continuity and change

National Art Education Association

Continuity and ChangeAuthor(s): Irving KaufmanSource: Art Education, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Feb., 1980), pp. 9-14Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3192442 .

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Continuity and Change Irving Kaufman

Art education likes to think of itself as the arbiter of class-

room creativity and art educators as the agents for change, mediating between the art world and the institu- tions of education. The role warrants a certain authority, but one is not certain such authority is always forth- coming. There are a few art educators who feel either comfortable or adequate in the art world. Judging from the ongoing retrenchment of the seventies, the educational establish- ment appears to be shedding its already sketchy commitments to broadly based art programs in the schools. Even as the nation rides into an orgy of arts popularization, art teachers have been and continue to be fired in great numbers, nor is there any promise of a reversal in the near future.

As for the discipline itself, despite its energetic cohorts, a sense of muddle, perplexity, and perhaps disarray is not too far below the surface. A leadership which recently has attempted, as exemplified by Elliot Eisner, to bring a sense of order and intelligent purpose to art education, may succeed at least in establishing a coherent and propitious direction. Yet there remains, if somewhat abated, a persistent tendency toward improvisation, towards an extemporizing with educational notions and cultural modes. Art education has been so replete with what Jacques Barzun has called "vague, vacuous, lofty and unexamined phrases," with irrelevant and illogical foreignisms, that it is a wonder it has withstood a chronic sense of crisis.

Buffeted from philosophical pillar to fiscal post, art education has taken on a chameleon quality. It values its steady changeability as a mark of desirable innovation rather than an ad- mission of continuing confusion. Thus, it is possible to regard art education as in some trouble. Alienated from a primary source of substance-the art world; in the process of being discarded by its locus of action-the schools; and struggling with a patchwork theoretical structure

and an ill fitting facade of practices, one would think it was time to call quits.

Yet the obvious does not happen. As in art, ambiguity and surprise en- gender appeal, and enthusiasm as a plucky and important idea maintains its hold on our attention and energies. The idea is that in some shape and by some way or means the art experience belongs in general education along with the academics, that students simply would not be accorded an education with valid meaning without art as a part of that education. It may not be sufficient just to hang in there. To meet one pinched occasion after another, jumping from critical turning point to vital climax to decisive juncture, is to work against the odds. Some things in this world are expend- able, even if necessary. Witness, for instance, the disappearance of civics from the schools. It was a perfectly reasonable, legitimate, and effective content area by which students were encouraged towards citizenship and a personal sense of responsibility and pride in local and national government. There were obvious problems of potential brain "washing" and subtle propaganda. In this instance, the baby was thrown out with the bath water. Art education is not likely to suffer as drastic a nullification, but its back-burner status should and does cause concern.

Since the forties there has been an almost embarrassing overflow of writ- ing on art education and talking about the field. Yet preciously few theorists in the field have offered pertinent and responsible conceptualizations which developed out of art rather than the consequences of art, out of an in- volvement with the perceptual and manipulative actions of artists rather than a psychologizing of behavior. Victor D'Amico was one who insisted on the child as artist. A visitor to art education, Rudolf Arnheim contrib- uted his studies in perception and visual thinking. John Dewey, of course, educated us all in the philosophy of the experiential aesthetics, while Herbert Read extended the notion of the primary symbolic worth of art

education. Chandler Montgomery offered a modest but eminently suitable teaching methodology, while Elliot Eisner has tirelessly pulled together the diverse and complex strands of art as practiced in the schools into an increasingly cohesive philosophy. There have been other theorists, though usually without focus upon art as an intrinsic experience, or an acceptance of artistic behavior as measuring the maker, not the other way round.

One other art educator I have ad- mired and respected is Ed Feldman, who has consistently drawn his ob- servations directly from art and aesthetic concepts, firing our enthusiasm with his exegetical wittiness and pertinence. In the halcyon days before the blustery and turbulent cultural eruptions of the sixties, he was already pointing up the distinctive nature of art education. In a felicitous essay appropriately titled, "On the Connection between Art and Life," Feldman presented the idea of art education as a connecting discipline and the art educator as situated at the point where art, scholarship, and action converge. These connections, Feldman admonishes his colleagues, should be based on a study of the products of art and sound studio practices in an educational setting which recognizes the force and influence of the culture in which we live. The culture is not always nurturing and may be distracting and uncertain, present- ing life's urgencies in sometimes dis- mal and raucous ways and not always with tolerance or tenderness. How- ever culture reaches us, the action of art educators, which is essentially ful- filled through teaching, becomes rhetorical, shallow, and even phillis- tine unless it is set within a framework of convincing social elan, sound aesthetic values, and discriminating artistic sensibilities. And it is perceived similarly by the intelligent lay public.

It is not to succumb to educational inflation to suggest that the basic cur- rents of art, culture, and education are entwined with one another. The connections that Feldman solicits and

Art Education February 1980 9



which all good art teachers pursue, knowingly or otherwise, become a teaching consideration only as their dynamics are felt. The more promi- nent ideas, the potent energies but also the more subtle workings of contemporary life, culture, and art over- shadow the classroom. They have a telling influence on what occurs between teacher and student and between the student and what he or she learns permitting the formal and ap- preciative aspects of art to take on more than solipsistic significance or recreational value. But the connections or relationships become increasingly difficult to discern or untangle. Sixties sloganeering has bequeathed to us the notion that Art is Life and Life is Art. As this conterminous confusion sinks in, the connections between art and life tend to be erased as they are merged. We are left with cryptic events, and non-objects. The classroom becomes an arena in which one only performs instead of learns. The self becomes like a narcissistic lump of clay which is modelled and shaped by outside manipulation instead of an internal sense of responsibility and discipline.

But I am jumping ahead of myself as I mention the consequences of cultural forces. What I would like to do is make reference to one of the more dominant cultural forces which touches each of us in fundamental ways-the application to human be- ings and the natural environment of technological process. Cultural considerations are not only those with the capital C, but those broadly based themes of controversy which are fused with our destiny as a civilization and our identity as individuals. The is- sues joining technology, art, and education are much too broad, complex, and amply present for me to do any- thing more in this paper than to mention a few of the most basic philosophical aspects which have a particular relevance to connecting art and life and both to teaching. I need not dwell on examples describing the physical changes in the environment. You are all too familiar with them. Forgive me if some of the comments sound like a litany of losses, but these are not the best of times. Possibly no time is, so that an optimistic note should also be struck. Nevertheless, I start off with an example which many of us will agree sets the public, if not the private, tone of our times.

Early in 1979, the New Yorker Mag- azine ran a cartoon showing a man checking his watch in an airline termi- nal in front of the Arrivals and Depar- tures board. The Arrivals board lists Pestilence at 4:02, Famine at 4:15, and in subsequent temporal order Triple Locks, Unemployment, Inflation, Shorter Summers, Longer Zip Codes, and Plastic Silverware. Good Taste is scheduled to leave on the Departure board at 3:32, Sleigh Rides at 3:49, fol- lowed at intervals by All-beef Bur- gers, Happiness, Security, Friendly Loan Companies, Warm Blankets, Hardwood Floors, and Homemade Ice Cream. This example of gallows humor is more than a frivolous com- ment on current social unease; it may well be an accurate reflection of a widely felt despondency, if not de- spair, of a society undergoing change. It is the nature of the change which is disturbing as well as some of the reasons producing the change. One can feel an obstinate perversity of direction characterizing the computer-like society in which we live, giving rise to chemically harmonized and electroni- cally energized culture in which, as the cartoon indicates, good taste is at the head of the Departures board. Certainly, the teaching of art in such a gloomy and aesthetically threadbare zeitgeist can take on challenging fea- tures.

Set against this bleak perception of deteriorating cultural values is the symbolic image of Camelot. That is, of course, the American fairy tale of John Kennedy's presidency-the time of the beautiful young Princess and her Prince Charming who lived in a rich and powerful kingdom. Here goodness reigned; brilliance and elo- quence were the order of the day, and many things were possible. Man was ever more perfectable, and science would solve the nagging problems left over in the work-a-day world. The arts would grace the lives of one and all-and weren't we on our way to the moon? Without facetiousness, I do recall the all-too-brief period when a new beginning, it was felt, would blossom into a tasteful, sympathetic, and abundant society, fueled philo- sophically by a rational ordering of aspirations and needs and American technological know-how. It is always pleasant to live at the tale's end of Cinderella rather than the floor washing episode where we may now be stuck like a phonograph cartridge on a

cracked record. In retrospect, even though the illusion was felt keenly, the time of Camelot conformed to some of the more sanguine qualities of Ameri- can society-to an ever active hope- fulness, good cheer, mechanical tinkering, and a sense of reasoning. The quality of change perceived in this setting was a benign one. Within such a salubrious environment the arts felt they were an integral part of their culture. Isaac Stem at the White House, the First Lady at the opera; even Abstract Expressionism felt accepted; certainly its major practitioners were becoming wealthy as museums and collectors vied for the work despised a decade earlier. The avant garde was alive and well and prospering, accepted the morning after its "dis- coveries" as a shrinking vanguard, not as a scruffy bohemianism. Pop art was rearing its paradoxical head to herald the quotidian image, and the government was priming itself to open the vaults to educators, even the common garden variety of art educators. The challenges to one's capacity to teach art within such a setting seemed to be only superficial and of limitless possibility.

It felt different from what is felt today, yet it seems to me that at one end of the spectrum or the other, change, newness, modification, and alteration motivated the social thinkers, the educators, and for that matter, many artists as well. Art education has often risen to the bait of so-called original- ity, coercing its appetites towards tempting tidbits of recognition and prestige.

No doubt we live in a mutable culture, in a time and place where stability, quiet, serenity, public courtesy, and private manners are almost mythic values of earlier times. Change is everywhere with its tilting and un- settling thrust. Middle grounds are out of fashion. A primary reason for the constantly accelerating change is nevertheless as discomforting as the stridency and belligerency of the change itself. The reason conforms to the ober dictum of Norbert Weiner, the genius of cybernetics who has provided the latter half of the twentieth century with its marching orders: "We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in the new environment"

In our pursuit of ease and effi- ciency, power and wealth we are told




to modify the very basic human nature with which we were born. This may be an exciting and even welcome prospect for some. For others, it is a frightening and painful awareness of the vulnerability of man's freedom in an actual as well as a metaphysical sense. After millennia of so called progress and enormous changes im- posed upon the earth, the human spirit appears to have changed little. The accumulation of lore, myth, history, and the insights of intelligence and feelings have only intensified whatever morality, meaning, and mortal- ity set our caveman ancestors to won- dering. The forms of art grew out of this quality of consciousness and sense of engagement with the earth and the heavens. Now that we are actually leaving the earth, shooting off into the heavens in an artificial environment, the wonder is whether we

will survive. Is there need or room for Rembrandt in a space capsule? Paral- leling such a question is the one which asks whether that fundamental sense of existential freedom, whatever its joys or terrors, is capable of with- standing a persistent tinkering with our natural being and surroundings. As technology comes to dominate the sense of things, that sense may very well change our viscera to gears and our awareness to programmed re- sponsiveness. Once science opens up possibilities and technology imple- ments these possibilities, choice is under constraint, though we are told a better understanding of human nature results, people are better satisfied, and better choices are offered. It is these latter presumptions which I ap- proach with skepticism.

Science and technology have studied and indeed altered the world,

"The Impact of Technology Does Not Stop With the In-animate World; It Has Intruded Pervasively Into Our Private Lives and Into Our Most Fundamental Associations With One Another and With Society."

but the basic indeterminancy of existence remains. To think that the scientific enterprise and its technological activity gives us the real truth of ourselves and the world is to submit to illusion. It is this illusion, the illusion of techniques as William Barret calls it, which is a basic article of belief in our contemporary culture, but a belief which seems to rule out other acts of faith. Art is most certainly based on intuited faith, and art education also may be more an act of faith in educationally unique transformation arising out of the personal vision of students than the controlled manipulations resulting from research data. The consequences are everywhere of this paradoxical belief in not acting on faith, but with detached analysis and technological control. Our culture is beholden as much to mechanical as human considerations. I need not refer to what we all know as clamor- ous, clangorous, polluted, and hard- edged surroundings which nevertheless demonstrate an essential vulnerability as energy becomes more difficult to obtain or produce.

Just as potent a consequence of technology but more subtle are the techniques we have developed to study one another, to order social relationships, to communicate. The impact of technology does not stop with the inanimate world; it has intruded pervasively into our private lives and in our most fundamental associations with one another and with society. Here too the accusations are well known; of depersonalization, brute reductionism, and undiscriminating standardization, or in educational terms, value free research, compe- tency based bureaucracy, and so called accountability. The modem modification of man may be a remark- able accomplishment, but then we can wonder if we are man or robot.

Here I would like to quote from Allen Whellis' book, The End of the Modern Age. Though a scientist and a psychiatrist, he says:

"We have a delusion, we cannot know the world. Aided or unaided we stumble through an endless night, locked in a range of experience the limits of which are given by what we are and where we live. Earthworm or dolphin, reaching our level of investigative competence, would find a different universe; and we ourselves, in the spiral galaxy of Andromeda, would write different laws. Our eyes have seen

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the glory, but only within a narrow range, while by us, through us, flows visions for other eyes, music we shall never hear. We are a flicker of joy and grief and need, and shall not see the shores of this dark ocean. May we see but well enough to lay aside the weapons with which we are about to destroy, along with that little we do see, a potential of experience we know not of.

Poetic and portentious, yes, but as valid an argument for taking a different cultural direction than the one that bids us to accept change and more change because we keep on un- earthing new knowledge or what we want to accept as new knowledge. For the little we do see that we may well destroy, inadvertently or not, includes

art. Technology has been regarded as

the supreme means of making the world fit for us to live good lives-of humanizing an otherwise hostile place. We have been so successful in this undertaking that much of the world is now almost completely de- naturalized. We have now an environment designed for machines; we live not in nature but in artifice. The results are that we are increasingly an urbanized people living in controlled surroundings. Though how long that will last if oil is a continuing factor makes the whole enterprise one of di- minishing rather than accelerating expectations-our hubris may yet lead us to a comeuppance. The denat-

uralization of our land has other consequence of an aesthetic and spiritual nature. The countryside is paved, and the cities sprawl, but what we see is not only clutter and concrete, but a wall of defense against the chaos of nature. All to the good, but when car- ried to the extreme such as we are on the verge of doing now, we may be cut off from some rather fundamental sources that offer meaning, succor, and aesthetic satisfactions. If we but look at the art from the Renaissance on, we can see the changes invested in the art forms. The rational examina- tion of the world by the Renaissance, its exuberant glorification of bourgeois appreciation during the two centuries before the French Revolu- tion, the sublime engagement of the Romantics, and the beginnings of scientific fragmentation with the Im- pressionists. The Modern period has been one of a progressive shedding of references to nature until we are now with the Conceptualists, who reject not only all works of art that transform ideas and feelings into form- but all aesthetics. When they do earthworks or the like, it is basically to tell us that dirt, water, trees, and such are simply objects, objects that become ideas, or vice versa ideas which become objects. The only im- portance is the narcissistic power of the artist to define art and to continue forever to do so. Actually, the deem- phasizing of the product in art education-the elevation of process as a sufficient experience may very well be a forerunner of conceptualist non-aesthetics.

The other cultural consequence of technology which should be men- tioned in passing is the ubiquitous dis- semination of popular culture. The mass media has changed our lives enormously and continues to do so at an alarming rate. Not only are we flooded with newspapers, magazines, reproductions, television, Xeroxography, and holography, the new discovery of microchips promises as drastic a revolution in the way we live as did the internal combustion en- gine and the cathode tube. The innun- dation of images to which we are now subject has not only democratized visual culture into Malraux's Museum Without Walls, but it has turned art on its head. The former serious or high art was raided constantly for ideas and forms by the advertisers and commer- cial manufacturers of popular culture.




We all now know the reverse trans- position of Roy Lichtenstein, the video artists, the Photo Realists, and, of course, Andy Warhol who in his very perceptive way tells us we will all be famous for fifteen minutes. The implications for art education are im- pressively infinite. The connections that can be made are staggering in number as well as rich in reaching students on a level with which we pre- sume they are familiar. The only problem is that there is a real danger we can be leaving them on the same level we find them, with a simplistic and meritricious attitude towards making and experiencing art.

The balance of good versus bad philosophical qualities is not a sym- metrical one; the scale is alarmingly tipped in the wrong direction. How- ever, there should be a recognition that technology has freed us increasingly from a dull and dreary drudgery which did not always satisfy our in- stincts to earn our way in the world. It has given us time and a productive means to securing desirable ends. It has extended our capacities to inves- tigate and transform the world, open- ing up concurrently fresh artistic speculations and ways of creating metaphorically rich visual forms. It has provided the possibility of more discrete and pertinent ways of looking at education, of engaging in research methods which sometimes actually tell us something important and use- ful. However, we must guard against the tendency of intellectual visions and cognitive methods becoming a means to power for its own sake and control rather than understanding becoming the aim of inquiry. Scientific findings and technological means have a way of accumulating knowledge and techniques, the new usually supersed- ing the old which gets sloughed off. Art, on the other hand, does not use up forms the way science and technology use up ideas and gadgets. The moment may give rise to art, but the resulting form endures.

Art education should address itself as much to that enduring continuity of form as to the spontaneity of expression. Its particular worth lies in merg- ing these artistic attributes. For the past two decades the distinctiveness of art education has too often been tied to the vagaries of the moment. It has frequently flirted with the affec- tions of art rather than engaging itself with the more durable forms of art. It

has been seduced by many of the passing claims of social conceits, cultural caprice, and psychological therapies rather than committing itself to the more demanding requirements of personal achievement, spiritual transcen- dence, and the cultivation of intrinsic values. The connections it has made between art and life have been many times grossly overblown or discourag- ingly inane guided as much by the illusion of rationalized technique mores than the intuitions of artistic insight. It has been dogmatic in its techniques of research, erring grossly on the side of technology, and much more vacillating in its teaching methods. Art education is seemingly unable to divest itself of a "tradition of the new," if I can borrow Harold Rosenberg's term in the pejorative, and establish a continuity of order and usage which would yield a genuine and substantive body of insight and understanding for the profession.

Art education has been no more guilty of confused and flatulent ideas than many other fields of education or in general knowledge, for that matter. The zany forces and dramatically rad- ical influences of our times have up- ended and scrambled many traditional patterns of understanding, introducing an abundance of neologisms which bedazzle sometimes, but more often bedevil us. Yet, it is disappointing to observe many aspects of art succumb to a succession of importunate mo- ments which sway styles and attitudes in every which way. Of greater concern perhaps for art education are the disconcertingly uncritical acceptances of these mostly faddish and contradic- tory influences in theory and practice. Art, after all, has not been a vertical progression of styles, each succeeding one better than its predecessor. Each new style is only different, and perhaps particularly but not exclu- sively relevant, for any one time or place. The very adept Altamira cave drawings, the severely frontal embod- iments of Pharoah in granite, and the mysterious chiaroscuro of a Rem- brandt etching are all as immediately available (at least in repro- duction) and significant to our sense of perception and comprehension of the world as is Audry Flack's gam- bling table painted last year or Frank Stella's latest improvisation on visual form. It is all form-making of a manual sort, and its qualities share in an an- cient and continuing expression of

visual metaphor which in my estima- tion conforms to some rather fundamental human needs which may even be biological in nature. Consequently, it seems futile to reject or ignore the large body of artistic understanding our entire human history has pro- duced characterized by a will to form. Seventy years ago the Futurists would have had us flood the museums and burn the libraries. Today's conceptualists have figuratively achieved that state in their own work. Unfortu- nately, art education has been caught up as well in this nihilistic assertation of the here and now, the living for one's self outside of a context of history and a derecognition of intrinsic value in art. The future of art in education is increasingly unpromising if art educators are not even aware of their assumptions when they support such ideas.

The early sixties, which has sup- posedly shaped the mature profession, may have been a time of greater confidence. It was, after all, the time of Camelot, and that did breed, justifi- ably or not, a confidence that a crisis of values could be resolved, that common sense, good will, courage, and perhaps charm would overcome the disasters of our unstable world. For art educators it was a time to believe in the universal efficacy of "cre- ative" behavior if practiced in a nurturing educational environment offer- ing a special brand of artistic TLC. The connecting emphasis was process, an engagement with the inner reaches of the self, as well as with whatever materials were at hand. The values were chimerical, the sensibilities flattened by therapeutic considerations, yet a sense of possibility existed-a false one, but heady, nonetheless. Art education had promise, even if founded on an illusion of substance.

As the sixties continued its narcissistic outbursts well into the seventies, social confidence, cultural iden- tification, and educational stability were eroded. Traditional values and enduring sensibilities were assaulted so that the shifting, chronically agi- tated culture of the current decade has been marked by a trivializing transi- cence and a cheerless dissatisfaction despite its popularity. It is most difficult to make connections between the flickering, fragmented messages of television and the immediately used up, pseudo events of daily existence,




betweeen the transient non-object def- initional tautologies of conceptual art and the unappeasing, capricious blan- dishments of consumer advertising, between the lonely, inconstant sexual permissiveness and the twice or thrice removed images of photorealism, between the museum of indiscriminate outreach and the hype of never-ending sports, between the fickle, myriad claims of self-actualizing gurus or sys- tems and the cold severity of reduc- tionist art, between the arcane inde- terminations of scientific knowing and the wandering fancies of potless pot- ters, between the surrealism of pho- tography and the quotidian grind- between the need we all have to in- vent reality and the impoverished role of an educational system with de- creasing expectations.

Into what system of worthwhile, satisfying values can we set such an array of vacillating and restless hap- penings? What kind of artistic sen- sitivity can abide such an indolent creativeness, such skillful posturing? And can we expect an educational es- tablishment massively attacked, be- reft of long standing purposes, uncertain and forced into retrenchment to make the connections which society seems to declare cannot exist as it pursues a continuity of change rather than a continuity of convincing values? Art education may have had its faith shaken more so than the traditional academic areas during this great onrush of revisionist reform; it does seem to have lost a good part of its provisional and expedient sense of identity shaped during its optimistic post World War II period. In reading the literature or even in ordinary con- versation with teachers, one finds that art education appears to be flailing about seeking a reason for being. The search has been booby trapped by a continuous attraction to the fashions of the academic market place with which we are all familiar ranging from the vast tundra of psychological theorizing through the thickets of ethnic and gender concerns to the political safe haven of back to basics. A defensiveness can also be felt below the surface which offers reasons and justifications that it is hoped will not be subjected constantly to ridicule, contradiction, to charges of superfi- ciality, internecine destructiveness, or even the sympathetic but chastening sorties of a friendly critic such as Jac- ques Barzun with his accusations of

inflationary and nonsensical educational claims.

It is at least appropriate to arrive at a shared consensus that art education is not an isolatable luxury in the cur- riculum. Art education has to be convincing that it is a basic discipline, one which rather than primarily catering to the impromptu shaping of passing urges, is one by which students learn to articulate their inherent impulses toward form making. In working with vision and images to create and understand visual metaphors, it is essential that the discipline involved lead towards critical and artistic judgment. An understanding is also necessary of how vision is both stimulative and selective and how images are created and composed for design purposes which do not hinder the expressive spontaneity and intent, but inform and direct it.

Said in simpler terms, art in education is to be defended as a distinct, separately sufficient, natural, and fundamental way of knowing the world and being in it. As with lan- guage or mathematics, art possesses a discipline, perhaps not as precise at times, but nevertheless with recogniz- able patterns of form making. It is this discipline or creating visual metaphors relying on the emotional and spiritual powers as well as the ordering of visual elements-that is the basic pedagogical responsibility of educators.

The discipline requires a sense of educational continuity, a development of ideas and practices which will pro- vide minimally a body of shared points of reference. Art education, from a pedagogical point of view, has an obligation to develop and present a core of fundamental content which offers some commonly accepted artistic insights and processes without re- stricting the extreme tolerance which defines the making of art. Whether this content be drawing, a study of color, or the handling of particular materials is only a problem of specif- icity; more fundamental is the need to assert some sense of a discipline re- lated to the subject that is being taught . . Though artists always in- vent new ways to relate the changing order of things, they also reaffirm the traditional forms of visual order so that some measure of stability is felt. It is in these permanent qualities of art, the relatively unchangeing relationships, that art educators can find a

fundamental core to teach, affirming the worth and the continuity of art and education. The substantiation of art education cannot lie in alterable and incidental concepts culled from the social sciences or the occult or any- where other than art. Art education has to ratify educationally the unique- ness and self sufficiency of art. The intrinsic and characteristically particular processes of art have to be af- firmed so that forms and understanding of art may be created by students affirming their own engagement with life's experiences.

Further connections between art and life and between art and education remain to be made by the art educator. The upshot is one of positive possibility-this meshing of form and existence, instruction and individual person. It is one that for art education must be based upon perception, then the development of visual expressiveness, analysis, and synthesis. The emotional and irrational aspects have to be recognized and accepted but not sentimentalized. Art educators should teach from out of their discipline, from their intimate association with and study of vision and image-in other words, from a position of strength and relevance.

It is essential that this teaching occur from the very beginnings of education, to encourage a progres- sively sophisticated and discriminating perception and a capacity for metaphoric inventiveness. Art education is particularly equipped to do this by educating a student's vision, by guiding his visual expressiveness and by engendering a critical visual intelligence through actual practice and dis- course.

The traditions of art were successful in the past in holding a culture together. Our rather frenetic and splin- tered culture is sorely in need of such a continuity of form and faith. Art may not be able to humanize technology, but it does offer personal alterna- tives. These may in time become once again the kind of values toward which art educators aim, a humane society with a culture and physical environment of aesthetic dimensions. This, I believe we can achieve only inasmuch as we value artists in what they do and art as an end in itself.

Irving Kaufman is professor of art, The City College, City University of New York, New York.




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