Mmmmm… art
I am far behind at checking out all the good things in my Google Reader. This one is weeks old, but as I read it I hear myself let out a satisfied “Mmmmm” as if I were eating a chocolate truffle: “Schools Adopt Art as a Building Block of Education.” I especially like picturing a little girl explaining that her class is outside learning about lines from the artworks built into their school: ““We’re looking for a slanted or diagonal line.” Life does not imitate art, nor art imitate life. Art is life.
Wait. Adopt it? Isn’t art a building block of learning already?
I think visually. I make visual analogies in my head for any new concept. I have secretly done this as long as I can remember. I just never told my third grade friends how I “pictured” things. A new idea is visual art to me. So sad that the verbal world of school forgets this. I have a decent mastery of words, but chose to use them — whenever possible — to create pictures to help others see what I “see.” It frightens me that we must ask for extra funds or special initiatives or “differentiate our curriculum for visual learners” just to keep visual stimuli, the chocolate truffles of the eye, in our learning environments. We would never think to have schools without words everywhere…and a lot of numbers, too. How, then, is it necessary to “adopt” art into schools?
One thing the web has done is spread visual ways of seeing new ideas. YouTube, Flash, Flickr, all the Flickr toys, even comic creators have made the visual a preferred vocabulary for so many. But we seem to forget that when we go to school. Art is a “special,” a frill, a poor, distant cousin who comes to visit during holidays.
Not everyone needs to be able to speak or study art (though I hope they will). Art is not a foreign language with its own grammar. Images and texture and lines should just be there at every turn like the neatly printed signs for “door” and “Mrs. Smithson” in a first grade classroom.
Please, don’t forget to share the art, even if you do not like it or understand it. Your students will.
