the preparation of teachers for aesthetic education

National Art Education Association

The Preparation of Teachers for Aesthetic EducationAuthor(s): Harry S. BroudySource: Art Education, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Mar., 1967), pp. 29-32Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3190965 .

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THE PREPARATION OF TEACHERS FOR

AESTHETIC EDUCATION

HARRY S. BROUDY

ONE HEARS WITH INCREASING FREQUENCY the demand that something called "aesthetic education" be given a more solid place in the public school curriculum than the customary offerings in art and music. Although there is no consensus as to what the added or new studies should include or how they should be carried on, the proposals for aesthetic education quite often resem- ble the humanities courses found in a number of college curricula.

Humanities courses bring together under one stream of instruction the fine arts, including literature, philosophy, chiefly of the moral and social sort, and historical materials, especially if they have some pretensions to literary quality. The materials are arranged around certain themes, e.g., Man and God, Man and Society, Freedom; or the clustering may be by historical periods, e.g., Greek, Roman, Christian, Renaissance, etc.; or by stylistic character, e.g., Classical, Romantic, Baroque, etc. There is a trend, quite strong, to institute something like humanities courses in the public high schools.1

The propriety of calling these humanities courses "aesthetic education" is not always obvious, especially if they include large doses of philosophy and the history of ideas. I shall, however, confine my discussion to the problems of teaching created by the attempt of such courses to correlate materials from a number of the fine arts (including literature).

Whatever pedagogical headaches the college humanities course may occasion, the major problem at the high school level is that of staff. First of all, English, music, and art teachers are skittish about the mere possibility that they may be called upon to teach in a field other than their own. If they are specialists in a given field, they share the specialist's suspicions about omnibus courses and his distaste for the mishmash into which they so often degenerate. In the third place, there is the unavoidable task of correlating materials from widely diverse sources. The whole point of these holistic courses is that a problem or theme or a period be perceived and understood through a number of artistic products done in a variety of media. Inasmuch as all of these perspec- tives cannot be taught simultaneously, the contributions

of the various arts have to be correlated sometime by someone, viz., the teacher.

The same sort of problem confronts the teachers who are designing the course. On the committee charged with this task-and usually it is a committee-there ought to be members who know their way around in cultural history well enough to make some firm decisions about periods, themes, styles, and the like. There is no assurance that on the ordinary high school staff, or even within the entire school system, that one can find sufficient competence within the several arts to make the planning adequate. Even when competence within the several fields is adequate, there still remains the problem of relating the members of the team to each other. Something is needed to enable them to speak to each other. The situation calls for, nay, cries out for, a generalist who somehow can communicate with specialists in literature, painting, music, architecture, drama, and, one would like to add, the dance and city planning.2 More important still is his task of instituting com- munication among them.

How shall we achieve the generality that will make it possible to unite the arts into a course or courses in aesthetic education? Shall we urge that a cadre of teachers different from the usual monospecialists be trained for this purpose? Shall we look for polyspecialists, i.e., demand that each prospective teacher be expert in more than one art, e.g., literature and drama, art and architecture? Or shall we seek a monospecialist with a background that enables him to work with other monospecialists?

I think it will be agreed that the goal of a team of polyspecialists is unrealistic. Even when these rarities are found, it only mitigates the relational problem. For unless every teacher is competent in all the arts, there will still remain the task of relating one polyspecialist to another. Maintaining harmony among the large and sensitive egos of such polyexperts would give pause to a seasoned impressario, let alone a high school principal.

For reasons already mentioned, the alternative of assembling an assortment of monospecialists offers a poor prognosis for the success of the course. We are

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left then with possibilities of two types of personnel (although there may be others) that merit further exami- nation. One is the generalist as such, i.e., a specialist in none of the arts, and the other is the monospecialist with a potential for a general understanding of all the other arts.

The first alternative is not impossible. College graduates with substantial courses in cultural history, the classics, and aesthetics are rare, but their number could be increased once teaching opportunities in the humanities course were appropriately publicized. Indeed, this might be the long-sought occupational justification that the liberal arts graduate, who has not specialized in anything, could invoke to mollify his practical relatives.

Nonetheless we would be uncomfortable with the prospect of having works of art being presented and discussed by a staff made up entirely of nonspecialists. Although it is conceivable that much good talk could occur in courses so manned, their potentiality for pedan- try and perhaps inanity as well is formidable. However, even if, as is unlikely, high school students could tolerate such concentrations of art-talk, these courses would lose their sole excuse for being, because as will be argued below, discursive knowledge about art does not necessi- tate a humanities course. Yet one or two such generalists might be of great help in planning, organizing, and administering the program. They might be especially helpful in conducting discussions that entailed fusing contributions from the several specialists.

Yet even if, "mirabile dictu," one were able to secure one or more such generalists, the problem of communi- cation among the specialists would not necessarily be solved. The organic unity that a course of this kind pre- supposes and which provides much of its rationale would be "in the generalist" and not in the course itself and, therefore, not in the teaching of it. This problem is not confined to a humanities course. All efforts to promote interdisciplinary study face the same impasse: the more competent the specialist, the more technical and esoteric are his conceptual schemata and language. He who would translate or correlate two schemata or languages needs a schema common to both of them, i.e., a third language. We thus rapidly get to the point at which a language common to a large number of special languages is an essential, but such a language, as far as I know, has yet to be invented. Lacking this, ambitious and expensive ventures in interdisciplinary conferences and courses are likely to sharpen the differences between disciplines, rather than to unify them.

The most promising alternative of those considered would seem to be the monospecialist with a generalizing potential. It is to the preparation of such personnel that the remainder of this paper will be devoted, although at best only a sketch of the program can be offered here.

I have deliberately avoided trying to characterize aesthetic education beyond its general avowal to unite several of the arts into one instructional unit. But it would be pointless to speak of designs for preparing teachers without stipulating the outcomes they are expected to achieve.

Aesthetic education can have as its goal some such general objective as increased sensitivity to works of art. One might justify this by insisting, as Roger Fry and others have, that there is a distinctive aesthetic pleasure or an aesthetic emotion aroused by the formal properties

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of works of art; presumably it is good to promote such enjoyment through education. Or one might justify the course as a means of realizing extra-aesthetic values, e.g., cultivation of personality, sensitivity to human dignity, the awareness of value potentials.3 Often the course is regarded as a means of overcoming the centrifugal effects of a compartmentalized curriculum or as a counter- weight to excessive stress on science and technology.

It is important in this welter of possible objectives and justifications to resolve that courses, like meta- physical entities, should not be multiplied without sufficient reason. And thinking that it might be a good idea to have such a course is not a sufficient reason, especially when the cumbersome processes entailed by curriculum changes for a public school are taken into account.

One must not forget that there are already courses which might achieve some of these goals, for example, existing courses in the arts and survey courses in the history of ideas. Moreover, literature is a fixture in the high school, whatever else is or is not taught. The dis- tinctiveness of the fine arts is that they convey whatever it is they do convey (insights, forms of feelings, values) by presentation rather than by discursive concepts, to use Susanne Langer's term for a familiar distinction. It is only when a curriculum lacks this kind of educative experience that it is in order to urge aesthetic education as an integral part of general education. In other words, knowledge about art and about civilization may quite properly be given by survey courses, while performance skill in a special art can be provided by the type of study with which we are already familiar; even general appreciation courses in the several arts are not lacking. Not generally available is the chance to experience man's quest for sense and value in the aesthetic dimension, i.e., as presented in works of art.4

If this view is maintained, the key requirement for teachers of aesthetic education is the ability to direct the pupil into appropriate modes of aesthetic awareness. This ability involves the following components:

1. Performance competence within at least one art at the level of a talented amateur is perhaps the surest guarantee against premature and purely verbal vaporings about art. To give concrete aesthetic meaning to such expressions as "to see as the painter sees" or "to hear as the composer hears" probably requires a modicum of experimentation with various media by the pupil. Finally, although technical subleties are not of primary importance in a course of this kind, discourse& about works from different periods may be difficult, if not misleading, without knowledge of the technical contexts within which the works of art were produced.

2. A thorough background in the history of art in general and of one art in detail would be essential in order (a) to select works for study, and (b) to develop a basis for criticism. I am assuming that the study of criticism would be included in a thorough study of art history. However, supplementary work in contemporary criticism might be necessary.

3. A course or courses in the philosophy of art or formal aesthetics. Not only do such courses generalize upon the history and criticism already mentioned, but what is even more important, they furnish the vocabulary and the schemata by which specialists in the arts can communicate with each other. (a) Courses in aesthetics, despite variations, emphasize certain phenomenological



properties of both the work of art and the experiencing of it. For example, it is generally agreed that a work of art presents us with an individual image, and that whatever universal import it contains is expressed by this image. Moreover, whatever meaning the work of art expresses must "seem" to be in the work of art, regard- less of how one explains the way in which the meaning got "out there." Another widely accepted distinction in formal aesthetics is that between a response elicited by and directed toward the formal properties of a work of art and the psychological associations triggered by it. Distance and empathy likewise refer to certain phenomenological peculiarities of the aesthetic experience. Because these phenomena are common to all the arts, the study of aesthetics facilitates enormously any systematic attempt to analyze and characterize the aesthetic experience by a team of monospecialists. (b) It is possible also through formal aesthetics to develop a vocabulary and procedures for analyzing works of art. For example, formal properties as displayed in composition are present in all the arts, and one can make discrimi- nation within the sensory elements appropriate to each of them. Style is another common variable. The variable that gives the most trouble is, unfortunately, the most important one, viz., that of expressiveness, significance, or, as Clive Bell calls it, significant form. Everyone recog- nizes the importance of the variable, but the identifica- tion of the expressive elements and the statement of them are sticky affairs; if they were not, aesthetics might have become a science long ago. (c) Although criticism is far from being a science, and although there is little hope of agreement among critics, the chaos is not so pervasive in this field as methodological skeptics would have us believe. The language and styles of criticism are fairly stable. One still looks for "integrity" in plays, poems, and paintings. Technical competence is a relevant topic in evaluation of all works of art. Judg-

"Two Figures," Honore Daumier. The National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection.

ments as to whether or not the artist has exploited the potentialities in a work of art are still relevant. While Greene's apparatus for criticism may be overelaborate, it does demonstrate the possibility that it can be an orderly undertaking, and that one could become better at it through guided experience, i.e., through instruction.5 (d) Courses in aesthetics and philosophy of art theorize about what art really does and means. Theories of art discuss the motives of art, the source of its power, and the secrets of its success. Such theories, to be sure, do get mixed up with phenomenological analysis of the aesthetic experience, and they do infect criticism, but in a humanities course these theories help to make explicit the connection of art with other domains of experience. For example, the Freudian theory of art; the Nietszchian speculations, or the Aristotelian model con- nect art with the realm of human values as a whole. It is a moot point whether or not these theories should be taught to the pupil, but there is little doubt that they are needed by the teacher to teach with, to talk with one's fellows on the aesthetic education staff, and to keep up with contemporary criticism.

This adds up to the claim that work in formal aesthetics may be the means for producing the generalizing potential needed to supplement the resources of the monospecialist. I have no evidence for this claim except that gleaned from about 10 years of experience with a seminar in the foundations of aesthetic education at- tended by prospective teachers in the various arts. By the end of the semester the most notable result is the ability of the class to communicate by means of a common vocabulary and a common set of concepts. There is little doubt in my mind that if the instruction were extended, these students could carry on analyses in arts other than their own with a fair degree of competence and confidence. In short they could discuss problems of aesthetic education.

4. This brings us to the more specifically professional training of the aesthetic education teacher. Let us assume that what passes for liberal education in most institutions of higher learning will have contributed something in the way of familiarity with cultural history and some competence in the sciences and the humanities. The variation in the preparation of liberal arts graduates is so great that a "catchup" review, a course in the humanities or allied arts, might be recommended as a general college requirement. This time, however, the course would be expected to serve not merely as background or as an ingredient of general education, but also to exhibit the problems inherent in the teaching of such a course.

The prospective teacher will quite properly ask how he can learn the actual procedures (as well as the theoretical background) of teaching such a course in a public school. In medicine or engineering, the answer to an analogous question would be that one learns procedures or rules of practice by work in the laboratory, the clinic, and as an intern of one sort or another. In a laboratory, we manipulate a piece of the task or some abstracted phase of it so as to achieve an understanding of the principle being exemplified. For example, learning and teaching the discernment of style in art objects could have a laboratory phase. Virtually every phase of analysis in every one of the variables mentioned above is amen- able to laboratory study.

Whereas laboratory study abstracts from the total

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teaching situation to illuminate this or that principle, the clinic asks the student to consider a real individual typical case and to make judgments concerning the relevance of all that he has learned to the diagnosis and treatment of this particular case. For example, the strategy for dealing with Dante's "Divine Comedy," an associated set of paintings, and examples of architecture calls on many principles and analyses. The teaching of the "Divine Comedy" to a high school class might itself be regarded as a clinical problem. Or the evaluation of a given class's responses to the "Divine Comedy" might be regarded as a clinical problem. Clinical teaching at its best is carried on under the direction of a master teacher who makes the decisions and performs the necessary procedures; the participation of the student varies from discussion of the case with the instructor and his fellow students to serving as a helper under fairly close supervision.

Internship provides the student with a classroom of his own for which he has a great deal of responsibility. Here he manages the total real situation under supervision of the school's personnel and with more or less guidance from the training institution.

The program we have been discussing, in addition to whatever general education the training institution might stipulate for admission to the program, would, therefore, include the following ingredients.

1. Foundational Studies Common to all Workers in Education. We can distinguish four problem areas in education-the nature and aim of education, curriculum, organization, and teaching-learning--and these may be studied in four dimensions: philosophical, psychological, historical, and societal. These constitute the foundational studies of all educational workers.

2. Specialized Program for Teachers in Aesthetic Edu- cation:

A. Training in performance of at least one art. B. Course work in history of art, criticism, formal aes-

thetics, and humanities. C. Problems of aesthetic education

1. Theoretical consideration of aims, curriculum, organization, and teaching-learning in aesthetic education.

2. Laboratory experiences in each of the problem areas.

3. Clinical study in each of the problem areas where appropriate.

4. Internship in selected schools. This sketch merely enumerates the ingredients of the

program; it does not deal with the ways of combining them into courses, sequences, or modes of instruction. It is difficult, moreover, to estimate time allotments and specific requirements, because of the variability in the education of the prospective teacher at the time he or she makes the decision to become a teacher of aesthetic education. For example, a young woman who has been graduated from a music conservatory will enter the program with a background different from a young woman whose work in music has been limited to several appreciation courses in college. The inventory is more useful for making up packages more or less tailored to individual candidates than for naming courses.

It would seem as if over and above general education and performance training in art, one would need be-

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tween 36 and 42 hours of professional academic work, plus a half year or a year of internship. The latter might be financed through internship stipends paid by a school system. Whether the work would be included within an undergraduate program or combined with graduate work would depend on individual cases.

I have elsewhere offered a rationale for the structure of teacher education6 to which I would appeal to justify the inclusion of this or that type of instruction. Although it is not possible to carry out such justification in this paper, it is a matter of real importance that it be done by every proponent of schemes for aesthetic education, humanities course, and the like for public schools. Clever ideas about content and packaging in this field are a dime a dozen, but a dozen of them will not solve the problem of staff, and so long as this is unsolved, nothing is solved, and schools would be well advised to steer clear of the whole business.

Harry S. Broudy is professor of philosophy of education at the University of Illinois. His most recent books are DEMOCRACY AND EXCELLENCE IN AMERICAN SEC- ONDARY EDUCATION (with B. Othanel Smith and Joe R. Burnett (Rand McNally, 1964), and EXEMPLARS OF TEACHING METHOD (with John Palmer) (Rand McNally, 1966).

REFERENCES 1. The courses being developed by the New York State

Department of Education and the Educational Research Council of Greater Cleveland are only two of scores of examples that might be cited.

2. One should not exclude city planning, because not in- frequently it is urged that the theme of aesthetic education most appropriate at the secondary level of the public school is the aesthetic quality of the environment. Cf. Thomas Munro. "'Beautification' Reconsidered." Journal of Aesthetic Education, Inaugural Issue. Spring 1966. pp. 85-100.

3. D. W. Gotshalk. Art and the Social Order. Chicago. Uni- versity of Chicago Press. 1962. Chap. 9, 10. Gotshalk is cited because he discusses the extra-aesthetic values of art; he does not advocate these as the primary justification of art or the teaching of it.

4. It may be objected that aesthetic education need not involve special courses at all. One might argue that sensitivity to the aesthetic components or aspects of experience can be developed in any and all courses-in the general conduct and demeanor of all school personnel. Such a view shifts the discussion so far as the preparation of teachers is concerned. It would entail sensitizing all teachers to aesthetic considerations, but this would have to be done in either the general education of teachers or in their professional training. If the first alternative is chosen, then the problem of how to include it in the curriculum of the public school ultimately reappears; if we choose to make it an item in professional preparation, then what specialist is to be charged with responsibility for it? And how would such a specialist be trained? For these reasons, I have chosen to concentrate the discussion on the supposition that aesthetic education involves systematic instruction, rather than accruing as a by- product of other modes of instruction.

5. Theodore M. Greene. The Arts and the Art of Criticism. Princeton. Princeton University Press. 1940.

6. Cf. H. S. Broudy. "Criteria for the Professional Prepara- tion of Teachers." The Journal of Teacher Education 16:4, pp. 408-16. December 1965.



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