Art is Primary - An experimental After School Program for Elementary Sckool Children

collage by Cecil Touchon

The Name: Art is Primary

When designing the program I thought about a number of different possible names: Open Art Studio, Art is Fun, Art is Fundamental, Art is Essential, After Hours Art, etc and they are all ok, but I wanted to come up with a name that would focus on exactly what the idea is and the word primary seemed to me to be the richest word for the purpose. Firstly, since this is an elementary school program, I wanted to allude to that fact. However, Art is Elementary, I felt, was too limiting because while art is elementary, this suggests that there is something higher up than the elemental. Primary refers to elementary education but at the same time has a wider and richer meaning.

The thing I want to stress is that art and creativity are of absolutely primary importance. Education in the arts is not secondary, it is primary. It is not peripheral, it is central. I am not sure exactly how we have come to the condition where we have so debased art that it has been almost completely removed from the school system when, in fact, it is the vary core that all higher education should and must be built upon. There are many, many important things to be learned through the arts that can not be learned as thoroughly through other means. You just can't get to them in testable, predictable ways and I believe that this is why we have gone astray. The education of young minds is not a product that can be stamped out at a factory. Each is unique, each has a special configuration of gifts. This is what the arts can bring out - the unique special contribution that each person potentially has to offer.

Our education system, AT LEAST at the elementary school level, should be exempt from the sort of rigorous testing that the statisticians insist on in order to monitor what they think amounts to mathematical success. The problem is, that this focuses too much attention on detail and not enough on the over all goal of education as a whole. The problem with science is that it can only explore what it can test and this is its great weakness. Most things that humans know and how they know it cannot be subjected to the predictability that science requires. Art does not worry about such things. Mystery and ambiguity are perfectly acceptable.

Therefore, so long as we keep moving down the wrong path in education, the arts are doomed to be some sort of after school activity that is shielded from the pressures of the testing mania that now plagues the education system. It is time to rethink it folks!