On Balance: Schools Should Teach Fine Arts to the Students

Thank you for your enlightening argument and I look forward to what you state in the next round. Before I begin my constructive speech, I would first like to rebut some of your points. Your first book states that students do better if they are involved in arts. I completely agree with this. I agree that students should be doing arts outside of school, but arts in school I disagree with. This would be the fact that students in art classes must conform to what the teacher wants them to learn and create, which stifles their creativity, not produces creativity. Children motivated by the arts do develop better attention skills and memory retrieval, but this does not state how the arts should be taught in schools. I would like to point out that insulting my arguments will not make some of them any less valid. Stating that my argument is a rant is quite frankly offensive, as I was stating my points in a opinion piece, this does not constitute a rant. I would just like to point out that your argument, though clearly outlining the benefits of the arts which I concede do make a compelling argument why the arts are needed in SOCIETY, I do not believe that it should be in school. Now I will move on to my constructive speech where I will seek to justify why even though the arts are beneficial to students and society, they should not be taught in school. In the present moment, artists are better off training themselves at home and acquiring the benefit of a good liberal arts or art historical education. This, because the model for graduate art education, established in the early "70s by John Baldessari and others (myself included), is 40 years old and virtually obsolete. This is a quote from Dave Hickey, one of the creators of the art education model. The creator of the arts education model is stating that art's should not be taught in schools! Now my wonderful opponent, how can you argue that we should teach arts to students in the 21st century when our teaching models are from 45 years ago? This is simply detrimental to the students as they would not be taught the art techniques that have developed in the past 45 years, they are being taught old outdated methods that are not being used anymore. To continue on my point I would like to state that Art students should not be placed under the authority of older practicing artists whose work they are mandated to render obsolete. This guarantees bad advice and destructive criticism. This will follow up my previous point, by showing that no art teacher would be a young person fresh out of school or a younger artist, as they have not had time to practice their craft and they would first try to make a living through art before teaching. I would concede that there would be a few teachers that define this definition, but the majority of the teachers would be old and practiced leading to enact my point above. Another quote from Dave Hickey that would clearly outline my point above: Only saints can nurture real talent. I am a writer, not even an artist, and even I can"t avoid feeling a twinge of resentment when a pimple-faced twerp with a skateboard under his arm shows me a mature and persuasive work of art. I can see, much more clearly than the twerp, the road opening before him, the obstacles falling away, and it"s all I can do not to stick out my foot and trip him. If I were an artist, with a stake in the game, I would probably trip him, and tell myself that it"s for his own good. It wouldn"t be. Better to buy the damned art and take your profit on the back end. Art in the context of an art school always looks bad, especially when it"s very good. Regular supervision and oversight of young artists" practice should be suppressed. My rule: "If you"re not sick, don"t call the doctor." This would further back up my point because artists should develop their craft on their own. Art is supposed to be an expression of ones thoughts or emotions. To be watched, graded and evaluated on your thoughts and feelings is simply not viable. It would destroy the students confidence and would also not be gradable. To give a high school credit for something that cannot be evaluated is not a viable education strategy. If art students want to study Continental theory, they should learn German and French and study it in a philosophy department. Because (1) art schools are incapable of distinguishing properly between theory and practice; (2) art school classes in these subjects are little more than uncritical "slow pitch" indoctrinations taught by advocates rather than scholarly adepts; (3) all of the American translations of this work are poisoned by the moment of their making; (4) this entire discourse is now "historical""a dated, conservative, academic field of study and no longer live talk. It is for the reasons above that I believe that arts should not be taught in school as arts are meant to be an exploration of ones self and it is detrimental to the artist themselves.