Social Goals and Education in the Visual Arts

National Art Education Association

Social Goals and Education in the Visual ArtsAuthor(s): Nancy R. JohnsonSource: Art Education, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Jan., 1982), pp. 22-25Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3192562 .

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i n t h e~1 V i s u a l A r t s

"Let us have dialogue which examines the interface between the visual arts and contemporary life."

Nancy R. Johnson

A popular approach to planning curriculum has been through the

framework of the Tyler rationale. Tyler (1949) states that one of the questions to ask when developing curriculum is: What educational pur- poses shall the school seek to attain'? According to Tyler, there are three sources that can provide a basis for making decisions about educational goals. These are the learners, contemporary life outside the school, and subject specialists. From this viewpoint, a discontinuity can be seen to exist between the goals cur- rently being emphasized in general education and those emphasized in visual arts education. In general education, goals focus mainly on contemporary life outside the school. Movements such as back-to-basics, career education, and moral education reflect a concern about many of the problems of living in today's society. Goals frequently involve being able to read and fill out a job applica- tion, balancing a checkbook, and behaving in responsible ways toward other persons. In visual arts education, however, purpose is derived mostly from the learners. Goals focus on the creative accomplishments of individuals and are often stated with terms and phrases such as self- expression, developing the senses, identifying creative potential, and visual problem-solving.

'I hs oiscontinuity in me sources or educational goals contributes to the lack of parity that the visual arts have with other subjects in the school curriculum. The emphasis on learner centered goals in visual arts educa-

tion is not easily justified at the pres- ent time when the public is con- cerned about the cost of education and seeing direct benefits from it. It appears that the educational decision- makers do not find the goal of prepar- ing citizens to express themselves creatively through artistic media to be cost-effective. In part, the decision-makers are correct. What need is there for all individuals in our society to be makers of visual art objects, either professionally or in their lei- sure? Furthermore, is expressing one's self by making visual art the only way to know about it and to understand it? Thus the conception of visual arts education as just the achievement of personal productive accomplishments is a somewhat nar- row one. Decision-makers are not correct, however, in assuming that the visual arts should be excluded from a child's school experience sim- ply because there does not seem to be any relevance between study in the visual arts and many of the problems in today's society. Historically, visual arts education has been involved with concerns in contemporary life, and some educators have developed educational goals and activities in art from this source.

The first state to recognize social goals through the visual arts was Massachusetts. In 1871, the State Board required that drawing be taught in all of the common schools (MacDonald, 1970, p. 255). The educational goals to be attained by doing so were derived from contemporary life in the 1860s and 70s, and included a concern for the proper place of machines and industrial products in society and the responsibilities of the state toward citizens. As a consequence, the drawing program in the Massachusetts schools was industrial in character and provided an oppor- tunity for all students to learn the skills needed for employment in the mills and factories of New England. This perspective on the visual arts reflected the approaches taken to public art education in England, France, and Germany. These countries were competing with one

another to manufacture and sell the most factory-made goods, such as textiles, ironwork, and pottery. Com- petition was stimulated through trade fairs and expositions. To gain the edge in trade, and in winning the prizes given at the fairs for the best designed products, a country needed persons who knew about the principles of art and could apply them to manufactured objects. In the artworld of the nineteenth century, however, knowledge about art was disseminated through art academies. It was the practice of the academies to select only a small group of tal- ented persons to be prepared as artists, that is, fine artists who painted, sculpted, and designed buildings. Educating the masses and applying art to industry were not concerns of the academicians. To provide work- ing men and women with the oppor- tunity to learn about design and applied art, public drawing or design schools were established (Bell, 1963).

As the nineteenth century edged into the twentieth, another educational goal derived from contemporary life was added to justify instruction in the visual arts. This goal, to teach "good taste" to the young citizens of the nation, was inspired mainly by the Arts and Crafts and the Aesthetic Movements (Naylor, 1971; Aslin, 1969) in which many middle class persons in England and the United States took part. Popular beliefs held at this time were that all great nations were characterized by high quality.in the arts and that art, conceived as beauty, belonged to all of the people and not to just a privi- leged few. Art activities that followed from these beliefs included public works projects and the design of gar- den cities, houses for factory work- ers, interiors, and home furnishings.

But one important consequence of the Aesthetic Movement, typified by such spokesmen as Oscar Wilde, was the spreading notion of Art for Art's Sake. In this conception, the artist was seen as a person who was indif- ferent to social life and who searched for personal sensations to be expressed by the self in pure form.

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Consequently, art objects were to have no content other than the rela- tionship of colors, lines, or shapes to one another (Gaunt, 1945). Also of significance at the turn of the century was the growth of child psychology which stressed the study of children's art work as a way to learn about the child's development. As a result, children were encouraged to make spontaneous drawings, paintings, and sculptures and received little or no systematic instruction in the visual arts. Formal instruction was per- ceived to be inimical to the child's natural pattern of growth in the same way that the tenets of the art acad- emy were seen by many nineteenth century artists to be restrictive of the artist's creativity. Influenced by these events, the conception of visual arts education as social service grad- ually shifted to visual arts education as creative self-expression, through media and design, for the healthy development of the child. Educa- tional goals in the visual arts eventu- ally came to be focused almost entirely upon the needs of the learner.

Yet social goals were not entirely dismissed as a central concern in visual arts education. Throughout the

past eighty years, many art educators have drawn upon art in contemporary life as a source of goals. For instance, Henry Turner Bailey, one of the early editors of School Arts Magazine, suggested that educators had a responsibility to establish a school estate that surrounded children with beauty when they entered the school grounds, the building, and the classroom (1914). Teachers were to be attired in well chosen clothing and were to encourage good house- keeping in their classrooms. In addi- tion, Bailey advocated that all school work should be well presented with attention given to neatness, good spacing, and excellent handwriting. Educating the public about taste and skill in art was also a concern of Charles DeGarmo, a professor of education at Cornell University, and Leon Loyal Winslow, a supervisor of art education for the state of New York. In 1924, they published a text- book, Essentials of Design, in which they developed principles for judging the beauty of a design. The goal that DeGarmo and Winslow hoped to achieve was an educated citizenry that would demand the best designs possible in tools, cars, machines, home furnishings, and clothing. Art

in daily life continued to be a key idea in the Owatonna Project of the 1930s (Logan, 1955). Owatonna, Min- nesota, was the site of a program designed by the University of Minne- sota that involved the whole commu- nity in art. The citizens, including children in schools, participated in learning to make decisions about the design of the town, their homes, and the everyday objects that they used.

More recent theory in visual arts e,ducation also utilizes contemporary life as a source of goals. For several years, Vincent Lanier (1976, 1980) has contended that the central purpose of visual arts education is to achieve aesthetic literacy among the nation's youth. He maintains that aesthetic literacy is best accom- plished by studying the social context of the visual arts, for most young

? people encounter the visual arts in a popular form, such as film, televi- sion, and advertising. June McFee

| and Rogena Degge (1977) also view I the visual arts as cultural communi-

cation. They believe that ideas and o meanings are communicated to peo-

ple through the artforms of a society. Therefore children should learn about the symbols and language of the visual arts as well as the role that art plays in the lives of people. One of the educational goals favored by McFee is improving the quality of our cities and living spaces through the study of environmental design and the built-environment. Finally, Laura Chapman has proposed that children learn "how art forms origi- nate in a society, how visual qualities express social values, and how media are used to express social values" (Chapman, 1978, p. 121). This social goal was developed as part of the Aesthetic Education Project at Ohio

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State University (Barkan, Chapman, and Kern, 1970).

From this brief overview of social goals in visual arts education, it appears that the purpose of visual arts instruction can be broader than personal productive accomplishment and that study of the visual arts does have relevance to problems in society. If continuity is to be achieved between the current goals of general education and those in visual arts education, art teachers in the schools must review and revise the educational goals upon which they pres- ently base their curricula. There is also a need for art educators in the colleges and universities and state education departments to develop social goals in courses on curriculum and in curriculum guides. Let us have dialogue which examines the interface between the visual arts and contemporary life. Such activity would contribute to a conception of visual

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arts education that is more appropri- ate for today's schools.

Nancy R. Johnson is assistant professor of art education at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

References E. Aslin, The Aesthetic Movement,

New York: Praeger, 1969. H. T. Bailey, Art Education, Bos-

ton: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1914. M. Barkan, L.H. Chapman, and

E.J. Kern, Curriculum Development for Aesthetic Education, St. Louis: CEMREL, 1970.

Q. Bell, The Schools of Design, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963.

L.H. Chapman, Approaches to Art in Education, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

C. DeGarmo and L.L. Winslow, Essentials of Design, New York:

Macmillan, 1924. W. Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adven-

ture, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1945.

V. Lanier, Essays in Art Educa- tion, 2nd edition, New York: MSS Information Corp., 1976.

V. Lanier, "Six Items on the Agenda for the Eighties," Art Educa- tion, Vol. 33, No. 5, 1980.

F.M. Logan, The Growth of Art in American Schools, New York: Harper & Row, 1955.

S. MacDonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, New York: American Elsevier, 1970.

J.K. McFee and R.M. Degge, Art, Culture and Environment, Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 1977.

G. Naylor, The Arts and Crafts Movement, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971.

R.W. Tyler, Principles of Curricu- lum and Instruction, Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1949.

Art Education January 1982

NEW!

Creative and Mental Growth Seventh Edition

By the late VIKTOR LOWENFELD and W. LAMBERT BRITTAIN, Cornell Universityx 1982, 448 pp.

The seventh edition of this outstanding text has been revised in light of the most recent research to continue to provide a framework for understanding and fostering childrens art productions. It features in-depth discussions on the interde- pendence of creativity and development as well as stages of development charts, which have been restored to this edition.

MACMILLAN PUBLISHING CO., INC. 866 THIRD AVENUE, NEW YORK, N.Y. 10022

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Social Goals and Education in the Visual Arts