Toward More Effective Arts Education

Abstract

The major players on the arts education scene can be likened to the members of a newly formed string quartet. No matter how skilled each of the players may be individually, successful performance as an ensemble remains a formidable challenge. While realizing their individual parts properly, the players must learn to listen to one another, to pick up subtle cues of timing, attack, phrasing, etc., to arrive at the same-or at least concordant-interpretations of a piece and to blend these in a performance which makes sense not only to the players themselves, but also to their wider audience. When-for whatever reason-the players have hit upon the appropriate playing stances, the resulting sounds can be magnificent, but only careful working together over many years can ensure performances of a predictably high quality. In incipient efforts to improve arts education, I've come to anticipate four separate players, or elements, on the scene. They may announce themselves overtly, or they may lurk in the background; but ultimately they must all be taken into account and synthesized if the effort is to succeed. To begin with, there are the philosophical notions of arts education: What is the purpose of teaching the arts, how are the arts construed, how do they relate to the rest of the curriculum and to the rest of society? Next, there are psychological accounts of learning in the arts: What is the student like, how can teachers work effectively, what are the effects of particular media of instruction, how does one evaluate success or failure? A third component entails the artistic practices of the past: What sorts of things have been done (for whatever reason); which kinds of settings have been favored; who are the masters, the students, the expected audience? And the final component-particularly complex in any industrialized society-is the ecology of the educational system: the assigned curricula, the school administration, processes of certification and licensure, the decision-making processes. Certainly, these four elements interact with and