The Things I Hear About Arts Education

"YOUR MUSEUM HAS ENORMOUS POTENTIAL..."

The importance of arts, especially visual arts, in a balanced education is beyond dispute. There is plenty of evidence from cognitive neuroscience that our brain development depends on visual stimulation.

More than 50% of the cerebral cortex is
involved in the processing of signals from the eyes. (According an article in MIT's CogNet - in the Macaque monkey - but we are close cousins and likely the same).

The Things That are Heard above are largely from school administrators. This is understandable because it is coming from the top down: Harvard and MIT. For example, Marjorie Garber, director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, asserted that art at universities is what business calls a 'loss leader' because the major donors give to mostly science laboratories.

See article Link:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/10/05/higher_art?mode=PF
For an initiative that is coming from an art institution, it is very exciting to follow the very aggressive approach that has been coming from the Tate Gallery in London. Since 2006, it has received major grants and embarked on special programs in partnership with schools and universities in the teaching of visual literacy. Its 3-year experiment with students from underprivileged areas around London will be monitored and results in student performance reported. Its scholarly research in partnership with universities includes The Sublime Object: Nature, Art and Language. The concept of the sublime is examined through philosophy, literature, theology, music, film and science.

See Link: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/sublimeobject.htm

The museum is a natural place to initiate teaching in art because of its rich resource of visual material and literacy. We may call this horizontal learning vs hierarchical learning in our school and university systems.

"Your museum has enormous potential. And always will."

(from administrator making funding decisions about said institution)