art in school -- educating the audience

Art education isn’t all that important to future artists, since becoming an artist is an individual path undertaken by only an extremely small percentage of students who were going do it anyway. It’s important in a practical sense because those who do become artists are going to need an audience one day. It can be daunting to practice art when the public doesn’t know squat about it, and self-exile and isolation rarely come as a surprise. Can’t blame the public who seem to have very little grasp of history or geography as well, too bad, although some say knowing about art helps with those other subjects by increasing the ability to absorb and opening the mind. It’s a theory. 

There are impediments -- beyond the perennial lack of funding, the subject isn’t easily taught. In school art is divided up into separate realms and categories that confuse the young mind, any mind really. There’s the centuries old art in museums with religious themes and subjects no one cares or even knows about these days, and more recent art, divided into traditional art that looks like stuff and modern art that doesn’t. Good enough. A few hours on art in a school year won’t unlock every mystery, but doesn’t matter. Some percentage of students will start looking on their own and ultimately begin to think for themselves, one of art’s more common side effects. Then later, as they begin to establish themselves in life, perhaps they’ll recognize the value of owning significant works of art, significant at least to them, and carrying them along wherever life takes them.

Art should be taught in school because art is a tool every citizen is entitled to, one that provides understanding of self as well as a way to comprehend the world and other people. Art as a practice is about seeing, discerning, and understanding -- educational advantages in a world full of visual deception and false promises.