Standards for Art Instruction
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Attempts to set and implement national standards for art instruction have met with little success in the United States. The process of developing such standards has, however, produced a number of novel approaches to teaching art. Among the most prominent innovations are the proposed incorporation of the concepts of art criticism, art history, and aesthetics into the arts curriculum. Yet, to take a single example, the idea of introducing art criticism into teaching has met with enormous resistance from entrenched interests, from those who assign a very low value to arts education, and from numerous parties who simply fail to see how such ideas are relevant to the education of children and teenagers. Reactions to the general idea range from outrage over the apparent desire to eliminate studio art classes, to rejection of the idea based on the inadequate arts backgrounds of most teachers in elementary and secondary schools. Art criticism is often confused with art history, misinterpreted as a reference to critiques of student art work, or taken to refer to the mere expression of likes and dislikes. Some critics of the idea have also assumed that criticism is not possible without extensive grounding in practice, history, and aesthetics. But, at a time when the development of critical thinking skills is, once again, becoming an educational priority, those who favor the addition of critical concepts and activities to art instruction believe that the discipline can advance t
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" in "physical, social, or psychological" terms (Anderson, "Defining" 201). Assimilation of these methods of describing an art work allows the student to perform exploratory criticism in which she "makes an initial evaluation, cautiously and tentatively," and then uses descriptive methods as the means of searching for those qualities that "either support or disprove the initial judgment" (Anderson, "Defining" 202). The initial evaluation of the student, or critic, consists largely of the personal reaction to the work of art. But, personal reactions vary in quality or, more accurately, in usefulness for the process of understanding the work. In any critical approach to art, the viewer must draw on her knowledge of art history, her experience in creating art, and her understanding of the nature of art--no matter how limited or how extensive they may be. Thus, merely by considering the difference in the level of sophistication that affects the personal reaction of the student and the professional critic, it becomes clear that students are in the process of acquiring these types of knowledge and understanding at the same times that they are acquiring skill in deploying art critical methods. The personal reaction of a student who
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Approximate Word count = 6090
Approximate Pages = 24 (250 words per page)
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