Clark, J. Kent

English

Caltech Authors - Main

DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES 
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 91125 
THE CREATIVE ARTS AND TWENTIETH CENTURY EDUCATION 
J. Kent Clark 
HUMANITIES WORKING PAPER 28 
Mareh 1979 
THE CREATIVE ARTS AND TWENTIETH CENTURY EDUCATION 
The creative arts are a natural and inevitable response to 
the basic human demands for significance, beauty, coherence, permanence, 
and design. Taken collectively, they are an attempt to make sense and 
order out of the random clutter of human experience, to explore the 
resources of the human mind and body, to sensitize and discipline the 
imagination, to widen the range of human perception, and to create value 
where none existed before. In less exalted language, the arts teach 
people to see, hear, feel, move, and act (in both senses of the term); 
they concern themselves with the quality of life 
Since the arts involve a continuous re-examination of human 
values, they crucially affect, and are affected by, the cultures that 
produce them. In a sense they define the quality of a civilization. It 
is no accident, then, that the social, technological, and intellectual 
revolutions of the twentieth century have redefined the position of the 
arts in society, produced new art forms and new techniques, and given 
a profound urgency to the problems of education in the arts. 
Of the many social forces that have affected twentieth century 
art, perhaps the most obvious is urbanization and the astounding growth 
of cities. This growth has meant that most Americans are now living in 
what might be called synthetic surroundings. In a sense, the cities 
themselves are artifacts. What they look like now and what they will 
look like in the future is a compromise between artistic perception and 
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economic constraint. Stated positively, the recent transformation in a 
city like San Diego is a reflection, in an important sense, of the 
citizens' taste in beauty. Stated negatively, the obsolescence and 
decay is a reflection of how much visual blight the citizens will hold 
still for. 
A second force operating on the fate of the arts has been 
democratization. Traditionally, arts have been the monopoly of an 
aristocracy, whether secular or ecclesiastical. They have been financed 
by people with wealth and enjoyed by people with leisure. Modern industry, 
in producing the 40-hour week, has, in effect, made everyone a member 
of the leisure class (some people, alas, because they are unemployed). 
The patrons of the arts have become anyone with the price of a movie, 
theater, or concert ticket, or anyone who can find the way to a museum 
or exhibition; and the arts are sponsored and underwritten by such 
diverse agencies as school boards, college committees, county councils, 
foundations (both government and private), city planning commissions, 
citizen associations, banks, business corporations, and state governments. 
The average citizen, as a consumer of the arts, finds himself, perhaps 
unconsciously, influencing the direction that the arts will take; and 
a citizen who achieves any position in local government or in the 
educational system may find himself making direct decisions on the future 
of art in his community. 
A third force that has transformed the nature of twentieth 
century art is technology itself. Such developments as the moving 
picture, sound recording equipment, computers, and sophisticated lighting 
techniques have led to the development of new art forms and dramatically 
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expanded the boundaries of the traditional forms. The camera, for 
example, has not only produced an art form of its own (and several giant 
industries) but it has proved an invaluable resource to visual artists 
in general. Similarly, sophisticated recording equipment has not only 
made possible the mass production of music (from Beethoven to The 
Beatles) but it has made modern dance, on a significant scale, possible. 
Again, the lighting, sound, and mechanical staging techniques now 
available to modern drama directors have contributed to the fluidity 
and effectiveness of modern play production and have widened the choice 
of techniques available to the dramatist. In one sense, the history of 
the twentieth century arts has been the attempt to exploit the new 
resources offered. 
If the technical revolution has created new arts and expanded, 
complicated, and sophisticated the existing arts, it has also forced the 
arts to deal with grave social problems. The arts have found themselves 
combatting the tendency of a highly technical, highly organized culture 
to reduce its citizens to statistics -- to units of production or 
consumption. They have been compelled to counter the dehumanizing tendencies 
of a mechanized civilization. In their separate ways, they have insisted 
upon illustrating, and demonstrating, the variety, complexity, and 
worth, of individual human experience. The arts have also found them-
selves combatting the isolation of the individual, lost in a bewildering 
culture, as well as the alienation between cultures separated by space 
and time. Since the arts speak a universal language they tend to dissolve 
individual, class and national differences. They not only make blacks 
understandable to whites, longshoremen understandable to bricklayers, 
4 
bourgeois understandable to each other, Russians understandable to 
Americans, but also ancient Egyptians understandable to modern 
Israelis. As the recent Tutankamen exhibitions and the Civilization 
series by Lord Clark have demonstrated, the arts collapse temporal as 
well as physical and cultural distance. 
Another social phenomenon of the twentieth century has been 
the emergence of the arts as a complex, powerful, interlocking economic 
structure. This is most obvious in the case of the popular arts but it 
is no less true of the traditional arts. The popular arts, such as the 
movies, the television, and radio, with the associated recording and 
pop-concert business, are clearly giant economic enterprises employing 
thousands of people. The traditional arts with music and dance concerts, 
exhibitions, legitimate theater -- to say nothing of the many self-
employed individual artists -- employ thousands more; and additional 
thousands are employed in the many supporting crafts and in the teaching 
profession. The arts, from an economic point of view, may be looked 
upon as a vast conglomerate with tentacles reaching into many related 
industries. While it is perhaps too much to say that the republic 
would collapse if the arts "industry" quit functioning, there is no 
doubt that the failure would be catastrophic. 
But perhaps as important as the direct economic effects of the 
arts are the effects of the daily esthetic judgments made, often 
unconsciously, by the individual citizen. There is an esthetic component 
(a compromise between utilitarian function and beauty) in the most 
routine of economic deCisions, and the effects of these decisions often 
determine the life or death of industries. These decisions begin with 
birth (from the time a mother selects booties for her baby) and continue 
5 
until death (when the erstwhile baby's executors select the style of 
lettering for his tombstone). In between, each person selects for 
himself, partly on the basis of esthetics, what kind of goods and 
services he will buy. (Someone, after all, thought the Edsel was 
beautiful.) On a grand scale, as already noted, the sort of house he 
will buy and the sort of neighborhood that he will tolerate are functions 
of his esthetic perceptions. On a trivial scale, what kind of toothpaste 
he buys may be determined by the color of the tube or the taste of the 
contents. On another level of decision, his sensibilities may determine 
whether he buys housepaint or Bourbon, whether he gets his drama at a 
football game or a theater, and whether he satisfies his taste for 
beautiful and significant motion at a ballet or a horserace (or both). 
In addition to such direct economic decisions are the indirect decisions 
that often occur when someone switches a TV channel or changes the 
station on his transistor. The list of such indirect decisions is 
virtually endless. It can be said in summary, however, that in a very 
important sense the citizens' esthetic sensibilities not only affect the 
way the country looks, sounds and moves but also the way its economy is 
directed. 
Besides changing the nature and impact of the arts, the 
twentieth century has furnished the arts with their most vital subject 
matter. The arts are continuously engaged in interpreting the twentieth 
century to itself to paraphrase Hamlet, in dramatizing the forms 
and pressures of the time. This fact is so obvious that it perhaps 
needs no illustration, as is the parallel fact that the growing 
6 
complexities of society have tended to make the arts themselves more 
complex. Nevertheless, it might be useful to sketch by way of example 
a few points in the development of twentieth century dance. One of the 
most obvious of these is the turning away from classical ballet as the 
dance form par excellence. Though beautiful and stylized and still a 
very viable art form, the ballet seems inadequate to interpret the 
emotional range and the varieties of significant movement vital to the 
twentieth century. The whole realm of "modern dance" with its many 
experiments in form, its selection of modern sounds for accompaniment and 
its range of moods, from despair to low comedy, is a twentieth century 
invention and a response to its world. Similarly the intense interest 
in folk and ethnic dance has widened the range of available art forms 
while contributing to social understanding. It should be added in 
passing that besides providing significant and stunning performance, 
modern dance has made many people at least dimly aware that nothing in 
the Consititution requires that American citizens must move like robots. 
The educational implications of the relationship between 
society and the arts are as easy to draw in principle as they are 
difficult to implement in practice. One obvious conclusion is that the 
time is probably past when American society can afford to be esthetically 
illiterate or semi-literate. Simply from the point of view of exterior 
appearance and the shape of the environment, the consequences of 
insensibility are staggering. But more important than the social 
consequences of illiteracy are its effects on the qualitx of individual 
lives. While it is perfectly possible for a man who is color-blind, tone 
deaf, and emotionally stunted, to be a good citizen, to be financially 
7 
solvent, and even write letters to the editor, it is a tragedy never-
theless. Similarly, it is a profound human waste, on a less dramatic 
scale, for people to go through life half-hearing, half-seeing, and 
only dimly aware of the range of their own perceptions and capabilities 
(to go through life not playing with a full keyboard). In this connection, 
it is both encouraging and pathetic to see the swarms of middle-aged 
people enrolling in adult classes in drama, dance, music and visual arts. 
It is encouraging because it demonstrates the hunger for self-expression 
and the demand for creative activity; it is pathatic because it often 
reflects years of frustration and cultural poverty. 
From such obvious facts it is easy to draw educational inference 
that every American child should have basic training in the arts and be 
equipped to deal, in at least a modest way, with the real world of sights, 
sounds, colors, and people with the experiences he will most certainly 
meet and with the esthetic choices that he will certainly make, either 
ignorantly or consciously. It is clear that people must be trained to 
deal with the world of perception and feeling as well as the equally 
important world of verbal and mathematical abstractions. It might be noted in 
passing that art education needs a new set of metaphors. The description of art 
courses as "enrichment" is misleading and inadequate. It suggests 
something nice but not essential, like caraway seeds on rolls or 
frosting on cake. Perhaps the new metaphors ought to suggest corrective 
surgery, like the removal of cataracts, the rebuilding of ear drums, and 
the curing of club feet. 
8 
Another modest but clear goal, on an elementary and secondary 
level, is that every child should be given a chance to acquire and 
develop artistic skills -- that his understanding of the arts should 
not be merely intellectual but also practical -- derived from experience. 
The nature of the arts makes it almost mandatory that talent in music 
and dance, for example, be recognized early and that years should be 
spent in acquiring the discipline and techniques that the arts require. 
It is no less important for education, however, that children who would 
never dream of becoming professional artists be given a chance to learn 
basic skills as a vital part of their education. It might be laid down 
as a principle, for example, that a student who goes through school 
without participating in drama (without playing any role but his own) 
should be able to sue a school board for misfeasance; and perhaps a 
reasonable corollary would be that a school which does not equip its 
students to appreciate drama more complex than Wonder Woman or All in 
the Family might be cited for dereliction of duty. 
Since the arts are not only educational in themselves but 
useful in the teaching of other subjects, it is clear that further 
experiments should be made in addition to those already successfully 
tried in relating the arts with the more "academic" disciplines. That art 
and history, for example, are mutually supportive studies is obvious 
enough -- as is the connection between music, drama and literature. The 
not so obvious -- but real -- connections between the arts and the 
sciences have yet to be seriously exploited in education, though valuable 
experiments have been made. 
9 
In California the general principles sketched above and the need for 
systematic, coherent, basic education in the arts have been recognized 
by the State Board of Education, and the general outline of what such a 
system of art education would involve has been drawn up in the State 
Frameworks in music, drama and visual arts. As yet these frameworks 
have not been implemented on any significant scale because of financ:Lal 
limitation, but their existence is in itself an important step toward 
the definition of an adequate educational system. 
If it is clear that the most serious deficiencies in art 
education lie in the primary and secondary schools (in spite of the 
heroic efforts of individual teachers and administrators and the excellent 
work being done by some fortunate and far-sighted school districts), 
it is equally clear that the ultimate fate of education in the arts 
is largely in the hands of the colleges. The immediate reason for 
this state of affairs is that the colleges train the teachers, both 
generalists and specialists, upon whom any serious improvement in 
the quantity and quality of art education ultimately depends. In 
addition the colleges have more and more taken over the role of 
training professional artists. It has been found by experience 
that the colleges have unique advantages in such training. With 
their devotion to both tradition and experiment and their historical 
perspective, the colleges have been able to develop standards of 
excellence and a quality of training that have improved the general 
level of professional competence. In California, the colleges, both 
public and independent, have visibly strengthened their professional 
staffs over the past few years; and their art faculties present a 
10 
formidable array of artistic talent. But beyond the excellence of the 
professional training available in colleges is the stimulating effect 
of the university atmosphere, with its ferment of ideas and its general 
collection of brains and talent. If artists are to interpret the 
twentieth century to itself, it is very important for them to know the 
intellectual currents of the age and to mix with other people who are 
also trying seriously to find out how the world is arranged. 
Concomitant with the rise in professional training has been 
the spectacular emergence of colleges as centers for the creative arts, 
not only within individual communities but also in the country in 
general. More and more the colleges have assumed responsibility for 
presenting art exhibitions, music, dance, and drama. Besides providing 
an essential service to their communities, they have served as models of 
what can be attained, and they have given many communities their first 
glimpse of modern art forms. 
Another vital role the colleges play is that of providing 
basic research in esthetic theory, and in exploring the relationship 
between the arts and the obviously connected disciplines of psychology, 
philosophy and history. That such research is necessary if sensibilities 
are to be expanded, if art forms are to be improved, and if experiment 
is to be useful rather than faddish is evident enough. It is also 
evident that a great deal more remains to be done in all areas of the 
art theory and that the associated disciplines of art criticism, art 
interpretation, and art sociology need further expansion. 
Perhaps as important as any of these functions has been the 
role of the colleges in general art education -- in what might be 
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called the training of an educated, responsive, and intelligent art 
clientele. General courses in such disciplines as art history, music 
appreciation, theater, and dance, along with basic non-specialist 
courses in the performing arts have raised the general level of 
artistic awareness and sensibility. The result of such education has 
been to diffuse into all communities a group of people, as yet a 
minority, who are vitally interested in the progress of the arts and 
who can furnish the leadership necessary for community projects and for 
the advancement of the arts in general. The current developments in 
community art associations and the burgeoning of special action groups 
are due in large measure to the effectiveness of college training. 
The progress that has been made over the past few years, 
particularly in the areas of college training and community activities, 
give reason for hope that the staggering problems that face art 
education in the twentieth century may be solved. Though the gap 
between a reasonable ideal and current practice is huge, most of the 
theoretical knowledge and much of the educational machinery for the 
solution of the problems is available. It may not be fanciful to 
suggest that we are on the verge of a beneficent revolution in 
American education -- of providing an education that actually meets 
the needs of contemporary civilization. 


The creative arts and twentieth century education

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The creative arts and twentieth century education

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