Decline in Arts Education in the Schools
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The decline in arts education in American schools is due largely to incomprehension regarding the role this branch of learning plays in the intellectual and educational development of children. Knowing and learning in art are different from these same activities in other areas. This idea is slowly penetrating the education field -- and as the idea of many different kinds of 'intelligences' takes root it becomes clear that they are served by different disciplines. But the problem is not limited to the general public. There is also a great deal of confusion, even among arts educators, over such basic questions as what is to be taught, who is to teach it, and whether children acquire skills from it that have broader relevance. Research in art education is slowly developing a new rationale for its existence on the basis of evolving ideas in developmental and educational psychology. But there is a long way to go in convincing the public and other educators that art education is a necessity. What is taught to children in school is, generally speaking, what the society believes they need to learn. Education in the arts is simply not seen by most people as a vital part of a student's education. Numeracy and literacy and now science and technology occupy the privileged positions in curricula everywhere. This is not just because they are felt to be sufficient in themselves, but because societies are facing crises and they believe that only improvements in the quality of teac
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ce. On the other hand, much of the dismissal of art education has had some justification because in using the sciences as the source of the "models of disciplines used in teaching the arts" confusion over what to do and how to do it has characterized the profession of art education (Efland 143). Recognizing that art is a specific type of knowledge domain, distinct from areas such as science or history, makes the use of other disciplines' standards for teaching and evaluation pointless. Arts education needs standards of its own based on how a child learns in this domain, what role this learning plays in development, and what teaching strategies facilitate the learning.
The nature of human knowledge has long been understood according to models from the sciences. A new distinction has been made, however, between what are called well-structured and ill-structured knowledge domains. Physics is a perfect example of the well-structured knowledge domain in which "laws, axioms, and theorems link together to form deductive explanations of given phenomena" (Efland 143). Art, on the other hand, is a prime example of an ill-structured domain in which it is the "particular details of individual cases rather than knowledge in the abstrac
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Approximate Word count = 2564
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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