A Common Core for Education in the Arts?
Elliot Eisner
Stanford University
First, I want to thank the National Association of Schools of Art and Design for its
invitation to speak to you today. I have long been associated with arts education, but in the main,
my attention has been devoted to the role of the arts in the lives of the 52 million students who
populate American elementary and secondary schools. So I come to you, I guess in some sense, as
an outsider, even an interloper. I am interested in the ways people develop in and through the arts
regardless of age level or location and type of schools they attend. I am interested in the process of
education, a process that does not end until we do. How this process should be promoted, how it
can be promoted, the direction it could or should take, are issues that I very much care about.
The topic that I was asked to address is not an easy one. It is this: “Should there be a common curricular core for the visual arts in higher education?” As you may know, the current policy
push in American schools is for the design and implementation of a common curriculum in each of
the fields that schools teach. It is believed that such a curriculum will bring substance, indeed
rigor, to the quality of schooling. In addition, curricula are also to have standards for each of the
areas and grade levels being taught. Curricula that have standards are believed to have clear direction and, in addition, criteria through which the efficacy of educational programs can be determined. If you know what every student should know and be able to do at each level of schooling,
you have a basis for making a judgment about whether schools have been effective. That, at least,
is the fundamental logic of the reform movement.
Of course, the subtext of that text pertains to the idea that teachers and other educators will
be more highly motivated when they are held accountable for their students’ performance, and
accountability cannot be secured without a baseline with which to make comparisons both within
group performance and across groups that have been tested. Hence, there is now a bevy of tests
that have been produced to make it possible, it is claimed, to identify successful and unsuccessful
programs.
I provide you with this little scenario to describe the desire among those concerned with
educational quality to establish a common curricular core for students and to hold teachers and
administrators accountable for their students’ successful achievement.
I have never been much of a fan of bureaucratic mandates as a way to improve a system.
Educational systems are always considerably more complex, delicate, and yet, at the same time,
more robust than the policy makers understand. It is so easy for bureaucrats sitting in offices in
state capitols to mandate what every sixth grader should know and be able to do without having
stepped into a sixth grade classroom in thirty years.
Those of us who teach know through experience, often through difficult experience, that
each student is, when we are at our pedagogical best, a custom job. Yet there is at the same time an
attractiveness about identifying that something stolid underneath our progress and upon which
specialization and diversification can be developed. The problem, as I see it, is to try to identify
what is fundamental to a field if anything is, and to make sure that students have at least been
exposed to it. At the same time, I think everybody here would agree that the last thing one wants
coming out of schools of art is an army of students marching towards the same destination
according to the beat of a single drummer. We want, in other words, students to follow their own
drummer as they say. The problem is one of promoting individuation while at the same time
promoting a sense of integration.
When I was a student at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, we
had a foundation program. I don’t believe there was a question on anybody’s mind that the new
recruits needed to be artistically socialized by having to deal with open ended and often difficult
tasks that required some degree of technical skill and a high degree of imagination and problem
solving ability. This foundation program dealt not only with drawing and graphics, but with threedimensional form, photography, and with shelter design. It was not clear which students would
pursue which areas of the curriculum, but what was clear was that the faculty of the school
believed it was important for students to have a common core.
The same general rationale to curriculum decision making was expressed at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago, another institution I attended as a student. The foundation program at
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was quite different in spirit from what I encountered at
the Institute of Design. The School of the Art Institute was, after all, a beaux-arts institution.
Nevertheless, and maybe especially because it was a beaux-arts institution, that it had a heavy
emphasis on drawing, on painting, on design, and on art history. We were expected to learn how
to look in order to notice, we were expected to learn how to draw, we were expected to think about
design, composition, layout, and all the rest. All of this was to be a foundation for later specialization. Judging from the work of the most talented students in the school, the curriculum seemed to
work quite well. However, what is not clear since this was not a random field trial, was whether
those talented students would have done just as well with a different program. Yet, I had no
objection to what I encountered as a student. Indeed, I wasn’t thinking deeply enough about what I
should study to have an objection to what was being provided. It was a meal, and it was a meal
that I had the opportunity to consume, with great pleasure, I might say.
Thus, it is clear to me that a common core certainly can be defined, at least in principle, for
an individual faculty populating an individual art school. It is also possible that certain beliefs
could be articulated regarding what students should learn in a nationally accredited school of art
and design as a foundation for what is to come. I suspect that what I have described is not novel to
most of you. I suspect that most schools have a common core for at least a part of the time. I
could, of course, be wrong in these assumptions and in the discussion that follows, I expect that I
will be corrected if my assumptions are erroneous.
I also need to remind myself that I attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1950 to 1953,
and the Institute of Design from 1955-1956. There has been a lot of water under the bridge. We
are living in different times. Indeed, it is because of the differences in the time at which we live
that this question about a common curriculum core was raised in the first place. For some aestheticians, our conceptions of art, at least the conceptions of art that have long dominated modernism,
are over. Art is supposedly dead and something else is taking its place, although I must confess I
don’t know what that something else is. What I do know is that forms of work are being explored
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with a no-holds-barred mentality. This is to say that since Marcel Duchamp, we have been
engaged increasingly in an activity that has as much to do with ideas that form implies as much,
perhaps more, than attention to qualities of visual form as such. If you’re not in on the ideas, the
work is likely to be an enigma. I am reminded of Tom Wolf’s book The Painted Word, in which he
speculates that theory has become so important in post-modern art that museums will in the future
have very large placards explaining the theory needed to decode the work. What he said we were
coming to was a situation where in museums in which you have very small paintings adjacent to
huge explanations. Artists have been exploring forms that impose new challenges to percipients.
In a sense, old assumptions will no longer do. Beauty is a casualty and it seems almost quaint to
talk about beauty as a feature of a painting, a sculpture, a print. Conceptual art is often lean in
character, something that feeds the ideational within us rather than the sensory from which many of
us have secured so much pleasure. Given the shift in orientation from the visual to the ideational,
is there a place for a foundation that is common? Can we legitimately talk about a common core
when the assumptions that are employed in the making of art seem so radically different than they
once were?
Now I recognize that there has always been shifts in the formal features of work in the
visual arts over the centuries and that the purposes and intended audience have also shifted. Yet,
there is something similar in the ways in which a work is read, whether by Velasquez or Vermeer,
or even from Picasso’s cubist period. There is a sensuous surface that one can relish and it was, I
think for many of us, the taste secured from relishing the experience that works of art afforded us
that provided the deep satisfaction secured from paying attention to them. And for some, of being
able to create works that provided such satisfactions for others.
Today we tend to be much more preoccupied, at least the elite do, with a message. We
want to make a comment about a state of affairs and that comment often trumps the qualitative
considerations that went into works made in the past.
The point of my remarks thus far pertain to a kind of dilemma that I experience when I
think about the topic I have been invited to address. I confess to you my sense of uncertainty. I
confess to you my sense of unease in trying to find a happy reconciliation for a tension which I
think is very real. That tension pertains to the desirability of fostering what is creative, imaginative, and surprising. Works of art, like works of science, have as one of their functions surprising
those engaged in that work. Works of art and science provide the conditions through which new
forms, new ideas, new perspectives, new explanations, new qualities can be made visible and
shared publicly. Such an orientation to creative work does not seem to fit well with an approach to
curriculum and teaching which assumes that everyone needs the same diet.
And yet, diets can and in fact do share common features. We need not cook up individual
meals for every student. The provision of a common set of tasks having similar goals can be
addressed in very different ways. Again, when I was a student at the Institute of Design, we were
asked to solve problems that made it possible for every student in that foundation class to arrive at
a solution that was distinct and, indeed, even unique. In short, the door was wide open for the
pursuit and development of our own individuality even though the program of expectations was
common across students. Such curricular features are, I think, of fundamental importance in
building a program for students who are expected to come up with ideas that are innovative, dare I
say creative. What diminishes students’ development in the arts is an imposed set of expectations
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that impedes ingenuity by holding forth a set of criteria that the work is to emulate. That is
precisely what is wrong with so much of what is going on in the elementary and secondary school
with respect to curriculum reform. Students respond to what they reportedly had learned by filling
in a bubble sheet which can be machine scored. I don’t think we want machine scoreable
outcomes coming out of art and design schools.
So perhaps the tension about which I spoke is easing up a bit, but then again, perhaps not.
Perhaps it is alright to build a program that has common tasks in a foundation course, but which
permits multiple solutions, diverse interpretations, distinctive perspectives in addressing the
problems students are asked to deal with. Maybe it is possible to have our cake and to eat it, too.
Thus far I have been discussing the tensions in the idea of a common curricular core largely
from the perspective of the arts. That, I suppose is to be expected. But it is important, also, to raise
the question as to whether or not the common core should include academic subjects. Should the
study of history be required? Should students have a course in aesthetics or in philosophy in
general? Should the history of science be examined? Should students be required to read and
discuss literature? Are there assets to such exposure?
Perhaps a part of the answer to those questions rests on our conception of what school of
art and design are expected to do. To what extent, for example, do such schools have an interest in
the general education of the student? Are such schools essentially and for all practical purposes
professional training institutions? And if they are, does a broad knowledge of the fields I have
identified contribute to the quality of thinking that someone is able to do in his or her own art work
or in his or her own appreciation and understanding of art? Put another way, should a common
curricular core include academic subjects or are we talking only about knowledge and skills related
to the creation and perception of art? How wide should the scope pf our curriculum be?
Now curriculum decisions, like most decisions in life, do not come without trade-offs. The
more time is devoted to what we might call academic subjects, the less time will be devoted to art
making activities or to activities concerned with the perception and understanding of art per se.
That kind of a question is precisely the kind of question that a faculty might deliberate. I can tell
you that my own inclinations are to lean towards breadth rather than narrowness in focus. The
ability to solve visual problems and the ability to create works that have significance are not only a
function of technical skills and refined sensibilities, they are also a function of the kind of conceptual thinking that one is able to do that pertain to issues that people care about or could care about.
Put more simply, I believe that a broad education is not a waste of time.
So now we are talking about a common core curriculum that not only includes what
students should know and as they say be able to do in the visual arts, but what they should know as
a part of a general liberal education.
The University of Chicago where I also went to school provides such a program to its
undergraduates. The canonical image of Chicago’s teaching practice at the undergraduate level is
an oval table around which twenty students sit with one professor and a primary source document.
When they read Herbert Spencer, they read Herbert Spencer, and not about Herbert Spencer.
When they read Aristotle, they read Aristotle. There is, of course, good reason for this kind of
initiation. The messages that writers convey are not only a function of the literal or near literal
meanings that they attempt to express, they are also a function of the forms that they use to say
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what is on their mind. This is, of course, a lesson that the arts teach most vividly. The distinction
between content and form evaporates in the arts. How something is said is a part of the content of
what is said. Thus, reading primary source material and being engaged in a dialectic discussion
about the meaning of a passage or the import of the whole is part of the content to be learned.
I mentioned Chicago and the features of its pedagogy because one should not assume that
the content of a text taken on its own is sufficient. The function of a good teacher is not simply to
cover the material but to uncover it. This uncovering process in dialectical forms of pedagogy
engages students and challenges him or her in ways that are often surprising. Can schools of art,
and again, perhaps you already do, provide such a program as a part of its core? Would students
take to it? That, I think, will depend not so much on the material that was selected but on the
quality of the teaching that is provided. Discussion about a curriculum core without attention to
the way in which it is mediated is likely to lead to disaster.
Let me comment on teaching.
Teaching is something that many artists simply have to do in order to survive. Their art is
what they create on canvas, in stone, through the cathode ray tube, in neon, in stainless steel.
Teaching is simply what one is obliged to do in order to receive the payment one needs to live and
to create art.
I have little sympathy myself for such an orientation to teaching. Teaching itself, when it is
done well, is an art form and I would argue that the more those who teach understand that, the
higher quality the education is likely to be. Painters who teach are also teachers who paint, and
recognizing and refining artistry in one’s teaching is, or at least ought to be, a part of what it means
to be on a faculty of a school.
Can you get your faculty to consider artistry in their teaching? What does it entail? How
can it be promoted? What is its significance in the large picture of the institution’s mission? To
the latter question I would respond by saying, “everything.”
When I was a student of the School of the Art Institute I must confess that I had some
teachers who prided themselves on how little they could say about the work that students were
doing. To be able to verbalize was for some, a kind of cardinal sin. Being mute in the presence of
a student is no asset. But then again knowing what to say and when is the crucial issue. It is this
timing, this sense of rightness of move, that matters most and like any art form, it is teachable to a
degree. But that, of course, would require an investment in taking teaching seriously. By taking
teaching seriously, I mean making teaching a public commodity. Teaching ought to be a practice
that people can share. We have many opportunities, at least in principle, to learn from each other
about how teaching might proceed. The tragedy is that all to often teachers lead professionally
insular lives with hardly ever having had opportunities or to see their colleagues in action and to
learn from them about what might be done in one’s own classroom. The point here is important,
but not profound. If a common curricular core is to have any significance in any school whatsoever, the quality of teaching that mediates it must be attended to. By “attended to”, I mean that the
school has to make it clear that teaching does matter and that one project that the school embraces
is to set up conditions through which those who teach have access to each other’s teaching
practices.
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I am sure that for some teachers this will be seen as an invasion of privacy, but I would
argue that classrooms are not boudoirs and that we have a responsibility to students and not only to
those who teach them. It is important to say to faculty that teaching matters and that an investment
will be made in its improvement.
Where does this all lead us with respect to a decision about a common curricular core for
schools of art and design? One place it leads us is the recognition that on a school-by-school basis,
such a core already exists. The examples that I used from the Institute of Design and the School of
the Art Institute provide testimony for the existence of a common curricular core. Whether it is
feasible and desirable for schools as a whole to share a common curricular core remains to be seen.
To the extent to which schools of art and design embrace different educational philosophies it may
very well be the case that a common core shared with those whose perspectives are fundamentally
different is not at all feasible. But this is a matter of debate. Second, it leaves us with the idea that
whatever common core exists, its efficacy will depend fundamentally on the quality of teaching
that mediates it. The quality of teaching can be improved if institutions of higher education assign
it a priority and if they develop relationships in which faculty can have access to each other for
purposes of observation and at times emulation. There is no reason why teachers should be
isolated. If Luciano Pavarotti can use a voice coach, I guess those of us who teach can use a
teaching coach as well.
A third consideration pertains to the academic side of the ledger. I raise the question about
attention to academics. My own view as I indicated is that such attention, even though there is a
tradeoff with respect to time, is in the long-term best interests of the student. What goes into art is
not limited to matters of technique but matters of perspective and understanding as well. To the
extent to which perspective and understanding is deepened and made more complex through
academic studies, it can contribute to the quality of the work that is done.
I am sure you recognize that the issues that I have identified are highly nuanced and complex. They require the collective judgment of faculty and input from students. There is no true
answer to any of the questions that I have raised. What one seeks is not truth, but right action,
what the Greeks called phronesis. The fact that the organizers of this conference identified this
topic as central to its deliberations is, from my perspective, reassuring. The problems we are discussing are at base philosophical, practical, and speculative. They reside at the core of educational
purpose. It pleases me no end that such a heady and complex topic would be the arena in which
your deliberations will take place. I hope my comments will stimulate what could well be a very
productive debate. Thanks again for inviting me.
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