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THE FOURTH "R" IN EDUCATION:
  want to tell you a story. Early one morning, a man was walking along a bluff overlooking the ocean, when he noticed a barefoot woman walking along the beach, clearly engrossed in a strange activity: she was picking up star fish that had been washed ashore by the tide, and one by one, throwing them back into the sea. Intrigued, he scrambled down the bank of the cliff and approached her. What are you doing? he asked.
"I'm saving star fish," she answered, gently tossing another into the water.
The man let his eyes drift over the endless shoreline in wonder. "But," he stammered, "there are thousands of star fish stranded on this beach. You can't save them all!"
"I know" the woman smiled. She picked up another star fish and returned it to the ocean. "But I'm saving this one." She continued undaunted. "And this one. And this one."
Dear friends, colleagues, teachers and students, those star fish languishing on the barren sand are the youth of America. And they have been swept up onto the beachhead of ignorance and sloth by the tide of our failed progressive educational system. It falls to us now, those of us who do understand the deep purposes of education, to save the future of our country. We can do this by returning our children, one by one, back to the sea of structured creativity, where each individual child - by nature of being a child - can be taught to swim smartly, successfully, and joyfully toward the promise of adulthood. To accomplish this task, I propose that we incorporate art education into the mandatory school curricula. I propose art instruction because only art educates the whole person as an integrated individual: it educates the senses, it educates the mind, and it educates the emotions. It educates the soul.
Before we set to exploring this proposal, however, I wish to say "Thank you" to Hillsdale College for inviting me to share my thoughts on "Art and the Moral Imagination" with you during this five day conference. And I thank you for coming this evening to share both the art and the ideas expressed in THE LEGACY LIVES art exhibit. It was on this very stage where, five years ago, I announced the formation of the American Renaissance for the Twenty - first Century arts foundation. I marvel at the good distance we have come since that day in 1992, and I am grateful to all those who have helped in our many achievements, including this exhibit. Our mission of promoting a rebirth of beauty and life - affirming values in all of the fine arts is, of course, not only for the purpose of improving the arts but also for the purpose of elevating our culture as a whole. It is an ambitious mission and the challenges are great.
These challenges take many forms. Not just in the arena of the fine arts, but even more fundamentally, in the arena of ideas - especially in our educational system. Let us remember that the three old fashioned "Rs" of education - readin', ritin' and 'rithmetic - were not instituted in schools to help the populace read the daily papers, write letters home to Mom, and pay bills owed the general store. These primary skills were and should be taught for the larger purpose of instructing young people to think and to function in the real world for the rest of their lives in a rational, efficacious, self sufficient and self - satisfying manner. School should prepare young people for life.
Reading (literature and history in particular) teaches the ability to comprehend the world and man's place in it; writing is the means of any serious communication and teaches the ability to crystallize thoughts and communicate them objectively; arithmetic (meaning the whole category of math) teaches the ability to measure attributes of entities in reality, thereby bringing all of the universe into perceptual grasp. These are the basics. In better schools, science is included, and in many schools, physical education usually rounds out the mandatory program, which is good except where - too often! - soccer dominates syntax. Too often, too, a serious education in the three basics is not really mandatory anymore, meaning that the courses are regularly adulterated for political correctness, diluted of solid grounding in rudimentary skills, and short - shrifted as subjects for prolonged study, all of which in turn defeat the purpose of required subjects.
In fact, in light of today's permissive educational environment, we might need to remind ourselves of why certain studies should be mandatory in the first place. It used to be a truism - and it is still true - that students do not yet know enough to know what they don't know; therefore, adults specializing in the teaching of knowledge, along with parents, should set the principal standards of their education. Once again, this presumes that a certain level of knowledge and ability in basic subjects is necessary to pursue an informed life on an independent basis after graduation from school and separation from family homes.
It is with these thoughts in mind that I propose the addition of art education to the three basics. I should clarify, here, that I mean art education founded in the established Western art forms. The reason for focusing on art forms evolving from our Western heritage is that the forms themselves (the physical presentations) are the most malleable, with the richest aesthetic vocabulary for expressing the most complex ideas. This kind of art - begun with the Greeks and carried on through the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, sadly skipping most of the twentieth but resurfacing with vigor as we approach the millennium - can be defined as an intelligible representation of the world and humankind that manifests an artist's conceptual visions in perceptual, aesthetic form.
The primary arts, as we all know, are painting, sculpture, poetry, literature, drama, music and architecture, the last of which is unique because it combines its art form with functional use. A modicum of working knowledge in all of the arts will facilitate an appreciation of them, but protracted study in the visual arts (drawing, painting and sculpture), creative writing (poetry and short story) and music (instrument and music appreciation) are critical for advanced perceptual and conceptual development, so these may best constitute the base triad for art education.
Why should the teaching of this art become the fourth "R"? Because to teach art is to teach life. Each lifetime, in its own way, has a "theme," an ever unfolding personal destiny, self - scripted by each individual depending on how they decide to approach and fill the hours of their days. Every (good) work of art does the same: first, it is an idea in the mind of the artist - a mental abstraction, a vision seen through the mind's "eye," an imaginative summation of the images and ideas wished to be expressed. Then it goes through the aesthetic process of transformation from that mental vision into a physical object (or in the case of the literary arts and music, a finite time experience( that can be perceived through the senses and the intellect of others - that can be understood. Finally, it takes on a life of its own to be enjoyed and considered as an individual entity - an end in itself - just like every human being. Because humans have free will, they choose their values by a process of selection; this is why character development and the development of art are so similar - they are both self created. Thus learning a demanding art form promotes both a curiosity and confidence that can be transferred to real life situations.
How does it do this? Let's take the benefits of art education one at a time: Sensory education, using the visual arts (painting) as our example; mental education, using creative writing as our example; and emotional education, using music as our example. These examples should not be construed as being exclusive of one another. Happily, each art form augments the lessons learned in all the others to educate the whole person. Each has its own aesthetic vocabulary, each appealing primarily to a different sense organ: painting and sculpture to sight (with sculpture adding the tangible sense of touch), music to hearing, and the most complex arts such as fiction appealing to all of the combined senses through imagination. Equally important, every art form is rooted in a discipline of craft, and learning the techniques of any craft teaches purpose, structure, observation, selectivity of essentials, and judgment of execution with verifiable outcome. In other words, the proficiency of means employed as well as the end result can be assessed via objective criteria. Furthermore, disciplined but ductile art forms can be endlessly manipulated and stylized to provide aesthetic emphasis as well as to dramatize ideational content.
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Frederick Hart
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Chanson
Frank Mason
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