Upon reading Chapter 2 of Dewey’s text, I’ve realized that perhaps not all of the chapters in Art as Experience will be of particular use/interest to me as a museum educator. As a result, I will be pulling out portions of his text that I have found most complementary to my current interests and studies.
Dewey begins Chapter 2 with the following quotation:
“The Sun, the Moon, the Earth and its contents, are material to form greater things, that is, etherial things—greater things than the Creator himself made.” -John Keats
Let's keep this on the back burner for a moment...
The main question under investigation in this portion of Dewey's text is why the attempt to make a connection between art (the higher, more refined things of experience) and the basic vitals of experience is often seen as a betrayal of the value of artistic creation (20). Why can't the fine arts be connected with common life without individuals thinking that the worth of the fine arts has been diminished? What is so harmful about connecting more developed forms of experience with its roots in the common?
As Dewey claims, "life is compartmentalized and the institutionalized compartments are classified as high and as low; their values as profane and spiritual, as material and ideal" (21). And, so it is with the world of art. Ultimately, this compartmentalization "brings about a separation of that mode of activity commonly called 'practice' from insight, of imagination from executive doing, of significant purpose from work, of emotion from thought and doing" (21). No matter which way you cut it, any sort of separation from the grounding forces of the "common" serves to inhibit the natural flow of life and learning.
Drawing upon this notion, Dewey relates a description of one's senses to the problem at hand. He states, "In much of our experience our different senses do not unite to tell a common and enlarged story. We see without feeling; we hear, but only a second-hand report, second hand because not reinforced by vision. We touch, but the contact remains tangential because it does not fuse with qualities of senses that go below the surface. We use the senses to arouse passion but not to fulfill the interest of insight, not because that interest is not potentially present in the exercise of sense but because we yield to conditions of living that force sense to remain an excitation on the surface. Prestige goes to those who use their minds without participation of the body" (21). Here is a tragic tale of a stunted growth caused by one's inability to connect more refined experiences to those basic in us all.
I was really struck by this statement for a variety of reasons, but primarily for what it can mean to those of us who strive to create the ideal learning environments for those we teach. What could our students be losing out on if we fail to connect the information we teach them to what they already know? This brings us back to an earlier theory of Dewey's expressed in Experience and Education that suggested that all knowledge in order to truly prove worthy must connect to the previous experiences undergone by the learners, a process that sows the seeds of life-long learning. I often wonder what the repercussions of our inability to make these connections with the fundamental qualities of life might be. If we don't connect the information we provide our students with those things that have gone before (those things that are basic in all of us), is there really any reason to teach? Why teach if what we teach is un-relatable? The heart of the matter is that information taught to our students only truly becomes alive and useful if tied to experiences already had. If we remember the inherent power of our students to transform mundane information into knowledge of extreme personal worth, how could we possibly ignore this as an imperative tool for educating?
Some great musings here Emily. I like the question of considering whether something can be un-relatable. When do you think this might happen? Where or how have you seen it happen in a museum? Do you think that you always have to have prior knowledge to connect, or can an experience become that knowledge that connects to the person in some way?
ReplyDelete