President Obama was the latest to
publicly question the value of majoring in art history in remarks made January
30th in Wisconsin. He said,
“…a lot of young people no longer see the trades and
skilled manufacturing as a viable career. But I promise you, folks can
make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than
they might with an art history degree. Now, nothing wrong with an art
history degree -- I love art history. (Laughter.) So I don't want
to get a bunch of emails from everybody. (Laughter.) I'm just
saying you can make a really good living and have a great career without
getting a four-year college education as long as you get the skills and the
training that you need.” (Applause.)
Making a good living seems to be the nation’s priority right
now as we watch the middle class circle the drain, and the uber-rich plot even
more political and financial control over what are clearly dwindling resources.
Where there might once have been public outrage at the suggestion that
institutions of higher education should be judged on the salaries of graduates,
now we even have accountability schemes that will judge those institutions on
the job performance and satisfaction with professional training of graduates
three years after graduation. (See my previous blog post about this happening
in my field of teacher education).
The defensive responses to attacks
on the value of a liberal arts education are often to justify its worth in a
lucrative field. Why study music? It makes you smarter in math. For example,
here’s the response from Linda Downs of the College Art Association to Obama’s
jab at art history:
It is worth remembering that many
of the nation’s most important innovators, in fields including high technology,
business, and even military service, have degrees in the humanities. Humanities
graduates play leading roles in corporations, engineering, international
relations, government, and many other fields where their skills and creating
thinking play a critical role. Let’s not forget that education across a broad
spectrum is essential to develop the skills and imagination that will enable
future generations to create and take advantage of new jobs and employment
opportunities of all sorts.
I don’t want to
dwell on this sorry state of things too much as others have done a very nice
job picking apart these arguments and political rhetoric. (See for example this
excellent article by Virginia Postrel). Instead, I thought I’d share how my art
history and Italian double major in college, followed by my graduate degree
from Syracuse University’s Florence program in Renaissance Art, have helped
shape me into the professor I am today, teaching future early childhood and
elementary teachers. First, two stories to capture a glimpse into my formative
experiences:
It’s the first day of a seminar on
the history of prints in my senior year at Wellesley College. My professor, Nia
Janis, has prepared works from the college museum’s collection that are covered
in brown paper save for a square inch window that reveals a piece of the
print’s surface. We are given the task of categorizing and analyzing the marks
we find. This careful, up close looking paves the way for learning to
understand the range of techniques and surface effects that can be achieved
with different types of printmaking. I have never forgotten this important idea
that looking closely at something is as important as looking more broadly. It
was to become a foundational idea for the work I did in interactional
ethnography in my dissertation on how teachers manage dilemmas in the
classroom.
I am with my fellow graduate
students in Florence, Italy. It’s fairly typical to have class in a church or
museum, and on this day we are meeting at the Basilica di S. Maria del Carmine.
We enter the Cappella Brancacci to see the first bits of restoration with our
professor, Umberto Baldini. He excitedly shows us the newly discovered fresco fragments, two heads each
inside a round frame, that were behind an altar in the center of the chapel.
One, he explains, is clearly by the teacher, Masolino. The other is clearly by
Masaccio, his apprentice.
Masaccio |
Masolino |
A fresco detail by Masaccio showing the giornate lines |
For my thesis, I investigated the restorations of the
frescoes on the wall facing the Maesta’ in the Palazzo Civico of Siena. Gordan
Moran, an American living in Florence, together with his friend Michael
Mallory, had been working on a problematic attribution to Simone Martini of the
fresco known as Guido Riccio at the Siege
of Montemassi. They recounted their tireless work on this enigma in a 1991 article, saying the story
concerns far more than red-faced art historians, an outraged city
government, and reluctance to face the distinct possibility that parts of
textbooks and guidebooks will have to be revised. More important are the issues
of scholarly ethics, censorship, and the possible withholding and even
destruction of crucial evidence.
The controversy over Guido Riccio has never been fully resolved in any sort of official
way, although many agree with Moran and Mallory. I learned from my experience
studying the problem of Guido Riccio
that politics has a way of shaping knowledge, and that too was a formative
lesson.
In my work as a teacher
educator, I constantly have to think about issues that surfaced for me in those
formative years of study. How do we really learn, and not just memorize, only
to forget? How is history the “imaginative reconstruction of the past” in the
words of educational historian Lawrence Cremin? Why is it important to
continually revisit the events of the past to understand the present? What is
it about politics and power that shapes the way we see the world and understand
it? Why must we value depth as well as breadth, and why do we need specialized
expertise to understand our world? My time studying art history in college and
the Syracuse Florence program shaped my thinking and expanded my mind. For
that, I am forever grateful.
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ReplyDeleteThank you. I was dismayed by the President's comments, and would have written an essay in response except that I'm in my final quarter at UCLA and have precious little time to respond to his banal anti-intellectualism. As a Classical Civilization major, I have a deep affinity to art history. I should also mention roughly a third of my upper division courses were art history courses of the ancient world. For the past two decades I've worked at a STEM company, and I've always been taken aback by both how narrow and shallow the education of the types of majors the POTUS was hawking.
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