Both the low marketability of arts degrees and the low salaries of arts educators in our society, when compared to the marketability of degrees and salaries of educators in science or technology topics, reflect an attitude towards the arts that sees them as accessories to our lives, good mainly for entertainment, pleasure, or escape. This attitude frequently undermines arts education funding and is, for some, due to the admitted difficulty non-artists and artists alike face when trying to assess success in arts education and production with measures that make sense to and can be appreciated by “non believers.”
Assessing arts education outcomes (Hanna, 2007)
To this end, Dr. Wendell Hanna (San Francisco State University) recently published a well-written and organized article on the applicability of the new Bloom’s taxonomy to arts education assessment [Hanna, W. (2007). “The New Bloom’s Taxonomy: Implications for Music Education.” Arts Education Policy Review, 108(4): 7-16.]. The first section of the article offers an insightful and concise outline of the significance of assessing music education outcomes and of the history and current state of Bloom’s taxonomy as an education-accomplishment assessment tool. It is followed by a meticulous and convincing (even if a little tedious at times) set of arguments for the way music education activities and national standards fit within the new Bloom’s taxonomy.
Hanna (2007) effectively accomplishes her principle goal, to show that:
Music education functions within and contributes to the same types of knowledge acquisition and cognitive processes, and its outcomes can be assessed using conceptually the same standards and tools as other educational areas that deal with topics traditionally more “respected,” “objective,” and widely accepted as beneficial to individual and social behavior and success.
Does “high assessment” translate to “high value?”
Whether the above conclusion can support claims for the need to keep music education in schools is not as clear to me as it seems to be to the author. Based on her concluding sections, Hanna seems more interested in promoting the usefulness of a new, uniform, and standardized assessment tool than she is in arguing for the general value of musical accomplishments. The goal of this assessment tool is to make communication of musical accomplishments among “music lovers” and between music lovers and non-music administrators easy, efficient, and consistent with concepts non-experts are familiar with. However, defending the value of music education in promoting the individual and social development of students is, in my opinion, a most pressing issue, as the way it is resolved will determine whether or not accomplishing the goal set in Hanna’s paper is of any consequence.
For example, even the process of systematically learning how to knit can be made to fit, to some degree or another, the knowledge acquisition and cognitive processes outlined by Bloom’s taxonomy. This offers us useful ways to assess what processes have been used and to what end and degree of success. Such an exercise, however, will not answer the question of whether the specific “end” in question is “valuable,” “respectable,” and useful to the individual and the society beyond the limited bounds of the activity itself. Algebra, biology, geometry, and all the other “respectable” educational subjects are not respectable simply because students end up learning how to solve equations or properly identify a frog’s internal organs. Rather, they are valued because of what one can contribute to society thanks to her advanced mathematical and scientific skills.
Precisely what these contributions may be is not made explicitly clear, but their value is implicitly accepted as being significant within our culture. On the other hand, what a student can contribute thanks to how well educated she is in music is even less clear and, largely, not accepted as valuable. It seems to me that, before one can appreciate how good a student has become in music and how consistently we can assess her accomplishments based on a standard tool, we must address the question, “Why should anyone become good in music?” The typical response: “for no good reason beyond entertainment and escape,” reveals an attitude that threatens to make efforts like Hanna’s ultimately inconsequential.
The cognitive significance of art & imagination vs. reason
In my opinion, the way to go is to systematically and convincingly argue for the cognitive significance of art in general and music in particular—a non-trivial task that is beyond the scope of the present post. To get things going, however, I would like to briefly assess the longstanding, conventional opposition between imagination and reason, which, I believe, is behind our difficulty to appreciate art’s cognitive significance.
Bear with me for one more paragraph, as I will be tracing an arguably problematic rational consequence of such opposition.
Common sense understands imagination as a mental activity that deals with things that are not really there. It is opposed to reason, which is consequently supposed to be dealing with things that are really there. At the same time, the observation that not all future events can be predicted based solely on past and present observations indicates that future things must include things that do not already belong to the past or present. If the future includes things that are not present (i.e. are not really there) or past (i.e. have never really been there) then reason, by definition, cannot address it. Such a limitation severely undermines the importance of reason to our lives, by stripping from it the power to, in any radical way, influence our outlook. The only way reason can address future things is by making believe that such things—things that are not really there—are present, so that it can subject them to determinate and reflective judgment. In other words, in order for future to be reasoned with it first has to be imagined. The conventional opposition between imagination and reason and the accompanying assumption of reason’s superiority leads, therefore, to a curious and paradoxical “reason” that is superior to imagination, but impotent without it.
Until convinced otherwise, I, for one, will keep imagining.