Research in Visual Arts Education - Bilderlernen.at

FROM PSYCHOLOGY TO SEMIOTICSIn Education through art, published in 1943, Herbert Read presents his radicalvision of the role of art in school and modern society. He insists thatour instincts and vital energy should be educated instead of suppressed.“Destructiveness,” Read (1943, pp. 201 f.) warns, “is the out come of unlivedlife.” The role of parents and teach ers should be to help in hibited and anxiouschild ren to become more open and secure, and “education should have noother aim than to preserve within us some trace of the penetration and delightof the innocent eye. (Read, 1945, p. 111)”Inspired by this philosophy, the young Swedish art teacher Jan Thomaeusdeclared that “the best art teachers are the laziest, since they don’t cause anyharm.” In a first mani festo, writ ten with Gösta Kriland in 1945, Thomaeus isoutraged, among other things, by a booklet on how to draw “Pigs,” to be followedby a series of booklets depicting “Cats,” “Dogs,” “Rabbits” and “Horses”.These booklets are not a joke, Kriland and Thomaeus (1945) complain:Unfortunately, they are meant to be taken in dead earnest . . . There is no end of thoseoval pigs and cir cular chickens that prospective art teachers have to draw on the blackboardas a norm for students. . . . When this system is introduced as the one and onlyway, creating ‘or der’ for the anxious little nitpicker and bureaucrat in a chaotic world, . .. this will neces sarily result in narrow-mindedness and impoverishment. This dogmaticjudgement: that is what a pig looks like, that is what a chicken looks like, then a leaf, etc.simply means that we put blinkers on the child and thus stifle her own fresh enjoymentin discovering the world (p. 12).Any system will end up in a blind alley if it is looked upon as “the one andonly way”. However, Thomaeus goes on to criticize every approach to drawingwhere the idea, the initiative and the design do not emanate fromthe child herself. Not surprisingly, drawing as a method of reflecting uponlocal history, geography and folk lore lost its appeal as “free creative activity”emerged as the new paradigm in art education.Drawing a pig, not to mention a “real pig”, was no longer considered amean ingful problem. If a student, nevertheless, was occu pied with prob lemslike this, she came under suspicion of being an “anxious little nitpicker.”Accord ing to a survey in the 1970s students who were not convinced ofthe benefits of “free creative expression,” and therefore ran the risk ofbeing labelled as rigid, usually came from a blue-collar family background(Pettersson & Åsén, 1989, pp. 19 ff., 256 ff.).In the late 1950s the new paradigm was the established way of thinkingabout art edu cation. In the 1962 Compulsory School Curriculum (Lgr 62),the concept of “free crea tive activity” is heavily emphasized. According toNORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION 39