Dear art education friends: First of all, I want to let you know that I was truly pleased to see about the involvements of your art students as shown on pages A3 and A6 of the Jan. 31 Brunswick Sun. Your guidance and their activities reflect that cultural development in the Brunswick Schools remains alive and well in a world that otherwise has many social problems.
Ever since the Neanderthal cave-dwellers painted images on their living quarter walls and left artifacts on the floors from 30,000 years ago — mainly in 200 locations in France and Spain — visual art images have been the major (if not all) that has remained to give insight into the values of the cultures existing throughout the world. Without those images, the history of mankind would simply be the bones such as were left by the dinosaurs in previous ages. In short, what you and your students are working for is to continue providing those visual images that will become the cultural heritage about our values for life to come.
The saddening thing is that many world leaders and educational decision-makers either lose, or are unaware of, the importance of training and activity of the arts especially when school funding becomes problematic and decisions must be made to conserve expenditures. As the saying goes, the arts are the first to go. When education in the arts go, so does the hope for cultural development. The truth is that the arts should be the very last to go out of the education for today’s youths.
The tradition of the American educational systems from the beginning has been to focus on academic coursework to learn skills useful to function in our society. That has required students to be placed in classroom situations to learn from presented information and to read textbook materials that are assigned by teachers who are knowledgeable out their subject areas. Research has pointed out that academic learning is a function of what is described as the left lobe of the human brain. However, there is the belief that there is also a right lobe that deals with creative insights totally independent of academic learning. Such insights cannot be taught in academic settings because they tend to happen spontaneously. In academic settings such creative insights are rarely welcome and are viewed as “day dreaming” or lack of attention to the tasks at hand.
The role of professional art teachers is to accept such insightfulness and to help students gain artistic skills, making it possible to produce visual forms that are appropriate for meaningful expression visually.
It is my hope that the Brunswick School System continues its quality education efforts in all areas of learning and activity. It is a ray of hope for today’s youths.
My best wishes go to you.
William B. Lewis
The writer is a professor emeritus of art education, Kent State University.