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Art The 4th "R"

Instructor, Jan, 2001 by Jason Ohler

In a multimedia world, art is a literacy as basic as reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic

One of the many reasons I enjoy being an educator during this time of unprecedented change is that the potential for revelation is great. To do my best revelation-hunting, I locate the eye of a hurricane, park, and look around with an open mind. When I do that, revelations come frequently.

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One such revelation has helped me understand an important shift underlying the Internet revolution in education--a change so pervasive and infused into our experience that we often miss it entirely. I am referring to the fact that the multimedia environment of the Web, as well as much of what we experience through our computers, requires students to think and communicate as designers and artists. The age of art has arrived, leaving behind the text-centric world that has guided us for so long. The language of art has become the next literacy--the fourth R. We need not linger any longer over whether art should have a permanent and central place in our curriculum. It should. And we need to move quickly to prepare students to be literate in the world that they are inheriting and shaping.

I had an amazing experience a few years ago that helped me fully appreciate art's new importance in education. I was watching a student struggle at his computer to create a multimedia presentation for a language arts project. He wasn't struggling with the technology--like any info-age kid, he could click around with ease. It was the aesthetics that seemed insurmountable. As I watched him clumsily cramming together video clips, graphics, sounds, buttons, and a few words, it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks: He was trying to create art, and no one had shown him how. In the process of fumbling with the medium, he was losing his sense of what he wanted to communicate in the first place.

And this wasn't an isolated incidence. I have watched it happen again and again--across grades and throughout the curriculum, from science to social studies, where term papers and reports yielded to Web pages and PowerPoint presentations.

Art and the Digital Age

Multimedia communication has become ubiquitous in a short period of time because of two fairly recent developments. First, in the same way that word processors opened up the world of the writer, multimedia technology has opened up the world of the artist. Today, anyone who can move a mouse can jump in and give it a go. Second, the Web has carried multimedia communication throughout the global world of the Internet, so that a shift away from text-centric communication and toward pictures, diagrams, sound, movement, and other more universal forms of communication seems inevitable.

The convergence of these two developments has earned art a permanent place in the common experience of life for us all. For that reason, art should be included in the common experience of school for all students. Those who do not grow up to create art for a living will nevertheless use it, manage it, interpret it, or interact with it in ways that simply did not exist 10 years ago.

The Long and Winding Road

For years, passionate believers in art education have tried to sell it based on a number of good reasons: It improves self-expression, and who can argue with a child's need for expression? There is a strong--perhaps even causal--correlation between being active in the arts and improved cognitive functions as measured in standard curricular areas. The arts are motivational, inducing students to attend school and be receptive to learning. Finally, art increases our understanding of the depth and breadth of humanity, inducing not only cultural awareness but also personal growth.

Despite these compelling reasons to teach art, educators and parents alike often see it as tangential, soft, or not entirely relevant to preparing children for work and citizenship. This is why art is the first to go when money gets tight. To keep this from happening, art must be considered the fourth R: a literacy as solid as reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic. When was the last time a school board discussed cutting those subjects from the curriculum? When art is considered a literacy and is as embedded in the curriculum and in our cultural psyche as the other three Rs, it will become self-perpetuating and unquestioned.

Fortunately, the ever-expanding world of multimedia and the Internet gives us the opportunity, rationale, and a broad base of support to make that happen.

What Can We Do?

How do we facilitate the coming of age of art in our schools?

* Rename art and get subversive. First--and I'm only half-kidding--we need to rename art. The word comes with too much baggage. Being an artist implies a life of penury, emotional pain, and public misunderstanding. We need to demystify the nature of art and see it all around us, from the designs that underlie our tables and automobiles to the aesthetics that imbue our Web sites, to the public sculptures that transform buildings from structures into monuments of public expression. I suggest that educators invent a Trojan horse for their fourth-R programs. Call it, say, visual literacy. Roll it into the literacy portion of the school's curriculum, and let it evolve. Everyone will thank you for being "visionary and proactive."

Art The 4th "R"

Instructor, Jan, 2001 by Jason Ohler

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