Clutching the Lectern, or Shouting from the Back of the Hall? A Comparison of Modern and Postmodern Arts Educational Policy Originally published in Arts Education Policy Review 98, 4 (1997), pp. 27-31. Dennis Earl Fehr, Ed.D.

Introduction

In this paper I will share my understanding of modernism and postmodernism and how each shapes arts education policy. Personifying them for comparison, I suggest that modernism views the cosmos as binary. Hence, it regards postmodernism as its opposite. It sometimes sniffs at what it feels is postmodernism's brashness.

Postmodernism views the cosmos as interconnected. It regards modernism and itself as voices that sometimes speak in unison and sometimes in discord, sometimes politely and sometimes not. At other times another metaphor is more apt(1)—modernism still grips the lectern, but now it must contend with postmodernism's interruptions from the back of the hall: “Oh yeah?” “Yeah!” “Oh yeah?” Meanwhile, the audience watches modernism's knuckles grow whiter.

Unlike the linear approach of modernism, the approach of postmodernism is multifaceted, and hence makes room for modernism. Yet, modernist professors may resist the additional workload demanded by postmodern studies. Therefore, teacher training programs may continue to produce teachers who view the world from one perspective, despite the increasing localization of global politics within the school. Likewise, arts educators may not realize their expanding roles as facilitators of the general curriculum, or as cultural arbiters who filter through postmodernism's pan-cultural offerings to determine which artforms are taught and which are set aside.

Modernism

Modernism is associated with the emergence of democracy, respect for the individual over the group, belief in the supremacy of Western culture, the advent of global war, the belief that reason is a superior way of knowing, and the assumptions that psychology can explain behavior and science, the universe. The charge to the modernist school is to pass these precepts, intact, from generation to generation.(2)

In arts education, modernist thought is reflected in the work of Viktor Lowenfeld. In 1947 Lowenfeld published Creative and Mental Growth, in which he wrote against imposing adult arts knowledge on children. Teachers, he suggested, should create nurturing environments rich with art-making opportunities and insulated from the world outside the school.(3) As the education field moved `back to basics,' Lowenfeld's child-centered approach held sway within arts education. An outcome of this was revealed in visual art education when abstract expressionism emerged on the post-war art scene. Art educators, reluctant to impose adult knowledge, did not give their students the critical tools necessary to view this challenging new imagery. Hence, their students did not learn the vocabulary of abstraction, making their generation the first in modern times to be unschooled in the visual art of their own period.

The artistic expressions of Nonwestern cultures are often judged by modernists as aesthetically inferior to those of the European tradition. Note the token representation they are given in surveys of `world' arts histories. Modernists view the ranking of one culture's artforms over another's as a matter of aesthetic judgment. They feel that the artforms of these groups are properly categorized within anthropology, and properly excluded from arts education. Modernists privilege tradition over innovation, high art over popular taste, lecture over dialog, art over craft, and West over East.(4) They draw careful lines between the arts and the rest of culture (5) although, ironically, they cannot agree on where the lines are.(6) Modernists believe that wisdom is generated by producing valid answers. They suggest that truth is universal and they focus on its acceptance.

In modern performance arts, the fourth wall—that between performers and their audiences—is considered inviolate. Modernist educators see the space between them and their students as a `fourth wall' which separates their level of knowledge from that of their students. Their task is to pass on their body of knowledge—intact—to their students, in effect `raising' them so that they can see over the wall. Modernist arts educators such as Ralph Smith suggest that when the arts pursue a mission other than the epiphany of aesthetic experience, they degenerate into something less worthy, such as “mere politics.” (7) Smith later adds, “Marxism, feminism, and multiculturalism [are] fueled largely by political agendas. . . . And there is a question whether [a politicized art education] will really be art education.” (8) Modernist arts educators often prefer work drawn from European performance, literary, and visual art canons. Artforms which express barrio or ghetto experience, or Third World concerns, are deemed inappropriate for classroom study. And the woman artist's place is not in the classroom; it is in the kitsch-en.

The Transition

Perched on the tightrope between modernism and postmodernism, between the synod and the sanhedrin, is a pedagogical model called discipline-based art education (DBAE). The publication of Creative and Mental Growth prompted a steady stream of rebuttals which, although spoken from differing positions, were united in their call for academic content within arts curricula.(9) By the 1980s this call had crystallized into the discipline-based movement.(10) Although ostensibly a model for the visual arts, DBAE has influenced the curricula of arts education in general.(11)

DBAE offers a kind of content through its four arenas of study: history, criticism, aesthetics, and production. Three are Western constructions, reflecting modernists' belief in the supremacy of Western culture: Arts history developed as an academic subject in nineteenth-century European and American universities, as arts criticism was emerging to translate high art into language the public could understand. Aesthetics can be traced back at least to the Greek thinker Plato. Ancient Greece was the cradle of Western civilization, and modern arts educators feel that Western aesthetics provides sufficient bone on which students can sharpen their philosophical teeth. Modern aesthetic study rarely encompasses the beliefs about visual imagery held by Asian, African, Native American, or other cultures, perhaps because the construct of aesthetics is often incongruent with such beliefs. An approach to aesthetic study often used by modernist arts educators is that of cultural literacy, which includes familiarity with those books and works of music, dance, drama, and visual art labeled masterpieces by expert consensus.¹²

Supporters of DBAE are postmodern in that they call for connections between the arts classroom and the world outside it. In another way, supporters of DBAE attempt to be postmodern by promoting the inclusion of pan-cultural artforms. Considering that they view Nonwestern work through Western lenses, however, such outreach is problematic. Ironically DBAE has become popular as the Western arts community moves to embrace world arts, and as American public schools fill with children of all ethnicities. This observation prompts another: given that a function of the school is to meet the needs of all its children, and that modernist teacher training programs produce modernist teachers, it is increasingly important that the arts education professoriate broaden its curriculum to embrace postmodernism. Yet traditional art education professors, whose productivity is rooted in modernist soil, may avoid postmodernism with its daunting and often contradictory range of knowledge.

Postmodern Arts Education

Postmodernists point to the emergence of electronic communication, the spread of multinational corporations, political activism in the arts, pan-cultural public education, the bristling militancy of marginalized groups, the demise of the Second World and the free-market industrialization of the Third, as harbingers of a new era. But after scratching away the hoo-ha, do arts educators find anything new under the sun? In a word, yesindeed. Despite its youthful ebullience, postmodernism poses profound questions.

Postmodernists point out that reason, in addition to being an engine of human progress, has been used to construct arguments which led to slavery, the secondary status of women, and abuse of the environment. Postmodernists suggest that reason is to be understood as one way of knowing among others, such as intuition, imagination, and morality. They question the diminished status of these ways of knowing within the schools.¹³

In postmodern performance arts, performers penetrate the fourth wall by provoking their audiences to finish the story. So too do postmodern arts teachers provoke their students. They see their task as intermingling their knowledge with that of their students such that all parties arrive together at a new place.¹⁴ They honor the relationship between the arts and pan-culturalism, as well as the host of other -isms bridging the moat around once-isolated arts classrooms. They suggest that the abstract images, atonal compositions, and experimental theater of modernism are too inaccessible to feed an arts-hungry populace by themselves.¹⁵ Smith, commenting on modernism and postmodernism in arts education, correctly observes, “Those who have blamed modernism for an alleged indifference to social content have set up a straw man,” ¹⁶ but he fails to make the more profound point that the social content of abstract artforms is irrelevant when the society in which they were created cannot decipher it. Perhaps it is no surprise then that postmodern artists prefer narration over abstraction when they prod society's belly about social concerns.

Encasing arts education within the parameters of aesthetic experience is muzak to the postmodern ear. Postmodern arts educators believe that the arts can offer more than self-expression or DBAE disciplines. Andreas Huyssen states, “[I]t is time to abandon that dead-end dichotomy of politics and aesthetics which for too long has dominated . . . modernism.” ¹⁷ Postmodern arts educators feel that students of today should understand not only the arts of their own time, but the culture that produced them. They call for arts curricula to include scrutiny of the overt politics of postmodern artforms. They believe the arts not only can explain social ills—they can help cure them. They consider hierarchical judgments of cultural artforms to be grounded not in aesthetics but in politics. Through the arts, they suggest, students can learn that cultures other than their own may be different without being inferior. The modern notion that the artwork is a message from the artist/god is jostled by the postmodern notion that the artwork is a conglomerate of quotations cobbled together from countless corners of culture.

Postmodern arts educators not only question the notion of Western cultural supremacy, but also the layering of cultural privilege within the West. They point out that the omission of populist artforms within arts education generates hostility toward the arts within their students, and that student hostility is not the mission of arts education. They suggest that the ubiquitous expressions of commerce and entertainment—billboards, television, radio, movies, computers, advertising—reflect the values of culture writ large, however attractive or not. Because postmodernists believe that arts education should include cultural critique as well as aesthetic experience, they feel that popular artforms should be studied alongside the cherished masterworks of modernism. Judith Simpson writes, “[A] world of fine art that is outside life is meaningless.” 18

An approach to the meaning of art which is favored by postmodernists is critical theory, which questions the processes by which artworks are deemed masterpieces. It critiques the `line' separating the fine and the popular arts, the decisions over which works will be taught in the schools, and the determination of who will make these decisions.

Postmodern arts teachers hold that everything is complicated, that borders are artificial, and that knowledge is best acquired through synthesis. They seek to `de-proper-noun' our cultural constructions. Richard Rorty, for example, claims that the modern concept of Philosophy is no longer credible; isolation makes it sterile.19 In a spirited postmodern gesture, some arts educators apply this notion to the schools by calling for the removal of borders between subjects. They feel that such borders cause teachers of other subjects to regard arts classes as little more than recess-in-your-seat exercises which serve as curricular handmaidens. This view is reflected in comments such as these, taken from Anyschool USA:

• “People, we are going to have art with our geography. Each of you has crayons and a map of the fifty states. Color in the states. And what else did I say we would learn about art? Very good—neatness counts, and yes—stay within the lines.”

• “People, the curriculum calls for drama instruction, so—let's have Show and Tell!”

• “People, as we study our U. S. history today, we're going to learn music too. Are you ready to memorize the words to “Those Caissons Go Rolling Along?”

• “Third grade boys, form a line along the bleachers. Move it, move it! Now listen up.

Today we can learn how to dance—or we can play killerball! What do you want to do, waltzes with the girls, or play killerball?”

Such comments measure where modernists, despite their rhetoric, have placed the arts in daily school life. Postmodern arts educators insist that the arts are essential ingredients in a holistic educational blend, and rightfully placed at the center of the general curriculum.

Postmodernists feel that wisdom is generated less from producing the right answers than from formulating the right questions. They suggest that truth is specific to time and place, and they focus not on its acceptance but on its construction. Postmodernists are wary of the tidiness of modernist arts histories, in which each artist and movement has its own drawer. They call the entire chest of drawers into question. Who made the chest of drawers, and why? Who wanted to make it but could not get a job at the furniture factory? And is it only a chest of drawers? Is it even a chest of drawers? Is it furniture at all, or is that just a label intended to create a line between furniture and the rest of cultural production? And last, who sells the chest of drawers, who buys it, and how is the money divvied up?²⁰

From this emerges a new scenario. Power is shifting from artists to other players in the arts community: historians, who define the past; critics, who establish the present; and teachers, whose role as cultural gatekeepers is now being recognized.²¹ It is teachers who sift through the offerings of the art world and determine what students will view. The issue may now be less how this triumvirate can serve artists than how artists can serve it. Postmodern arts educators are assuming a mantle of power never worn by their modern counterparts.

An academic feature of the postmodern school is the likelihood that a given body of knowledge will be interrogated. Postmodern arts educators may devote class time not only to discussing information from arts history texts, but to questioning why the sections on Nonwestern artforms are so tiny. They ask George Preston's question: why, for every ton of earth excavated from Greece and Rome, has only a teaspoonful been excavated from sub-saharan Africa? ²² They critique the impressions of Nonwestern cultures created by airport gift shops, Tarzan movies, and tom-toms made of cardboard oatmeal cans.

Under postmodernism the term `art world' takes on literal meaning. In response, postmodern arts educators devote large portions of the curriculum to Nonwestern work. From their research they discover that in many cultures it makes no sense to box cultural expressions into categories such as music, dance, theater, and visual art. Nonwestern cultural production—what we call art—may involve ceremony, worship, dancing, costuming, music, color, movement, sound, and more—often all at once. Placing Nonwestern artifacts into Western museums under spotlights and expecting to understand them may be comparable to handing a tuba to a member of a Nonwestern culture and expecting the individual to conceptualize Ode to Joy.

What then is new under the sun in educational practice? After all, in 1932 Germain Dulac summarized modernism's avant-garde cinema as “. . . a renewed expressiveness of image and sound, [a] break with established traditions to search out new emotional chords [in the visual and auditory realm] . . . detached from motives of profit, march[ing] boldly on towards the conquest of the new modes of expression. . . .” ²³ In 1916 John Dewey suggested that arts education connect itself to the world outside the school.²⁴ Are there differences between such rhetoric and the rhetoric of postmodernism? Not necessarily. Apparently the education community of decades ago was not ready to hear their messages, whereas postmodern arts educators find much to love in Dulac and Dewey. They acknowledge the multiplicity of codes and conventions—whether of culture, class, or gender—operating within arts education. For our students to learn to honor them, we must expand the roles of groups connected to arts education.

We can accomplish these goals. As Huyssen observes, “[T]he landscape of the postmodern surrounds us. . . . It's our problem and our hope.”²⁵ When artists, professors, administrators, teachers, and parents link hands with children—and make room in the line for those white-knuckled hands gripping the modern lectern—we will usher the postmodern era into the schools.

Notes

1. Erica McWilliam, “Authorising Arts education: Fehr or Abbs/solution?” Australian Educational Researcher 22 no. 2 (1995): 121-124.

2. William Pinar and William Reynolds, Understanding Curriculum as Phenomenological and Deconstructed Text. (New York: Teachers College, 1992).

3. Viktor Lowenfeld, Creative and Mental Growth (New York: Macmillan, 1947).

4. Susie Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987).

5. Melvin Rader, A Modern Book of Esthetics. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978). Rader's anthology summarizes the views of a number of prominent modernists, including Bell, Freud, Hegel, Marx, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and Wilde.

6. For an illustrative comparative reading, see George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1924); and Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?, translated by Aylmer Maude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930).

7. Ralph Smith, “Building a Sense of Art in today's World,” Studies in Art Education 33, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 74.

8. Ralph Smith, “Problems for a Philosophy of Art Education,” Studies in Art Education 33, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 257.

9. See, for example, Manuel Barkan, A Foundation for Art Education (New York: Ronald Press, 1955); June King McFee, Preparation for Art (Belmont CA: Wadsworth Press, 1961); and Elliot Eisner, Educating Artistic Vision (New York: Macmillan, 1972).

10. Duane Greer, “Discipline-based Art Education: Approaching Art as a Subject of Study,”Studies in Art Education 25, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 212-218.

11. Marianne Jacks, professor of music education at the University of Houston, pointed out in a conversation with me that discipline-based models have become widespread in performing arts education programs. Houston, Texas, 12 February, 1996.

12. Eric Hirsch, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

13. David Elkind, 1995. “Society in the Postmodern World,” Phi Delta Kappan 77, no. 1 (1995): 8-14.

14. Ira Shor and Paulo Freire, A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1987).

15. Ronald Neperud and Don Krug, “People Who Make Things: Aesthetics from the Ground Up,” Context, Content, and Community in Art Education: Beyond Postmodernism, ed. Ronald Neperud (New York: Teachers College Press, 1995): 141-67.

16. Ralph Smith, 1995. “The Question of Modernism and Postmodernism,” Arts Education Policy Review 96, no. 6 (1995): 3.

17. Andreas Huyssen, “Mapping the Postmodern,” Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. L. J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990): 234.

18. Judith Simpson, “Constructivism and Connection Making in Art Education.” Art Education 49, no. 1 (1996): 56.

19. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

20. Dennis Fehr, Dogs Playing Cards: Powerbrokers of Prejudice in Education, Art, and Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 1993): 85.

21. Howard Becker, Art Worlds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

22. George Preston, African Art Masterpieces (New York: MacMillan, 1991): 6.

23. Germain Dulac, “The Avant-Garde Cinema,” reprinted in The Avant-garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978): 43.

24. John Dewey, Democracy in education (New York: MacMillin, 1916).

25. Huyssen note 18 above, 234.