National Art Education Association

Art and the Open ClassroomAuthor(s): VitoriaSource: Art Education, Vol. 25, No. 6 (Jun., 1972), pp. 16-19Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3191760 .

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Art the

and

open

classroom Vitoria

The malaise of anachronism and dehumanization which has long characterized American education - lamented particularly by those in the arts - has been penetrated with the first tenuous shafts of major change. But art educators aren't paying attention.

The generally repressive, utilitarian climate of traditional education particularly stunts the normal in- tuitive, inquisitive characteristics of people. The existence and need for the development of these fun- damental human characteristics should be an em- barkation point for art educators. The relative growth and maturity of any individual, regardless of culture, is reliant upon relatively totalized growth from the reception, perception, and reaction of oneself, the world, the culture, and the universe, through con- sciousness and beyond instinct, to order the very

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tread of evolution itself. Above and beyond the many challenging issues in

art education, the one of over-riding importance is ac- tual aesthetic survival, in and out of the schools. Con- cern and the need for the aesthetic is inextricably linked with man's progress up the evolutional ladder.

Art is man's ability to transcend the immediate to comprehend the universal, to make visible that which is invisible. A great civilization which is devoted to sameness rather than differences, passivity rather than action, reveres the cognitive above the intuitive, equates practicality with what is deemed essential in life, reveals a serious cultural Achilles heel. It is not surprising that art has become one of the many fragments orbiting the culture, surgically inserted as a formality into the educational institution and alien in the home. The history of the separation of the arts from American life is a long and puritanical one.

What has been does not necessarily have to be, however. But, unless art educators are able to set their sights above the rims of their water buckets, tattered budgets, and the cramped quarters that betoken art programs everywhere, there can be little but token ad- justments. More than being a piece of the action, art could be the action, the pivot for learning far and beyond traditionally conceived and executed "art programs". The willingness of far too many art educators to accept unreasonable and professionally compromising instructional situations is due in part to imposition, but also to a lack of vision coupled with inadequate training and preparation for the monumental task. By accepting substandard con- ditions, art educators are tacitly endorsing second- class teacherships, with all their accompanying hard- ships. Administrators who provide and make man- datory such conditions are irresponsibly contributing to and reinforcing an already dangerously low national level of aesthetic deprivation.

Traditional education is being short-circuited by teachers, parents, and students, who care more about learning than teaching, who are returning institutional organization to its appropriate place of servor, who sense the need to unify the puzzle traditional teaching calls "education" and, above all, who may eventually eliminate schools as, presently delineated, altogether. The surge of humanism in education began to surface in force in the mid-1960's. From it spring a number of varied educational experiments, loosely and collec- tively called the "open classroom"*

The open classroom philosophizes that a sym- pathetic environment to learning should consider trust and belief in responsibility and independence between children and adults of critical importance. Such an environment can encourage the interrelation- ship of subject matter and varying rates of speed and interests within the learning context, and can recognize many ways and means of developing learn- ing structures through providing alternatives and op- tions normally ignored in traditional education.

These elements of the open classroom should sound familiar. They have the temper of all the art education manifestoes and appeals written during the last thirty years. The brass ring is there; where are the art educators?

The reasons are many and diverse. All are deeply in-

terwoven into the fabric of the country's history and development. Apparently art educators have been unable to rise above their own, the culture's and the educational system's limitations to produce a substan- tial number of quality art programs, or to overcome as a group the considerable number of restrictions forth- coming from a severely aesthetically disadvantaged populace. The resounding absence of the presence of art education in the opening frontiers of educational experiments is an echo to these collective woes. The schools have been the only viable institution to di- rectly consider art at all. Its haggardly token existence in the schools can be righteously criticized ad- ministratively, but the nature of a large number of art programs, where they do exist and conducted by "art specialists" are also to be faulted, as they have been by and large without recommendation or even adequacy.

In addition to the generally undertrained or mistrained art specialists currently practicing throughout the nation, are the scores of inequities in the positions themselves as imposed upon art specialists by administrative educators and personnel. While these inequities admittedly may be red herrings dragged over poor art programs, they are in any case, an impediment both to excellence and experimen- tation. Certainly it is essential to have a supportive professional atmosphere in undertaking deviations from traditional curricular forms. But in many instan- ces, there is a low level of support for any type of art program; and where the principal instructional objec- tive is survival, experimentation may be unthinkable. Also, newly graduated art educators from higher education certification programs are often unprepared for the harsh realities of the profession much less to change them. The daily frustration, maddening incon- sistencies, presumptuous requests, and general hand- to-hand combat with the lot of educational kith and kin turn idealism and energy to exhaustion and disdain.

In states hampered by recent severe budgetary restrictions and fiscal cutbacks, the value our society places on art is clear as art and specialists are dropped without a protest from hundreds of school programs across the country. Art educators are also taking an ac- tive hand in phasing themselves out on the whole, through inability to alter or revise existing instruc- tional situations.

In the past there has been little to revise to. Art programs followed a variation of three or four tracks in terms of organization and concept. The pattern of all the tracks have tied to the traditional educational framework in terms of time, duration, and management. Almost without exception, art has been a "special subject", a rip-off for debut into "educated society", or valued for development of manual and technical skills. Between inadequacy and mediocrity, a large proportion of the adult population is lodged on a ten-year-old level perceptually and creatively. The effects can be seen along every highway, in the choices of products and the repetitious selection of things that look alike and are alike - the total tapestry of an aesthetic malnutrition.

The tapestry is constructed in part from choices, or a lack of them, and choice-making, which while

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possibly beyond rehabilitation in adults can be re- cycled in some. Children base their choices on their models and on cues received from the total environ- ment. It is clear that before any art program is re- thought or "brought up-to-date", some teacher recycling is preeminent. There are at present, too many art programs on all levels of education being taught that are deficient, inadequate, and mediocre. Their effects are short-ranged and myopic to the real needs of art in education at present. It is people who change education, not programs, new buildings, new furniture or new texts.

Assuming that some art teachers can be "re-cycled, and particularly that students preparing to be art teachers, in addition to knowledge of their subject area, be fully acquainted with a range of instructional strategies and techniques for change, subversive or frontal, it is entirely possible for art to achieve its in- tegrity in the public school curriculum.

Strategies under the open classroom umbrella do provide for the possibility of unclogging traditional educational channels, if teachers, students, and ad- ministrators are in genuine accord with the basic philosophy which can facilitate its concepts.

For art, the open classroom can provide a climate in which all that the student is learning becomes interac- ting, instead of an isolated "subject" conducted in a special place at a special time. Since the open classroom functions through all the participants, in- cluding the students, there is an opportunity for in- dividual differences, perceptually and creatively, to be assessed, developed, and evaluated in a personal and meaningful way. Through peer learning, programmed instruction, and teacher involvement, students have an opportunity to learn what they want to know, to the degree they wish, and at a personally compatible rate of speed. The teacher has the opportunity to provide alternatives, make options available, advise, consult, and generally be the resident "expert". Far from being "unstructured" learning, it is in reality mutually-structured learning-all are involved in charting and tracking directions.

The possibilities are unlimited. As the students become progressively more independent and knowledgeable about what they want to accomplish and the ways in which to accomplish it, and as they find out in what ways they did or did not fulfill their goals, a noticeable increase in the quality of work will automatically occur. For the essence of being able to advance personally through learning is to have a clear sense of what one has done, why and where the ideas have emanated from, and what must be done to ex- tend, supplement, use, or embellish them further. The ability to make purposeful and productive choices, utilize resources, as people, places, and things, is uniquely human.

Experimentation in the midst of a fundamentally rigid system is not without risk. But, as art educators, we must begin to utilize the perception and creativity which we prize so highly to radically alter the func- tioning of the field in the field, for we are an en- dangered species.

Vitoria is assistant professor of art, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware.

REFERENCES

Teilhard deChardin, The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Torchbook, Harper & Row, 1965.

John Dewey. Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1934.

Erich Fromm. The Revolution of Hope. New York: Bantam Books, 1968.

James D. Koerner. The Miseducation of American Teachers. Boston: Pelican, 1965.

Herbert Kohl. The Open Classroom. New York: Vin- tage Books, 1969.

R. D. Laing, The Divided Self. Maryland: Pelican Books, 1969.

George B. Leonard, Education and Ecstasy. New York: Delacorte Press, 1968.

June King McFee, Preparation for Art. San Francisco: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1961., (N 350, M.23)

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Ex- tensions of Man. New York: Signet Books, 1964.

Marshall McLuhan, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Message. New York: Bantam, 1967.

National Education Association. Schools for the 60's. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1963.

J. H. Plumb, ed., Crisis in the Humanities. England: Pelican, 1964.

Carl Rogers, Freedom to Learn. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Pub. Co., 1969.

Harold Taylor, How to Change Colleges: Notes on Radical Reform. New York: Holt Paperback, 1971.

Mark Terry, Teaching for Survival. New York- Ballan- tine Books, 1971.

Charles Weingartner and Neil Postman. Teaching as a Subversive Activity. New York: Delacorte Press., 1969. (LA217)

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