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Home-Study Newsletter
Entries from 2001 to the present
Dear Home-Study Students and Parents,
6/30/07 I am currently writing an article tentatively titled: Toward a technical foundation for the visual arts. Here are the opening paragraphs: “ I am an art teacher. I am an artist. These are not statements that I make with pride or with the expectation of a genuinely positive response. After nearly a century, modern artists, critics, and art educators have so “liberated” these terms from their traditional meanings that they no longer have the power to convey information. In both the popular and professional senses of the term, the word “art” has lost its capacity to function as a word. It has been expanded, in the name of inclusiveness, to the point that it can no longer distinguish itself from what it is not. In both theory and practice, art today is anything you choose to make it; an artist is anyone who makes the claim.
“The institution (of art) as a whole has no theory…”
-Jacques Barzun
It should be no surprise that the term “Art Education” has suffered a similar fate. One of the results of the lack of focus in the visual arts generally is its fading presence in the curricula of American schools. This is due not only to its theoretical ambiguity but to its related lack of instructional coherence and measurability. It can be safely stated that Art education is the only performance-based field of study that has neither a viable system of standards nor an established technical foundation.
The purpose of this article is to make the case and propose a course for the development of both.”
2/10/07 One of the Progressive movements most prominent figures is taken to task in a recent book by Henry T Edmondson entitled: John Dewey and the Decline of American Education. One of the first educational practices to fall under the pressure of the movement was rote learning: developing and retaining knowledge and skills through repetition.
“We are what we repeatedly do.”
-- Aristotle
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