Alexandra Miletta heard President Obama make an off-hand remark about art history, a putdown–what can you do with it? What will it pay? Having been a college major in art history, and having studied art history in Siena, she bristled at the condescension.
Here she explains how her study of art history prepared her to be a teacher educator and why she treasures what she learned as a lifelong resource.
I went to the same undergraduate college as Alexandra, and to this day, I regret that I didn’t study art history but spent most of my time in political science and history courses.
Some people will never get the idea that life is more than about making money. Because to them it is not.
A fool knows what he knows but the wise know differently. It is like a person who is tone deaf but thinks they sing beautifully because they are so tone deaf. Is there not some parallel here with Obama who smugly thinks that everyone is nodding in agreement with him when he makes such ignorant comments !
Or Blake’s, “A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees.”
I remember a certain fool who said, “If you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen them all.”
Also no big surprise that Obama goes out of his way to praise Reagan.
We’ve moved from what was once considered a well-rounded education to mere preparation for an economically beneficial career. While I hope my children will be able to support themselves, I hope they’ll also develop souks that allow them to appreciate art -and other people!
In addition to Reign of Error, we should all be reading the introduction to When I Was A Child, I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson. The preface alone is a wonderful plea for education and its effects on democracy. A reviewer writes, “[Robinson] is angry at America for its betrayal of its founding principles…at our failure to sustain the conception of community.” (Some liberties taken with quotes from Andrew DelBlanco ‘s NYT Sunday Book Review, 4/22/2012)
STANDARDIZED Lies, Money & Civil Rights: How Testing Is Ruining Public Education
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.
http://rdsathene.blogspot.com/2014/01/as-ucla-classical-civilization-major.html
Go Classics. BA UCLA ’72 Classics and History. Wish I had taken Art History too.
narrow and shallow indeed
The current education “reforms” are the triumph of Philistinism; the barbarians are not at the gates; they are now an occupying force in our schools, and many are the collaborators with them. Their “standards” and testing schemes are recipes for shallowness and mediocrity. Their “data-driven decision making” is purest numerology. But we know these things, and are fighting back. Thank you for your post, Robert, and for paying attention to what’s going on.
I practiced law for a long time before I became a math/science teacher, and art history was, hand’s down, the best preparation I had for law school and the practice of law. It was all compare-and-contrast; you had to pay attention to the details and separate the important from the coincidental. Pre-law students were always shocked when I told them to scurry over to take the art history survey course, but in practical terms, it was the most useful preparation I had for reading and analyzing cases and statutes, the critical skill for success as a lawyer. Happily, art history also gave me a more sophisticated eye and a lifetime of pleasure of enjoying and appreciating art. Oh, and did I mention that the art historians made us write some of the toughest papers in college? I learned most of what I know about writing from them, too.
Please don’t regret your study of politics and history. They are essential. I am a product of the “greed is good” 80’s so I have an undergraduate degree in business and a post graduate degree in law. But most of my electives were in history and literature. I soon found I didn’t fit the”greedy” mold, and eventually found my way back to what I always wanted to do. .teach. I now take what I learned through my education and my self studies and use them to teach history the way I wish I had been taught in high school.
I may have taken a different path then Alexandra, but we had the same destination. All education is valuable. It should be broad in scope to give an appreciation for all disciplines before being narrowed to just one discipline. This is the lesson the current “reformers” need to learn. No subject is an “elective”; they are all essential.
Well stated!
Offering art history, music, literature next to math and science is offering students a choice and a balanced education. That’s called freedom—freedom of choice.
But what happens when someone like President Obama and Bill Gates become the only judges that have the (undemocratic) power to restrict the choices to classes that in the end only contribute to corporate profits?
If there are not art classes, then there is no choice.
The study of art histories (there are many versions, not just one grand narrative) is valuable for may reasons, not the least becoming a well-educated person. As a parallel to the value found by at least one lawyer, consider this. At the University of Cincinnati Medical School students are introduced to the critical analysis of works of art in varied styles for the purpose of honing their skills in observation, making warranted inferences based on their own and others’ observations, and more. This strategy requires dismantling preconceptions and studying different accounts of the significance of the works. I believe this method of instruction was developed in one of the Boston area MD training programs. The skills are then brought to bear on encounters with patients.
Unfortunately, all of the President’s comments on education have been off-handed. But as with most Presidents, education/teaching/schooling is not something you have to study or experience. Instead you offer up whatever is the political belief of the day and put people in the cabinet position that also shared in their ignorance of education and schooling. In fact, it appears that the less you know about education, the more an individual is qualified to comment on the subject. The irony would be, if one of the President’s daughters becomes an art history major.
This quote has been going around in my head for quite a while, even before the Apple commercial using the quote came out. Put in “art, music, history, etc.” where it says “poetry” if you want, because it’s ALL important.
There was one couple, with a baby in a stroller, at the rock gem and fossil show at the new york state museum today, that was of african american descent. They are, I have come to feel, a people, who try to use the least amount of resources they need from the planet to survive.. and look at everything around them as an excessive and extraneous use of commodities. They appreciate whats around them, and do not try to use more than they need. I am not surprised that, Obama, in keeping with this mindset, feels the way he does about liberal arts, and the arts in general. The issue is that the focus of liberal arts should not be contingent upon survival based on the dollar, but based on the critical thinking that is core to any school of thought… and the life that is to be sustained upon exit.
This happened at least 25 years ago. I had a student in my math class who never expressed interest in anything, and worked as little as possible in all his classes. I mentally gave him the moniker “Slug”, as he physically seemed to move about in the world in slow motion. I was not the only teacher to think half-seriously, that, because he was blessed with extreme good looks, the only job he would ever have would be a gigolo.
One day he bounced into the classroom with every book on Egypt, that he could find in our school library. He was so excited, he told me, because he had just discovered Egyptian art and wanted to know everything about Egypt. That boy started to act like a fire had been lit under him ….no, in him! The more he studied his passion, the more interested he became in school, even doing better in math class.
And the nickname? No longer fit, as he now moved through the world with gusto. All because of artists who lived thousands of years ago.
donasonora: and I am guessing that you and the other teachers and school staff helped fan that newly-found fire of learning.
But now for the Rheeally important question when it comes to “our most precious assets”: what in the world did you do to make him “college-and-career ready”?
😎
lol I can’t think of a time when my public school didn’t educate to help students become college or career ready. lol Of course, back when the above student was in high school, college attendance was more affordable and there were jobs available.
Back then we also had three art teachers; after NCLB there were just two. Ah, but through creative scheduling, the district made teachers teach more periods and with larger class sizes.
Denigrating an Art History Major is no substitute for lack of jobs. Remember the WPA!
It is so easy to dismiss that for which we do not see an immediate concrete purpose. How dull life would be if we did.
Here’s the thing about art history: it teaches a student to critically consider how powerful forces shape the beliefs and the visual images of a culture. That is the best kind of learning unless you. don’t. want. people. to. think. critically. Yes, I just used creative punctuation and I’m not ashamed.
We have a democratic administration in the White House and governors, mayors all who cares little about real education. President Obama has sold out the people who voted him in and were stupid to believe in the change he stated that he would be. He ,Vice President (his brother who runs the biggest charter school system) and the democratic party have taken our vote for granted because there were no alternatives. The destruction of public education,unions is what the President and his army have been after. When he said Michelle Rhee was the greatest educator before the 2008 inauguration, we didn’t realize that he was telling us what was coming down the pike. When he wouldn’t stand with the teachers, unions in Wisconsin , when he stated the teachers in Rhode Island deserved to be fired, we didn’t believe the man we had voted in was now totally against us. How could that be? His off the cuff remark meant we don’t deserve our dream jobs in the arts, music, theaters only special people do. If he isn’t owned by corporate America I don’t know who is. Yes we have health care but did that mean we had to lose union protection for teachers to get it. I don’ think so. We didn’t let our voices be heard to say stop and listen to the people The next election will be different we will demand more from whoever is the front runner .
We all need to follow our dreams, maybe we can’t get the dream job in America for art, music the world is a big place. It is indeed terrible we might have to go someplace else to have the positions we want, but we will be successful and our gain will be the lost of real intellectual firepower that the United States really needs.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with my Executive Officer when I was a hospital corpsman serving onboard the Attack Submarine USS Pasadena in the 1980’s. He was chastising Liberal Arts/Humanities majors with me because I was finishing my first MA degree in History. He commented that the trouble with such majors is that, while Science majors had to stick around and take the lab component of their courses, we finished with our lectures and went home for the day. My response was that, while he was working on prescribed labs and taking multiple choice exams, we Liberal Arts/Humanities majors were conducting primary and secondary research in the library and in our “off-hours”, and writing extended research papers. I concluded by stating that we were taught to see the world in its many shades of gray, and that, as an Executive Officer whose primary responsibility was over the personnel in his command, he could have benefitted from having a Liberal Arts/Humanities degree. His Science/Engineering/Math degrees helped him little in trying to analyze the myriads of human problems he encountered every day. The world does not exist within the realm of right and wrong, or the world he was taught to see. He conceded my point!
Thank you for all these thoughtful comments. I thought I would share a piece of news about the President’s personal response to a letter from an art historian in Texas:
http://hyperallergic.com/109775/presidents-obama-pens-personal-apology-to-an-art-historian/
I wonder if Obama realizes that there are probably very few public high schools nowadays offering art history.