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Dr. David Potter,
Commissioner, Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning
 What
I have to say today may seem far a field from the practical
concerns you face in your work. I'm hoping to locate the
arts within a much wider context. I also hope that as you
digest what I have to say, you will find it useful as a
basis not only to justify but also to inspire your work as
educators.
It's tempting to begin with a conclusion that the centrality of the arts to our lives is
self-evident. John Keats said it best in his poem Ode on a
Grecian Urn "Beauty is truth, truth beauty that is all ye
know on earth, and all ye need to know." In this view, the
path to truth is through the arts. Unfortunately, the
assertion does not convince everyone. Some wonder, for
example, if Keats actually saw this statement on a Grecian
urn. Perhaps he made the whole thing up. That's the
trouble with poets, you know, they tend to make things up.
And what of this proposed relationship between beauty and
truth? Some would say we have spent too much time on a
frivolous pursuit like beauty, ignoring the quest for
truth. Others would claim that we have spent too much time
on truth and not enough on beauty, that the arts have been
neglected for science, the emotional for the rational and
logical. That's part of what Id like to discuss today.
In many ways, I am
singularly unqualified to talk about the arts. As far back
as elementary school, I learned my limitations. For years,
my only blemishes on report cards were C grades in
handwriting and art. I did fare a little better with music,
taking piano lessons until I convinced my mother that sports
were going to make that a poor investment. I gained enough
skill to play hymns at my fathers church and the organ at
his street corner meetings, but even that is a fading
memory.
I do have one vivid memory
from my younger years, however, thanks to an elementary
music teacher. She gave me the thrill of my first live
music, taking our class to see the Philadelphia Symphony in
its gorgeous hall. It has been through this spectator role
that I have accessed the arts ever since, and that is how I
come here today.
I will qualify that, though. I prefer
to describe my affiliation with the arts not as a spectator
but as a voyeur, a more active, if slightly salacious,
stance. My interest in the arts is avid. I'm a fan, an
enthusiast, a zealous romantic. Some would say I've taken
that to extremes, romancing the artist as well as the arts.
It is true that much of what I've learned about the arts I
have experienced with and through my wife Pam, who is a
painter.
A second qualification to my spectator
claim: I'm an anthropologist, though one who has been a
full-time administrator rather than a scholar for more than
twenty years. I would say that during those two decades I
have practiced anthropology, as a participant and observer
in one of our most exotic cultures, academe.
But anthropology leads me
to search for an understanding of human endeavors in
relationship to our human roots, the ways in which human
behavior manifests our emergence as a distinctive species.
From this evolutionary perspective, I would identify two
fundamental capacities derived from our knowledge of the
fossil and archeological evidence that define our unique
adaptive capabilities. We are remarkable first for our
capacity for symbolic communication; second, for our skill
at making and using tools. We have refined these ways of
being in the world far beyond other species. Language and
technology are the building blocks on which we have
constructed our legacy, survived and prospered as a
species. And the flowering of these twinned forces is the
ground of our greatest human achievements.
The arts reflect and embody
these emerging human qualities from the outset. They use
our ability to symbolize, by creating forms and images, and
employ technology with their various tools of the trade
and materials. The earliest traces of Homo sapiens are
marked with cave paintings, reminding us of the depth of the
human investment in visual expression and the range and
power of symbolic communications.
What distinguishes our
ability to communicate from other signaling systems is the
freedom from immediacy, from being dependent upon direct
sensory stimuli. The qualities of displacement and
abstraction lend richness to our communications, providing
the wondrous gift of meaning to our lives. This gift
is especially connected to our fundamentally social
existence, and it highlights the inextricable link between
human existence and culture, through which our symbols are
developed, shared, accumulated, passed down and revised from
generation to generation. This cultural process is the
heart of human learning, the interplay between individuals
and their collective legacy.
In the same way, technology
is cumulative and progressive, drawing upon prior bodies of
knowledge while inviting innovations. Because of the
intimate relationship between science and technology, we
could say that both the arts and the sciences are central to
this prehistoric saga of human development, deeply rooted in
our survival strategies, present at the creation of our
humanness, and the foundation for our evolution through our
ancestors and into the future.
The physical organ most responsible for
these remarkable developments has been, of course, the human
brain. Its growth in the fossil record distinguishes us
from other species by its complexity. Its functioning is
marvelously attuned to generating, storing and manipulating
symbols and in coordinating the complicated physical and
mental activities associated with a technologically
sophisticated creature.
Recent research on the brain offers
insights about the relationship between the arts and human
learning. The mind appears to be comprised of a limited
number of faculties or modules, each specialized in a form
of information and each therefore carrying out a particular
kind of perceptual or cognitive task. These functions
likely correspond to specialized neural connections in
different areas of the brain. Modules have been identified
for a language system, a visual system, a motor system
tracking the body in space, and, interestingly, a system
associated with music. A central module integrates these
inputs into a unified understanding of the world and
formulates actions based on that conception. The brain
therefore employs many forms of intelligence, enabling us
to learn and to build a storehouse of knowledge based on
that learning.
In this account, not just the arts and
sciences but all disciplines are, of course, natural; that
is, they derive from human abilities and experience. In
reality, the concept of a discipline is an artifact of the
social organization of knowledge, most particularly academic
knowledge, though underlying these categories are profound
ways of making sense of the world. When we focus on the
arts as an original human activity, we are not trying to
establish a higher legitimacy or status for them, but rather
examining how the kind of thinking associated with the arts
contributes to human learning. The hard-wired modules
associated with language and with spatial cognition are a
good place to start.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger
reminds us that language was, for many centuries, spoken
rather than written. He observes that speech enables man
to be the living being he is. In his view, the speech of
genuine thinking is by nature poetic, though it need not
take the form of verse. He says, The opposite of poetry is
not prose; pure prose is as poetic as any poetry. The voice
of poetry must be poetic because poetry is the saying of
truth.
Heidegger extends this illuminative
function of poetry when he states: all art is essentially
poetry, because it speaks the truth. And poetry, as
linguistic, has a privileged position in the domain of the
arts, because language, rightly understood, is the original
way in which beings are brought into the open clearing of
the truth. As he puts it, the naming [through language]
is a birthing, and from that beginning the other arts are
born.
Heidegger reminds us that our symbolic
talents are not simply utilitarian or adaptive in the
primitive sense of survival. Instead, they enable us to
reflect on our own existence and experiences and, most
remarkably, to reflect on ourselves in the world.
Consciousness, including self-consciousness, adheres in our
being as well as in our doing. Our search for
meaning, through reflection, is essentially an artistic act,
an imaginative and creative response to the mysteries of
existence.
Consider a work of visual art in this
context. In one sense the work is a physical object in
space, a thing that we perceive through our senses. But
the art work is unlike other things that we make for use.
The art work instead evokes a world and seeks a meaning in
the world it portrays. It transforms the material, physical
world, not simply to represent or offer a likeness of the
objects it portrays but rather to present an opportunity for
reflection. I like Virginia Woolf's formulation of this
phenomenon. She observed that art is not a copy of the
real world. One of the damn things is enough. In this
sense, art is meta-physical, not just beauty but also
truth.
I warned you that I was a zealous
romantic when it comes to art. The play, the text, the
dance, the song, the painting, the sculpture-- works of art
have the power to illuminate, to transform our life into
meanings inaccessible through other forms of learning. In
Heidegger's words, "art brings the passage of the unknown,
the unfelt and the unsensed event into the realm of human
consciousness." The philosopher Arthur Danto speaks of the
expressive power of art. He defines art as the
transfiguration of the commonplace. Art lifts us outside
our routine thinking and asks us to see the world anew. The
artwork brings forth an interpretive view of the world for
our attention and reflection. In doing so, it connects the
creator-artist and others who receive it, participate with
it, and hopefully feel its power at work.
Its time to move beyond this somewhat
mystical perspective on the arts to ask what implications
this view has for teaching and learning, for our role as
educators.
First and foremost, I think it argues
for the arts as basic to a full understanding of the world.
That should influence our decisions about the curriculum.
We need to ensure that students of all ages experience the
literary, performing, and visual arts throughout their
educational journeys. Curricula ought to recognize that
some can benefit from this experience directly by doing
the arts, while others, like myself, are likely to gain more
through more voyeuristic modes.
Second, we might think of ways to take
better advantage of the pedagogical model typically used in
the arts to encompass other fields of learning. Usually,
arts pedagogy involves doing as well as thinking; i.e.
practicing the craft, with immediate feedback to the
student. At its best, it also includes dialogue about
historical and cultural contexts within which works stand.
This combination of experiential, active learning and
conceptual thinking is a valuable model for good teaching
and learning in all subjects.
The brain operates as a parallel
processor, holistically engaging thought, emotion,
imagination, predispositions, information processing and
other aspects of our learning systems. Our teaching should
provide activities drawing on these multiple paths and
manifold ways of learning. Immersing students in learning
environments that call upon several learning modes at once
can be enriching. Experiential learning is a beneficial way
to pursue this goal.
We also can draw upon the learning
processes associated with the arts to penetrate other
disciplines what might be termed an arts across the
curriculum approach. We can design learning experiences in
other fields that call upon and strengthen the mental
qualities so dominant in the arts. Art, for example,
emphasizes perceptual thinking, which is an inherent aspect
of productive thinking in all areas of cognition. As Aldous
Huxley observed, "What emerges most strikingly from recent
scientific developments is that perception is not a passive
reception of material from the outside world; it is an
active process of selection and imposing of patterns."
Creating learning strategies to stimulate perceptual
activities in all disciplines where feasible, and using the
arts as a point of access to other fields of knowledge by
incorporating visual and auditory elements into our
teaching, are fruitful approaches. This is best
accomplished not by using the arts as aids but as essential
modes of learning new materials. In doing this, we would do
well to keep in mind the caution of David Bronson, who said:
"quite apart from anything the teacher does the student is a
pattern-finder and a pattern-maker." Possibly the greatest
obstacle to make use of this principle is our ingrained
notion that education is the acquisition and mastery of new
material.
Another teaching and learning strategy
is to focus on the metaphoric dimension so evident in the
arts but also critical in other fields. Metaphor, like
perception, is pervasive in daily life, not just in language
but in thought and action. Our ordinary concepts are
fundamentally metaphoric and shape our views of the world.
As T. S Eliot wrote:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow.
Being attentive to metaphors we use in
our respective fields and drawing students attention to
their complex, many-layered meanings, can be productive and
rewarding.
In a similar vein, creativity in all
fields involves the role of personal engagement and
expression. Our teaching should strive to help students
relate material to their own lives. Class assignments using
personal narratives in responding to abstract subject matter
are an instance of this tactic.
An individualistic perspective also
recognizes that each brain is unique, in terms of its own
substance based on past experience, but also its capacities
for learning systems. Some of us learn more through
textual materials, others through visual, tactile, auditory
or other learning modes. Our teaching should strive to tap
these biological preferences through course materials
offering diverse forms of learning. This will enable
students to respond personally with their preferred ways of
learning and knowing while developing lesser abilities.
Finally, many people confront the arts
and other disciplines as spectators or audiences.
We teach mostly students who will not become professionals
in our fields. How can we fulfill the promise of our
respective ways of looking at the world even when our
students are not apprentices? David Perkins, director
of Harvard's Project Zero, celebrates the arts as a way of
developing habits of mind useful in all areas of knowledge.
He speaks of the minds hungry eye, which seeks meaning
through intuitive responses to perceptions. The
perceptual system engages in experiential thinking which
grasps situations through quick decisions about what is out
there. Artists capitalize on this by offering
provocative images which ask the eye to react in ways that
seek their meanings. Perception is typically
reasonable without reasoning, without conscious
deliberation. We use experiential intelligence to
extrapolate one layer of meaning using eye and mind.
But much of art, as with other
disciplines, is invisible to the quick takes of
experiential intelligence, which does not catch all there is
to be seen. To understand fully a work of art, we look for
meaning beyond technique.
For this we need reflective
intelligence, the mindful, self-conscious use of our
conceptual tools. We master a work only by cultivating
deliberation, analyzing, questioning, [and] making
connections. We need to give looking, or reading, or
hearing-- or any involvement with the arts time. While this
is good advice for contemplating language-based, visual or
auditory artworks, it also is an appropriate model for all
learning. What Donald Shoen has called reflective
practice inspires us to address learning holistically,
combining experiential and reflective ways to engage
materials.
As the arts show dramatically, the mind
is eager to engage in the search for meaning if stimulated
by challenging, evocative and novel materials if given the
chance and the tools to think broadly and deeply about
them.
Let us all make learning an artistic
experience, drawing on the rich legacy of the human species
and the human spirit. Let us follow Einstein's dictum that
no problem can be solved from the same consciousness that
created it. We must learn to see the world anew. As
teachers, we are entrusted with helping students to see the
world anew as well. In this sense, we can all become
artists. Thank you.
Dr. David Potter
October, 2003
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