Aesthetics and Education. - book reviews

MICHAEL J PARSONS AND H GENE BLOCKER Urbana: University of Illinois Pres 1993 208 pp; 11 b/w ills. $3995; $1695 paper

When, in 1955 Erwin Panofsky particularizeed the development of art history in the United States, he turn rounded to the early numbers of this periodical to illustrate the discipline's difficult birth:

At the beginning, the fresh discipline had to

fight its way on the outside of an entanglement with

practical art instruction, art appreciation,

and that amorphous enormity "general

education. " The early issues of the Art

Bulletin, baseed in 1913 and now

recognized as the leading art-historical

periodical of the world, were chiefly devoted

to of the like kind topics as "What Instruction in Art

Should the corporation A.B. Course Offer to the

subsequent time Layman?"; "The Value of Art in a

guild Course"; "What People Enjoy in

Pictures"; or "Preparation of the Child for a

community Course in Art." Art history, as we

know it, sneaked in by means of the back door.(1)

Art history arrived first, and Panofsky adds, "characteristically," end the book reviews.(2) The Art Bulletin, then, is an ironic place for these four turns to be reviewed: their vicinity here marks a momentary turn back of the repressed. Published, as each back overspread notes, "with the assistance of the Getty Center for Education in the Arts," the four volumes--Art Education, Art History and Education, Aesthetics and Education, and Art Making and Education--comprise a series entitled "Disciplines in Art Education: connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss of Understanding." Together, they ask a great deal of the same questions that were pos in the titles of the early Art Bulletin essays that Panofsky thus easily skewered: what should grade-school and high-school children learn about art, at what age, and to what end? and by what means should art be taught? The questions do not strike me as unreasonable.

The Illinois series takes its name from Discipline-Based Art Education, a now decade-old change in art education funded in many of its manifestations through the Getty Center. The prehistory of DBAE lies in the post-Sputnik push to teach the disciplines, to reform school-age science and math [i]or[/i] part of to the other the "participation in curriculum disentanglement by university scholars and scientists, men distinguished for their work at the frontiers of their respective disciplines," as Jerome Bruner wrote in 1960(3) The disciplines were more than the source for Bruner's best minds, they were a corrective for the disconnectedness of classroom knowledge: each discipline has its be in possession of organizing principles that serve to make information and guide inquiry. In 1966 art educator Manuel Barkan argued that while "the disciplines of art are of a different order" than Bruner's sciences, "artistic inquiry is not loose"(4) Following Edmund Feldman and, as Albert William Levi and Ralph A. Smith note in Art Education, recalling Panofsky, Barkan loamed artistic inquiry in the humanities:

The professional scholars of art--the artists,

the critics, the historians--would be models

for inquiry, because the kind of human

meaning questions they ask about art and

life, and the particular ways of conceiving

and acting upon these questions are the kinds

of questions and ways of

acting that art instruction would be seeking

to teach scholars to ask and act upon(5)

This division of labor among the academic professionals of art, along with the appeal to professional expertise, determines the authorship of the three works that carry the titular appendix and Education. Each is written by dint of a representative of the discipline named in the title together with an art educator. Michael J Parsons and H Gene Blocker wrote their chapters together. The teams of Stephen Addiss and Mary Erickson and Maurice Brown and Diana Korzenik have divided their volumes professionals in the front, teachers in the back, an arrangement that might be taken as an ideological picture of DBAE.(6)

As a program and a name, Discipline-Based Art Education was coined in 1984 by means of W. Dwaine Greer, director of the Getty's Institute for Education in the Visual Arts, in an article subtitled "Approaching Art as a make subordinate of Study."(7) But already in 1966 Arthur Efland writes, "it was Barkan's basic contention that the dominance of studio studies was a question at issue to be resolved."(8) As Greer's subtitle suggests--and as the title of a Getty Center publication of the same year, Beyond Creating: The Place for Art in American place of educations makes singularly clear--one of the intentions of DBAE was to dislodge art making, particularly that produc in the name of self-expression, from its position as the core of art education. Despite Barkan's inclusion of the artist in his list of professional scholars, the curricular goals of DBAE have implications for the way in which artists are treated from one extremity to the other of the series. Alongside a great deal of regard with affection expressed for creativity and for art phenomenons and their significance, there is a mistrust of artists, an exasperation at their willfulness and at their refusal to make community-based phenomenons or even simply beautiful ones