Art Education for Life

In this paper I argue that art is a search for meaning, and should be taught and learned in that context. The immediate goal is to understand ourselves and others better, allowing more intelligent and meaningful action in the arena of life. Toward that end, I suggest that the social agenda of art education, in a world that is both increasingly interdependent and turbulent, can be the construction of community through personal, group-centred, and cross-cultural understandings approached through art. I examine traditionalism, modernism, postmodernism, and contemporary visual culture for content and strategies to serve the purposes of art for life, and construct the outline of a model for instruction utilizing those concerns. Finally, I make a case that thematically mining and creating art works, performances, and visual culture for aesthetic significance that ultimately frames, forms and enhances meaning is the primary strategy for this construction of community, not in the tribal sense, but universally. My topic here is art education for life. Alfred North Whitehead [2] once said, “There is only one subject matter for education, and that is life in all its manifestations.’ From that perspective, what I am advocating, in addition to understanding and appreciating art itself, is teaching art for the sake of success in life outside the school, and particularly for the sake of global community. Many years ago Herbert Read [3] was sufficiently affected by what he saw in World War One and Two to write his most famous tome, Education through Art, which also was focused on art for life. Amplifying on what he said there he later suggested that: we who are interested in peace must begin with small things, in diverse ways, helping one another, discovering our own peace of mind, working for and waiting for the understanding that flashes from one peaceful mind to another. In that way our separate cells will take shape, will be joined to one another, will manifest new forms of social organization and new types of art [4]. It is to forget the lessons of the past, but since the bombings in New York City and Washington, D.C., and then in Kabul, it has increasingly become apparent that we are all one global community and that no one is outside the relationships that affect that community, whether good or bad. Art education for life is about these relationships, about the way we understand ourselves and others at home and all around our small blue planet.