Art
Introduction to Art
Art is a language of visual images that everyone must learn to read. In art classes, we make visual images, and we study images. Increasingly, these images affect our needs, our daily behaviour, our hopes, our opinions, and our ultimate ideals.
Complete literacy includes the ability to understand, respond to, and talk about visual images. Therefore, to carry out its total mission, art education stimulates language-spoken and written-about visual images. As art teachers we work continuously on the development of critical skills. This is our way of encouraging linguistic skills. By teaching pupils to describe, analyse, and interpret visual images, we enhance their powers of verbal expression.
Why do we teach art?
Beyond the qualities of creativity, self-expression, and communication, art is a type of work. This is what art has been from the beginning. This is what art is from childhood to old age. Through art, our students learn the meaning of joy of work-work done to the best of one’s ability, for its own sake, for the satisfaction of a job well done.
Today we hear much about productivity and workmanship. Both of these ideals are strengthened each time we commit ourselves to the endeavour of art.
