Art as Tool in Helping Children Understand Life’s Weirdness

When it comes to art education, how much should children be exposed to?

That question is facing more and more teachers, administrators and parents--not to mention a couple of art museums in Orange County.

Offering educational tours to prop up public school programs crippled by state and federal budget cuts, museums have stumbled into an ethical quagmire involving sexually explicit or thematically provocative works.

Last week it was reported that one school principal canceled a tour for fourth-graders to Newport Harbor Art Museum in January because he considered some sexually graphic works in the current “Skeptical Belief(s)” show to be inappropriate.

It wasn’t the first time an art tour had been canceled. In December, several field trips to the Laguna Art Museum were scrapped because of similarly controversial pieces in a neo-Expressionist exhibition, “Morality Tales: History Painting in the 1980s.”

Although many school groups continue to visit, both museums have taken to rerouting youngsters around questionable paintings and sculpture, some of which reflect irreverent or disrespectful views of society, sexual situations and gang violence.

Should elementary school students be allowed to see such nasty stuff?

By all means.

Those are precisely the issues that pre-teens are--or soon will be--bombarded with outside the classroom on TV, in the movies and in the streets.

Informed guidance, analysis and discussion of these issues must be integral to such field trips. But to deny students access to contemporary art says that ignorance is preferable to knowledge.

School is supposed to be an intellectual training ground; the classroom should provide as much of a workout for students’ minds as the playground does for their bodies. It is the perfect forum for vigorous debate, even controversy.

And it is the nature of art to provoke questions, challenge assumptions and stimulate thought. As 18th-Century English essayist Joseph Addison wrote: “What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul.”

One PTA member, who is an artist and the mother of three children, said she opposes censoring exhibits but suggested a rating system for museum shows that might be patterned after movie ratings.

Parents, of course, not only have the right but should demand to know what their children are being exposed to at school. But appointing someone to classify some artistic creations as “approved” and others as “unsafe for child consumption” is asking for trouble.

For one thing, who gets that job?

Besides, as that same PTA member pointed out: “Artists are merely reflecting the weirdness in the society. A lot of art is aggressive now. It’s not enjoyable to look at. It is a reflection of a society in which there is so much anger. People are shooting at each other in cars. . . . These are things happening in our society, and maybe that is what art should deal with.”

She is right. There is much violence and weirdness in the world. Because art often does, and should, imitate life, we expect to see contemporary artists trying to interpret and understand those themes.

If the objective of public school art programs is merely non-provocative art, why not bus kids over to Anaheim Convention Center for one of those auctions where no painting costs more than $39 and there is nothing but scenes of spacious deserts, sandy beaches with crashing waves and mist-shrouded mountaintops?

No one has suggested that the museums alter or censor their exhibits, only that it is somehow damaging for young viewers to see them. Or worse, that they might raise the ire of a parent (i.e., voter) somewhere.

What happened to the concept of education that encourages individuals to think, that exposes students to the widest range of ideas, rather than merely supplying career training?

Without that, education becomes so safe it is passionless (not to mention boring), and art is once again shunted off, de facto, to the realm of esoterica.

According to a Latin proverb: “Art hath no enemy but ignorance.” Let’s give that enemy no comfort on this shore.