The Triumph of American Culture Over The Art Education Establishment: Findings from the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress in Art Page: 2 of 4
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The findings were that 18.8% of students traced around the Madonna-
Triangle, and even fewer, only 10.9% traced around the Child-Triangle. Over-
all, only 8.% were able to successfully trace around both triangles.
Since many students in American High Schools do not take art classes it
might be maintained that perhaps students who have taken four to six secon-
dary school art classes would score more highly. Surprisingly, they do not!
Students who have never taken art in secondary school do, however, score
significantly lower than the national average. So the assessment tells us that
few American students learn to detect the underlying compositional features of
works of art. Moreover, those with a good deal of art instruction performed at
about the same level as those with only a small amount of at instruction.
This lack of attention to the aesthetic features of art appears in other exer-
cises as well. For example, students in all three age groups were shown a re-
production of George Grosz's drawing Stamtisch. First, they were asked: 'Do
you enjoy looking at Stamtisch. We were not surprised by this small positive
response since we had chosen a drawing containing what might be considered
'ugly' subject matter but, of course, we had also chosen a drawing with an
unusually coherent composition and exquisite line quality. We wanted to see
how many students could go beyond subject matter to enjoy a drawing for its
aesthetic merit. Yet when we asked students to give reasons why they either
enjoyed or did not enjoy looking at the drawing, only 28% of 17-year-old
students gave responses that contained references to aesthetic features such
as composition, formal, sensory or technical aspects. Fifteen percent of
13-year-olds and 5% of 9-year-olds gave aesthetically oriented responses. In
other words, students in America seem not to have learned that a work of art
with 'ugly' subject matter may also be aesthetically beautiful. Yet to look at a
work of art only for its subject matter is to greatly diminish one's enjoyment.
Through the presentation of these two exercises you have not only had an
opportunity to see the nature of the National Assessment tasks, but also to
view some of the findings. The exercises, however, were not limited to such
things as diagramming paintings and responding to questions; we also presen-
ted several exercises that assessed students' graphic abilities. One of the sim-
plest of these graphic tasks is also one of the most informative. When 9- and
13-year-old students were asked to 'Draw a person who is running very fast'
only 21% of 9-year-olds could depict a running motion and only 38% of 13-
year-olds could do so. Yet when I have asked art teachers and supervisors in
America to estimate the percentage of 9- and 1 3-year-olds could do so. Yet
when I have asked art teachers and supervisors in America to estimate the per-
centage of 9- or 13-year-old students who could successfully complete this
task, they sometimes guess that as many as 90% of 9- or 13-year-olds would
be able to draw running figures. 1 think that we might all learn a lesson from
this discrepancy between what it is assumed that students can do and what is
actually the case.
The performance on the 'running person' task seems especially low in light
of the fact that elementary school curriculum guides in the U.S. are filled with
units of instruction relating to drawing figures in action. Yet, I think that we
can take the students inability to draw a running person as an indication of the
general inability of young Americans to adequately depict any type of gross
action in human figures.
Of course some would say, 'Well that kind of drawing skill is trivial and
unimportant,' to which I might answer 'One of the primary reasons that chil-
dren draw is to produce visual symbolic models of themselves and their worlds
so that they might anticipate and test possible future realities. But if children
are unable to move into action the characters that they draw, then they are
deprived of extremely important ways of presenting and thus comprehending
reality.'
Simple skills may not by themselves be considered as art but they are cer-
tainly indispensible ingredients for the production of art and it may be that in
the United States we have ignored these basic elements.
Moving from graphic skills to knowledge of the history of art, it was found
that only 15% of 17-year-olds could recognize that Picasso's Three Musicians
was an example of the cubistic style of painting, and that a mere 20% could
identify one of Monets paintings of water lilies as an example of Impression-
ism. To show how stable our data are, in years six and ten of the assessment
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Wilson, Brent. The Triumph of American Culture Over The Art Education Establishment: Findings from the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress in Art, thesis or dissertation, [1989..]; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1051401/m1/2/: accessed June 6, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.