The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

There is a serious problem with our model for arts education, and indeed for education in general. By focusing on “esteem building”—rather than, say, achievement—we are doing a great disservice to generations of burgeoning young artists, who emerge into adulthood naturally expecting the world to love whatever they make. At the same time, these self-regarding young people have never learned empathy for and appreciation for others’ work, leaving a world with exploding numbers of artists (300+ % increase since the 1970s) and a declining audience for art in real numbers over the same period.

Compounding the problem is the fact that students are getting this message—that everything they do and make is golden—even as a recent study by the Center on Education Policy indicates that school time spent in art classes has decreased by nearly half since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001. This is mainly because NCLB focuses so intensely on the teaching of measurable skills—arguably a necessity, since achievement in reading and math has continually declined over the past 40 years or so. The result, however, is schools are forced by this to siphon time away from other non-tested subjects such as music, art, and dance.

Now that we’ve been teaching “self-esteem” for more than 25 years, the main problem seems to be that even as measurable skills decrease, students’ self-regard for their own skills and their own worth has actually increased. This disconnect is driving a generation of poor achievers who are irrationally proud of what they do. This leaves policy-makers, and critics like me, somewhat at a loss, or as Sandy Kress, Bush’s former education adviser, put it, while it’d be nice to give students  “a broad education,… it’s hard to study art history if you can’t read well.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 9:20 am and is filed under Failure of arts education, Entitlement in art and education, Decline of human accomplishment in art, Artistic failure in America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.