Art, Education and Democracy

                John Dewey thought that the best way to think about art was to think of it as experience.  Like all experience, art creates knowledge and insight, so that the aesthetic was always already part of the cognitive and social dimensions of life.  If we think of art that way, it’s easy to make a case for the role it plays in educating people for participation in a radical democracy.  We encounter each other and learn to understand each other not through the contrived categories of social science data but through our direct experience.  Part of that encounter is aesthetic.  We react to the way people dress, what they listen to, how they talk and what they smell like before we even have a chance to think about the more abstract and intellectual markers we sometimes apply to others.  These senses are developed and fine tuned by the same experiential judgements we apply to art.

                I taught what was basically an ‘art history’ class for almost forty years.  I understand that the way we teach art now is exclusionary and colonizing.  The whole process of making canons of art and passing ‘universal’ judgements about high and low art is completely undemocratic.  Limiting art to the story and perspective of any one culture, religion, race, class or gender has less to do about art than it does an oppressive cultural narrative of dominance and exclusion.  But it doesn’t have to be taught that way.  It doesn’t have to be judged and ranked and limited so only a few tastes and perspectives, only a few experiences, are represented and explored.  Art in education is not meant, as Eliot’s reforms at Harvard in the 1870’s would have it, to train a few lower-class individuals to mingle with and work for the owner class.  We don’t need to study art to be ‘better’ or more sophisticated.  We need art to make us whole and to help us engage each other.

                Radical democracy is a contact sport.  It is more relational than it is rational.  We have tried building a democracy around rational and institutional practices.  It hasn’t really worked very well.  We are an extremely segregated society, in which we increasingly limit our contacts to people who are mostly like us.  The fear – and sometimes loathing – of ‘others’ makes it impossible to see a common good or a communal way forward.  Our democracy has become, primarily because of a broken economic system, a zero-sum game of groups waging political war over the few scraps left behind.  Education, particularly the vocationally oriented education we provide, merely reinforces the estrangement.  We still promote an ‘ideal’ culture, which means a white, patriarchal, protestant, heterosexual, European culture that excludes any other way of organizing the world.  We do not structure education as what Pratt calls a ‘contact zone.’  Mostly we teach folks that they don’t belong, unless they buy the right stuff, of course.

                None of us are the synthesized data-points we are thought to be.  The stuff that makes me interesting (Okay, cut me a little slack here) and human is not collected in an algorithm.  Our experience of the world and each other is primarily and initially an aesthetic one.  I’ve lost count of the number of times that music, dance, food, painting, tapestry or poetry helped me understand and value something that my abstract rational intellect just couldn’t comprehend.  The best things, the richest things, about a democracy are created in the intersections of our contacts with each other.  We create a world together and fill it with music and food and laughter and love.  We share pain and disappointment the same way.  Institutional democracy has lost the people that live in it.  We’ve stopped thinking about education as a fully human and life-long journey and settled for a hollowed-out and deracinated shell of ourselves.

                Dewey knew that art was an essential and irreplaceable part of an education.  He knew that if democracy was going to evolve beyond the crude forms it had started with and become an ethos and a way of life, then the aesthetic experience of our encounters and endeavors had to be part of it.  Art doesn’t make us ‘well-rounded.’  It doesn’t make us sophisticated, and it doesn’t make us cool.  It represents what every culture we have ever encountered already knew: art is how we understand life.  If that seems too obtuse or precious, ask the folks in El Paso or Dayton how the alternative works.