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.
Interesting post, Pantelis. As someone with a background in theater education, I am also fully aware of the need to defend the arts as a ‘legitimate’ field when compared to the fields of science, math and technology, among others.
Your argument that music strengthens ones imagination and thusly will be a skill needed in the ‘rational’ disciplines is an intriguing one. However, one can argue that scientific hypothesis and experiments can achieve the same results. One thinks of what the future outcome may be and then systematically tests it. If incorrect, it will inform him or her so they may formulate a new hypothesis and repeat the pattern.
Now this is not to say that I disagree with what you are saying. Quite the contrary, actually. I see that the Arts as being a different way to imagine and to think creatively. It is the combination of the systematic hypotheses combined with the creative and artistic imagination that creates a well-rounded individual who can take the very scientific way of thinking to the next level.
I also don’t think that any Arts student should be without the science and math courses. I believe they are also fundamental to any person studying art, music, theater, painting or any other arts field. It is the combination of the two- soft and hard- that create individuals capable of creating amazing works, be them artistic or scientific.
Too often the Arts have a need to be defended simply because the results are not as tangible. To create a drug that has X effect on an illness is measurable and concrete. Whereas to create a composition is difficult to measure in quality. What does it ‘do’? This is a focus on the ends rather than on both the ends and the means. Which I believe to be just as important, if not even more so.
So, the question then becomes ‘how can the arts be assessed on an equal playing field as the sciences’? I don’t believe this may ever happen. What I do think should happen, though, is a change in mindset that there is importance in both- even if they cannot be measured in the same way. The way to get there, however, may be a long road.
Thank you for your comment, Joann.
I believe that the question ‘how can the arts be assessed on an equal playing field as the sciences?’ may not the right question to be asking, as I do not think that such assessment uniformity is even desirable.
A more valid question to be asking would, in my opinion, be: ‘how can arts education accomplishments be assessed on an equal playing field as science education accomplishments?.’ This question has been asked by Hanna (2007) in the paper cited in my original post. In her paper, Hanna has shown that such an equal-playing-field assessment is possible, through her application of the new Bloom’s taxonomy to music education. My post’s argument was that Hanna’s successful demonstration of ‘legitimate’ assessment is inconsequential and powerless until we are able to answer another question: ‘Why should anyone become good in arts?”
To place arts and sciences in an ‘even playing field’ one must first recover art’s cognitive significance, and the first step in doing so is recovering the cognitive significance of imagination and releasing it (as a concept) from its strong philosophical subordination to reason.
In other words, I am not really arguing (yet) that music or any of the arts strengthens imagination. This argument on its own is weak and an old cliché, as weak and old as the one that claims that ‘music is the language of emotions’. I cringe whenever I hear/read such arguments and want to make sure it is clear that I did not intent to commit the same error in my post. I therefore agree with your objections to such an argument, which have also been eloquently presented in several cognitive psychology publications.
The intension of my post’s last paragraph was to start questioning the philosophical opposition, within post-Plato’s western culture, between imagination and reason. In this, I am following a long tradition of thinkers from several pre-Socratics to Gadamer, Ricoeur, and even computer science researchers such as Winograd. I am in the process of drafting a paper on the cognitive significance or art for submission to the British Journal of Aesthetics and will be happy to share it with you, as it progresses, for your comments.
Hi Pantelis
I read your post along with the Hanna paper. I have several comments. It seems you are saying that until educators get their act together and philosophize why do music at all, that any assessment initiative is meaningless. With that approach, we may have to wait a very long time, while arts programs continue to be slashed and or shut down. You did not mention that the Hanna paper also talks about the significance of the New Bloom Taxonomy in terms of the addition of the highest cognitive category which is now referred to as CREATE (creativity). Here is where music does have something to say, and in fact, your point on imagination can now even be legitimately assessed. Much or science and mathematics the way it is currently taught is void of any sort of creative thinking.
You might go back to the classic work of Koestler where he speaks of three forms of creativity– the ah!, the aha!, and the ha ha! He ah! is the domain of artistic creativity–aesthetics. the aha! – scientific creativity. And the ha-ha! is humor–a domain that is unique in its ability to hold two opposing meanings simultaneously (bisociation).
In any case, I thought the Hanna article on assessment offered a lot of ammunition to arts educators and arts administrators than the sort of philosophical meanderings and banterings that we have seen thrashing around for the last 50 years. Yes, art is cognitively significant–and Hanna shows us how we can play the language game of assessment to make such a case. It might be nice to talk philosophically about how the world needs to reconcile imagination with reason, but in the meantime– those of us who are held accountable by policy makers need tools to argue our case that music education is just as legitimate as algebra. Hanna’s article does a superb job of doing just that.
Ron
Ron,
Thank you for sharing your comments and engaging in the conversation.
I agree with you that Hanna’s article does a superb job accomplishing its goal and I also agree that this goal is a very significant one. My original post should have made clear as much.
Before dismissing the rest of my discussion as ‘philosophizing meandering and bantering’ that is ‘thrashed around’ consider the following:
As long as we fail to demonstrate what is special about arts education and experience, what the two can offer us that is different than what other education and experiences do offer us, we will be left open to arguments of the sort: “If I want to be better at math, I’ll practice more math rather than practice music.” When arguing that music is as good in promoting certain skills and creativity as some other topic, one implicitly allows for music to be rendered redundant.
The significance of creativity in the new Bloom’s taxonomy (well discussed by Hanna) helps music or other arts education only under the assumption that the arts foster creativity more/differently than other activities. Although this is an implicitly accepted statement, by most, it cannot, on its own, hold its ground against statements that argue for the way creativity can be fostered through science, language, or even physical education. Again, the arts are left open to redundancy ‘accusations.’ We could of course argue for the special kind of creativity fostered by the arts, one that cannot be nurtured through any other activity and one that benefits all activities. What is this kind of creativity? As far as I am concerned, this question leads me back to where my original post started.
What do you say to a top ranking administrator who looks you in the face and essentially tells you “I don’t care how good your students have become in what you teach them (music) because what you teach them has no value beyond what is already offered through learning other topics or simple entertainment/escape”?
Appeals to vague notions of creativity, emotional richness, socialization, etc. may not take you far, and neither will demonstrations of how objectively you can assess your students’ musical accomplishments.
I agree that Hanna’s arguments provide us with much needed (short-range/term) ammunition. As I have already told her, I’ll be using her paper in all my Music Education classes and will bring it in as a valuable ‘cheat-sheet’ to every administrative meeting I attend. At the same time, as a passionate musician, educator, and researcher, I’ll keep probing the long-term/range questions I find crucial to what I do everyday, toying with them through blog entries and delving into them more deeply in conference presentations and publications.
Pantelis
Ron, one more comment.
The deeper one delves into issues of the value of an activity, issues that are central to our discussion, the more one needs to engage in serious reflective thought, which you refer to as philosophizing.
I believe, one problem we face is that we do not often seriously question what we do. Musicians keep doing/teaching music, scientists keep doing/teaching science, and so on. This is wonderful in that it shows conviction but conviction will not take us far when interacting with those who do not share the same convictions as we do. And this is precisely the case in our (music educators) interactions with administrators. In such interactions, we need to present arguments based on serious reflective thought (e.g. philosophy) and empirical evidence (e.g. science). As the arts are highly dependent on issues of aesthetics and taste, scientific investigation can offer a limited set of arguments, which can be, and often are, easily counter-argued and dismissed. In my opinion, what can empower us most is the ability to convincingly argue for the benefits of the arts, beyond entertainment and escape on one hand, and utilitarian approaches (e.g. music makes you smarter at something else) on the other.
Based on the literature on the topic, I, for one, am optimistic that this is possible, assuming we are willing to seriously address the most basic questions (e.g. “what is art/music/etc. good for?”) and convincingly argue for the value of the arts, rather than shooting ourselves in the foot, so to speak, by undermining reflective thought, our biggest ally, as “philosophizing bantering.”
Finally, humor’s ability to hold two opposing meanings simultaneously is also shared by metaphor and is behind metaphor’s power to create meaning. This power is closely related to the work of imagination involved in making sense of a metaphor. Metaphor is an explicit act of transgression in search for new meaning within a specific context, where predicative impertinence is produced not by the deviating use of isolated words but by the clash of semantic fields in an event of language. In short, I believe that the “ah” of Kestler’s artistic creativity and the “ha ha” of humor must not be seen as occupying completely different domains, as it is throught an understanding of the workings of metaphor that we can address and argue for artistic imagination’s productive potential and therefore value.
Hi Pantelis,
It is interesting to note that business has suddenly taken an interest in what they can learn from art. There is a growing literature out there on how many companies and academics in business are turning to the arts to understand the value of imagination, creativity and the capacity to create in a collaborative context. This is promising. Music educators should pay attention to this new development.
I agree with your position that music education should build its own unique case for its “value-added proposition” (a business term that most administrators would understand). So far, as you say, music educators have avoided doing this…
I think much can be learned by studying the literature and research on creativity–as creativity is not the same across domains–i.e., science, architecture, poetry, math, literature, visual arts, performing arts.
Ron
Hi Ron,
Your comment on the importance of a domain-specific understanding of creativity is a very important and valid one. Thank you.
As a quick clarification, my background and current work are not in business (not really sure what gave this impression). I have a BA in Composition, a MA in Ethnomusicology, a PhD in Music Cognition, Acoustics,& Aesthetics, a Post-Doc in Hearing Sciences, and currently teach at DePaul’s School of Music and at Columbia College. If you have time to kill, more info and publications/presentations are available at http://www.acousticslab.org
It seems to me that you really want to compare Fantasy and Reason…. Imagination does not deal, as you say, with things”that are not really there” but, rather, examines various ways that things that “are really there” might occur. Imagination is thus rational and a coexists with logic as part of the thinking process. Imagination finds new ways of doing things with existing parts.
Fantasy, on the other hand, is the art of “seeing things that are either not really there” or could not exist in reality.. .
Thanks for your comment Anthony.
My approach to “imagination” follows Kant’s and Ricoeur’s “universe” of “as if.” See for example Ricoeur’s “The function of fiction in shaping reality” (1979, Man and World 12: 123-141 http://www.springerlink.com/content/k44u4434460385v6/ )
I am actually agreeing with your assertion that imagination and reason work hand in hand. More emphatically, my main point is that the two are inseparable. This is precisely why Ricouer attaches such importance to Kant’s understanding of imagination as “schematizing a synthetic operation.” The problem is that the artificial dichotomy between imagination and reason, which has it’s roots in Plato, is so deeply rooted within the western tradition that it remains present, albeit concealed, even in statements like yours, which on the surface bring imagination and reason together (at the expense of imagination).
Trying to distinguish between “new things” and “new combinations of old things” is, in my opinion, neither possible nor fruitful, especially since the “units” of things or events are neither fixed nor context independent.
At the same time, even if we were to (wrongly) assume that units of things/events are fixed and knowable, limiting imagination to essentially a reshuffle of a limited menu of existing things is not very … imaginative. As Gadamer argues, works of imagination grasp our interest by calling on, but not being limited by our knowledge of their referent. It is the tension between “real” and “unreal” fostered by imagination, as expressed in art, that enables the communication and creation of yet un-encountered realities. In other words imagination permits us to encounter radically new experiences, calling on but not being limited by previous knowledge/events.
In the Gadamerian discussion of art as play and of the “free play of productive imagination,” imagination is free not in being haphazard but in being temporarily withdrawn from its preoccupation with the player’s world; and it is re-productive not in reproducing the world of the game but in re-shaping the world of the player under the guidance of the play.
By supporting a temporary suspension of the real, imagination in art helps us break away from our ordinary conception of reality and provides the most fertile ground for experimenting with alternative ways of being in the world, in an at-once playful and serious manner. Art’s explorations in the realm of the imaginary hold out new possibilities for thought, feeling, and action. Consequently, imagination enriches our experience through art’s own unique modes of representation, by giving voice to thoughts, feelings, and actions that have never “been” before but have the potential to turn from imagined reality into lived reality and from proposed alternatives into choices.
So imagination both relies on and temporarily suspends previous knowledge/experience. This tension is crucial to the work of imagination and is precisely what Ricoeur’s seemingly paradoxical idea of ‘productive reference’ captures. Firstly, that art is productive of new experience in that it ‘reworks’ our horizons through the free play of imagination; through bracketing the guidance of our effective history in favor of the guidance of the play that, for Gadamer, brings a work of art to presentation. And secondly, that it is a reference in that it reworks experience ‘from the inside,’ based always on our particular situation (effective history) since, even though bracketed, this situation represents the basis from where horizons can be extended.
Even for Aristotle, imagination at work seriously considers how something, which may or may not be capable of being may actually come to be and, in exploring the potential for being and change, imagination may produce new knowledge.
My imagination does not work with “images”, per se, but rather with “word-construct scenarios.” My imagination takes the set of word-related relevancies and juggles them into all possible outcomes, which my mind then sorts and discards according to … well, mostly whatever state my mind happens to be in…. My imagination may and can deal with all sorts of “imagined” scenarios, but that does not make it irrational… and at core, imagination is always .. stress… always, dealing with a definite set of knowns and pitting them against an undefined set of unknowns (possibilities) via synthesis… the synthetic arguments derived are imaginary because they are future related. In terms of art, if only imagination is used then we will have a “classical” school of art limited by the available number of possibilities or variations on a theme… so what I am suggesting is to revisit the word “fantasy”, which suffers a bad press…. as fantasy is perfectly at home dealing with images such as two sides of the same coin at one and the same time .. and as such, in dealing with the eternal, is limitless in its possibilities…
New knowledge… In my view, discovery can be viewed as: [a] the realization of new ways to do different things with known elements, which I call imagination, and/or [b] the realization of concepts into workable ideas by abstracting a truth from a perceived image, which I call fantasy and others may call the asymmetrical component of bi-logic….
I think I understand your argument. It seems to me that what I and most authors dealing with the topic since Kant refer to as “imagination,” you split into two related but allegedly distinct concepts, “imagination” (dealing with creative/innovative rearrangement of known elements) and “fantasy” (dealing with invention, mental imagery, productively tense coexistence of opposites, limitless possibilities, serious consideration of the “impossible,” etc.).
I am not sure if/why this separation is necessary. As my previous post implies, the core characteristics of your “fantasy” are crucial to what I and most authors on the topic describe as “the work of the productive imagination.” You have clearly devoted a lot of thought on the issue and, if you have not already done so (based on your arguments I suspect you have not), I strongly encourage you to read Gadamer’s “The Relevance of the Beautiful.” http://www.amazon.com/Relevance-Beautiful-Other-Essays/dp/0521339537/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215746266&sr=8-1
It is a rather small book, a collection of selected essays by Gadamer on imagination, beauty, creativity, and creation of meaning. I am confident you will find it very interesting and useful to your argumentation and thoughts on the issue. I actually think that, like me, you will truly appreciate and enjoy its philosophical and intellectual standpoint, while benefiting from its insights.
Thank you for the link.
I do not see fantasy and Imagination as distinct, per se, as there is at least a transcendental link between the two and it ius highly probable that one cannot operate without some measure of the other. However, clearly we use each to different degrees — otherwise we would all see the same things… people who daydream, for example, are fantasists… image based as opposed to word based… interestingly, this group use their ears as alerts to danger or other events in the environment… try it sometime… you will certainly know a daydreamer or two, and when he/she is deep into reverie, quietly mention something germain to another person… say “have you heard about the pay rise?” and watch the almost instant response from our dreamer: “Pay rise! Who, when?”
Best regards.
Thank you.
Excellent NPR podcast arguing convincingly that the key reason for the human species’s dominance of the planet lays in its ability to create and believe in stories, i.e. to imagine, which in turn supports flexible large-scale social networks. Great presentation, featuring Prof Y.N. Harari
http://www.npr.org/2016/03/04/468882620/why-did-humans-become-the-most-successful-species-on-earth