Art and Imagination: Reclaiming the Sense of Possibility.

Abstract

Classroom encounters with the arts can move the young to imagine, to extend, and to renew, Ms. Greene reminds us. If the significance of the arts for growth, inventiveness, and problem solving is recognized at last, a desperate stasis may be overcome. THE EXISTENTIAL contexts of education reach far beyond what is conceived of in Goals 2000. They have to do with the human condition in these often desolate days, and in some ways they make the notions of world-class achievement, benchmarks, and the rest seem superficial and limited, if not absurd. They extend beyond the appalling actualities of family breakdown, homelessness, violence, and the savage inequalities described by Jonathan Kozol, although social injustice has an existential dimension. Like their elders, children and young persons inhabit a world of fearful moral uncertainty -- a world in which appears that almost nothing can be done to reduce suffering, contain massacres, and protect human rights. The faces of refugee children in search of their mothers, of teenage girls repeatedly raped by soldiers, of rootless people staring at the charred remains of churches and libraries may strike some of us as little more than a virtual reality. Those who persist in looking feel numbed and, reminded over and over of helplessness, are persuaded to look away. It has been said that Pablo Picasso's paintings of weeping have become the icons of our time.(1) They have replaced the statues of men on horseback and men in battle; they overshadow the emblems of what once seemed worth fighting for, perhaps dying for. When even the young confront images of loss and death, as most of us are bound to do today, it is important that everything we love be summed up into something unforgettably beautiful.(2) This suggests one of the roles of the arts. To see sketch after sketch of women holding dead babies, as Picasso has forced us to do, is to become aware of a tragic deficiency in the fabric of life. If we know enough to make those paintings the objects of our experience, to encounter them against the background of our lives, we are likely to strain toward conceptions of a better order of things, in which there will be no more wars that make women weep like that, no more bombs to murder innocent children. We are likely, in rebelling against such horror, to summon up images of smiling mothers and lovely children, metaphors for what ought to be. Clearly, this is not the only role of the arts, although encounters with them frequently do move us to want to restore some kind of order, to repair, and to heal. Participatory involvement with the many forms of art does enable us, at the very least, to see more in our experience, to hear more on normally unheard frequencies, to become conscious of what daily routines, habits, and conventions have obscured. We might think of what Pecola Breed-love in The Bluest Eye has made us realize about the meta-narrative implicit in the Dick and Jane basal readers or in the cultural artifact called Shirley Temple, who made so many invisible children yearn desperately to have blue eyes.(3) We might recall the revelations discovered by so many through an involvement with Schindler's List. We might try to retrieve the physical consciousness of unutterable grief aroused in us by Martha Graham's dance Lamentation, with only feet and hands visible outside draped fabric -- and agony expressed through stress lines on the cloth. To see more, to hear more. By such experiences we are not only lurched out of the familiar and the taken-for-granted, but we may also discover new avenues for action. We may experience a sudden sense of new possibilities and thus new beginnings. The prevailing cynicism with regard to values and the feelings of resignation breeds cannot help but create an atmosphere in the schools that is at odds with the unpredictability associated with the experience of art. The neglect of the arts by those who identified the goals of Goals 2000 was consistent with the focus on the manageable, the predictable, and the measurable. …