Some Criticisms of the 1977 NAEA Commission Report

Abstract

From time to time, every discipline needs to take stock of its expanding reservoir of ideas and issue a statement as to where it stands. A decade ago, this kind of statement was called a position paper. Art education has carried out this task with some regularity: for example, the National Art Education Association twice formed commissions and published extended reports, once in 1965 and again in 1977. It is the second of these documents which will be examined here. The value of a position paper is, of course, that it provides a clear and compact assessment of current ideas in the field it examines and offers some sense of direction for the future. It should also serve as a target against which competitive ideas might be most easily described. To that end, this paper will attempt to analyze the second chapter of 1977 Report of the NAEA Commission on Art Education, entitled What We Believe and Why and will present, briefly, an alternate conception of value and purpose in art teaching. The selection of Chapter II rather than any of the other sections reflects the bias of this writer, who believes that conceptions of value and purpose are, ultimately, the theoretical bases of any educational study. They are used or can be used and certainly should be used to support practice. In this sense they maintain a considerable status and they demand the highest possible level of critical appraisal. The second chapter of the Commission Report proposes five areas of purpose for the teaching of art. Each of these purposes in turn grows out of a particular conception of the value of aesthetic functioning. The purposes are not ordered as to priority. In fact the chapter opens with an argument for the tentative and multiple nature of purpose in art education: