Art Education: Thing or Device

Abstract

Many of the articles in this issue focus on ways of increasing student engagement with art. Several are particularly interested in how to encourage students to initilate their own learning, creative discovery, and self-transformation. Art education, they seem to be saying, can flourish when students become involved in the world around them, using art as a vehicle for interpreting that world and understanding their relationship to it. This is all the more true when the student's own point of view is taken seriously as a starting point for those explorations.This notion that art is a form of engagement with our social, political, environmental, and cultural contexts is one that has been central to much of my own thinking over the years. However, the openended nature of art education when seen from this perspective runs up against current demands for an economic assessment of education. Is education a good investment? That is the question on the cover of the current Newsweek (201 2). Without denying that the economic costs of education are a serious matter, it is problematic to approach education in this reductive way. The transformation of the student that takes place during the educational process cannot be measured solely in terms of job preparedness and employability. Perhaps more important is the educator's success at cultivating the students' capacity to engage with their world in all the ways that the richness of that world demands.When our students leave school and university, we hope that they have more than a purely utilitarian or instrumental relationship to the arts. We are in trouble, I think, if students, their parents, school administrators, and taxpayers in general approach the value of art by asking only is it for?That question asks for the instrumental relevance of art knowledge and skills. Of course, art knowledge and skills have instrumental uses and increase employability for some students in some job markets. However, reducing art education to this purpose alone misses the full range of engagement that a successful art education would have instilled in students.It is the task of art education to introduce students to and bring them into the world of artmaking. Within this world we can face inward, focusing on the bodily skills of art production, the empathetic and cognitive processes of expression, and the critical skills of assessing and appreciating works of art. However, we can also face outward, focusing on how the broader social context provides the materials, ideas, and problems to which artworks respond. Also, we can focus on how art has an impact on that broader context as well. This world of artmaking is multi-dimensional - there is no one thing that it is for. What is learned through becoming part of this world is a way of seeing, thinking, and engaging that is more complex and important to a democratic society than mere instrumental skill and knowledge.My distinction between the instrumental approach to art education and this more complex world of artmaking echoes a distinction made by philosopher Albert Borgmann between things and devices. Writing about the philosophy of technology. Borgmann notes how modern technological development often replaces technological things with devices resulting in a gradual reduction of the engagement of individuals with the technological objects upon which they rely. Things require engagement, both physical and cognitive. Devices usually resist our engagement by virtue of their design or the specialized expertise they require. Borgmann's example is the replacement of the wood stove or hearth with the furnace. The former required physical skills such as chopping wood or laying a fire and it was the central pivot of a set of social relations and ways of being. The furnace, on the other hand, is simply a device we turn on or off. Contrast making photographs with a film camera rather than a digital camera; or compare being your own car mechanic in the 1950s as opposed to working on today's computerized cars; or contrast making your own paint and ink with buying them at the store. …