he journalist Bill Moyers when interviewing the esteemed scholar of world mythology, Joseph Campbell, observed that myths and images speak powerfully since they "express what I know inside is true" (Campbell 37). When elementary teachers offer art projects celebrating multicultural diversity they are encouraging children to create their own inner worlds rather than merely parroting in a reactive manner what they see surrounding them. Recently art educators across America have been disturbed by a "back-to-basics thrust" which is "over-taking and overturning some art programs" (Fowler 7). Yet students thirst for classes which will enable them to build a language for self-expression and discover new and creative ways to analyze the increasingly confusing world around them.
Art emphasizes skills which are not essentially verbal. Its reliance on nonverbal skills resounds at the center of these recent debates about art's worth in the classroom. In A place called school Goodlad considers the contradiction between the importance of art in society and its lack of importance in public education. Goodlad contends that age-old myths about learning need to be abandoned. Grade-school learners have routinely been classified into two types: the first, academically oriented, learn by using their heads and should be encouraged to do so; the second, "maybe those who prefer painting", learn by using their hands and should go on to work with their hands. The myth concludes that "school is where one cultivates the head. Conse-quently, "headedness" more than "handedness" is needed for and valued in schools" (Fowler 4).
Goodlad's critique of educational myths of learning underscores that children are sometimes unduly restricted by too narrowly defined educational objectives. Yet it also reinforces the truism that children can only learn from what they have been exposed to. In a 1995 biography, Picasso. Portrait of Picasso as a young ma...