No more NET committees?

PE grows brain cells

Linda McNeil on the link between NCLB and increasing dropout rates

Gail Sunderman's new book critiques NCLB

Virginia considers leaving NCLB behind

Case number one for art education

Television became common in U.S. households shortly before I was born. My parents' secluded religious sect forbade TV (along with pretty much everything else) so I was unable to watch it in a literal sense, but this only made me watch it all the more as a societal tour de force. When playground conversation turned to the previous evening's shows, I listened enviously, occasionally lying that I too had seen The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and thought Maynard's giant tin foil ball was a riot.

A benefit of growing up without TV is that I never formed the habit of sitting in front of one, but I remain keenly interested in it as a social phenomenon. As a young man teaching both art and English, I noticed how effective it was at conveying information with images instead of words. I had learned in art history that humans made images several tens of thousands of years ago. Writing, at perhaps 8000 years old, is a comparative infant. And whereas images can be universally understood, writing must be learned. Further, each culture's version of writing is incomprehensible to the others without study. Despite these shortcomings, writing spread quickly by filling the governmental and commercial needs of emerging civilizations in ways images could not.

The preference for writing over imagery grew unchecked until 1839 when Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre invented the first practical camera. Photography, coupled with the new technology of mass media printing, quickly began to supplant text. Within five years cameras were used around the world.

Future historians will recognize the invention of the camera as one of the most significant events of the modern era, primarily because of what it led to: First, Thomas Edison's moving pictures. Then television, which brought these moving pictures (and the attendant commercials) into our—okay, your—living rooms. If television did not bring us into post-modernity, the computer surely did, because by then being human had come to mean something different from what it had at any earlier time. Add the Internet and the digital revolution and we arrive at the present. Quantifying the degree to which the world has converted from text to images (for the most part unwittingly) is a task for someone other than me, but anyone my age or older has lived through a shift of profound nature, whether we noticed or not.

Schools tend to follow rather than lead social trends. One consequence is a perpetual state of dawdling as schools catch up with changes that are already in place. This might explain why most educators have not noticed the trend from text to image, despite the facts that 1) It is global, 2) It is occurring in plain sight, and 3) The consequences for education are weighty.

Oddly, many art teachers, for whom this shift perhaps has the most educational import, seem no more aware than anyone else. The foremost task of today's art teacher is to give students the critical filters needed to navigate through an increasingly image-based world. In other words, we must teach them visual literacy. Otherwise the messages of the marketplace, the political arena, and popular culture, now perhaps delivered more by imagery than text, will manipulate them throughout their lives.

In this regard, NCLB-driven tests commit two sins: They bear down oppressively on reading literacy while ignoring the visual altogether. Educators, whether of art or not, have two jobs to do:
We must insist that our schools employ art specialists.
We must further insist that these specialists teach rigorous art content, something most graduates of U.S. schools never received.

We art educators have an additional job to do:
We must replace the vacuous traditional curriculum with the rich and robust content of our discipline. No more It's-November-trace-your-hand-and-make-a-turkey. No more It's-February-fold-this-red-paper-in-half-and-cut-out-a-heart. We need to teach children visual literacy with the same seriousness with which their reading teachers teach them verbal literacy. Because their world now communicates with them simultaneously in two languages, the verbal and the visual, they need to become in essence bilingual. A Powerpoint presentation titled "Visual Studies at Texas Tech University" at courses.ttu.edu/fehr/Speeches/Speeches.htm gives examples of visual literacy.

In the December 2007 edition of NETwork I argued that civil rights legislation must occur at the Federal level since the states don't always play nice (take the Civil War). Therefore, since much school policy involves civil rights, Federal legislators have a job here too: Play a larger role in public education. The arts, when taught in an informed way, are rooted in civil rights, as is made clear below. Prompted by this fact, the NET's Arts Committee drafted the following legislative language and submitted it to both Congressional education committees. We also gave it to several individual members of both chambers, including presidential candidate Barack Obama (via NET member Linda Darling-Hammond, who advises him on education issues). We respectfully request that it be included in NCLB's new incarnation. Although in this editorial I am referring to the visual arts, the legislative language advocates for all of the arts:

The world has entered the Era of the Image. Art teachers can no longer afford the dilettantism of teaching an "enrichment" subject. The four core subjects must be expanded to seven by adding the arts, physical education, and world languages. Then our students will acquire the knowledge they need to succeed in the world they will inherit. That world will be even more image dependent than the one we live in today.
Warm regards,
Dennis

P.S. In the April edition of NETwork I will make Case Number Two for art education. It is quite different from Case Number One, but if anything even more important.
D.F.