About myself: I’ve already implied that I am an artist and this is true. I am also very much concerned about the future of our school children and the public school system. Frankly I believe a near revolution in curriculum / instruction is required (if it hasn’t begun already!). No, I do not merely mean to acknowledge that NCLB hasn’t worked. Nor do I merely acknowledge that the arts are not represented fairly in all schools. Nor do I mean to suggest that painting or throwing clay will kindle innovation for tomorrow’s industries. What I do insist is that visual literacy should stand squarely in the center of literacy itself. And that therefore, we can justify saying that in the least visual concepts and vocabularies can play a larger role in instruction independent of incorporating the visual arts as a discrete discipline. Let me state for starters that drawing a simple line is at once an indication of a particular understanding of relationships. Drawing a meaningful line is an indication of a greater understanding that relationships themselves can be seen across all disciplines and not just within the periphery of a picture frame. I contend that we can reinstate a classical sense of graphic skill and visual literacy to their proper place amongst reading writing and mathematics in this very way. Every step we take as educators should be as versatile and flexible as possible... even to the point of following an unanticipated development spawned by students themselves!
I also contend that teachers should not be constrained to a regional much less a national standard of testing. How else can we achieve an exemplary diversity of innovations if not by a variety of methods and passionately engaged unique teachers. The next few decades must become an era of experiment and diversity otherwise all we’ll get is more of the same―the same approaches to the least amount of sterilized content. In other words we need to scrap the constraint of political correctness, both left and right (excluding of course racism or gender bias).
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