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I want to tell you a story. Early one morning, a man was
walking along a bluff overlooking the ocean when he noticed
a barefoot woman walking along the beach clearly engrossed
in a strange activity: she was picking up star fish that
had been washed ashore by the tide, and one by one, throwing
them back into the sea. Intrigued, he scrambled down the
bank of the cliff and approached her. “What are you doing?”
he asked.
“I’m saving star fish,” she answered, gently tossing another
into the water.
The man let his eyes drift over the endless shoreline in
wonder. “But,” he stammered, “there are thousands of
star fish stranded on this beach. You can’t save them all!”
“I know,” the woman smiled. She picked up another star fish
and returned it to the ocean. “But I’m saving this
one.” She continued undaunted. “And this one. And this
one.”
Dear friends, colleagues, teachers and students, those star
fish languishing on the barren sand are the youth of
America. And they have been swept up onto the beachhead of
ignorance and sloth by the tide of our failed progressive
educational system. It falls to us now, those of us who do
understand the deep purposes of education, to save the
future of our country. We can do this by returning our
children, one by one, back to the sea of structured
creativity, where each individual child—by nature of being a
child—can be taught to swim smartly, successfully, and
joyfully toward the promise of adulthood. To accomplish
this task, I propose that we incorporate art education into
the mandatory school curricula. I propose art instruction
because only art educates the whole person as an
integrated individual: it educates the senses, it educates
the mind, and it educates the emotions. It educates the
soul.
Before we set to exploring this proposal, however, I wish to
say “Thank you” to Hillsdale College for inviting me to
share my thoughts on “Art and the Moral Imagination” with
you during this five day conference. And I thank you
for coming this evening to share both the art and the ideas
expressed in THE LEGACY LIVES art exhibit. It was on
this very stage where, five years ago, I announced the
formation of the American Renaissance for the Twenty-first
Century arts foundation. I marvel at the good distance we
have come since that day in 1992, and I am grateful to all
those who have helped in our many achievements, including
this exhibit. Our mission of promoting a rebirth of beauty
and life-affirming values in all of the fine arts is, of
course, not only for the purpose of improving the arts but
also for the purpose of elevating our culture as a whole.
It is an ambitious mission and the challenges are great.
These challenges take many forms. Not just in the arena of
the fine arts, but even more fundamentally, in the arena of
ideas—especially in our educational system. Let us remember
that the three old fashioned “Rs” of education—readin’,
ritin’ and ‘rithmetic—were not instituted in schools to help
the populace read the daily papers, write letters home to
Mom, and pay bills owed the general store. These primary
skills were and should be taught for the larger
purpose of instructing young people to think and to function
in the real world for the rest of their lives in a rational,
efficacious, self-sufficient and self-satisfying manner.
School should prepare young people for life.
Reading (literature and history in particular) teaches the
ability to comprehend the world and man’s place in it;
writing is the means of any serious communication and
teaches the ability to crystallize thoughts and communicate
them objectively; arithmetic (meaning the whole category of
math) teaches the ability to measure attributes of entities
in reality, thereby bringing all of the universe into
perceptual grasp. These are the basics. In better schools,
science is included, and in many schools, physical education
usually rounds out the mandatory program, which is good
except where—too often!—soccer dominates syntax. Too often,
too, a serious education in the three basics is not really
mandatory anymore, meaning that the courses are regularly
adulterated for political correctness, diluted of solid
grounding in rudimentary skills, and short-shrifted as
subjects for prolonged study, all of which in turn defeat
the purpose of required subjects.
In fact, in light of today’s permissive educational
environment, we might need to remind ourselves of why
certain studies should be mandatory in the first place. It
used to be a truism—and it is still true—that students do
not yet know enough to know what they don’t know; therefore,
adults specializing in the teaching of knowledge, along with
parents, should set the principal standards of their
education. Once again, this presumes that a certain level
of knowledge and ability in basic subjects is necessary to
pursue an informed life on an independent basis after
graduation from school and separation from family homes.
It is with these thoughts in mind that I propose the
addition of art education to the three basics. I should
clarify, here, that I mean art education founded in the
established Western art forms. The reason for focusing on
art forms evolving from our Western heritage is that the
forms themselves (the physical presentations) are the most
malleable, with the richest aesthetic vocabulary for
expressing the most complex ideas. This kind of art—begun
with the Greeks and carried on through the Renaissance to
the nineteenth century, sadly skipping most of the twentieth
but resurfacing with vigor as we approach the millennium—can
be defined as an intelligible representation of the world
and humankind that manifests an artist’s conceptual visions
in perceptual, aesthetic form.
The primary arts, as we all know, are painting, sculpture,
poetry, literature, drama, music and architecture, the last
of which is unique because it combines its art form with
functional use. A modicum of working knowledge in all of
the arts will facilitate an appreciation of them, but
protracted study in the visual arts (drawing, painting and
sculpture), creative writing (poetry, drama and short story)
and music (instrument and music appreciation) are critical
for advanced perceptual and conceptual development, so these
may best constitute the base triad for art education.
Why
should the teaching of this art become the fourth “R”?
Because to teach art is to teach life. Each lifetime, in
its own way, has a “theme,” an ever unfolding personal
destiny, self-scripted by each individual depending on how
they decide to approach and fill the hours of their days.
Every (good) work of art does the same: first, it is an
idea in the mind of the artist—a mental abstraction, a
vision seen through the mind’s “eye,” an imaginative
summation of the images and ideas wished to be expressed.
Then it goes through the aesthetic process of transformation
from that mental vision into a physical object (or in the
case of the literary arts and music, a finite time
experience) that can be perceived through the senses and the
intellect of others, that can be understood.
Finally, it takes on a life of its own to be enjoyed and
considered as an individual entity—an end in itself—just
like every human being. Because humans have free will, they
choose their values by a process of selection; this is why
character development and the development of art are so
similar—they are both self created. Thus learning a
demanding art form promotes both a curiosity and confidence
that can be transferred to real life situations.
How
does it do this? Let’s take the benefits of art education
one at a time: Sensory education, using the visual arts
(painting) as our example; mental education, using creative
writing as our example; and emotional education, using music
as our example. These examples should not be construed as
being exclusive of one another. Happily, each art form
augments the lessons learned in all the others to educate
the whole person. Each has its own aesthetic vocabulary,
each appealing primarily to a different sense organ:
painting and sculpture to sight (with sculpture adding the
tangible sense of touch), music to hearing, and the most
complex arts such as fiction appealing to all of the
combined senses through imagination. Equally important,
every art form is rooted in a discipline of craft, and
learning the techniques of any craft teaches purpose,
structure, observation, selectivity of essentials, and
judgment of execution with verifiable outcome. In other
words, the proficiency of means employed as well as the end
result can be assessed via objective criteria. Furthermore,
disciplined but ductile art forms can be endlessly
manipulated and stylized to provide aesthetic emphasis as
well as to dramatize ideational content.
To take our first example: we can readily grasp how creating
what seems to be the simplest of paintings requires
knowledge of drawing, color, shape, composition and
perspective—knowledge derived not only from technical
training but also from close observation of reality. Once a
student has learned to render the three dimensional world of
nature in this two dimensional form, enjoyment and
appreciation of the real world automatically become enriched
with ever keener observations. In order to paint a single
tree, we really have to look at it. How a young
person’s sense of seeing will be improved! What
nuances of the color green alone will he notice in the
future because of these acute observations, not just in
nature but in man-made objects as common as clothing, cars
and tableware? What varieties of textures, edges and shapes
gleaned from scrutinizing fragile, scalloped leaf formations
will enhance his everyday experience of the patterns made by
interlacing shadows, the woven surfaces of fabrics, or the
eyelashes of a newborn infant? Even to imitate nature we
must observe her; each student of painting—one by one,
remember?—will gain life awareness by these observations.
Moving up one level, to interpret nature through
painting, consciously creating (let’s say) a mood will
benefit students even more because it requires developing a
process of selection in order to fulfill a larger intention,
that of endowing the work with significance. Subject matter
is then employed indirectly to express... something more.
Now, questions arise as to which observations are
most relevant to that deeper intention. Those graceful
veins in the leaves, are they important enough to delineate
or should she just suggest them? What of the bark sheathing
the trunk? Since she wants a serene feeling, should she
apply the paint thinly with light brushstrokes to
de-emphasize the rough surface? In order to create an
atmosphere that stresses the mysteries of nature, should she
push the blue of the sky toward violet? Because this next
level of art teaches how to formulate a hierarchy in
the selection of essentials, entailing judgment at every
turn, it prompts questions and demands problem solving,
sensitizing powers of discrimination and increasing
attention span for contemplation of the relative importance
of all things in life, large and small.
Thus we see that inherent within the process of exercising
their sense perceptions, students must by necessity also
exercise their minds. And beyond this first horizon of
sense-mind interplay lies the limitless vista of the
imagination. Meaningful art is not just mimesis of life as
it is or even an expressive rearrangement; it is an inquiry
into the human condition, of man’s desires and dreams, fears
and fantasies. Important art is important because it is
multi-layered, stimulating our senses, touching our hearts
and awakening our minds to verities and possibilities.
Aesthetics, then, become the means to art’s supreme end:
content. Content is inseparable from the underlying theme(s)
of a work; it is that, but it is so much, much more:
Ultimately, it is the human spirit incarnate—the shimmering
breath of light streaming from a thoughtful artist’s mind
and hands and soul that, through meticulous crafting,
becomes a theme illuminating itself. It resides within and
emanates from the art as a pure result of the artist’s most
purposeful and personal imbuing of it with intelligent
meaning, with ideas. It is great art’s anima: both
source and sum, it is the substantive realization of an
artist’s deepest values, true or false, good or bad,
beautiful or ugly. And here is where the moral imagination
enters fully into the creative process, for even a novice
approach to this highest level of art educates the mind
philosophically.
Let’s use creative writing as an example. Because
literature is a conceptual transmission from the mind of a
writer to the mind of a reader it becomes, whether via a
wide avenue or a narrow labyrinth, an enchanting passage to
the imagination—a journey of ideas not to what is but to
what could and might be. Good fiction compels us to weave a
theme through the events of a story and the actions of the
characters. Assuming craft, the more universal and
fundamental the theme, the greater the fiction. Assuming
theme—unfortunately, most fiction today, as most art in
general, lacks theme—but assuming theme, we imagine
interlocking scenes in our imagination first, and then
heightened visions of all that is possible in the world are
activated in our minds as we write. Gradually, as we learn
to distill our thoughts and communicate through the
techniques of narrative, description, dialogue, metaphor and
dramatization, our imaginations are freed to create whatever
we can dream up! New questions arise: Is this idea true?
How is truth determined? Is it relevant to all human beings
or just a few? Or only me? Are my characters
understandable? Are they behaving morally or immorally, and
why? Are their actions motivated by their value
system?
Because the written arts are conceptual in form, students
have an opportunity (even in creating a nursery rhyme, a
dramatic skit or a fairytale) to explore the moral
imagination directly. An artist’s value system is
consciously or unconsciously inherent in every work of art.
This is so precisely because, as we have seen, the process
of creating art requires constant choices of everything from
subject matter to size. But creative writing requires the
student to pay special attention to the internal lives of
fictional, “made-up” individuals. How do we make up
fictional human beings so as to render them believable? By
infusing their thoughts, utterances and actions with
values. As readers we understand that we come to “know”
fictional people largely the same way we learn to know
real-life people: we discern their underlying “character”
by observing and listening to them. A rational person
selects his or her values through the use of reason and
logic, making sure that the values are consonant with nature
and human nature. If they are, they will be life-serving
values. If they are life-serving values, they will be
moral. If a person (or a character) acts only on
rational values, their actions will be moral. If their
actions are moral, they will be moral. If we wish to
present an immoral character, we will create a fictional
person who acts consciously against sound values. And just
think of all the inbetweens, the conflicted characters! By
learning writing skills, students can play out real life
conflicts in an imaginative setting with imagined people.
Talk about a chance to explore ideas, issues, behavior and
psychology in a safe environment!
As the visual arts train the senses by honing our physical
perceptions of the world, so the art of writing trains the
mind by demanding concept formation and a philosophical view
of the world. If students are engaged in both art forms,
what they learn in one will reinforce what they learn in the
other, beginning an interactive process with incalculable
power to foster discreet subtleties of awareness and
sensitivity (literally!) in every walk of life. In
addition, incidental but important side benefits of all art
study are learning to be alone, enjoying the kairos
of life by becoming involved in the act of creation to the
point of forgetting time as chronos; learning to
experiment uninhibitedly with various options; learning to
follow curiosity not only for the purpose of inventing but
also for the adventure of discovering; learning to approach
effort as pleasure, work as pleasure, and challenge as
pleasure.
Lastly, but perhaps first in today’s world of rampant
subjectivism and temperamental indulgence, the arts educate
the emotions. Not everyone is passionate—passion is the
fervent intensity of emotion one experiences only when one
commits the highest level of devotion to values—but everyone
has feelings, if only instinctual fear or desire. And all
feelings, whether complex or primitive, mentally inspired or
physically excited, can be conveyed productively and safely
through the structure of an art form. In this way,
pubescent youngsters in particular can learn to deal
constructively with feelings often so strong they don’t know
what to do with them; they can actually “work them out”
through the creation of their art. This doesn’t mean
“express yourself” wallowing nor does it mean
psychotherapy. It means healthy emotional flowering. It
means psychological growth.
All art training nurtures this, but music is indispensable
for guiding psychological development because it speaks
directly to the sentient consciousness. One might say that
music is emotions, because feelings are its primary
themes. The instrument chosen to channel music’s emotional
flow, whether it be piano, clarinet, violin or voice, is not
important. Learning to play the instrument is. The
discipline of serious music is exact and exacting, teaching
the precision of math in a poetic realm, teaching both the
exhilarating balance and the exalted integration of
“reasoned harmony” (music’s form) and emotions (music’s
content). It is not often in our culture that children are
taught to unite reason and emotions. Tonal, melodic
classical music does this for all of us. So the competence
to hear it, to appreciate it to a degree made
possible by knowing how to play any instrument, can be a
rare source of indescribable pleasure and safe emotional
release for the child now and the adult later.
Like life, musical passages contain highs and lows, fast and
slows, and musical vocabulary includes dissonance and
resolution, tumult and sublimity, all emboldening a student
in the process of making music to feel to his heart’s
content within the security of a confined experience. There
is no way to fall out of control because the rhythm keeps
the music going—the notes must be played on time and
accurately—affording an expansive opportunity to learn to
channel emotions into a finite structure with a finite time
limit. By learning to orchestrate emotional content through
so rigorous a structure, the student must learn to
merge reason and emotions; otherwise, the resulting music
will be cold and sterile, math without the poetry.
Classical music is too mentally commanding to permit the
flailing and screaming incited by rock n’ roll, thus it
forces young people to control their emotional output,
offering them the experience of cathexis rather than
catharsis. Also, because music deals with broad
abstractions—triumph, defeat, love, loss—it allows a young
person to personalize universals of the human condition, to
feel on a grand scale both the hope and the hurt that
necessarily accompany an individual life fully lived. For
teenagers, in particular, it unlocks gateways to mature
excursions into the ecstasy and the vulnerability of love,
the headiness and the hazards of risk. Often, once young
people begin to understand the value of classical music,
they turn to it in moments of emotional need to help them
experience deep stirrings that may not make it to the
surface of consciousness by themselves. Repressed boys,
especially, can benefit immensely from music study.
So we begin to see the vital importance of art education,
the invigorating and reinforcing spiral of experience
inherent in learning the various art forms. Back and forth,
from real life to art, from art form to art form and back to
real life, the senses, the intellect and the emotions flow
together, charging each other along the way with images,
sounds and ideas. Students of art become students of life.
And this should be our goal. Once they experience
the arduous bliss of making art, some will pursue it as a
profession, of course. But the purpose of art study is not
to make artists out of our young people; it is to help them
become complete human beings.
Youth is forward motion. And the arts can forever inspire
this forward motion because they are open ended and can
continue indefinitely to absorb our natural creative
energies. No art form can ever be entirely mastered because
the techniques can always be further expanded and exploited,
so skills and appreciation learned while we are still
chronologically young can serve us our whole lives long. As
we grow and develop as human beings, we can continue for a
lifetime stretching our capabilities through artistic
expression, if only as a casual hobby or through spectator
appreciation on a high level. Our bodies will age and our
physical prowess (in sports, for example) will diminish, but
our minds and our imaginations need never grow old.
Practical knowledge of the arts can keep us forever active
mentally, psychologically and emotionally, learning,
growing, advancing...the very hallmarks of youth.
Let us insist that our children be offered these priceless
opportunities provided by art education. Whether they want
it or not. Mandatory, remember? My own father used to tell
me it was his responsibility as a parent to “introduce”
me—that meant I had to do it—to certain things in
life that would help me become a worthy human being. I
began ballet at three, piano at five, acting at seven, and
voice (on my own) in college—Making up stories and plays I
always did on my own. I was required to bring home one book
a week from the library throughout grade school—Did you know
that the girl detective Nancy Drew is still on the
shelves? My brother and I were required to taste everything
set out on the dinner table. If we weren’t fond of some
particular food, we could ask our mother for a “courtesy
helping,” which meant one level tablespoon. If we made a
face or said something negative, we got another tablespoon—I
remember eating a whole bowl of parsnips that way one
night—until we learned to acquire a taste for the flavor or
at least moderate our behavior. Today, there is not a
single food I do not savor.
It is my observation, these days, that many parents and
teachers are afraid of children. You don’t need to beat
children into doing what’s best for them; you can negotiate
something you want for them with something they want for
themselves. You do, however, need to inculcate the
habit of cooperation in them while you’re still bigger than
they are! In my early childhood I disliked piano, but if I
wanted dance lessons (which I loved) I had to stick with
piano as well. When, in my mid-teens, I finally terminated
music lessons, I was glad (as I am now) that I could
entertain myself by playing the instrument respectably and
appreciate others’ playing of it as well.
Another observation, obvious to anyone, is that parents (and
even grandparents) today emulate their children instead of
setting examples for them. By dressing like kids in jeans,
sneakers and message tee-shirts, wearing baseball caps
during dinner, reducing their own vocabularies to mindless
street jargon—“hey,” “cool,” “no problem,” “Hi guys,”—by
listening incessantly to blaring primitive music, what do
parents think they are offering their children regarding the
refinements of adulthood?—a state of achieved maturity that
they, by the way, are pathetically missing themselves. No
wonder America has become a nation of aging adolescents!
I suggest to you that the nation’s schools could not have
failed, as they have, unless mothers and fathers failed
first by abdicating their parental responsibility as
guardians of their children’s inner development. Now, it is
past time for concerned parents to assume their obligation
as parents and set the standards for the education of
their own children. Art education is crucial. It
can be taught privately, of course, but instituting it into
school systems, public or otherwise, is not as formidable as
you might think. There are hundreds of prototype parent
groups all over the country doing just this by forming
nonprofit organizations that fundraise and contribute money
to schools targeted only for the purpose of
incorporating the arts into the curricula. If anyone wants
specific information on this, please contact me personally.
Finally, may I say that although Americans largely do not
understand this, art is not a luxury, it is a necessity...a
spiritual one. At its apotheosis aesthetically,
philosophically and psychologically, art provides a
spiritual summation by integrating mind and matter—abstract
values perceived by the senses. When form and content are
exquisitely unified in art to express the most universal
truths via the most beautiful physical presentation in the
most technically proficient manner, art offers an experience
of complete concinnity, a harmoniously integrated experience
of mind, body and soul—both to its maker and to its worthy
beholder. Thus it is the very souls of our emotionally
abandoned, value starved youth that we can rescue through
art education. For it is art that best teaches the moral
imagination everywhere apparent in the different art forms,
through which the soul of the artist, young or old,
professional or amateur or student, is revealed. But, just
like the star fish we can rescue them only one at a time,
for every child like every adult is a precious, fragile,
unrepeatable, individual being. Shan’t we nourish
each soul with the beauty, the wonder and the delight of the
mind as carefully as we nourish each body with bread, milk
and honey? The thirteenth-century Persian poet Muslih-uddin
Sadi counseled us thus:
If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft
And from thy slender store
Two loaves alone to thee are left
Sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul
Yes! It is the beauty of art and the arts of beauty that
feed the human spirit by making the invisible visible and
the visible more visible, affirming the value of
visions, visions that bring values to life. Art and the
moral imagination? Art is the moral imagination.
Copyright
© Alexandra York. All rights reserved. |
