Art Education-A Treasure or a Tool?
INFLUENCING POLICY AND EDUCATION REFORM
Should arts education be looked at as a treasure, or as a tool? Is arts education an en to be pursued for its own sake, or is it a means for more general education goals? Is its value primarily intrinsic, or instrumental? The way policy makers answer these vital questions will fundamentally determine the size, shape, and direction of arts education programmes in a country's school system, and thus indirectly affect the work and careers of many of us.
Although I am not an arts educator as such, I have been both an educator and an artist, and because of my academic background in philosophy, and my work background in policy, I am happy to be able to share with you the lessons I have learned over the years and hope that this information is of use to those concerned about the role and place of arts education today.
Allow me then return to the initial question above: Is arts education a treasure or a tool? While there is much debate, in reality, of course, it is both. So it is important to make this clear to decision-makers as they will form their strategies based on the information they are provided. If we convince the policy makers that arts education is both a treasure and a tool, then the policy and curriculum guidelines that emerge will reflect this.
In some situations it may be best to treat the arts and culture as a treasure, particularly when it comes to government ministries. For example, in the Philippines , before reforms were made after the collapse of the Marcos regime, the arts and culture were part of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports. Education ate up 95% of the resources, to the neglect of culture, including the neglect of the national museum and library and of historic monuments. Reform of the ministerial structure led to the creation of the Commission of Culture and the Arts, with a coordinative framework and a more effective policy environment. These changes enabled better support for artists and greater prominence for the arts and culture in Philippine society.
When it comes to art in education, the issue may be more complex. The debate over the role and place of arts education is part of a wider debate over education systems in general. There is an increasing sense of frustration among today's educators regarding the fact that education systems and programmes of study remain stubbornly unchanged while the world around us changes rapidly. There is a sense that education is supply driven: directed by teachers who have subject matter expertise that they will deliver to their students whether relevant or not, rather than being demand driven: providing students with content that is more appropriate, perhaps using new methods, in today's fast-changing, interdependent world. Curriculum planners, rightly or wrongly, are often the focus of criticism; they are reminded that their brightest students, with the highest academic grades, are often not the ones that are the most successful, and that the successful people often acquire their traits and skills outside the formal curriculum. In response to this criticism, there have been education and curriculum reform movements in many countries throughout the Asian region.
The place of arts education in a programme of study has become the subject of intense debate in these reforms. Those who valiantly defend its intrinsic value as "treasure", struggle to increase, or at least maintain, the already limited percentage of classroom time devoted to arts education. They argue that plans to integrate arts education into more general subject areas like "social sciences" or "holistic living" and vague and risk disintegrating arts education rather than integrating it. These art educators would rather have a visible, even if small, territory of their own.
Others point to the failure of an overloaded curriculum with too many subjects and too little time for each subject make any impact. They make the analogy with fertilizer, which when spread on top of soil is much more visible to the eye (and noticeable for the smell) but which cannot achieve its true value until it is mixed with the earth and becomes invisible. It then allows all other things to grow and develop. Hence the wave of interest in integrating arts education into other subjects, locating both the design and evaluation of arts education programmes within larger subject categories, and decentralizing curriculum and arts education planning.
The tide of reform around the region favours the second view, and there are examples in Malaysia , the Philippines , Vietnam and Korea of such reforms. Some of these countries have taken to heart the essence of the Jomtien Declaration on Education for All, which states that the purpose of Education For All (EFA) is to meet basic learning needs, and if one does not clarify and articulate these needs to assure relevance, it is not good basic education. These countries have been further guided by the Delores Commission, which lamented the fact that past education has focused too much on learning to know and learning to do, and not enough on learning to be and learning to live together.
Theoretically, these premises should help areas like arts and aesthetic education, values education, self-esteem, cultural identities, and tolerance and peace education. In reality, however, although much said about arts education and these other subjects being important and how they should permeate the entire curriculum, in actual fact there are very few cases where that has been achieved effectively.
In order to point out the hazards in any reform programme, allow me to share with you a case study from my personal experience with education reform.
In preparatory studies conducted by the Philippine Presidential Commission on Education Reform of 2000, of which I was the Chair, among the many findings was that Philippine public school teachers were among the best formally educated and credentialed in Asia, and yet produced among the worst-performing students of the region. Further analysis showed that the problem lay not in mastery of subject area, but in four key result areas in which teachers were chronically weak: analysis, creativity and flexibility, computer literacy, and values education. Consequently both in-service and pre-service teacher training programmes shifted to focus on these areas.
At the same time, a fundamental curriculum revamp took place, leading to the New Basic Education Curriculum of 2002. The major thrust of this design was to streamline and simplify an overloaded and over-compartmentalized curriculum, and to change to a more participative and relevant pedagogy. Subjects were clustered into five major categories, English, Tagalog (the national language), mathematics, science, and, the largest one in terms of time allocation, "makabayan," or "citizenship" in its holistic and comprehensive sense.
Under "makabayan" were grouped arts education, music, health, civics, physical education, etc. This change met with much controversy and debate, not least from the teachers affected. Specialists in music education, arts education and physical education felt very threatened and believed they would no longer have their own area to teach, and would have to expand their capacities quickly and dramatically. It did not help that specific implementation strategies to integrate these were left to decentralized and local decision makers.
Theoretically, this reform should have resulted in a more coherent, relevant programme, fueled by greater inter-disciplinary activity and team-teaching, but resistance to change and an insufficient number of successful role models for this, in a centralized bureaucracy, continue to create problems to this day.
From this example and experience with other reform processes, it is evident that there are several areas that need to be addressed in any reform effort:
• Influencing policy makers: My experience is that timing is crucial. The rhythm of a reform effort is rarely within the control of the administrator, but once launched it is important to for us to ride the wave and intervene at the appropriate times. It is also important to build allies, most importantly the media and public attention, in a team effort to influence policy makers.
• Clarifying learning outcomes: If arts education is to be demand driven rather than supply driven, it will be necessary to undertake a rigorous exercise of identifying learning needs and then translating them into desired learning outcomes. It is easier to sell the need for something than to sell the product itself.
• Teacher training: Policy change, even curriculum change, is ultimately effective only if it is accompanied by a systematically-planned teacher training and reorientation programme. In the inevitable tide towards inter-disciplinary approaches, the effectiveness, or even survival, of a vigorous arts education dimension will depend on team-teaching, and team-planning of curriculum modules, which demands significant capacity-building.
• Innovation observatories: In bureaucracies where new approaches are often discouraged rather then promoted, it would be immensely useful for ministries to institutionalize a mechanism to encourage innovation in such areas integrative or successful arts education. It would also be of great use to then methodically disseminate information on this and provide examples of success stories so as to provide guidance for others. Such innovation observatories, or watchtowers, can play a crucial exemplary, and even advocacy, role.
By drawing your attention to these examples and issues, I hope to provide you with information and ideas so that you are able to influence policy makers and reform efforts so as to ultimately give arts education the place it deserves within our educational systems.
