PUPIL INTERESTS VITALIZE THE HIGH SCHOOL ART CURRICULUM.

A DYNAMIC concept of art education demands a hook-up of pupil interests in the ever-changing and growing curriculum. To make our art courses vital, we should feature the phases of art which interest the high school pupil, offering varied classroom activities which relate closely to life experiences. Our concern is to connect the experiences of pupils in school with the uses of art in everyday life, giving them the essentials of good art planning for life needs, such as in the home, garden, clothing, neighborhood, city. We know that appreciative understanding is an experience for the pupil. Time allotted to appreciational opportunities should be proportionate to their importance as a major objective in art education.

* Dr. Judd says, "It has been the contention of the art educators that pupils learn to appreciate by being trained in the production of art. The school has aimed to make pupils discriminating in enjoyment of art by giving exercises in art. The difficulty with emphasis on production as a means of cultivation of appreciation is that teachers lose sight of the real purpose of production and make it an end in itself." The report on art instruction of the National Survey of Secondary Education shows that too much pupil time is allotted for the development of skills. Mr. Hilpert explains in this report that curriculum content and standards should be based on the needs of all pupils, and not on the abilities of a few talented pupils. He says that there is need for increased opportunity to use tests and measurements to estimate imaginative and creative capacity, because these qualities rather than skill and technique are essential for art expression and appreciation.

* What high school pupils enjoy and like is a legitimate guide for art lesson content, and the curriculum maker should always plan subject matter based on pupil interests, needs, and abilities. Fifteen years ago John Dewey quoted Rousseau as having said, "The whole of our present method is cruel, for it consists in sacrificing the present to the remote and uncertain future." Dewey was a pioneer in realizing that the aims based on subject matter which was expected to function in the pupil's adult life are not vital. He saw the pupil, rather than the subject matter, as the center of education, and he saw educational aims in terms of the development of the capacities and needs of the pupil.

* Today, the aims of art education relate to present interests and needs. This education will give the power to feel, think, will, and act in vital relation to life. Bobbitt explains that the curriculum should give pupils the chance to live fully and the ability to produce in practical ways. It should unfold the potential nature of the individual. Education is not a matter-of-fact learning, but is a reconstruction of experience to meet a new need. Art in education means a creative activity. Mere exhibition of development of pupil skills in technique is dangerous. Mere drawing of the imitative sort is questionable. Of first importance is the pupil's interest and impulse to draw, to compose, to objectify his feelings through art. Principles of art should be discovered through experiences in working with the imagination, and the environment. Outlines and courses of study are now more flexible, allowing teachers freedom to focus attention on the pupil as an individual, so that whatever is done means something to him, and he will be able to see advantages in his mastery of every lesson. This is easiest when interest is centered on life needs.

* The International Exhibition of Children's Paintings held in New York, and later seen on tour of the larger cities of America, was studied by those interested in art education as creative expression. It represented the first international group of paintings by children which had ever been assembled, the pictures having been secured from forty different countries. All of the pictures most emphatically show the effect of recent social changes on the life interests of children, and demonstrate the readiness with which they turn to their environment for inspiration. One fascinating picture in the exhibition was painted by an eleven-year-old Mexican boy who never had instruction, but whose paintings are in important private collections.

* True art education should engender an appreciation of the world's artistic inheritance, and an evaluation of all things of art values. High school art teaching should cause pupils to be conscious of proportion and symmetry to the degree that they will not pass by unnoticed or unappreciated any evidence of design or construction of superior quality, for pupils should be led to evaluate their surroundings to the end that good taste and art understanding will become a national heritage. Architecture of the pupil's environment should be studied for appreciation of beautiful relationship of parts and fine use of materials, form, silhouette, light and shade, type of construction, arrangement of apertures, noting reasons for their beauty and adaptability. The class may then create skyscraper designs. Some may draw an abstraction, in sculptured mass, giving light and dark effects of the huge set-backs, vertical cleaving of the whole structure, offset by apertures which do not detract from the power of the great walls. The problem gives emphasis to understanding of fine arrangement of line and mass, dark and light.

* When pupils are working with color--perhaps chalks, crayon, water color--they will be interested in seeing fine examples of color handling for appreciational experience. They enjoy noting how Vincent Van Gogh proved that the principle of color dissection could be handled to show the breath of life in nature. In the Cypresses, his brush work organizes the surface with brush strokes which are all in motion. Starting with the motif of a cypress branch stirred by the breeze, he depicts everything else in the picture with the same moving brush strokes, to create a living, suggestive rhythm in which little tongues of blue and yellow flame permeate the picture and form a pattern that seems to be full of constant motion. Pupils see and feel there something that they know in nature. A real rhythm seems to have gone over into the picture, and we feel the wind swaying through the trees. Expressionism in the art of a great artist gives us lessons in color treatment through our appreciative understanding of his message. Teachers are finding that the art lesson which is taught for enjoyment and for capturing pupil interest is not presented as though production were the primary aim--an aim obviously pointless with ninety per cent of average pupils.

* The transfer of interests which the pupil has had kindled by the modern art curriculum will closely relate his leisure time activities with those of his school day. This harmonious plan increases pupil purposing, wherein an emphasis on pupil interest is the compelling motivation. By this method, responsibility for accomplishment goes over to the pupil, learning is individualized, and growth takes place through a process of experiencing. This inculcates the idea of freedom of thinking, tends toward relaxation, and enriches the life of the pupil in school. It also encourages an informal atmosphere in the classroom. Content of the curriculum is constantly in danger of becoming detached from practical life and it is our chief concern to organize our content around functional values in life. Items of the curriculum should be scrutinized for their values in application to use, and materials should be included with the thought of pupil orientation, motivation, and direction. Pupils in the high school are interested in meaningful symbols which have life values for them today.

KATHARINE TYLER Lake View High School, Chicago, Illinois