Visual Arts, Untaught and Unlearned

The national curriculum is to include the arts some time after 2011 when English, mathematics, the sciences and history have been established as its core. The arts will be added in the second stage along with geography and languages. If, as seems likely, the National Curriculum Board seeks some overarching conception that can embrace Music, Dance, Drama, and Visual Arts, that conception might prove to be a Procrustean bed for all. Visual Arts, for example, could not easily be accommodated under a schema that would suit a subject such as Music. More than this, however, I want to argue that Visual Arts, as taught in Australian schools today, is not even educational.

In lobbying for the inclusion of Music shortly before the decision was taken, Richard Tognetti was reported in the Australian as suggesting that Australian students needed “a comprehensive program taught within schools”. He noted that organisations such as the ACO, Musica Viva, the Song Room and various orchestras had been “doing their bit” for music education. It might be supposed that Tognetti sees these various efforts as directed towards the same ends, and that they all would agree with the aims of the National Curriculum Board:

Mobility of students and teachers across state and territory borders within Australia is one reason for developing a national curriculum but there are other compelling ones as well. Among the OECD federal states, Australia is relatively small, and some of its jurisdictions are particularly so. Harnessing effort across the country offers economies of scale and a substantial reduction in duplication of effort. Most importantly it will enable us to work collectively in defining what young Australians should learn and in creating and sustaining a world-class, and even a world-best, schooling system.

If a family moves from one state to another there will be differences to which a student must adapt. But how different are the various subject offerings around Australia? And how much have they changed over the years? In subjects such as music and mathematics there has been such stability of educational content and pedagogical style that students might quickly find their feet anywhere in Australia. Even if they were put in a time machine and sent back a hundred years or so, music students would recognise Carl Czerny’s piano exercises, and maths students might recognise Hall and Knight’s Elementary Algebra for Schools (1887), which some teachers are still using to challenge their most able students.

The case with Visual Arts is radically different. There are differences between the states, and there has been continual change over the decades. More than this, however, a student who has to move down the corridor in her own school, from Mr Jones’s art class to Ms Smith’s, may well face differences of style and content as great as any that might be imagined. This is not because the teachers are disregarding the official curriculum; it is because they are required to be different.

The curriculum documents, euphemistically described as “frameworks”, are devoid of specific content. Teachers develop their programs independently, and difference across the system is valued as if it were an educational benefit. Consider, for example, the advice of the Victorian examiner this year telling students to produce “works of quality” by “developing and refining diversity in art practice”, and to this end warning them not to “follow specific teacher-directed tasks, as this will result in all students producing exactly the same work each lesson”. There is little danger of this happening because their teachers will already be telling them to work towards something “creative”, or at least they will be urging them to do something different.

A simplistic faith in creativity is apparent in the justification of the Arts Minister, Peter Garrett, of the inclusion of the arts in the national curriculum:

Creativity, interpretation, innovation and cultural understanding are all sought-after skills for new and emerging industries in the 21st century … Arts education provides students with the tools to develop these skills.

Creativity is not a skill, and even if it were some kind of mental capacity—something like intelligence—there is no reason to believe that it can be taught, or that the kind of creativity promoted in the art class can be of any use to “emerging industries”.

Although Visual Arts as a subject aims for creativity and self-expression, and in the years from reception to Year 10 it struggles to attain those obscure ends, in the senior years it focuses on the contemporary artworld. In looking to the artworld in this way, art teachers take themselves to be doing the same as other teachers when they look to the corresponding adult counterparts of their subjects, whether it is a university discipline, or some professional or commercial practice. Students are treated as creative artists, and in line with this notion they are required to participate in a statewide art competition for which they must produce “major works”—works of art that supposedly exemplify the latest speculative artworld theory (which they are also required to study).

All the Australian state systems have converged on this general strategy, but it is perhaps most spectacularly realised in New South Wales in the annual Artexpress exhibition. Each year more than 9000 students prepare artworks in emulation of what they understand of contemporary art. They are, however, even more directly influenced by their acquaintance with the Artexpress exhibitions of previous years. Those exhibitions are held up to them as exemplars of what they must strive to achieve. The high standard of this student work is an illusion, and the diversity of the works on show is achieved at a cost.

The foreword to the 1996 Artexpress catalogue is typical in making out a case for this diversity: “Subject matter varies enormously in the artworks in this year’s exhibition … Forms and media also vary greatly … [and the works] represent the wide range of students’ interests”. Minister Aquilina’s foreword then goes on to indicate the range of works, media and techniques on show from across the state. It is, however, a mistake to suppose that just because the students’ interests are collectively wide-ranging the experience of individual students will have been wide-ranging. The tendency is quite the opposite. Students will be narrowly focused on whatever is required for their own major work. Their quest for individuality precludes any common interests within the class that the teacher might address with formal lessons.

Much of the diversity on show in these exhibitions is a result of the teachers having narrow specialisations that they acquired during their art school education. As art students they will have been encouraged to find an artistic identity by seeing themselves as painters, jewellers, conceptual artists, ceramicists, photographers, weavers, industrial designers or sculptors. The art school graduates who become art teachers will have an understandable bias towards their specialisation, yet students will have little or no choice between teachers. The much-vaunted diversity of media on show in these student exhibitions should not be interpreted as evidence of any kind of educational achievement.

Students could have been assured of a varied experience by a state-wide curriculum that mandated whatever variety and whatever content was thought to be educationally beneficial for all. When such a curriculum did exist fifty years ago, and was held in place by the requirements of an old-fashioned examination of three hours’ duration, it would have produced the uniformity across the state system that was evident to the first generation of modernist art educators, and was used by them to justify abandoning any curriculum with mandated content.

The same system operates with “Year 12 Perspectives” at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and “Top Arts” at the National Gallery of Victoria. In Queensland students submit their work to Creative Generation Excellence Awards, and in South Australia the SACE Art Show is put on at the Light Square Gallery. These shows are promoted by education authorities with means that only the wealthiest professional artworld entrepreneur could afford. Exhibitions are sent overseas, and student works are reproduced in lavishly illustrated catalogues with artists’ statements, and puffing official pronouncements are provided for media release. The whole matter is engineered so well that the exhibitions are widely accepted as evidence of the quality of the educational experience that is supposedly available to all the students.

Christopher Allen identifies some of the educational consequences of the Artexpress system in his review of this year’s exhibition (Australian, February 28). He recognises that such a show cannot be approached or reviewed quite like other exhibitions; nevertheless, in the very act of reviewing it as an art exhibition in the pages of the Australian he gives credibility to the strategy it represents. He recognises a general ambience of youthful idealism in the works on show, and suggests that this emerges at an age “when love and sex and relationships are being discovered, as well as the beauty of the natural world and of art and literature”; all this, he says, is something that “mysteriously awakens with puberty”.

But apart from Allen’s sympathy for the adolescent content of the works, his professional eye is scathingly critical of the artistic pretentions of even the best work on show. He remarks on the predominance of “fussy works made by sticking things together, sewing, weaving, cutting, and so on … [that] really just look like more sophisticated forms of primary-school projects”. From this he is led to argue that there is a need to teach something: “Drawing is something we need to learn, and it is something that can be taught … Why should this not be taken seriously?”

Although it is clear from what he goes on to say that he means “drawing” to cover a very broad range of authentic representational activities, he fails to see that any teacher who did as he suggests would disadvantage her students. The best efforts at teaching and learning drawing in an authentic way would show up the students’ understandably limited skills. The works they produce could not stand comparison with works produced by students who simply copy or trace from photographs. An example of the problem is provided by the student work from Artexpress that Allen has chosen to accompany his review: the student artist is named and the work is described as a “sketch of her brother”. It is patently a rendering of a photographic image. Such copying is of course permitted because it is consistent with the practices of professional artists.

Allen is prepared to accept that what is on show is “the very best of a vast amount of work made for examination”, and, though he finds much to criticise, he fails to consider what the examiners are doing through their selection. With 9000 works to choose from they are able to create their own image of last year’s student endeavours and thereby show this year’s students what they should be striving for.

Allen does not consider how demeaning it must be for this year’s students to be set to work trying to please examiners whose criteria of assessment are beyond their comprehension. In this respect they might seem to be no worse off than the hundreds of professional artists who submit portraits to the Archibald Prize each year. Nevertheless, those artists are “consenting adults” to whom Archibald Prize judges owe no responsibility beyond fairness. The school examiners, on the other hand, have a responsibility to be assessing student work in ways that are consistent with an educational plan.

In other school subjects—mathematics, English, the sciences and music—the assessment and grading of class work is what guides students in learning the subject, and in preparing themselves for their final examinations. A subject’s status as part of an education system depends not only on assessment being accomplished by publicly available objective criteria, but also on the students acquiring the ability to judge their own work just as their teachers and examiners do. Artexpress fails on both counts. It merely mimics the adult artworld by placing students in a position like that of their professional counterparts. The students are on the lowest rung of an authoritarian hierarchy, a demeaning position they are induced to accept by the prospect of being recognised as artists (that is, the one-in-a-hundred chance of having their work included in Artexpress).

Art teachers are like teachers of other subjects in being judged by the results their students obtain in competitive examinations. However, the Artexpress system compromises the art teacher’s role as educator. Maths teachers and music teachers have to stand back when it comes to final examinations—they are like coaches of sporting teams who must retreat to the sidelines when the game is in progress. Art teachers, by contrast, are effectively out there on the playing field with their students. Any wise or knowing advice given to a relatively naive student will make a work something other than the student’s own. And because there are no skills or abilities that demonstrably prepare a student for creativity or self-expression, there is nothing the teacher can do to divert students from simply (and perhaps surreptitiously) copying from (or “appropriating”) the accredited artworks that are held up to them as exemplary. Any systematic teaching will be time-consuming and indirect—it will hold students back from preparing the work upon which they are to be assessed.

The only test of authenticity that is invoked in discussions of student art work is that the manual work should all be the student’s own. With modern art, however, the manual activity of production is often incidental to the artistic value of a work. In the end a student may sincerely believe that he has created the work he submits, just because he has “made it all himself”. And he may, indeed, be responsible for the manifest content—for example, the idealistic adolescent subject matter that Christopher Allen recognises in this year’s Artexpress. Despite this, however, the examiner’s assessment may turn on an appreciation of artistically sophisticated aspects of a presented work that are not the student’s own—artistic qualities of which the student had no appreciation even in the act of incorporating them into his work. Artexpress may have “advanced” to the stage where the works on show are, in effect, being made by teachers using Year 12 students as their assistants. If this has come to be the case, no one is in a position to know.

The Australia-wide pattern that can be identified for the senior years does not provide the basis for a national curriculum because the central aim of achieving diversity precludes anything that could properly be described as a curriculum. Close inspection of what goes on at classroom level would reveal the extent to which systematic learning is everywhere vitiated by the educationally irrelevant search for “creativity” and “individuality”.

If art teaching at these senior levels has as much structure as the system of assessment dictates, in the years from reception to the end of Year 10 there is nothing to protect students from the idiosyncratic approach of teachers who are encouraged to be individualists. And in this environment those teachers who would choose to co-ordinate their efforts with their colleagues have no means by which to do so. The teachers are only one rung above their students in that authoritarian hierarchy—the curriculum documents set a task for them to fulfil rather than giving them the material they can teach with justified authority. The art teacher’s freedom to be an individualist deprives students of any possibility of continuity and development in their art studies, while at the same time it deprives the art teacher of the authority that teachers of other subjects have when they invoke the specific and mandatory requirements of an externally imposed and well-tested curriculum.

Students are in no position to judge the ultimate educational value of what they are being taught in their years of compulsory education. In the case of mathematics, for example, it is our confidence in the ultimate value of what is being taught that gives sanction to the teaching of a set curriculum. The maths teacher proceeds with complete indifference to her students’ dislike of the subject. The art teacher, on the other hand, has no such support; she is burdened by the myth that art should be enjoyable. It is implicit in the ideology of the art class that its beneficiaries are compliant and even enthusiastic participants. In practice it becomes the art teacher’s responsibility to maintain this illusion; she is constrained to become the provider of an unending sequence of entertaining activities for her students. Every lesson must appeal to the students’ immediate interests––childish or adolescent though they may be. Nevertheless, art lessons must be protected from the disruption of recalcitrant students, so every lesson is framed in terms of requirements that are, in their own way, as explicit as a recipe in a Home Economics class, or a project in a Technology class. At the same time these lessons must give scope for the variations in student outcomes that are counted as “creativity” or “self-expression”.

Class activities follow fail-safe recipes that require little more than arbitrary or indifferent variations as the students’ input. When class work is displayed, an indulgent eye will see the pleasing effect as being due to the individual achievements of the students, while a more experienced eye will see the frozen ingenuity of the teacher’s recipe in twenty student variations. In this climate it is not surprising that from reception to the end of Year 10 art lessons are little more than a sequence of unco-ordinated busy-work activities.

In the final two years of study the art class is dominated by its claims to a more sophisticated involvement with contemporary art, and perversely this has come to mean a good deal of reading and writing. This academic work must dilute the subject’s claim to be offering something distinctive within the broader school curriculum. The new Victorian documentation indicates just how ambitious are the aims of this academic activity:

Within the VCE Art study, theoretical research and investigation informs artmaking. Students are encouraged to recognise the interplay between research and artmaking … Students develop their visual language through personal and independent learning by combining a focused study of artworks with practical artmaking.

Few professional artists would endorse the idea that their work could be guided by any kind of academic research, and the idea that students will be able to do so is implausible. The real purpose of all this theorising is that it should bolster the subject’s credibility. The whole idea of students doing “theoretical research” is not only implausible in itself, it depends on untenable assumptions about the nature of art and the artworld. Consider the bold opening declaration of the new Victorian documentation:

The VCE Art study recognises art as an integral part of our lives. Art is a potent and dynamic visual language through which we are able to communicate personal experiences, ideas, cultural values and beliefs. In both the process of making and examining art, students can realise the power to inspire change through imagination, creativity and innovation.

The contemporary artworld is not constrained by any such values; it is not characterised by concern for understanding and communication, and it is not the source of any identifiable visual language. The student exhibitions that are the public face of the subject’s values are modelled on contemporary art competitions that are not accountable to anyone’s understanding. Archibald Prize winners are not determined by any explicable process of evaluation, and the even more famous Turner Prize often makes international news on account of the apparent absurdity of the works on show. In 1999 Tracy Emin rose to fame after exhibiting her unmade bed, and in 2001 Martin Creed won the prize for The Lights Going On and Off (an empty gallery with the lights going on and then off). These may be extreme cases, but the contemporary artworld is generally characterised by such obscurantism. In their attempts to write “creatively” about such things Year 12 students will be struggling with concepts and forms of argument they can only pretend to understand, and the classroom teachers whose job it is to guide their efforts will not be far ahead of them.

The endeavour to make such connections between theory and artmaking leads to the kind of documentation to which Christopher Allen directs well-justified criticism. He notes the way the New South Wales curriculum material has students studying deconstruction, postmodernism and other modish intellectual movements. The new Victorian curriculum documents are no better, even if only because they assume that the literature of the visual arts is transparently available to the comprehension of adolescents—students are supplied with a bibliography and set to make their own way in the literature. The annotated bibliography lists 186 scholarly books classified under thirty-six categories, along with twenty-two journals and 119 websites. An equivalent bibliography is provided for art students in New South Wales, and an even more extensive one is supplied for students in Western Australia—it runs to many hundreds of items. Classroom teachers are supposed to be able to take on a role like that of a university professor supervising postgraduate research students. It is beyond belief that the diverse and freely chosen research endeavours of Year 12 students can be supervised by classroom teachers, and that the many thousands of resulting research projects can be meaningfully assessed and graded by examiners at the end of the year.

The extravagant claims that are made for the subject should be tested against some direct scrutiny of what really goes on, day to day, in art classrooms. My own jaundiced view of what I have seen over the decades cannot easily be conveyed, but some suggestive illustration can be given.

More than twenty years ago I was surprised to discover that my own students, in the final year of their art school degrees, hadn’t acquired even the most elementary understanding of perspective drawing. My simple test was to ask them to demonstrate on the whiteboard how to space out the sleepers in a schematic drawing of a railway track with its familiar “vanishing point” on the horizon. Only two out of thirty students had any idea of how to do this. (The diagonals of the equal rectangular spaces between the sleepers are all parallel to each other; once a vanishing point for these diagonals is established the diminishing distances between the depicted sleepers can be progressively marked off.) There is much more to learn about perspective drawing than just this, and fifty years ago it was taught systematically in Australian art classes.

I have found that art teachers these days don’t know anything about perspective. While this might be a sweeping claim to make, some confirmation of it can be seen in a textbook written to meet the Australian National Profiles: Art is … Making, Creating, and Appreciating (1998). The authors, Sandra Jane and Max Darby, devote eight pages of their book to the subject of perspective, yet all their diagrams are wrong, and their explanations are misleading. (They don’t understand even the spacing in depth I have explained above.) The same authors also offer to teach colour theory, yet here, too, everything they say is either misleading or wrong. Students are told that “The primary colours are red, yellow, and blue. No other colours can be mixed together to create these colours.” Any student with a magnifying glass can see that the red, yellow and blue in the book are each made of half-tone mixtures of magenta, lemon and cyan. Jane and Darby go on to present the traditional painter’s lore relating their “primaries” to “secondary colours”, “tertiary colours”, and “complementaries”—all of it confused or false. Students taught this painter’s lore can’t explain how any combination of the red, blue and green pixels on a television screen or computer monitor can produce “primary” yellow.

Jane and Darby clearly know nothing about perspective or colour, yet what they present in their textbook is typical of what art teachers are presenting to students in art classes around Australia. To count as educational what is taught must at least be true. Although there may be art teachers somewhere who know better than Jane and Darby, an important function of a curriculum is to protect students from teachers who may be ignorant or incompetent.

The possibility that an effective national Visual Arts curriculum will be formulated by Australian art educators might be tested by reference to some of their recent endeavours. An illustrative if extreme example can be found in South Australia, where Ian Hamilton reports (Australian Art Education, No. 1, 2008) on a new syllabus that he and Tiffany Beasley were contracted to write for the Art Subject Advisory Committee. They recommend renaming the subject “Studies in Visual Culture” for the purpose of “reframing visual arts education from the current teacher-centric approach to one which is student-led”. This change Hamilton sees as “a more appropriate post-post-modern curriculum construct”. It will require “teachers to shift their focus from being the font of all knowledge and to assume the role of facilitator and co-learner”. Teachers will be “removing the focus from art, craft and design and refocusing on all cultural artefacts”. It is not clear what kinds of practical classroom activities would meet the needs of such radically new objectives, but the envisaged outcomes are remarkable:

Through careful collaborative planning, students, with their teachers, will come to recognise and explore the dichotomy of sameness through diversity: the impact of their life-worlds and their communities. Recognising and acknowledging that assumptions can be socially, economically, politically and culturally constructed opens the visual culture learning space to delve into new ways of deconstruction.

Anyone might conclude from this that South Australia has advanced to the lunatic fringe in art education, but an altogether more important research effort is to be found in the National Review of Visual Education published in August 2008 under the title First We See. Plans for it were announced in August 2004 with provisions for $250,000 funding, and in August 2005 a team based at Murdoch University was commissioned to do the work. An interim “Discussion Paper” identified “emerging key questions”, answers to which were to be “enabled by an iterative research process”. The team formulated fifty-six such questions under twelve categories. After this something seems to have gone badly wrong. The final report, First We See, was deemed unworthy of hard-copy publication, and at 88,000 words it makes for unattractive online reading.

The efforts of the Murdoch team, described as “Phase One”, bulk large in that document but amount to very little. A questionnaire about the provision and resourcing of visual education was sent to a “stratified random sample” of 557 schools. These standard precautions against bias were rendered pointless because only 106 of the schools returned a response. Nothing could be reliably concluded from this sample because it is likely to disproportionately represent schools that have something to boast of. The fault was not with the 451 seemingly unco-operative school administrators who didn’t respond—the research methodology was at fault. Even so it remains unclear what critical questions such research could have answered.

The lack of clear purpose is equally evident in the attempt to identify “best practice” by visiting schools selected to represent “varied State/Territory educational jurisdictions, Government and non-Government schools and community sites, encompassing different stages of schooling and including a range of models of Visual Education”. Whatever the plan may have been, the nine school visits that are reported can have little bearing on any general issue about visual education in Australia.

The Review also reports on art education research and teacher education, though there is no perceptive or critical account of the theories and beliefs that currently guide classroom teaching, and most surprisingly there is no examination of the curriculum documents currently in force in the various states. In arguing its case for a form of visual literacy (in terms of its neologism “visuacy”) the Review fails to mount any clear case against the prevailing concern with modern and contemporary art.

Along with the concept of visual education it promotes, the Review endorses an unquestioning faith in creativity as an educational aim—there are 456 occurrences of create, creating, creative and creativity in the document. The researchers are like Peter Garrett in regarding creativity as some kind of commodity or liquid asset that can float free in the culture, as when they suggest, “Creativity as a key economic driver is clearly widely acknowledged as each country strives to find ways to increase its quantum across a broader range of the population.” Although First We See was briefly discussed in the press at the time of its publication, in less than a year this major research effort disappeared without trace or effect.

We are asked to believe that each year tens of thousands of Year 12 Visual Arts students produce works of creative art, and conduct carefully directed scholarly research in support of that creative work. The credibility of such claims might well be judged by reference to the standards that the art educators who make those claims are able to demonstrate in their own research efforts—in First We See, for example.

Over the past fifty years the teaching of the modest skills and abilities that once characterised the art class has been abandoned. Various drawing skills, especially those of a technical nature, were held to ridicule, often for no better reason than because they were capable of being objectively assessed in examinations of three hours’ duration. These identifiable abilities were not thought capable of being progressively developed towards greater educational relevance, so any such teaching was abandoned in pursuit of ever more sophisticated conceptions of art, creativity and self-expression—outcomes that never have been accountable to the understanding of students, nor to any set of demonstrably objective criteria of assessment.

An effectively promulgated national curriculum could transform visual arts more than any other school subject, and the first step in making room for the content of that new curriculum would be to dismantle the “junior artworld” that is maintained through the various Artexpress-type exhibitions. The image of excellence created by carefully choosing a hundred works from a pool of more than 9000 aspirants is deceptive, with regard to standards and to educational diversity.

The harm of this system could be ended by requiring that any public exhibition of student work be representative, rather than competitive. This could be accomplished simply by requiring that works be chosen strictly at random from all work achieving at least a passing grade. The first such exhibition would disappoint the inappropriately intense public interest that attends Artexpress, and it would expose the false pretensions of the subject. The state art galleries would not want to associate themselves with such exhibitions once the emphasis had been shifted to merely educational matters. The next year’s cohort of Visual Arts students could not easily be intimidated by such an exhibition; they would lose interest in pretending to be able to make contemporary art once the glittering prize of Artexpress was removed. Parents would begin to ask what demonstrably valuable knowledge and abilities the subject offered; they would no longer be content to have their children examined for some innate quantum of artistic creativity that no one can claim to teach them.

It would not be difficult to establish the content of such a new curriculum. Even the authors of First We See recognise that a visual education needs a better rationale than can be supplied by the contemporary artworld. The need of such a change of direction was argued cogently in the Australian context by Donald Brook as long ago as 1981, most directly in his widely reproduced lecture “What Can We Do with the Art Class?” (reprinted in his Art, Representation, Education, 1992). Brook suggested that a first condition of offering to teach art to children should be agreement about what art is, and he observed that “the adoption of such a high principle would have the effect of immediately closing down Art teaching in schools”. Art teachers should stop claiming to be able to teach art, and instead take on “representation” (broadly conceived) as a worthy educational objective.

The continuing chaos of art education in the intervening years should lend credibility to Brook’s case. His proposal might be seen as less radical than it was thought to be a quarter of a century ago, especially in the way it might meet the needs of a national curriculum. Noting that his proposed Representation subject would often be taught in ways that “the casual eye would not distinguish sharply from the old Art class”—excepting that his new subject would have a defensible rationale—Brook goes on to suggest that:

Properly trained teachers would know what they were doing and would be entitled to confidence that other teachers of the same subject were doing the same thing, even if they were doing it differently. Clear sense could be attached to the notion of developing the subject, and standing later work on earlier foundations, of judging performance and of improving skills through meaningful criticism and effective rehearsal.

The Visual Arts “frameworks” that are presently in force in the state systems actively encourage an educationally meaningless diversity; they serve to disguise the lack of any true consensus about aims, and they should be recognised as the antithesis of a curriculum.

In the decades during which the deprecated skills of the traditional drawing class have been neglected, psychologists and philosophers have made great progress in understanding our visual representational capacities. These studies range beyond the traditional painting, drawing and modelling of the artist’s studio.

It is only necessary to browse through science journals to see the extent to which scientific knowledge is everywhere mediated by forms of graphic representation. And even mathematics, which is the most abstract and symbolic of the sciences, is rich in forms of visual representation. Euclidean geometry is a form of “visual literacy” that has been embedded in Western culture for more than 2000 years, and the development of linear perspective in the Renaissance is understood to have changed our vision of the universe. In every area of the arts and sciences we are users of charts, maps, diagrams, graphs, plans, scores, notational systems, story boards and pictures; and for all of these there are methodologies of practice and application that might be usefully taught.

Such visual representational practices already have some place in every subject taught at school. Perversely, however, they are hardly to be found at all in the art class. While Visual Arts teachers have been intent on promoting their senior students into the obscurantism of the contemporary artworld, they have been losing their expertise and authority regarding what always should have been their special educational province.