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Arts Education Curriculum, History of

The purposes and content of the school art curriculum in the United States have evolved in a kind of spiral since the institution of comprehensive public schooling in the late 19th century, varying the emphasis on art appreciation, art-making skills, and art as a basic humanities discipline according to the prevailing reform movements of the time. Though arts educators argue for the value of art in its own right, art has never been a central core subject in the school curriculum; its importance and its integration with other subjects ebb and flow, and today art is taught in ways that allow it to be integrated with other subjects. That states now have a minimum arts requirement for high-school graduation testifies to the tenacity of the advocacy efforts of arts educators in recent decades.

Through the years, the art curriculum has been shaped by changing societal perspectives. It has evolved from emphasizing technical training and moral uplift to encouraging creative-self-expression, from teaching art as a multidisciplinary humanities discipline to helping connect students to their own visual lives. Its history is a history of our changing definitions of art and of learning. This entry discusses art curriculum from early industrialization to the present.

The Visual Art Curriculum and Early Industrialization

In the late 19th century, romantic idealism led to the picture study movement and other efforts at providing exposure to works of high moral character: Art education served a kind of social reform purpose. Concomitantly, however, art was also taught as a practical skill, tied to the rise of industrial production; as the early-20th-century match-book advertisements for “art school” suggest, much of what is now called visual arts education then consisted of lessons in draftsmanship and precision drawing, teaching individual discipline and technical workforce skills. Learning art meant learning to draw well.

The focus changed with the advent of progressive education before mid-century, emphasizing both child-centered education and Viktor Lowenfeld's “creative self-expression.” This approach emphasized manipulation of art media and mastery of skills to enhance creative self-expression. Teachers taught painting, drawing, ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, and other art forms, all “art production” with little contextual study of the cultures that produced exemplars. The training of art teachers was inconsistent in its inclusion of art history and criticism techniques; assessment was limited.

The Art Curriculum and Modern Crises

Modern history of art education has been a cycle of decline in times of national crisis and rescue by committed art educators and policy makers. Two events more than two decades apartthe USSR's launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983separately changed professionals' and the public's attitudes toward art education. Both events threatened the resources of the art curriculum by shifting policy attention to science, math, and reading. But committed arts educators between these two events had kept the arts alive in schools and communities partly through the 1960s' creation of state arts councils and the National Endowment for the Arts, raising the visibility of art in public life andwith the National Art Education Associationproviding important support to art teaching. Coincidentally, at about the time A Nation at Risk was published, the introduction of the concept of “multiple intelligences” through Howard Gardner's work at Harvard University's Project Zero clarified the role that less-measurable ways of knowing can play in individual development. The resulting openness to creative disciplines is now challenged by the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, difficult for disciplines that value unpredicted and surprise outcomes; its lasting impact on the art curriculum is still unclear.

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