Art Education

The old approach to writing American educational history has been to shape the report so that all things seem to be moving in an upward trajectory towards some far, far better day. The quaint past was shrouded by the historian in a miasma of superstition. Public schools, advocated by noble and forward-looking heroes (and, rarely acknowledged, heroines), were the stairway to an enlightened future that would be among the metaphorical stars. Progress, these writers believed, was evident-it was predestined.

Thus, Frederick Logan wrote an art education history titled The Growth of Art in American Schools ( 1955). The title has a message, although a close reading of the book reveals that Logan had many doubts about predicting a necessarily rosy future for art education. While he knew that learning about art was not just a matter of school study, the hope of the future seemed to be in schools. Logan 's book implied increasing sophistication in art programs in the schools and suggested a future that had to be good and less troublesome than the past.

In 1989 Elliot Eisner presented an address (later published in the 1992 The History of Art Education: Proceedings from the Second Penn State Conference) in which he questioned how history research contributed to the field of art education. The presentation was titled "The Efflorescence of the History of Art Education: Advance into the Past or Retreat.from the Present?" With such a title, it may not be surprising that Eisner's view of art education historical research was not overly warm. "Efflorescence" has an aura of luxuriant bacterial growth, of fungi on a very dead and rotten creature, the implication being that historical writers are like maggots on the decaying and useless corpse of days long dead.

Eisner set up one criterion for what constitutes worthwhile research in educational matters. These problems addressed must be defined at the outset of research.