visual arts. Also, it would do this as art educa- tion alone-without an "s" on the word art-since it can and should be argued that the various arts are more dissimilar than they are alike and should be taught separately rather than together.

Unquestionably, model curricula of some detail following these very general guidelines might be developed. However, it would be unfortunate if these curricula or the attitude with which they were used tended to curtail imaginative directions conceived and attempted by the classroom teacher. After all, there is no general curriculum appropriate for all pupils in all places at all times. Curricula should be as numerous and as different as the groups with which they are used.

What is being proposed here is a significantly different approach to the teaching of art both in desired outcomes as well as curriculum. Nothing less than a large portion of what is proposed here will properly alter the present al- most frivolous and certainly ill-conceived character of art education. On the other hand, nothing on the horizon of the field today suggests that even the smallest portion of these ideas will be adopted or adapted. It is more than likely that we are doomed to another twenty-five years of shadow dances- amusing for those who know the steps, but ultimately futile.

For the reader who is sympathetic to my general uneasiness with the condition of art education, but who may believe I have overstated the case, I will close with some very tenta- tive trends from an incomplete research. Eisner's Art Education Belief Index pilot study-at least from a popula- tion of some two hundred college student subjects-indicates among other early findings, that 94 percent of the students disagreed with "reading, looking and talking about art should be an important aspect of art programs for secondary school students," while 74 percent of the students agreed that "the major function of art education is to develop a child's general creativity."

Vincent Lanier is professor of art education, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon.

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