art ed

I'm actually kind of glad I got the opportunity to post this late. Over the weekend I was able to have a conversation with someone based on what was said in this article, and this is what I was able to gather.
The article was able to put address the things we are constantly working towards in our impending careers, which is teaching people not just skills in artmaking but also how to interpret and perceive art. To teach people how to think is, in my opinion, so much more complex than teaching them a skill alone. Training the brain and eyes is almost as nerve-wracking as trying to help a 3-year-old master how to cut paper properly with scissors.
In being able to speak to one of my friends this past weekend, she herself studied art for nine years, yet went off to study Electric and Computer Engineering in college, eventually switching to Math. Her reason? because she felt Math was teaching people how to see things, and had such a similar approach to that of how people perceive art. As she went along in her new program, she realized that there were many different solutions and ways to get to the solutions. She felt like a "robot" in her engineering courses, and felt that even the people around her could never understand why she felt so deattached from the work. She credited this to being given leeway to create more, even if it wasn't art, she was given the ability to see things differently.
One thing that stood out to me the most in the article was the section speaking about instilling a sense of critical thinking. It's a skill that will frankly carry one further than they think in life, and critical thinking in art is almost one of the strongholds where people can practice this. Somehow along the way, students became more concerned with wanting to get the better grade rather than being concerned with how their work was executed to the best of their potential. Although I see one's point in that teachers are only allotted a certain amount of time to complete their lessons and meeting up to standards, etc., perhaps this influenced too much into how we teach students to this day. Although students today seem to be so well-informed on certain issues, somehow they still are unable to name certain artists and identify their work.
Somehow I'm hoping that people will still continue to root for Art Education in America's educational values system. These skills don't lie in the great things they can present for anyone that attempts to learn them.