art education: the basics and beyond

National Art Education Association

Art Education: The Basics and BeyondAuthor(s): Junius EddySource: Art Education, Vol. 30, No. 7 (Nov., 1977), pp. 6-8+10-12Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3192229 .

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Junius Eddy

For those who may have wondered whether our present emphasis on teaching the basic skills is actually making any headway, let me set your fears to rest right at the outset. There is good news on that score, according to a recent clipping from the New York Times. It bears a headline that states "MATH IMPROVEMENT INDICATES LEARNING IS TIED TO TEACHING." That should bring considerable comfort to the nation's math teachers, at least, who may have been inclined to give the whole thing up and join a think-tank. It may, in fact, be comfort- ing to everyone in the education busi- ness who's wondered from timeto time whether learning had anything at all to do with classroom teaching.

As an inveterate headline-reader-as opposed, say, to a headline-seeker- I'm always on the lookout for reassur- ing headlines of this kind which state complicated issues clearly and succinctly.For example, another one of recent vintage-also from the good, grey New York Times-tells us for- thrightly that "REACTION TO ENERGY PLAN DEPENDS ON POINT OF VIEW." Now that's something a good many people probably never realized either, and I'm glad the Times cleared it up.

I must confess, though, that my own biases about the importance of the arts to the educational process might very well have made me react in less of a smart-alecy manner if that first headline had indicated that improvement in learning, generally, was tied to teaching the arts. So perhaps one's reaction to simplistic headlines does indeed depend on your point of view, after all.

The title of this conference, for example-"Skills and 'Frills': Making Room for Both"-may be somewhat misleading in suggesting that we might, in our schools, wish to make room for things that are both frills and skills. I doubt if any of us would advo- cate things in our educational programs which we truly regarded as "frills", and I presume that's what the conference planners had in mind when they put that word "frills" in quotation marks.

To be sure, there are a good many things in our schools which some people consider to be "frills." And the arts are certainly high on that list for a number of parents, as well as a good many educators... the arts-and all those other things we are frequently exhorted to eliminate in order to "get back to the basics." An article in a recent issue of the Phi Delta Kappan quoted the following list from a conser-

Art Eduation:

The BaSics

vative journal-The National Review- as among the frills we ought to eliminate: it said that "clay modeling, weav- ing, doll construction, flute practice, 6 Art Education, November 1977



volleyball, sex education, laments about racism and other weighty mat- ters should take place on private time."

One could perhaps add driver training, drug education, guidance, and other kinds of "social services" which many schools have included over the years but which critics are saying take needed time from the acquisition of basic skills. Even physical education can be found on some people's lists. But you'll note, in the list from the National Reivew, how many items have to do with the arts. Obviously, they're fair game for almost anybody who feels strongly about the basics in education and starts constructing a list of so- called educational "frills" he or she wants the schools to excise.

That word "frills" goes back a long time, it seems to me. Some years ago- in the early Sixties when my kids were younger-I got elected to a school board out in Ohio. And we were always having to make decisions about which programs might be regarded as frills or extras, and were therefore susceptible to cuts when we failed to pass a tax levy and had to work with more stringent budgets. It seems to me that driver education and kindergarten-since they weren't mandated by many States-were the more expendable items in those days. I'm sure the arts were, too, but we really had very little in the way of comprehensive arts programs at that time-so there wasn't much to cut.

I don't believe that the "back to basics" advocates were quite as vocif- erous then as they seem to be today, and we were really babes in the woods when it came to dealing with those practices that seem nowadays to be emerging as a part of the basic education movement: tests for competencies and proficiencies in the basic skills, and a curriculum based on standards of performance, not simply on text-book facts.

It seems likely to me, however, that people who still regard the arts as educational frills are impelled to do so because they are still viewed largely as frills in many segments of the larger society. This, despite the fact that national surveys have revealed to us recently that more Americans are now attending arts events (if you lumpthem all together) than they are sports events, each year. Clearly, many of these arts attendance figures include "repeaters"-but, this is also true of sports fans as well.

Whatever these figures may mean, it's clear that many people do indeed still look on the arts as essentially a kind of enrichment factor in education-nice to include if you can afford it, through assemblies, field trips, out-of-class activities, marching bands, and elective courses, but otherwise largely incidental to the

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school's regular educational program. For the most part, this is a fairly accu- rate description of what arts programs consist of in the vast majority of the nation's schools today. And it is not surprising therefore that the arts are coming increasingly under fire, as the costs of schooling continue to rise and the demands for some kind of ac- countability are urged on the entire educational establishment.

When these factors become acute, they provide the kind of climate which naturally gives rise to renewed attention to those aspects of education which can be regarded as basic or fundamental to general learning. The controversies develop, of course, because people don't always agree on what is basic and what is not-what ought to be retained and strengthened and what can be dispensed with. And more and more, it would appear that this comes down to a matter of regarding as basic mainly those skills which will enable the student to survive and function effectively in everyday life.

The pressure is obviously on educators at all levels these days to make decisions about these things. And state education agencies and boards of education-as well as their counter- parts in local school systems-are responding by formulating plans, passing legislation, and developing guide- lines to help the schools to move effectively in these directions. The state of New Jersey, for example, is obviously concerned about this matter, as its "Thorough and Efficient" Public School Education Act of 1976 clearly indicates. The law calls for every school system to develop a program which contains "all elements of basic skills necessary to function in a democracy." But that state's education department, interestingly enough, is quick to point out that-while "priority attention" is to be given to achievement in basic reading, language arts and mathematical skills- nothing in T and E should be taken to mean that "The goals and objectives of educational programs should be restricted to cognitive achievement only." The Depart- ment's T & E Primer for School Improvement, in fact, goes on to point out that "local districts must specify additional goals consistent with the intent of State goals and may add additional goals to reflect community aspirations." Elsewhere in this docu- ment there is a list of twelve State Educational Goals and Standards, of which perhaps half relate to learnings in the arts-directly or indirectly.

Now, vague as the term "T & E" may seem to many people elsewhere- when I first heard the term, bytheway, I thought it might be referring to "Travel and Expenses," a phrase we became accustomed to in Washington when I worked in the Office of Education ten years ago-but vague as the term may

8 Art Education, November 1977

be, those statements in the New Jersey Primer seem to me eminently sensible and sound.

Nobody, as a matter of fact-not even we arts education types-can reasonably be against the acquisition of basic skills. If we hadn't acquired them somewhere along the way, we wouldn't be able to function, either- not in this society anyway. The thing that bothers us, though, is that we usually get excluded when it's put in Either/Or terms. While it's not yet apparent to most of the educational establishment that the arts may indeed be dealing with basic skills, or at least offering effective instrumentalities by which students might acquire such skills, we can't-on the other hand- accept the proposition that we repre- sent expendable educational frills.

The whole problem was highlighted a bit for me, during the course of a two- day conference I attended recently at the Rockefeller Foundation. The group was composed of school administrators, testing experts, teachers, Ameri- can Federation of Teachers, and National Education Association representatives, arts educators, artists, and representatives of the state education agency in Albany. The conference was concerned with teacher education and re-training in the arts, and with the ways in which those concerns were expressed in state certification (and credentialing) procedures. It can come as no surprise that, often in those discussions, the current hue and cry about "returning to the basics" was raised. One school administrator- from a large school district on Long Island-suggested, however, that his system was placing basic education in a different context by viewing such concerns as "The Basics and Beyond" (and I've stolen that phrase, you'll note, for the title of this presentation). In effect, he was saying "we accept the necessity for basic skill development but we go on to ask, in our goals: 'What then?' - rather than saying we can't really do anything else if we adopt the basic literacy skills as a priority."

Another participant, with some pas- sion, pointed out that "reading, writing and arithmetic are essentially the tools of education-the tools for education-and not truly education at all. I've known a lot of people," he said, "who could read and write and figure but who weren't really educated in any meaning of the word."

And a man from ETS, down in Prin- ceton, said he took the concern for basic skills very seriously-he'd seen too many reading scores not to-but he then said "there are whole realms of learning out there that the basic skills don't touch-they merely make us ready to deal with them."

And this, I think, is the crux of the question: what's essential to the education of human beings Beyond the Bas-

ics? What's out there for students to learn after they've mastered the verbal and computational skills that enable them to function in our society? What should the basic tools of learning enable us, then, to learn-in order to become perhaps fully-functioning human beings?

Well, there's a whole lot out there which could do that. Most school systems are trying their best to provide it, too, as their students move up through the grades and become acquainted with history and geography (... excuse me . . . with social studies), and with science, English literature, and maybe foreign languages. All of these realms of learning build on the basic tools students have acquired earlier to help develop needed competencies for personal and social growth, for a suc- cessful life as a jobholder, a taxpayer, a consumer, a citizen, and a member of a family.

But, frequently at these levels, too- as I've suggested earlier-there is an ingrained tendency on the part of educators and parents to keep on regarding the creative and performing arts as less essential than those other academic subject-matter fields I've mentioned. They are therefore relegated to elective status and to the realm of extra-curricular activity, if not simply to assemblies and field-trips as cultural enrichment. I need not, I think, give chapter and verse to this-it's something we've lived with for a long time in education.

This manifestation is heightened, as a number of authorities have pointed out, by the demands of the College Board Examinations, which must be taken by all secondary school students who seek admission to the presti- gious colleges and universities. Elliot W. Eisner, professor of education and art of Stanford, puts it quite succinctly: "This examination makes no provision," Eisner says, "for allowing the student to demonstrate compe- tency in the arts or in those modes of thinking"-notice he said thinking- "that are lyrical, metaphorical, synthetic or-in short-creative. Furth- ermore, the messages that a great many colleges and universities give to students .... is that admission is con- tingent upon doing well in a strong 'academic program.' But academic here connotes the standard discursive fields such as mathematics, history, English, and science. The arts do not fit under the 'academic' umbrella."

Let me continue a moment with more of Eisner's perception of this problem.

The emphasis on the discursive, the propositional, the sequential and the analytic occurs not only at the secondary level, it also occurs with increasing frequency at the primary levels... The criteria used for college admission creates a wave that



moves downward through the system ... Thinking in images, metaphorical thought, openended interpretation-in short, responses that do not lend themselves to standardized measurement are excluded from the assessment procedure. What happens is predictable: the evaluation tail wags the curriculum of the school. What is measured and counted, counts. What is not counted, doesn't count since it can't easily be measured.

In line with this, by the way, another of my New York Times clippings has a headline which reads: "PANEL ASKS WIDE REFORM OF COLLEGE BOARD EXAMS," and it describes the findings of a Blue-Ribbon Panel of educators, testing experts, psychologists, college deans and presidents, and foundation officials which was asked to study the College Boards and recommend needed changes. The Panel placed heavy emphasis on the need for the 3oJlege Boards to assess the skills, ialents, and mental attributes of college-bound students in a variety of ways other than in verbal and mathematical ability-ways that would not penalize the especially creative or imaginative student whose competencies may be more fully reflected in intuitional and inventive ways. And some members of the Panel concluded that "because the tests are so narrowly conceived, they exercise a'stultifying' influence on education."

You might think I would be delighted with this finding-and indeed I was- but this clipping is dated November 1 of 1970! To be sure, there have been some changes in College Boards since then, but not very many that have compen- sated for the serious shortcoming noted by that Panel.

And yet, changes are occurring- and one of them comes from what might seem to be a somewhat unlikely source-the Washington-based Council for Basic Education. I heard that Graham Down, the Council's exec- utive director, had been saying, in a number of national meetings recently, that the Council now believed that the arts should be included as a part of its basic education philosophy. I inquired further about this at the Council and Mr. Down wrote me as follows: "As you will see from our new descriptive lea- flet, we have specifically added the arts to the basic curriculum-and when I was testifying in Memphis to the [Arts, Education and Americans] panel chaired by David Rockefeller, Jr., James Michener seemed quite sur- prised to be told that there was no incompatibility between basic education and the arts. I assume he had read about all those people who are suggesting that the arts are dispensable frills. We would not agree with them". You can't get much plainer than that, I

10 Art Education, November 1977



would think. I should add that the Council's and

Mr. Down's view of the educational role of the arts would place heavy stress on its scholarly and intellectual aspects- and the only people in the arts education camp who would be likely to quarrel with that are those who believe so strongly in the affective values of the arts that they tend to overlook their fundamental cognitive value. (You'll recall I emphasized Eisner's use of the phrase "modes of thinking" a moment ago-and it's underlined again here. Affect and cognition together, not affect at the expense of cognition; to make the case on an Either/Or basis simply begs the question and weakens the case. Besides, it just isn't true.)

In a speech recently, Mr. Down listed some of the essentials of basic education, as he viewed them-and after mentioning the three R's, he went on to say that "CBE would add a number of other indispensible skills to the list. They would include a knowledge of history, and, coupled with this, the essential facts of geography, foreign languages wherever possible and, of course, some understanding of the basic tenets of both the arts and science... Although research is ad m ittedly I i m ited to date, it does seem that training in the arts, for instance, frequently reinforces proficiencies in the so-called basic skills. As an orga- nist, I am firmly persuaded that it is hardly chance that so many musicians are accomplished mathematicians."

There seems to be, then, a growing suspicion among educators of all per- suasions that the arts may somehow be fundamental to the entire educational equation-and this view is no longer limited to the arts educators alone. It is beginning to be found among chief state school officers, a growing number of school administrators, and also among generalist classroom teachers. I have in my files statements too numerous to include here from a wide sampling of these essentially non- arts educators which say much the same thing in different ways: we can no longer afford to keep the arts on the periphery of education if we expect to bring students to maturity as fully- functioning human beings. (Maybe this means incidentally, that some parents are also saying these things.)

But the educators and researchers are saying something else, too- something which comes even closer to our concern here with basic skills. They are saying that the arts are essential to learning not only for their own sake-as representations of man's creative nature and a record of our cultural heritage through the ages-but also that they have profound utility for the process of basic skill development. Expressive and perceptual skills, which are only two of the things that are developed through work in the

arts, are not in themselves very far removed from those discursive and computational skills which most people think of as "basic to education." And if communications skills-another thing the arts are about-are not basic to the ability of human beings to function and flourish in this society, they come awful close to it.

Despite the limited research on the contributions of the arts to basic skill development of this kind, there are nonetheless bits and pieces of evi- dence beginning to come in from schools and school systems where programs in the arts have been firmly established, over several years and more. Reading scores in particular are being looked at in some of these places-and there do appear to be gains showing up-as measured annu- ally by standardized tests. These figures suggest, if they don't yet fully prove, that a flourishing involvement of students in aspects of the creative and performing arts has been a contribut- ing factor.

I'll mention only a few instances here, in passing: The Guggenheim Museum's "Reading Through the Arts Program" in New York City-and the "Open Door Program" in New York's Community School District No. 4, in Spanish Harlem, have both recorded reading score gains in participating students over those of non- participants. Some arts-in-general- education projects which have been under way for several years in Mineola, New York, University City, Missouri, and Jefferson County, Colorado- under JDR 3rd Fund sponsorship- suggest much the same thing. Some project administrators point out, however, that they haven't really screened out all the other variables which may have produced these outcomes and thus they can't certify specifically that the arts programs have been fully responsible. The City Build- ing Program, which has been operating in a score of Los Angeles area elementary schools has, on the other hand, found that student scores in both math and reading were higher than those of students in a control group. Reading score gains have also been noted in a K-3 Arts Magnet School in Oakland- and in an arts-oriented elementary school in Irvington, New Jersey. Other instances elsewhere provide similar testimony.

And John Melser, the principal of PS No. 3, in Manhatten, an alternative school which has made the arts central to its program, sums up his observa- tions on the subject this way: "One can expect from an arts-based curriculum a small but fairly certain increment in the rate of development of basic skills, together with the development of a degree of confidence, self-reliance, re- sourcefulness, and a willingness to work through difficulties, which helps

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the child to become a much more self- motivated and efficient learner." And then he goes on to make a point that is often overlooked in this area of achievement testing: "A fact which has to be taken into account here," he says, "is that a relatively much smallertime is spent on drills in the 'basic skills' so that the same or a slightly higher level of achievement reflects a much more efficient learning and much less frus- tration on the part of both child and teacher."

Melser is emphasizing the idea that even though something else in the school day-perhaps, in fact, specific attention to the 3 R's-may have been given up to include work in the arts, it does not, in the main, seem to affect basic skill test scores adversely (which is something that many parents and educators fear when new or expanded arts programs are being considered.) This may be a somewhat negative way of saying something positive, but it's an important point, I think.

And finally, there is a vast, relatively untouched aspect of this matter that sits out there waiting for researchers, psychologists, and others with an interest in education to grapple with. And this has to do with the belief among some educational theorists today that the arts not only contribute to and enhance basic skill development in children but that, at rock bottom, the arts are themselves among the so-called basic skills which students need to master. This view focuses on the cognitive values of the arts perhaps more than on their affective values. It sees the processes and disciplines that are inherent in work and study in the various art forms as fundamentally another set of symbol systems which are essential to human beings in reading, decoding, and inter- preting major aspects of our environ- ment, our day-to-day existence, and of our society in general.

This concept of the basic values of the arts for learning has, for some authorities, been derived from the wide range of research which has recently been going forward on split-brain functions-and whose findings indi- cate pretty clearly that the two hemispheres of the human brain perform quite different functions. Speech, for example, seems to be mainly a function of the left hemisphere while orientation to space is a function of the right hemisphere. The two hemispheres seem to operate independently of one another, as well-the left hemisphere being digital or discursive and the right analogic or eidetic; the left is rational, the right is metaphoric and so on.

And you'll note that almost every- thing that seems most closely to rep- resent what presently goes on in schools is associated with the left hemisphere; and conversely, most of 12 Art Education, November 1977

that which has a relationship to what we do and learn in the various fields of the arts is more a function of the right hemisphere-and these manifesta- tions have, as we've noted, been largely excluded from the school environ- ment. Again, let me quote Elliot W. Eisner on this. He, like me, does not profess any technical competence in this new field of research and would not attempt to take it much furtherthan I've done here, but he comes to the following conclusion, one with which it's hard to disagree. "If," says Eisner, "education as a generic term is a process that expands human conscious- ness, and which fosters one's ability to construct forms that give meaning to experience, then any educational program that neglects half of man's mind is half an education at best; at worst, it is a mutilation of human capability."

So there is much out there that needs to be explored with respect to the true place of the arts in the learning lives of young people. How basic they are to learning is perhaps only now beginning to invade our educational con- sciousness. As this split-brain research goes on, moreover, we will need to ex- amine its findings more and more closely because, in many ways, it could affect education more dramatically than any of the other innovations we have fallen heir to in the last several decades.

Though I know only enough about

that research to suggest what's involved in the simplest of ways, I do know one thing for certain. If the arts are not yet included among the most basic of educational skills, they can certainly no longer be regarded simply as educational frills. They are fundamental. Just how fundamental we need now to find out.

Junius Eddy, formerly with the U.S. Office of Education and an arts education advisor to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, is an independent con- sultant for education and the arts.

NOTE

Elliot W. Eisner's comments, quoted above, are from an article in Art Educa- tion, March, 1976, entitled "Making The Arts a Reality in the Schools of Tomorrow-An Agenda for Today."

This article is adapted from a keynote address given at Rutgers University's In- Service Education Conference, April 29, 1977.

P-P.doW



art education: the basics and beyond

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