From Existential Questions to Existential Answers: Now!

National Art Education Association

From Existential Questions to Existential Answers: Now!Author(s): Paull McCoySource: Art Education, Vol. 26, No. 5 (May, 1973), pp. 15-19Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3191841 .

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From Existential Questions to Existential Answers---

NOW! Paull McCoy

The mode of philosophizing called Existentialism has profound implications for contemporary education, especially art education. This is apparently not well- understood, even though the currently popular argument favoring freedom of students to choose what, when, where, how, and why they shall learn, with relevance to personal- life issues the chief criterion, is based on existentialist thinking. This should be recognized, and one purpose of this article is to call attention to it. A more important purpose is to point out that this existentialist-based thinking, and the dialogue concerning it, however sincere and en- thusiastic, are simply not enough. Now, very soon, we must have existentialist-based action in educational practice. We must change from talking to doing. We must go from the authoritarian, dehumanized classroom to the free-learning situation that personalizes education. It should be clear at the beginning that I am on the side which favors this liberation of students.

The really contemporary teacher knows that education must be humanized in this way or it will self-destruct. If the change is too slow coming on institutional levels, he can transcend the numerous forces fighting it only by im- plementing, with individual students, a flexible, existentialist philosophy that demands active student freedom to find self-affirmation in responsible choosing and responding. The tremendous variety of choices is frightening. The school states them in terms of career choices. But because of the awe-inspiring magnitude of the area of life-choices, the student experiences ambivalence and, thus, existential anguish. Silberman (1970) is right when he says the "new" student well understands that choice of a career involves far more than the choice of how to make a living. "What shall I do?" ultimately means "What shall I make of myself?"

And that means asking "Who am I?" "What do I want to be?" ""What values do I want to serve?" "To whom and to what do I want to be responsible?" As Drucker rightly ob- serves. "These are existential questions, for all that they.., appear as choices between a job in government, in business, or in college teaching" (emphasis added).7

An existential question can be answered only by the person asking it. If students are asking existential questions (and we know they are), this means only they can choose the answers which must be based on values deduced from their own becoming, and that they must initiate action which, to them, seems appropriate to implement the choices. All this must be done on their own, in their own way, without any fore-knowledge that they have chosen correctly. Therefore, it is done in the existential agony of doubt. In the presence of this kind of soul searching, schools had better help students now by changing the present anachronistic system which is failing to provide op- portunities for them to find their own answers. If it does not, survival of education is unsure.

Silberman charges that American schools are oppressive, grim, joyless, and generally intolerable-that they are not only failing to educate students meaningfully or even adequately but are preoccupied with order, and routine. He says this promotes docility, passivity, resignation, and conformity through an overabundance of rules and through classes taught in a uniform, social-group context, with no relation to the individual child's understanding or interest in the subject. One result is to "destroy students' curiosity along with their ability-more serious, their desire-to think or act for themselves."2 Students are denied development of ability to understand contemporary complexities and to translate that understanding into meaningful personal choices and action. I do not think he has overstated the problem.

It is easy to blame other societal institutions-the church, the government, the media, the family, etc. But if, in order to correct it, we are to place institutional blame somewhere for mindless mass conformity, for witless compulsive con- sumerism which takes from the environment and returns nothing but waste, and for lack of personal values expressed through societal interaction, it appears the American school system-and everyone responsible for it-must take the larger share of that blame. The many school systems which sense this, and who appropriately feel guilty, often respond

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J0 in very public and neurotically spectacular ways. Bigger and more luxurious new buildings, facilities, materials, and equipment-and other publicized status symbols such as "winning" ball teams and marching bands-are offered as panaceas for educational problems. Though it is all too common, the assumption that mere presence of these possessions has much to do with providing a "good education" for individual students seems very naive. Neglect of individual student development toward authentic maturity, resulting from this assumption, appears to be one of the big reasons for production of a low-quality society. This species of spectacular "answers" has turned out to be pathetically inadequate, presumably because the real problem has never been comprehended in the first place.

No one wishes to deny students and teachers the positive advantages of newness, aesthetically satisfying space en- vironments, and useful physical equipment. But if these are not enough, what else needs to be done? How can it be done? Holt (1969) makes this multi-faceted suggestion:

Question from the editors of Education News, New York City: If America's schools were to take one giant step for- ward this year toward a better tomorrow, what should it be?

Answer: It would be to let every child be the planner, director, and assessor of his own education, to allow and encourage him, with the inspiration and guidance of more experienced and expert people, and as much help as he asked for, to decide what he is to learn, when he is to learn it, how he is to learn it, and how well he is learning it. It would be to make our schools, instead of what they are, which is jails for children, into a resource for free and in- dependent learning, which everyone in the community, of whatever age, could use as much or as little as he wanted.3

This is the big change, and it may seem too big a step all at once. But we are talking about revolution, not slow, com- fortable evolution. We cannot wait any longer for uncertain, hesitating school systems to make the big change. The situation requires that the teacher look to himself for changes now, that he find existential answers to existential questions in a new, empathic student-teacher relationship. In spite of the system, schools must be for individual creative learners now, not for teachers, administrators, or board members-nor for the community except as its individuals wish also to become creative learners.

A creative learner may be defined as an individual in search of his own unique selfhood, who appropriates into his life-style that knowledge and those value-truths that appear to him to be most relevant to creative self-actualization of his own unique potential. The criteria for choosing knowledge and values can come only from his existence in

the world, from his experience, from his becoming-so the process has an open-ended, and therefore creative, aspect. Once choices are made, the individual assumes full responsibility for initiating acts calculated to implement ubiquity of the values as qualities directing his life-or any part of it, such as the creation of his art production. In a free society, this individual necessarily has to have the freedom to choose the place, time, and mode of whatever learning experiences seem to him to have relevance to his development toward authentic self-affirmation, because free choice is the basic and undeniable need of a free man. If there is anything that distinguishes human begins from animals, it is that hLumans are born choosers.

Tragically, the society, school systems, parents, and even most teachers, usually function as deterrents to fulfillment of student needs for choice-making. There is a genuine educational problem when authoritarian posture stands in the way of individual student choice of values, standards, ways, and means. Because the need cannot be ignored, sublimated, or replaced by socially-approved nostrums, the individual student (particularly in art), no matter how awk- wardly and painfully, will inevitably make personal choices anyway, in spite of an authoritarian teacher, administrator, or parent. Taking cold showers, making love, bowling, smoking pot, or smashing windows in a riot will not quiet the basic urge to choose-nor will sweet reason, making war, intellectual or emotional appeals, unassailable logic, moralistic platitudes, or threats of punishment. Human beings will choose. Students will choose. They cannot help it. They are human.

Stressful student-teacher relationships, often caused by this hard fact, are a specific manifestation of the larger and very basic paradox concerning two profoundly conflicting interests in public education: (1) the individual's need to plan and control his learning activities in a manner com- patible with his personal motivations, interests, and preferences, and (2) the need of a power-structured society to maintain, perpetuate, and further develop the cultural status quo it now values-if necessary, at the expense of in- dividualism-and to "educate" (better, condition) each individual to fit into socially-approved and certified career and life-style categories. But Kaelin (1968) says inevitable variability in individual reaction to social classification means the individual alone will finally determine the precise meaning of his place in the societal milieu.4 If this is true, no matter what is done in any part of the society to discourage it, individuals will not only choose their education but will choose their life-at least, they will want to, will try to, and deserve the human right to do so.

Many educational theoreticians think this is probably the

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NOW0 greatest of public school problems. Kneller (1967) is typical:

The crisis of modern public education is one of finding ways in which the demands of social conformity may be reconciled with the intrinsic natural diversity in human beings.5

If the American drift toward social conformity has been reflected and perpetuated in the schools to the extent that educational collectivism has reached a stage of crisis, the problem of individuals in group situations (societies in miniature) is genuine and pressing. The teacher can handle this only through mutual-response learning relationships with those individuals. Increasing pressure is placed upon the art educator to handle learning situations in ways com- patible with "needs" of individual students, though this usually is merely a slogan which assumes the teacher and the school know better than the student what his needs are. It is tempting to doubt if motivation for such pressure, in most cases, is any more than a too-typical response to what is now "in." But even where this pressure is sincerely in the interest of individual students, art teachers must serve as both resource persons for individuals and as well-informed, efficient, democratic, and sympathetic group leaders. Can a hard-pressed art teacher do both? The answer seems to be that he must do both-because the individual's in-born uniqueness, which forces him to make personal choices, in turn forces the teacher to be first an individual resource person and, second, a group leader. But, in any case, he must be a friend who knows the student will-to-choose has to be uncoerced because only the individual can know his own uniqueness intimately. And if only he can know the true inner nature of his own uniqueness, only he can discover the possibilities of its expression. And this means only he can choose the what, when, where, how, and how- well of his learning. Of course, he is not to be protected from the consequences of personal choices. Nor may he seek excuses or blame others for mistaken choices or weaknesses of commission. Some have thought a free- learning approach is over-permissive and tends to baby students. It is, in fact, precisely the opposite when viewed in these terms. The student makes free choices and then becomes totally, subjectively involved in the carrying out of acts necessary to implement his choices. He gets involved because he is self-motivated.

This approach finds its most natural setting in art education. Through autonomous choice of ways, means, and ends in art activities, a student becomes an artist. He cannot help having his understanding of specific art problems enhanced; he must solve them one by one in the whole process. But the general area of art education has not encouraged self-actualization of potential of unique in-

dividuals in this manner. Many teachers do not believe this is the role of art education. So, for either this reason or because they, like their systems, wait, wait, wait (why?) to make the change they profess to believe in; how-to-do-it in- struction and group "problem-solving" activities remain the norm in most art classrooms. Probably a majority of these teachers would protest that they want only aesthetic and expressive development of individual students. But this usually means individual development toward levels of skills, means, and ends which he feels are standards to which the student should aspire because he thinks they are correct and good. What the student thinks is correct and good does not matter. In spite of protestations to the con- trary, however sincerely felt, this cannot be interest in other individuals. It must be seen as interest in giving to the world, through a captive group of individuals, the gift of perpetuation of one's own standards, skills, means, and ends. This can only be called self-interest at the expense of others. If the student were given free choice, instead of being trained in a tradition the teacher happens to favor because it is his way, the student's approach and expression undoubtedly would be divergent, even totally different, from teacher modalities. But this is precisely what we must want for students if they are to be creative learners. Surely no one should have to remind art teachers that creativity, by definition, means divergency and open-endedness. True interest in individual art students requires that they have free creative choices, however different they may be from teacher modes. When students imitate the teacher's aesthetic feelings and ways of creative expression, when they appropriate his ways of working, his techniques and style, then both teacher and students are in trouble. This is true because it is simply not in human nature to learn creatively by being a passive receptacle for established "knowledge," a mere spectator to a parade of erudition and skill, a mechanical reactor-machine to manipulative stimuli chosen for their directive value (euphemistically called "motivation"-which means he has to become an automaton who more or less efficiently performs the programmed function of extending the teacher's subcon- scious self-image by mindlessly carrying through a series of teacher-motivated directives), or a social being who is made to understand what his "place" is in an institutionalized hierarchy called society. Forced into these traps, the student does not freely and fully participate in his own learning. He is told. He does not choose, he does not express his own feelings or values, does not discover anything, creates almost nothing, takes practically no responsibility, does not enjoy-does not, by free choice and free will, do much of anything. His interests, and therefore his motivation to want

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01 to know and do, are left out.

The thinking that has been briefly outlined here is existen- tialistic in nature. What kind of learning situation does this thinking require? Generally, each student is left free to find his own personal selfhood on a strictly individual basis; each may choose to be or not to be group-oriented, mildly individualistic, or may be a rebel if he needs to be. The student is left alone to autonomously transcend meaningless conformity, not only to his peer group and to school and societal norms, but also to teacher modalities, preformulated rules, techniques, concepts, absolutes, and univer- sal outlooks on life. There is a very wide range of physical, psychological, and philosophical possibilities within which his sometimes-agonized, but always-free, choosing permits him to find deep, self-motivated involvement, along with commitment to rights of others to do the same and to general improvement of what appears to be a decaying society. And what is beautiful is that this kind of situation can be made to happen even where there, is a lack of facilities, materials, and equipment. The change can only improve any existing situation.

Specifically, what does this imply for art teaching strategies? It means a very close relationship between teacher and student, with empathy and communion between them as equal partners in an exciting, mutual, reciprocal-response experience (as in Buber's I-Thou experience). It means the teacher is a free personality, en- thusiastically involved in activities with individual students in a way that leaves them no doubt that they, too, are free personalities and are being treated that way. Existentialist thinking requires three large strategical goals:

(1) Treatment of the total subject-area in a manner that makes it possible for the student to discover, in completely free association and without interference, what are truths and untruths within the subject-area boundaries. This means the teacher must seek evidence that his students hold something to be true because they have convinced themselves it is true. The student's discovery of truth through his own personal solution, even though previously thought out by others, is new to him and therefore becomes a personal, meaningful revelation to him.

(2) Facilitation of student's "autonomous functioning of the mind" in a way that produces in them a type of charac- ter that is "free, charitable, and self-moving."6

(3) Establishment and maintainence of a free-learning situation that liberates each student to conduct the search for himself in his own way.

The teacher is never condescending or meddlesome. He participates with students, is imaginative, sympathetic, help- ful, and stimulating. Fallico (1954) long ago stated that a

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talented teacher "knows how to avoid officiousness in his dealings with the educational development of a student." He said the teacher must not stand in the way of a "healthy existentialist crisis." Nor may he present palliatives, psychological cures, panaceas, or other expediencies at the expense of student autonomy.7 Kneller describes what the autonomous student actually experiences:

First comes a confession of ignorance, and a realization of one's moral and intellectual unconsciousness, much as Socrates advocated. This is followed by an examination of oneself and one's life purposes, including one's judgement of values in life and the choices that need to be made. Education can play its part by filling in the gaps necessary for the fulfillment of these purposes; it is not a mold into which the purposes of the student must be fitted.8

After setting a goal for himself, the student is left free to realize the potential accomplishment, whatever it may be, as a matter of highest importance to himself alone. The teacher's role is to fill in the gaps by participating with students and becoming a counselor-friend who knows when to help them and when to leave them alone. Most of the real art of teaching lies in this intuitive ability. He cannot "teach" (dogmatize), but must rely on dialogue, verbal and otherwise, as did Socrates. He has to be a provocateur, a demurrer, and an equal. In company with his students, he strives to express value-truths of his own becoming through open, honest disclosure of his own creative struggles and aesthetic growth. He is not a teacher-artist-expert showing the way to what is "right" and good in art. He learns from his students as they learn from him and from each other.

With this framework of the teacher's role as provocateur and Socratic gadfly in mind, specific methodological objectives directly affecting the student can be listed:

(1) Help the student develop awareness of and sensitivity to his total sensory and eidetic phenomenological environment by

a. stimulating him to become intellectually and affec- tively conscious of his external senses and internal aesthetic sensibilities, and by helping him exercise them within a very wide range of aesthetic-response possibilities.

b. showing him that all his creative experiencing and learning-and, in fact, the rationale behind the learning of all men-is tied to sensory and emotional components within the self.

(2) Help the student find self-actualization by a. feeling his freedom to be individualistic in the most

personal terms. b. understanding that, if he has the courage, he may

freely choose, implement, and accept the responsibility for any and all aspects of his creative learning and of his



40 life-he is accountable only to himself.

c. drawing upon the potential of his experience by in- tuitively making personally meaningful aesthetic responses to internal and external stimuli arising from that experience.

(3) Lead the student into deeply intuitive, affective involvement in all his experiences, particularly his total aesthetic experiencing and art production, from original eidetic fantasying to final, communicative art prod- uct.

(4) Lead the student to understand that chronic American nostalgia for "certainty" is anachronistic, and that every creative learning problem, no matter what its source, has a variety of equally valid solutions-but each valid only if it is an expression of his own feelings and value-truths.

(5) Lead the student to understand that he is more important than the subject area of "Art" and that creative learning experiences are to be undertaken only on his own terms, not on any preformulated terms which refer to norms.

(6) Facilitate the student's understanding that content of any subject area is limiting, and that truth lies in the inner appeal to private knowing, to one's own inner, private ingenuity.

(7) Seek to sustain the student's delight in divergency and uniqueness and endeavor to mitigate the more conservative and conventional conformist attitudes he acquires as he matures in the midst of a mass society.

(8) Encourage sensitivity to problems; stimulate the ability to be excited and puzzled by what others take for granted.9

Really good art teachers necessarily are already familiar with the existentialist-based, humanistic concepts presented here. No one may pretend these ways of thinking and doing are easy or that they are not controversial. This is well- known. But it appears that, if teachers and schools are to answer basic needs of today's students, these are the ways and attitudes which will have to be not only considered and reflected upon but, more important, acted upon.

Art teacher (all teachers), have you already made the change, or will you continue to teach for yesterday's goals-while perhaps swearing allegiance to today's goals? Or will you start now, before it is too late, to activate today's goals of freeing the student to become a responsibly- choosing, mature, expressive individual in the existentialist sense of authentic selfhood? The question is not what you are thinking or saying about this issue. Most art teachers think and talk in affirmative ways about free, creative learning choices of students. If you wish to identify your present position in this controversy, remember you are what you do, not what you say. The real question, then, is: what are you doing about it? If you are merely talking, don't wait to change-because it appears the big change, if it is to

come at all, must come soon!

Paull McCoy is associate professor of art and art education, University of Wisconsin , Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

REFERENCES

1C.E. Silberman, Crisis in the Classroom. New York: Random House, 1970, p. 23.

2lbid, p. 136. 3). Holt, The Underachieving School. New York: Pitman,

1969, p. IX. "4E.F. Kaelin, An Existential-Phenomenological Ac-

count of Aesthetic Education. University Park, Penlnsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University, May 20, 1968, monograph.

5G.F. Kneller, Existentialism and Education. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1967, p. 32.

6R. Harper, cited in Kneller, op. cit., p. 117. 7A.B. Fallico, "Existentialism and Education,"

Educational Theory, Vol 4, No. 2 (April, 1954), 168 ff., cited in Kneller, loc. cit.

8Kneller, loc. cit. A considerable portion of this article is based on the thinking of Kneller and others writing in this area. The purpose of the article is to direct attention of art educators to their thinking and to call for action based on this way of thinking.

9This list of objectives is, in part, a compilation of points deduced from similar lists by authors to whom I have referred.

SELECTED ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY.

M. Buber, I and Thou, second edition. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958.

A.B. Fallico, Art and Existentialism. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962.

E.F. Kaelin, "The Existential Ground for Aesthetic Education," Studies in Art Education, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Autumn, 1966), pp. 3-12.

V.C. Morris, Existentialism In Education. New York: Har- per and Row, 1966.

C. Moustakas, The Authentic Teacher. Cambridge: Doyle, 1967.

C. Moustakas, "Heuristic Research," Challenges of Humanistic Psychology, Bugental, J.F.T., ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967, pp. 101-107.

H.F. Thomas, "An Existential Attitude in Working With Individuals and Groups," Ibid, pp. 227-232.

I.T. Wilde and W. Kimmel, eds., The Search For Being. New York: Noonday Press, 1962.

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From Existential Questions to Existential Answers: Now!