My freind and I have been co-writing engineering graphic workbooks for about ten years. In the beginning, we were both teaching graphics so this was a natural extension of our work. In later years, I have moved away from that field but I still enjoy working with this subject even through the time I have to devote to it is much more limited. I was first exposed to drafting as a student in high school and I was so proud of those drawings because I felt like I could really draw even if it wasn’t art. It was a great feeling.
Every student needs to have an opportunity to learn something that gives them that same sense of success. For some this makes the difference between staying in school and leaving early. It also needs to be a real achievement, not a participation award. Unfortunately, those opportunities are dying. In an era when success is measured by standardized test scores, there are fewer and fewer programs that give students something tangible to hold on to. Even in career and technical education, the youth programs now depend on testing to determine winners at competitions.
Students no longer travel to large halls to exhibit their work, admire the work of their peers and then return home reach the mark set by their peers. Part of this is due to the over involvement of parents who rob their children of the sense of achievement by doing the work for them. Using tests helps to weed out this type of abuse. Part is this is due to cost; most organizations do not want the event to last any longer than needed so often only the judges now view the work and everyone removes their work after judging. This allows everyone to leave as quickly as possible after the awards.
For these reasons, the focus is now on the winner rather than the work. At the last science fair for which I volunteered, the projects did not even stay up long enough for the participants to view the winning entries. I never did know what the students had done to merit their awards. They did not have an opportunity to stand by their work and receive the accolades that their work deserved. The other students did not have a chance to see what a winning entry looked like.
This is a real loss. As a student, I went to several of these types of events and although I did not receive many ribbons, I was proud to be there and to be part of my group. I was impressed by that my peers had created such wonderful work and this made me believe that I could also create wonderful work because people my age had done those beautiful projects. How lucky I was to have a great drafting teacher who gave me the opportunity to learn the value of striving for improvement rather than one who just tallied up the wins. It easier to believe that you can achieve something when you see achievement as a process rather than as a strike of genius.
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Karen,
ReplyDeleteA big, big AMEN for this one! The truth is that in graphics what we do is communicate- no more and no less than we do in words. By and large, though, we treat "art" as though it were something special and different, robbing the youth of countless generations of a decent education in visual communication.
Failing on top of that to do the obvious- allow competitors in visual communications contests to see the fruits of excellent labor- compounds the failure. Graphic communication is a skill. That skill can be taught and was part of a classical education for hundreds of years. We don't expect everyone who takes English in elementary school to become a novelist or poet, but some do. In the same way we should not refrain from educating people well in graphic communications because so few will be so-called "fine" artists. Instead we should educate them all as well as possible. Then those few who do have the poetic visual gifts will be well grounded in the fundamental skills they need to express their gifts and the rest of the population will be able to communicate far better than they can today.
Lee Jamison