Art education is becoming fashionable in China today. From kindergarten kids to college students to retired workers, people are trying to gain some form of education in art as a way to improve their aesthetic taste or to kill their spare time.
But China's art education faces many challenges as it seeks to embrace the opportunities brought by the new century, said Judith M. Burton, an internationally renowned art educator who is professor and chairperson of the Arts and Humanities Department of the Teachers College of Columbia University, New York.
Born in London, Burton studied art and art education at the University of London and the University of Manchester before moving to the United States in 1974. While chairing the art education program at Boston University, Burton received her doctor's degree in education from Harvard University.
In 1990, she was invited to join the faculty of the Teachers College of Columbia University. Through the efforts of Burton and her colleagues, the college's art and art education program has become one of the strongest graduate programs of its kind in the world and a leading base of research on art education.
In an interview with China Daily, Burton spoke directly of her impression of and concern for China's art education. The interview is as follows:
Q: Professor Burton, I know you were invited to give lectures on art education to some Chinese art academies this summer. Did you have a good time exchanging views with Chinese art educators? What do you think of China's art education today?
A: I didn't have as much time as I wanted to exchange views with Chinese art educators because of the language barrier. From what I have ascertained, there are some major problems confronting China's art education at this moment, which are also issues we have to deal with in the United States.
The first problem is: Does art education in colleges mean training artists or art educators? You should get more people engaged in becoming art educators, and have a new generation of high-level, experienced art educators.
Another thing that is problematic here is that many art educators I have talked to have problems thinking structurally and strategically. The curriculum and program are all centralized. You have got to design programs, you have got to reform the system, and you have got to change.
Q: In recent years the Chinese Government has begun to stress "quality education." In the past, art courses were not given so much emphasis in schools, especially middle schools where students face the pressure of the national college entrance examination. How important do you think art education is in a nation's educational system?
A: Art education is not just about making nice pictures. It's teaching kids in thinking, being imaginative and critiquing.
You need to look inward. What happens to a country's culture as you get greater internationalism in the technological and economic spheres?
The arts play a critical role in the preservation, appreciation and cultivation of culture.
The stress on so-called "quality education" is an attempt to get everybody to a reasonable standard of education. I agree with that. We should not narrow young people down. The best way is to educate the mind fully so pupils can deal with the complexity of modern life.
Some teachers don't really understand about the value of art education to everybody. They just think that art education is only given to the gifted and talented and tend to dismiss all kids.
Q: Children's art education, however, is popular in China. Many parents want their children to take art courses after school. Do you think it's necessary and normal?
A: Again, it is still so in the United States. Art courses for children after school are terribly popular.
My feeling is that if you have good art education in schools with art educators who really know how to support development then you wouldn't have parents running all over the world to ensure their children get extra art classes.
I think it's normal. And I think it's probably necessary if you have better teaching out of school than that in school. Probably parents are on the right track.
But if the kids are bored, that means the teaching is poor. It's not the kids' problem. Good teachers know how to keep kids' minds alive.
Classes in China have 50-60 kids in a class. To me that's mind-blowing. The only way you get quality art education is that you get good teachers and cut those classes in half.
Q: Tell me something about your plan to co-operate with the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing?
A: There are a number of suggestions at the moment that we are talking about. One is to have a summer Columbia campus here at the academy to develop some kind of degree program, partly done here and partly at Columbia. We haven't worked out the details yet.
Another thing would be some in-service work with teachers. We would also have some high-level students either enter a master's program or a doctoral program at Columbia.
Q: You might have noticed the tendency that the Chinese art educational system is becoming very much Westernized, whether it is studio art or art history and art theory. Not enough attention is given to Chinese traditions. What's your opinion?
A: I think you are probably right. One thing that always strikes me when students come from China to apply to my program at Columbia is that most students know more about Western art than a lot of American students do.
I was always wondering if that learning was at a price. The price was that they didn't really learn much in depth about the traditions of Chinese art.
I am excited that it is part of our partnership with the Central Academy that every summer Chinese art educators will go over to Columbia to do some work with us on Chinese art or Chinese calligraphy.
We would love the opportunity to think about the traditions of Chinese art and what that means in the contemporary world.
Q: What role should public organizations such as museums play in art education? Any suggestions?
A: I think art museums should play a huge role both in teacher education and the education of children. The museums are increasingly taking on the mission of being public educators, as well as continuing to be conservers and preservers of art.
I think museums should become part of the educational provision in schools, not just for art, but for social studies, history, science, math, English and Chinese.
That extension enriches children's education because it allows them to engage not only with the objects but also study them aesthetically so they can figure out what they were made of, how they were made, and their general purpose. It's a wonderful starting point for interdisciplinary education.
It's also very important if you want young people to be respectful of the traditions of their culture.
Q: What about the role of the mass media in art education?
A: Of course, the mass media plays a huge role in art education because they provide young people with all kinds of visual information. In the absence of good art teaching and the ability to create out of imagination, children turn to the media to borrow images and to use their images to express their own ideas and feelings.
The problem is that children have not created the images for themselves and it was not their own individual creativity there. That's one level of the conversation on the role of mass media.
The other level is how to get kids to be good critics of the mass media. A lot of that should be going on in schools so they help kids be discriminating over mass media.
Q: What do you think is the meaning of art in a world that is becoming increasingly dominated by technology?
A: Technology is productive and it in a sense makes energy for kids. However, you can use the computer to make wonderful images but that is at the cost of being unable to use the kind of physical hand-touch texture, all those sensory responses to the world that are so important in meaning making that art makes possible.
We know, for example, the work of hand physical texture, the work of touch, is critically important in the development of the human mind. If you cut that kind of education out of schooling, then something rather restrictive is going to happen in terms of the children's intellectual development.
We are not just talking about making nice images. We are really talking about something else: How we make meaning and how to make them meaningful to ourselves; how we engage our minds in the creation of meaning through the agency of visual materials. That's a much more fundamental way of talking about why the arts are important to all people. That engages the physical as well as the mental.
(China Daily October 21, 2002)
