Art & Diversity in the Classroom

Since the beginning of time humans have struggled to understand themselves through experimental expression in song, dance, poetry, music and art. When the cavemen painted a bison hunt on the walls of their Grotto in Lascaux, France centuries ago they were laboring to express their connection to nature and others (Campbell 68). Painting on cavewalls appears to have offered them a sense of having mastered their world while simultaneously allaying their fears. Elementary school children enrolled in art classes today fulfill this same ancestral need to subdue their anxieties even as they develop their own sense of mastery. Jungian psychologists assert that allowing children to create yields them an enriched sense of control. Contemporary multicultural classrooms composed of children from divergent backgrounds benefit from an art curriculum which focuses on ethnic and cultural difference, exploring the diversity of values uncovered there rather than ignoring them.

In Raising the Rainbow Generation the Hopsons record the narrative of Gary and Seth in "The Media and the Message." While unsupervised these two children watch an action film plotted with a stereotypical storyline and characters. When a minor Hispanic character appears on screen, Gary dutifully tells Seth "he's a spic. That means in this movie he's either a pimp, a drug dealer or he's going to whack off somebody's head with a machete" (Hopson 92)

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backlash of this principle for centuries. Whitney Chadwick begins her study of Women, art and society by analyzing Johann Zoffany's 1771-72 portrait, The academics of the royal academy. She powerfully observes that although two women, Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser, had managed to be included as founding members of the British Royal Academy in 1768, they were excluded from the group portrait. Since it was considered scandalous for women to be presiding in a group populated by nude male models, their presence was denied. Rather than appearing as one of the living, breathing group members, these women were transformed into inanimate paintings themselves as their own portraits graced the walls behind the men in the painting's background (Chadwick 7). Although women's presence has of late been less easily banished, it is still imperative to instill in grade-school age children that females should not be consistently relegated to secondary positions. The exclusionary principle has equally been applied to members of racial minorities. In America the undervaluing of black culture and the earlier exploitation of black slave labor in the cotton fields of the South socially structured a mammoth rift between blacks and whites. As
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Approximate Word count = 2386
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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