Art for life and work. (Editor's Comments).

Last fall, I did some volunteer work for a friend's congressional campaign. For several weeks, I went door to door to speak with voters in communities throughout the congressional district. Surpassing health care, gun control, and abortion, the two biggest concerns voiced by voters, regardless of party affiliation, were quality of education and quality of life. The key word being "quality."

There isn't time in a door-to-door campaign to discuss issues in detail, but after several hundred homes, you certainly begin to identify with the general sense of loss that voters, in a cross-section of neighborhoods, are feeling--a loss of quality in work performance, a loss of responsibility to the environment, and a loss of concern for others. And you sense that people look to education for restoration of these lost values.

With this experience of a congressional political campaign under my belt, I began to wonder what I might have said to those same voters, expressing those same concerns, if the door-to-door encounters had been an advocacy campaign for "Art for Life and Work." What would I want the brochure left with the voters to say? For starters, here are some key concepts I would hope to get across.

We live in a society that is dominated by visual images, designed objects, and complex structures that affect the natural order of our environment. To live successfully, participate fully, and contribute positively in this visually oriented world, we all need to understand and evaluate the meanings and purposes of the whole range of visual forms we encounter on a daily basis. Quality art education programs teach us to discriminate among the mass of conflicting visual messages and to increase our potential for communicating with visual images. They help us to understand the roles and accomplishments of image, object, and ritual makers throughout time and around the world, and to appreciate the richness of global cultures.

Increasingly, in the contemporary world, designed works are the products and results of creative and collaborative processes involving mediation between individuals. Well-taught art programs cultivate students' sensitivities to work effectively in groups and to work well with others. As they understand the personal, social, cultural, and historical dimensions of artistic production, students learn how to participate in a democracy.

The responsible teaching of art engages students in productive work habits involving inquiry skills, organizational abilities, creativity, and critical thinking. As students construct knowledge of their visual world, they take responsibility for their learning and acquire skills of self-discipline.

Responsible teaching of art encourages students to refine and extend inquiry by observing, questioning, comparing, selecting, classifying, constructing support, analyzing perspectives, and abstracting. As students engage in improved habits of mind, they acquire skills to help them act confidently, independently in finding solutions to important problems.

Design processes develop abilities to respond rapidly to the unexpected, to deal with the element of surprise, and to recognize and pursue goals that were not obvious at the outset. As students develop their abilities to assess and shift aims in process, they learn to reflect on the quality of their performance and to set and achieve personal goals.

Under the guidance of a certified art teacher, students learn that problems can have multiple, appropriate solutions and questions can have multiple, acceptable answers. As they learn that good things can be done in different ways, they come to understand the value, diversity, and complexity of making responsible choices throughout their life.

The study of art increases visual sensitivity and develops the ability to visualize situations and tasks--to consider, in the mind's eye, the rightness of planned actions. As students come to realize that small differences can have large effects, they pay attention to the nuances and subtleties of performance.

The study of art is important, not only because it improves learning in other subjects, but because responsible teaching of art--including reflective interactions with design, the built environment, and visual culture--accomplishes things that cannot be achieved quite as effectively in other subjects.

We at SchoolArts believe that the study of art is basic to a comprehensive education. It strengthens positive attitudes toward learning and develops performance strategies central to life and work. It helps students to identify and solve problems more effectively through the manipulation of visual, as well as verbal and numeric symbols. It helps students think clearly and feel deeply. After all, art is an essential human experience.

Now all of this is too much to expect disinterested parties to read, and far too distant to persuade the anxious voter to support art in our schools. Maybe the better thing is to hand the voters a copy of this issue of SchoolArts. For we believe that the articles are solid proof that the responsible teaching of art can be interdisciplinary, thematic, conceptually based, and socially relevant. We hope you will agree that they are clear examples of art for life and work.