HIS HONOUR THE BEAK: So, your client crashed the vehicle because he couldn’t tell which was the clutch, the brake or the accelerator ?
Defendant’s counsel: Yes, your Honour. You see, he went to the …
Beak: … and he hadn’t been taught any of the State’s road rules ?
Counsel: Well, erm … no. You see, went to the Free Range Driving Collective, where they …
Beak: The what ? It is a driving school, isn’t it ?
Counsel: Erm, yes, your Honour, but it works on a non-interventionist philosophy, taking its inspiration from Frank Derham.
Beak: From who, I mean, whom ?
Counsel: Frank Derham, your Honour. He’s related to Frances Derham, author of the 1960s best-seller Art for the Child Under Seven.
Beak: Never heard of it.
Counsel: I’m not surprised, your Honour. She advocated a method of teaching art where the teacher did not intervene.
Beak: You mean that the children were taught nothing about art, not even through an occasional quiet and helpful suggestion ?
Counsel: Erm, yes, your Honour, not to put too fine a point on it.
Beak: And, I s’pose, you’re about to claim that your client was taught nothing about driving ?
Counsel: Ah, erm, … I’d have to admit that’s the case.
Beak: No conviction recorded on the condition that your client undergoes a court-approved course of serious counselling and enrols in an RACT driving course for the experientially-challenged. Clerk, start the moves to issue arrest warrants for anyone with any association with the Free Range Driving School …
Clerk: “Collective”, your …
Beak: … Collective, especially this Francis, Frank, Whoever Derham.
Fanciful nonsense, you’d say, a fiction from an enfeebled imagination – no-one could get away with running a driving school along those lines.
Nor, we’d hope, Brain Surgery 101, or Advanced Airbus Pilot Certification, or even Strategies for Defence Counsel in Lower Courts.
Nor schools, you’d reckon, wouldn’t you ? You’d like to think that when your children are in school, they’d have teachers who actually teach them – by a variety of methods, of course.
You’d like to think that your average teacher, graduated from a university and trained in the craft of teaching, would have knowledge and skills to pass on, particularly in the early years of schooling. In a caring, sharing, sensitive and non-threatening way, of course. You’d reckon that, say, a Phys Ed teacher would be able to impart, say, some ball-handling skills, or a teacher of English some word-handling skills.
And, what’s more, you’d want to think that they’d be encouraged to do so, and, what’s more — now we’re in the realms of fantasy – that those teachers good at this would be suitably remunerated, or, at least, acknowledged, and would especially be welcomed by those in charge of preparing the next generation of teachers.
Not in art teaching, if this report by Glynis Quinlan in Arts, The Australian, Tuesday 23 August 2005, is to be believed:
Read it HERE
Now, before apoplexy starts, let’s keep in mind that Quinlan’s article is about pre-schoolers and the early primary years, but how insulting is the notion that these children should be deliberately deprived, as a matter of principle, of any instruction in the skills of drawing ?
Louse Perry’s shorter report on the same day, Future artists lost to expressionism [not online], quotes the principal of the Sydney-based Julian Ashton Art School: “Learning to draw is the intellectual side to art and we underestimate the intellect of children”. [Visit http://www.julianashtonartschool.com.au/ ]
Quinlan makes it clear that Frances Derham’s book, Art for the Child Under Seven, was in reaction to the repetitive sketch-by-numbers approach that was followed until the 1960s; my Margaret remembers the numbing effect of being told to charcoal-draw the one india-ink bottle as if viewed from most of the 360 degrees of the circle.
The saddest point is this one
But, as in far too many reactions, the philosophical pendulum swung too far: from pedantic over-instruction in finicky detail to imparting nothing. In addition, like much of public debate, it became an “Either-Or” conflict, when it should have been a “Both-And” correction.
Perhaps the saddest point is this one made by Felicity McArdle, senior lecturer in early childhood at the Queensland University of Technology: “one of the reasons the non-interventionist approach has been sustained for so long is that it is very attractive to early childhood teachers who have little knowledge of art”.
To put it more bluntly: education authorities, and therefore politicians, and, ultimately, “we the people” are prepared to foist ignorant fall-guys on our kids because giving would-be teachers a broad and deep general education is not seen as important, and therefore not worth funding.
At the risk of using a False Dichotomy [ http://oldtt.pixelkey.biz/index.php/weblog/comments/the-thinking-reed/ ], what if some of the tax-payer millions spent on elite athletes at the Australian Institute of Sport and elsewhere could be matched by ensuring that our teachers are thoroughly knowledgeable in their teaching subjects ? That all early childhood teachers of art know their Cezannes from their Correggios, their Mondrians from their Munches, and their Impressionists from their Expressionists. That, when a child produces a set of [what look like] blobs, his or her art teacher would have the knowledge and confidence to say, “Leslie, there was a very famous painter called Matisse who painted a big picture like yours, about 50 years ago, when your grandma and grandpa were young, and he called his painting The Snail. Do you know what you will call yours ?” That, when the painterly equivalents of “some mute inglorious Milton”^ seem to have some above-average native talent, they’d be helped by knowledgeable and committed teachers who, having learned and developed the skills of their craft, would be able to develop the next generations’ skills and talents.
Ryllton Viney, finalist in the first two years (2004, 2005) of the prestigious Glover Prize for landscape, is a Tasmanian-born and -schooled artist who has both taught and practised painting for over four decades both here and on the Mainland. After a graduate course at the then equivalents of university and teacher-training, his career took him in the 1970s to one of Melbourne’s most prominent schools, Wesley College (Prahran campus), where he was appointed Head of Art and Curator for the College’s extensive collection.
A scholarship from Wesley enabled him to attend a Union of Soviet Artists sponsored course in traditional icon-painting in 1982 at the old Russian Orthodox centres of Novgorod and Suzdal, NW and NE of Moscow. He followed this up with some specialist training in Melbourne, and extended these sorts of skills to art-in-miniature*; samples of this work have been exhibited at Washington DC’s prestigious Smithsonian Institute. After a printmaking residency in the UK at Cumbria’s Lowick House in 1996, some of his work is in its permanent collection.
Teachers of art ought actually to teach
The highlight of a week-long stay last year in northern Italy’s Emilia-Romagna province was billeting with one of the teachers at the famed Municipal Infant-Toddler Center and Preschool of Reggio Emilia, reported in The Australian article as having “attracted worldwide attention among educators for its collaborative approach to education and its emphasis on children’s many symbolic languages, including drawing, sculpture and writing”. For more on these schools, visit http://zerosei.comune.re.it/inter/index.htm .
Viney is emphatic that teachers of art ought to actually teach, that children deserve to be taught, and that the very young should be gently guided by skilled practitioners:
“The teaching of art to young children requires great subtlety. Teachers must create the circumstances through which native talent may be nurtured. The ‘artist’ in the child — and all children have this — can be developed through encouragement, sympathy and suggestion.
“I wish to emphasise the word ‘suggestion’. It should not be thought that a child will, even if surrounded by good materials in a good environment, express ideas through them with no outside suggestion whatsoever.
“Art education, as with all other areas of study and learning, requires basic ‘building blocks’ upon which a sense of purpose and direction within the child may be accomplished.
“Certainly, the child must develop independent judgements and a flexible outlook, with a sense of freedom. But, teachers must be able to sense in which direction the child’s native talent is developing, and be able to give the necessary advice and help — through suggestion — to enhance the outcome of the works.”
And to do this, you’d expect that they’d have some skills themselves.
Another of Viney’s experiences is relevant here. One of his participants in a recent Adult Education icon-painting course progressed slowly and steadily, but surely, so much so, that he suggested to her that she follow it up with further training and study.
Which she did.
In this year’s just-finished Tasmanian Living Artists Week, she visited Ryllton at his open-house studio, and, inter alia, mentioned that she had been taught more in one Viney session that in all subsequent TAFE and tertiary courses: “They [the so-called teachers] never taught us anything — it was all ‘Just paint what you feel’. Students had to continually ask for information about preparing surfaces, mixing paints, that sort of thing. I felt a bit silly having to say ‘Excuse me, but …’ all the time.”
Any driver-training school that refused on principle to teach the skills of driving would not last long. We don’t tolerate a “Just snip what you feel like snipping” methodology in preparing the next generation of surgeons, nor a “Just push any old button and tug on any old lever you feel like” approach to upgrading airline piloting skills, so why in art education ? Or, for that matter, in any education ?
And Viney has a further question: given that so much art, particularly painting, in the last three or four decades has been done by those unskilled in the basic techniques of craftsmanship, there is going to be a huge amount of conservation needed to preserve them. [Critics of the I don’t know much about Art, but I know what I like School would doubtless respond: “Why bother ?”]
If graduates who’ve been through content-free art school have so little technical know-how, who’s going to do the conservation ?
^ from Thomas Grey’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, c. 1742-50, line 59
* A NW Coast artist/administrator is currently President of the World Federation of Miniature Artists. Burnie’s Joan Kelly was one of the foundation members of the Tasmanian branch of the Australian Society of Miniature Art (ASMA), and helped secure Hobart as the site for the Second World Exhibition of Miniaturists in 1996. Burnie’s Regional Art Gallery is host of the next World Exhibition of Miniaturists in March 2008. A future TT article may further develop this interesting story of Tasmanian success on the world stage. For more information about art-in-miniature, visit www.worldfm.org .
Leonard Colquhoun 7248
