The Value of Art Education

Art education assures the fullest possible integration of art with life. Whether students are being taught to make art, to learn about the art of the past, or to experience art critically and sensually, the goal is to achieve a 'literacy' in art equivalent to the literacy, numeracy, and other skills that every educated person must possess. This is, of course, an ideal goal since American society tends to view any activity so frivolous and nonproductive as art with a jaundiced eye. The struggle that faces those who believe in this goal, therefore, is to explain, or demonstrate, convincingly how art is an essential human activity completely on a par with all the traditional 'academic' skills of which this manifestly practical society approves. Two of the major documents in support of this idea are John Dewey's Art as Experience (1934) and Herbert Read's Education through Art (1958, first edition published in 1943). Both Dewey's and Read's works argue the essential nature of the art experience for the fully integrated human being. Dewey makes his arguments, however, on aesthetic-philosophical grounds based on his understanding of the relationship between art and human experience. Read, on the other hand, holds that art must be the basis of all education and demonstrates this through his philosophical-psychological examination of the precise nature of education.

These influential works were instrumental in the development of the pedagogy of art and many of the views held

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follows the movement of a butterfly or a speeding fire engine, or chooses the colors of her/his clothing are the same essential elements that make up the pleasure to be gained from a work of art. And he perceives aesthetic dimensions in almost all human experience. Even an experience of thinking possesses an aesthetic quality of its own. As Dewey explains it, in thinking "premisses emerge only as a conclusion becomes manifest [and this] experience, like that of watching a storm reach its height and gradually subside, is one of continuous movement of subject matters" (p. 38). The conclusion the individual reaches in the process of thinking is, therefore, a consummation of a series of connected movements. Thus, by extension, these qualities of experience exist in art, but art has an essential nature that sets it apart from common experience. It partakes of all the same relations of energy coming and going, of sending and reception, that constitute every experience. But the aesthetic aspects of everyday experience--from thinking to looking at flowers--occur in the midst of a host of variable elements. The work of art, however, eliminates any part of experience that does not contribute directly to the experience on which the

Category: Arts - T