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Issue 10: |
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| Article 4: |
Art And Children's Questions by Peter
Kline Another article by Peter Kline, challenging us to engage in the art of educating, whether we are professional teachers, parents, or others whose mission is helping each other to grow through learning, and to help others to do the same. -- ED |
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On the subject of Einstein's genius, Edmund Blair Bolles had the following provocative comment: He said, "Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world." Whoa! Einstein knew he was over generalizing there; knew that many people ignore the world altogether and think exclusively about themselves, or they think not at all and simply act. |
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Maybe; but I think that Einstein, while generalizing idealistically, may
not have been over generalizing about how the mind was designed to work.
My experience has been that most people, once they are given a route into thinking about how to create an intelligible picture of the world, will jump at the chance. That's been my experience in tutoring illiterate adults, working with students who weren't doing well in school, and watching young children develop. A few days ago I went to watch two of my grandchildren perform in a recital. Grace played both the violin and the piano, Alex only the piano. I hadn't known that Grace was playing the piano, but her father explained to me, "We gave her lessons, because she was playing it anyway, and we thought she ought to learn about things like proper fingering." Both Grace and Alex played relatively elementary piano pieces with unusual gusto. But already their styles of performance could be distinguished from one another. (Not a thing you'd even think of trying to do with most children learning to play an instrument.) The recital proved to be a genuine musical event. Every child played with panache and a degree of sensitivity one doesn't always experience so uniformly at such events. One little girl, smaller than most of the others, played the entire first movement of a Vivaldi violin concerto familiar to me from professional recordings. The worst I could say for the performance was that the half-sized instrument was too small to produce the resonant tone one would want to hear, but the notes were all there, and more than that a sense of style and real excitement about performance. Grace's violin piece was not nearly as difficult, but every phrase was given its own interpretation, perhaps exaggerating the differences between them more than Grace will grow into doing, but certainly proving that to her, music is much more than the notes. It's how you feel about each of them individually, as well as all of them together. It requires a complete world picture of the individual piece you're playing. At the end of the concert I found out why everyone played so well, because the teacher performed a couple of Chopin pieces noticeably better than any of the recordings I have of those pieces. In fact, she played them so well that I immediately went home, read up on Chopin and developed a whole fresh interest in his music. There's no question that the children I heard play weren't just run of the mill kids off the streets. Their parents wanted them to learn music, and were willing to go to great lengths to see that they did so. Still, I've heard many such events where that was true and the results were scarcely to be appreciated as music. So it's more than just talent - which as we now know beyond question, can be taught. Any child can learn to stand up and play a violin concerto with a symphony orchestra. Some will inevitably do that better than others, but just how much depends on nature and how much on nurture? While inevitably both are involved, I think that education is the key, and not just the kind of education that teaches people how to do things. Education, as everyone knows, means "leading out of," not "putting in." A teacher's job is to elicit from you all that you're capable of; but, unfortunately, there's nothing about school as most people experience it that would suggest that's true. Education begins with the first question a child asks and the way the attending adult deals with it. Some parents don't believe it makes any difference how they respond to their children, and those children generally grow up educationally disadvantaged. Others, like Leopold Mozart, think it makes all the difference in the world how they respond, and those children grow up, so far as we know, far ahead of the game. What if education did the kinds of things that Leopold Mozart did for his son? What if it sought and always developed the teachable moment in a way that does not "put in" but "leads out" the genius hidden within the mind. I once attended a class led according to the program of Mona Brookes in which I was the only participant over the age of seven, and there were 35 of us in the class. I learned so much about drawing in three hours (the others were there for an entire week) that for two weeks I couldn't stop myself from producing more pictures. I finally had to bite the bullet and stop my little artistic binge so that I could get other things done. Feeling, in the process, like Berlioz forgetting a symphony he didn't have time to write. Recently I interviewed artist Phillip Ratner, who has developed a wonderful new method for teaching art to children. He gives them a progressive series of exercises as simple as things like "Draw three red circles and two green ones in this space." He told me that it doesn't matter much what the exercises are, only that they always produce results in which no two students will do exactly the same thing. The exercises pose a series of problems to solve, and as you make the decisions involved in solving them, you gradually build up your own vocabulary of artistic concepts and decisions (all derived from your own experience) so that you will be unable to give up progressing with your art. The reason I think that Einstein was wrong in practice but not in theory to think that everyone builds a coherent world picture is that children who are essentially driven away from the natural activity of questioning the world to find out how it's put together will often just give up and stop trying. That's why they won't bother to do anything but just react, or if they think at all, think only about themselves. We desperately need approaches to teaching that will guide children through activities that enable them to discover what they're capable of doing in all kinds of different venues. Once they have developed their own ideas about what makes sense, say, in medicine, or world peace or aerodynamics, they'll become frantically interested in what others think about those subjects and will soon become capable of educating themselves. This is something that could largely be accomplished in Kindergarten. So if all the Kindergarten teachers in the world got together and designed the ideal Kindergarten program, the rest of the teachers would never know what hit them, but would be forced to accommodate their teaching methods to the rows of geniuses lined up in front of them. Fortunately for them, but unfortunately for the rest of us, we don't have to worry about that happening anytime soon. |
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