SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

“yes well, to be sure they all missed the point, but perhaps none as badly as you.
THE PROBLEM
To echo St. Francis, colleges of education have missed the point (and, in a larger sense, society
as a whole seems content to allow, condone, even approve of this untenable state of affairs)!
They have tried to produce technical, professional teachers following misinformed ideas of
objectivity and misunderstood efforts at pragmatism and have virtually ignored the fine arts and
humanities in their efforts to prepare elementary and secondary teachers. In some ways, it is
almost as if schools of education suffer from some self-inflicted inferiority complex. They want
to be viewed on an intellectual par with the natural sciences and so “they continue to behave as
though there is such a thing as ‘objectivity’ and, moreover that the only subjects admissible in
the academy are those that are measurable, quantifiable, and unentangled with messy emotions
and transitory enthusiasms” (Smith, 1990, p. 284). And in the oddest of paradoxes, they
continue this behavior despite the findings of some of the most noted natural scientists. Nobel
prize winning physicist Walter Heisenberg’s idea of the “uncertainty principal”, the notion that
pure objectivity is an illusion because a researcher’s own predispositions always alter the
“object” of an experiment, is accepted by most natural scientists today (Smith, 1990). In fact,
Smith (1990) notes that many prominent natural scientists seem to follow the observations of
physicist James Trefil (author of The Dark Side of the Universe) who states that most important
scientists are rarely those pure objective creatures who believe something only after laboratory
replications “ad nauseam”. Instead, they believe that beauty, elegance and simplicity have a
natural place in science and that an idea must bring a spark to the soul if a true scientist is to
accept it. Many teacher education programs have ignored the ideas of the arts and humanities
and have therefore lost the ability to bring a “spark to the soul” of teacher and student alike.
Just as education has been the last institution to hold to Logical Positivism’s principal of
verifiability, it has also been the last to let go of the “objectivity as truth” myth. The effort to
prove (verify objectively) that “we are as good a profession as anyone” has caused teacher
education programs to ignore the fine arts and humanities because they do not generate
objective data to justify their existence and also actually to discourage students from engaging
in the arts and humanities because there is no time to work these esoteric topics into a
curriculum designed to produce “professional” (specialist) teachers. The tragedy, the absolute
crisis indicated here is the idea that those fine arts and humanities that we so cavalierly ignore
might just be the very things that provide the aforementioned “spark to the soul”.
This steady infiltration of the specialized and occupationally oriented material in
teacher training programs has produced a decimating erosion of the general philosophical
topics of a liberal education, especially those concerning the fine arts and humanities in
teacher education programs (Brubacher, 1965). The elective curriculum popularized by
Charles Taylor at Harvard subjected the design of liberal education in teacher training
programs to the sentimental values of the students rather than to the intrinsic values and ideas
espoused by the fine arts and humanities. Early on there were educators who found flaws in
such an “elective system”. Chase (1993) notes that as early as 1912, Alexander Meiklejojn
called the elective system “a kind of intellectual bankruptcy. It is an announcement that
(college teachers) have no guiding principles in their educational practice, no principles of
selection in the arrangement of study, no genuine grasp of the relationship between knowledge
and life” (p. 24). Such a curriculum in teacher education certainly further encouraged students
to concentrate on their “likes” and also on those courses that they felt were more closely and
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