Grand Plans and Their Subversion: Speculations on the form and Formlessness of Twenty-first Century Art Education

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Art education is like an ancient city for which modern planners (and yes, postmodern planners, too) have grand designs. Like urban designers, art educational reformers always have schemes for tearing down old buildings; erecting new ones; clearing slums; widening streets; creating new traffic patterns; establishing zones for culture, industry, commerce and entertainment; and in a myriad of other ways dictating to citizens the kinds of environments in which they should live their lives. But the common citizens of art education-teachers and their students-also have ideas, perhaps less formally divised, about how are educational cities should be built and how they should function. If we are to understand art educational change we must recoginze the tensions that exist between grand schemes for reforming art education and the undisclosed actions of teachers and students-acts that both deform change initiatives and keep art education in a state of formlessness. Morevoer, if we wish to understand the factors that affect art educational change we must look beyond or field to things such as the art world, the broader realm of visual culture, and the, world wide web. We must attend to the things that will literally change and relocate the ”urban spaces” on which art educational designers attempt to impose grand plans.
The architect Christopher Alexander has shown that urban planners base their designs for cities on tree-like structures that permit few interactions among elements. On the other hand, natural cities that have been shaped by many thousands of individuals over hundreds and sometimes thousands of years have lattice-like structures that permit millions of interactions and overlapping functions. In short, professional designers are unable to replicate desirable complexities that citizens natrually devise for themselves. Like most cities, most art educational programs have both ”naturally-occurring” and designed elements. They have been influenced by grand plans in the form of national curricula, change initiatives, the writings of influential art educator theoreticians and visionaries, by textbooks, and examination policies. These same art educational programs have their ”natural” attributes. They are influenced by thousands of strands of conventional folklore passed from on generation of art teachers to the next. The conventional features of art educational programs are also subverted by the perpetual transformation of art and artworks-thus making content, practices, and values problematic. Even students, who are frequently more comfortable living in contemporary visual culture than their teachers, sometimes bulid their own forms of art education-their own art educational neighborhoods-that are enormously more interesting and important than those designed by their teachers.
In my paper I employ Alexander's theory of natural and designed cities as a metaphor for examining the art education we now have and the art education we might plan for the Twenty-first Century. First, I will argue that the national examinations found in countries such as Britain and the Netherlands, paradoxically, improve art education while impeding desirable change. Second, I will argue that Japanese children who draw graphic narratives following models based on comic books called manga, devise a more potent and influential from of art education than is found in textbooks based on the Japanese national curriculum. Finally, I will propose a way of structuring art .education programs in order to capitalize on the strengths of planning while at the same time accommodating the seeming formlessness and ambiguity of visual culture, popular culture, and the postmodern art world.