The issue of how
the studio arts could contribute to a liberal arts education is not something
that Dewey addressed in his long career.
This is surprising since he had an enormous impact on educational theory
in his early and middle years, and an equal influence on aesthetics,
particularly with respect to the visual arts, in his later years. Moreover, on a practical level, he and his
writings had a notable impact on the role of the studio arts in liberal arts
education through his effect on various colleges and universities with which he
was associated. Notable in this regard
was his impact on those at Black Mountain College who were reshaping our notion
of the liberal arts as something that would strongly incorporate the visual
arts. John Andrew Rice, the director of
Black Mountain, was strongly influenced by Dewey’s educational theory, as was Josef
Albers, one of the leading visual art teachers there. Dewey was even on the Black Mountain advisory
committee and visited on at least two occasions in 1934 and 1935.[1]
Black Mountain was a liberal arts
college with a special emphasis on the arts, and it had great influence through
such figures as (this list includes both faculty and students) Anni Albers, Ruth
Asawa, John Cage, Harry Callahan, John Chamberlain, Robert Creeley, Merce
Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Elaine de Kooning, Robert Duncan, Buckminster
Fuller, Suzi Gablik, Paul Goodman, Walter Gropius, Franz Kline, Gwendolyn
Knight, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Motherwell, Beaumont Newhall, Kenneth Noland, Charles
Olson, Arthur Penn, Robert Rauschenberg,
Dorothea Rockburne, Ben Shahn, Aaron Siskind,
Stephen De Staebler, Cy Twombly, and Peter Voulkos. Dewey also had an influence on art education
through his close association with Albert Barnes and the Barnes Foundation. Even today a large portion of the secondary
literature on Dewey’s aesthetics appears in art education journals.
Today, Dewey’s fame
is most closely associated with his educational theory, which was mainly
directed to K-12 schooling. So, those
who were influenced by Dewey in visual arts education at the college and
university level were mainly making inferences either from his educational or his
aesthetic theory. Of course there are some general points that
would apply to higher education as well as to K-12: for example, Dewey was widely known for
stressing active learning over rote memorization. His emphasis on hands-on activity would make
studio teaching and practice particularly relevant to his notion of liberal
arts education. He also sought to overcome prejudicial
distinctions between vocational and skills-based learning on the one hand and
book-learning on the other. And of
course he strongly associated education with the promotion of democracy.
But today if we
are to find inspiration in Dewey on the role of the studio arts in liberal arts
education we should look mainly to Art as
Experience (1934). Only this work provides the theoretical
basis for a strong pragmatist reading of the arts upon which can be based a re-evaluation
of that role. I will begin with a review
of Dewey’s directly stated views on the liberal arts and on the relationship
between the studio arts and the liberal arts, and then will go over some of his
views in Art as Experience that are relevant
to our concerns here.
Central to our
investigation are the passages in Democracy
and Education (1916) that deal with play, imagination and fine art. Chapter 15, “Play and Work in the Curriculum,”
is particularly relevant. There, Dewey stresses
that both play and work should be incorporated into school activity. (Again, this is directed to K-12, but may be
extended to higher education.) Dewey
observes that, already in the classroom, “[t]here is work with paper, cardboard
[etc] …” employing such processes as cutting
and folding, and using such tools as hammer and saw. He also mentions ”[o]utdoor excursions,
gardening, cooking, sewing, printing, book-binding, weaving, painting” etc. and
argues that the educator should “engage pupils in these activities in such ways
that while manual skill and technical efficiency are gained and immediate
satisfaction found in the work, together with preparation for later usefulness,
these things shall be subordinated to education – that is, to intellectual
results and the forming of” what he calls “a socialized disposition.” (106-7)
In Chapter 18, on “Educational
Values,” he goes further, arguing that “[a]n adequate recognition of the play
of imagination as the medium of realization of every kind of thing which lies
beyond the scope of direct physical response is the sole way of escape from
mechanical methods in teaching.”
(237) For Dewey, “imagination is
as much a normal and integral part of human activity as is muscular
movement.” (237) Imagination allows for the translation of
symbols into direct meaning. When play
activities “develop in the direction of an enhanced appreciation of the
immediate qualities which appeal to taste, they grow into fine arts.” (237) It
follows that the function of the fine arts is the enhancement of qualities that
make ordinary experiences appealing.
(238) They are the main means for
achieving “an intensified, enhanced appreciation.” (238) Their purpose, beyond being enjoyable, is
that they fix taste, reveal depth of meaning in otherwise mediocre experiences,
and concentrate and focus elements of what is considered good. In the end, the fine arts are “not luxuries of
education, but emphatic expressions of that which makes any education worth
while.” (238)
In his chapter on “Labor
and Leisure” Dewey addresses Aristotle’s conception of a liberal arts
education. Aristotle distinguishes between
useful labor and leisure, where the second is privileged over the first (253). Dewey
believes this prejudicial distinction is still dominant today, as also the
related distinction between liberal education on the one hand and professional
and industrial education on the other. (251)
He agrees with Aristotle on some points, for example, joining him in
rejecting as mechanical whatever renders the student unfit for the exercise of
excellence. But, unlike Aristotle (and
the Greeks in general) he holds all men and women to be free. (255) He
also rejects the idea that it is natural to separate production of commodities
and practical achievement from knowledge.
(256) The thrust of his analysis
is to retain the notion of liberal education and yet free it anti-egalitarian Aristotelian
assumptions.
An Opinion piece
in the New York Times by Michael S.
Roth, titled “Learning as Freedom,” has recently returned to Dewey to explore
the issue of the survival of liberal arts education today. Roth observes that “[a] century ago, organizations as varied as chambers
of commerce and labor federations backed plans for a dual system of teaching,
wherein some students would be trained for specific occupations, while others
would get a broad education allowing them to continue their studies in college.
The movement led to the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, which financed vocational
education, initially for jobs in agriculture and then in other industries.”[2] The
Smith-Hughes Act (which was applied mainly to high school education) stressed
isolation of vocational education from other aspects of education. Dewey
publically opposed the act because he believed it would exacerbate the
inequalities of the time. Although he
recognized that there will always be distinctions between managers and
subordinates, he believed “the great thing for one as for the other is that
each shall have had the education which enables him to see within his daily
work all there is in it of large and human significance.” In short, students should not be reduced to
mere tools. He put his argument in terms
of what we would today call a progressive critique of relations of production,
writing that, “[t]he kind of vocational education in which I am interested is
not one which will ‘adapt’ workers to the existing industrial regime….” Roth also stresses that, for Dewey, liberal
arts education was a matter of learning how to learn. As Dewey put it, “[t]he inclination to learn
from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in
the process of living is the finest product of schooling.”
Roth correctly observes that Higher Education
faces stark challenges today as well. He
notes “the ravaging of public universities’ budgets by strained state and local
governments; ever rising tuition and student debt; inadequate student
achievement; the corrosive impact of soaring inequality; and the neglect by
some elite institutions of their core mission of teaching undergraduates.” In a Deweyan spirit he insists that “learning
in the process of living is the deepest form of freedom. In a nation that
aspires to democracy, that’s what education is primarily for: the cultivation
of freedom within society.
Dewey’s Explicit Statement
on the Liberal Arts
In his 1944 piece,
“The Problem of the Liberal Arts College, ” Dewey sought to re-define the
liberal arts in terms of the notion that an art is a liberal art if it is
liberating. This was intended to free up
the liberal arts from traditional lists of disciplines that did not, for
example, include the practice of creating visual art (although he does not
mention this), and also from what he considered an outworn identification of
the liberal arts with the linguistic, the literary and the metaphysical. We should bear in mind, for the sake of our
discussion here, that Dewey’s re-visioning of the liberal arts in this essay
did not come from his work in aesthetics but from his conception of scientific
method. He believed that previous
theories of the liberal arts were based on the notion that knowledge is based
on intuition of essences by pure intellect, a view that he saw refuted by the
scientific revolution. He also reiterated
his opposition (expressed, as we saw, in Democracy
and Education and in his objections to the Smith-Hughes Act) to the
separation of the liberal from the useful arts which, in the past, was based on
the notion that the useful arts were mere matters of routine. However, now, with the technological
revolution, these arts are much more closely allied with the scientific
revolution. Moreover, he believes a social
revolution has occurred in which the useful arts are no longer simply
associated with the menial class.[3] Dewey’s main method of analysis of the
liberal arts is to situate a need for a new definition within the reality of
changing social conditions. He sums up
the issue in this way: “The problem of securing to the liberal arts college its
due junction in democratic society is that of seeing to it that the technical
subjects which are now socially necessary acquire a humane direction.” They can only be “liberating” if they are
connected in important ways with humane sources of inspiration. Similarly, the literary arts can only be humane
and liberating when not cut off from the world of the technical. As he puts it, “The present function of the
liberal arts college, in my belief, is to use the resources put at our disposal
alike by humane literature, by science, by subjects that have a vocational
bearing, so as to secure ability to appraise the needs and issues of the world
in which we live.” Dewey would often
defend liberal arts education by relating it to the idea that science and the
scientific method should be utilized for the welfare of mankind.[4] However, again, this says little about the
role of studio arts in a liberal arts education. For this, one needs to turn primarily to
Dewey’s Art as Experience.
Earlier, in the 1930s, Dewey had become involved
in a debate over the nature of higher education with Robert Maynard Hutchins,
President of the University of Chicago. [5] Hutchins had published The Higher Learning in America, which Dewey reviewed. Hutchins argued for pursuit of truth for its
own sake, making a strong distinction between liberal and vocational education.
Dewey, by contrast, believed that
education should liberate students to prepare them to be good citizens. For Hutchins, as Lisa Heldke puts it, “[t]o
pursue truth requires one to do nothing less than abandon one’s efforts to
develop the roles that define our human lives.” But, for Dewey, as Heldke also nicely states, and
I quote here at some length, “[k]nowing ….must be understood as always emerging
from, and responding to, a particular context—a time, a place, a problem, a
situation. Knowing, furthermore, has both “instrumental” and “consummatory”
facets—it aims at solving identifiable problems, and it is also potentially
beautiful and worth contemplating. ….The human activity of knowing is a
complex, indissoluble mesh of consummatory knowing “for its own sake” and
instrumental knowing, pursued for the sake of accomplishing some practical,
concrete, or vocational aim.” For “abstract
understandings regularly present themselves as useful solutions to all sorts of
ordinary, day-to-day, practical problems we humans encounter.” As we saw in Democracy and Education, Dewey believed that the sharp division
between liberal and servile arts in the Greeks and in Aristotle need to be
replaced in our contemporary democratic vision of the liberal arts.
Art as Experience as the Key
By the time he
wrote Art as Experience Dewey was
engaged in transforming the notion of experience itself. He did this in a way that would reconstruct our
very notion of knowledge and thus of what higher education could and should be. Whereas his previous writings, and even his
1944 piece, mainly featured the role of science in knowledge production, Art as Experience placed emphasis on the
arts… to the extent that, in many respects, the arts came to be treated as
equal to the sciences. The notion of
empiricism itself is expanded. The unique quality of esthetic experience is a
challenge to philosophy, for aesthetic experience is “experience in its
integrity” and, Dewey argues, the philosopher must go to aesthetic experience
to understand what experience is.
It is also a
challenge to traditional notions of the liberal arts. It is my view that the role of making and
materiality in the liberal arts can only be fully understood once we understand
the full implications of Dewey’s closely related concepts of experience and
medium. Dewey’s conception of “an
experience” as it relates to artistic making and appreciation can be best
understood in terms of his understanding of the creative process. Materiality plays an important role in this,
especially, again, through the concept of medium. The creative process works in a cyclical way,
where the artist draws from the public domain both subject matter and materials,
processes this through his or her imaginative activity, and then puts it back
out into the world. Art involves
intensification of experiences of everyday life achieved through expression
using materials in a medium designed for one of our senses, each art form
focusing on a different organ of sensation.
For example, the visual arts develop their media for the perceptive
eye. The creative process is dominated
by a pervasive quality which first emerges in the inception of the work, and
which evolves to the point at which the artist perceives the work as
completed. But, as I have suggested, the
creation of the product is not the end of the creative process. It continues in the reconstructive perception
of the viewer.
Materiality enters
into this in several ways. First, the
subject matter comes from a shared public world. As Dewey puts it, “[c]raftsmanship to be
artistic …must be ‘loving’; it must care deeply for the subject matter upon
which skill is exercised.” (49) He connects this closely with the idea that
the work must be based on an experience of the artist’s own and must be framed for receptive
perception by others. Second, the
materials themselves, for example paint and canvas, and the artist’s activity
on them, form the medium of the artistic process. Third, the artist herself is a material being
insofar as she is conceived as a live creature interacting with her
environment. Fourth, the product is a
material thing, although imbued with meaning.
Fifth, the creative process is actualized in the experience of the audience
which itself exists in social context in a publicly shared world. Sixth, as with Marx, this materialism is
closely associated with a democratic impulse that seeks to overcome a social
system that alienates the common man.
Seventh, as with a later Marxist, and contemporary of Dewey’s, Walter
Benjamin, this all is directed towards overcoming the discontinuity between
rarefied fine arts and the experiences of everyday life.
Dewey’s overall
approach, then, is materialist. But it
is not physicalist. He does not reduce
the material world to discreet physical objects interacting with each other in
a mechanistically organized world.
Instead, his materialism is deep and rich, so much so that it can easily
be confused with a form of idealism.
Part of this is because of the importance in his mature thought of the
concept of experience. But Dewey does
not take experience to be something merely internal. To understand what he means by experience we
need to understand what he means by “an experience.” “An
experience” is a type of experience. It
is distinguished from confused or incomplete experience in that it is an
organized whole with a natural beginning, middle and end, and the
above-mentioned pervasive quality. He
mentions, as examples, the experience of a great storm, the breakup of a
friendship, and a restaurant meal that sums up all a meal can be, but it should
be clear that every appropriate experience of a good or great work of art is
“an experience.”
An experience is
not a subjective or ideal entity, but neither is it merely describable in terms
of material causal processes. Experience
is a function of the live creature interacting with her environment. When we have “an experience,” which, again,
is the high point of experience, the past is drawn into the present and
projected into the future. We have here
something in which the end is a culmination of all that went before. The dynamic relation of past, present and
future in “an experience” gives the creative process a quality of going beyond
what we immediately see, one that makes crude or mechanistic materialism
impossible.
An undefined pervasive quality binds together
all the defined elements, making them a whole. Evidence for this is the
immediate sense of relevance of the parts to the whole. For Dewey, “A work of
art elicits and accentuates this quality of being a whole and of belonging to
the larger, all-inclusive, whole” which is the universe. This is why we feel a great clarity and even
religious feeling in front of an esthetically intense object. We experience a “world beyond this world
which is nevertheless the deeper reality of the world in which we live” and
this carries us beyond ourselves in such a way as to find ourselves. The
work deepens “that sense of an enveloping undefined whole” characteristic of
normal experience, and this is felt as an expansion of ourselves. Unless we are egoists, we are “citizens of
this vast world beyond ourselves” with which we can feel unity. Many of Dewey’s readers saw this almost
religious way of talking to be a betrayal of his naturalism and his commitment
to a science-based view of the world.
However, it might better be seen as consistent with a manner of
materialism based on an accurate understanding of human experience true not
only to our material being to the way we experience the world as material
beings.
Imagination plays
an important role in this dynamic process.
It is not, for Dewey, an isolated faculty with mysterious potency. It too is material in the sense that it
exists where “the mind comes in contact with the world.” (278) It is present when old things become new in
experience. Esthetic experience is
imaginative, but then all conscious experience has some imaginative
quality: in all experience, at least all
that is live, meaning come in from prior experience. And experience is only human when meaning and
value, drawn from what is absent, are present imaginatively. The artist uses imagination to draw from the
past and project into a future culmination.[6] Imagination,
then, should be distinguished from mere day-dream which is arbitrary and
fanciful. It is perhaps most evident in
art. For in works of art, as opposed to
non-art experience, meanings are embodied in a material as medium. Imaginative quality dominates here. The work of art, “unlike the machine, is not
only the outcome of imagination, but operates imaginatively” through enlarging
and concentrating experience. As Dewey
puts it, in art “the formed matter of esthetic experience directly expresses
…the meanings that are imaginatively evoked…”
This is not only true for the art creator: the work of art also challenges the
experiencer to a similar imaginative act. Thus, as Dewey puts it, “Imaginative
vision is the power that unifies all the constituents of the matter of a work of art….”
[1]
Dewey wrote to Black Mountain College “I hope, earnestly, that your efforts to
get adequate support for Black Mountain College will be successful. The work
and life of the College (and it is impossible in its case to separate
the two) is a living example of democracy in action.
No matter how the present crisis comes out, the need for the kind of work the
College does is imperative in the long-run interests of democracy. The College
exists at the very ‘grass roots’ of a democratic way of life.” Füssl, Karl‐Heinz. "Pestalozzi in Dewey’s
Realm? Bauhaus Master Josef Albers among the German‐ Speaking Emigrés’ Colony
at Black Mountain College (1933–1949)." Paedagogica Historica, vol.
42, no. 1/2, Feb. 2006, pp. 77-92. 81.
[2] Michael S. Roth, “Learning as Freedom,”
Opinion Pages, NYT, Sept. 5, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/opinion/john-deweys-vision-of-learning-as-freedom.html
[3] We
should of course beware of identifying the fine arts with practical
vocation-based arts. Although Dewey saw
a continuity between these he did not erase all distinction. Many advocates of the fine arts practice as
part of the liberal arts might insist that these arts gain this status
precisely by being less practical and more cerebral than the vocational
arts.
[4]
See for example Janean Stallman, “John Dewey’s New Humanism and Liberal
Education for the 21st Century” Education
and Culture Fall 2003 20:2 http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1463&context=eandc
[5] Lisa
Heldke “Robert Maynard Hutchins, John Dewey, and the Nature of the Liberal
Arts.” The Cresset: A Review of Literature, the Arts and Public
Affairs, 2005 (Vol LXIX, No. 2, p 8-13) http://thecresset.org/2005/Heldke_A2005.html See Dewey “The Problem of the Liberal Arts
College.” Vol. 15 of John Dewey: The
Later Works, 1925–1953: 276–280.
[6] See his sophisticated non-idealist theory of
imagination pp. 277-286.
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