The Art Textbook

I over heard a student say,”Hey, remember to bring your Art text book along!”

An art text book? That’s like trying to teach people to be creative. Oxymoron.

In all of my years pursuing my interest and studies in art and design, other than art history, I’ve never used an “art text book”. Naturally, I was furiously curious about what these art text books are about.

You see, when I was a elementary school student, we had art classes, and music classes and physical education classes. We drew and made stuffs in art classes. We learnt how to read music scores and some instruments in music classes and we learnt and played sports in physical education classes.

Today, in Taiwan’s elementary education, they jumbled up art, culture and music in one lump. There’s no distinct art or music classes. They are now the same. So you don’t have a teacher who’s well versed in art, or music, or “culture”. You have a teacher who knows nothing only to be enabled by the presence of a text book. If you can read, you can teach art, music and culture, because you can just read the text book to the kids.

The same goes with physical education. It’s lumped together with hygiene class. So the teacher doesn’t need to know any sport. He/she now has a text book to follow and it’s up to him/her to decide how the class will spend their time. In class or outdoors.

We have a sports equipment room full of basketballs, footballs, badminton rackets and soft base ball bats. We also have three brand new table tennis tables and tons of new rackets. We also have a mid-sized grass field and a nice basketball court. Yet, I rarely, if ever, see teachers teaching the students about any sport other than baseball (Baseball team). All those basketballs and footballs and badminton rackets are locked up behind the door all the time. It wasn’t until this semester that I decided to teach the kids English starting with basketball that the kids started to actually play basketball on a basketball court. It was a riot but everyone had fun.

Back to the art text books. I borrowed the mysterious text books from a teacher to see it for myself. The text books includes both art and music contents, as well as introduction to certain cultural activities, but it’s lacking. Why is it lacking? It’s lacking the most most important aspect of arts learning- experience.

Arts and crafts, music and definitely culture are not what you can learn from text books. These are to be experienced with emotions, with direct interaction between body and mind. Art and music are essentially forms of expressions. It comes from within, not external. For a child, whether it is art of music is irrelevant. They should have the freedom to choose whatever ways to express themselves, and the important thing is not about the tools, but their confidence.

The text books includes famous works paintings and sculptures. It’s not a history text book so it’s not trying to make students memorize anything, but it puts students minds into pre-built frames that defines what’s a painting, what’s a sculpture, what’s fine art, what’s classical etc. Kids don’t need to know these adult bullshit. They just need to know that it’s ok to crush crayons into pieces and smear it all over their papers as long as that’s what they want, and that they clean up the place when they are done.

What’s the use of telling kids that “New York City is full of high rise buildings, rude people and foul smell” when they don’t even get to go to town that’s only 7min drive away because their parents are working in another state to raise enough money to feed the family? Oh and the info is probably out dated represented by only one image and a paragraph of after thoughts.

Why can’t we use multimedia and do video conferences with other countries’ school children? Technology is what we have, for cheap!

If it is so damn necessary to have printed literature as learning tools, why can’t the school order National Geographic, Lonely Planet, Times Magazine and/or Newsweek and talk to the students about what’s on these constantly updated magazines?

“Art text book” to me is the concrete evidence that the world is run by morons as decision makers who doesn’t know what the fuck they are doing, so people who don’t know what the fuck they are doing can avoid telling the kids,”Opps, sorry kids, teacher has no idea what art is.”