My personal philosophy of art education
Arts’ role in child development, the relevance of art to the community, public attitudes to art and values of the creative experience, all constitute in part to the role of the visual arts in a secondary school students’ general education. This theory can be related to educationalist John Dewey quote: ‘The moral function of art itself is to remove prejudice, do away with scales that keep the eye from seeing , tear away the veils due to wont and custom, and perfect the power to perceive (1934)’.Art can be seen as an object imagined, conceived, pondered over, worked on and made. This is an expression and communication of feeling that comes via a personal and physical response to one’s environment.
Visual arts in a secondary school students’ education is more than learning how to use a paint brush or pencil. It is about developing strategies of thinking, ways of seeing, analysing, recording and evaluating. The technical side of art education gives the student insight into ways of making and doing, with further avenues being opened when choices and strategies are made available. This aesthetic response in its context of education is as valid an attitude to experience as anything mathematical or scientific.
One of the first writers to insist that art is a process important to individual development was the philosopher Hubert Spencer (1911, ix). He said: ‘The question is not whether the child is producing good drawings. The question is whether it is developing its faculties.’ Art provides children with the stimulation necessary for creative growth; its purpose in the school curriculum lies with its expressive potential in the hands of the child.
A child who has expressed him or herself at their own level encourages more independent thought than the child who imitates and consequently becomes dependent in thinking. Art’s value in the promotion of individual and independent thought can help the student to tackle those emotional or mental problems so often encountered in latter life. Critics, curators and art dealers alike often hold this popular position of art as an individual retreat, or the last refuge of humanism.