Visual Arts should become a Compulsory Part of the Curriculum

The Australian, 15 August 2008; The Australian, 16 August 2008

The National Review of Visual Education report released this week calls for visual education to be regarded as a foundation skill for students in the compulsory years of schooling.

The report, which was commissioned by the Howard Government, states that a ‘rethink of school art education’ would dispel the idea that studying visual arts was only for training artists, and that ‘visuacy’ should ‘take its place alongside’ literacy and numeracy.

‘One of the problems besetting visual education ... has been the perception that its role is to train artists rather than to educate all students visually. In the compulsory years of schooling, its role is to achieve visuacy for all students in the same way that mathematics achieves numeracy and English achieves literacy,’ the report stated.

The report suggests that the visual arts curriculum should be updated so that students can ‘scrutinise the conditions of value and meaning’ in great works of art, but also in larger variety of images, such as a billboard featuring Elle Macpherson’s bras and briefs and television advertisements and footage.

It goes on to say that ‘given the specialised discipline expertise necessary to interpret and create images, it is thus no longer either defensible or responsible for the visual arts educator to focus only at the traditional end of the spectrum’.

The Executive Director of the National Association for the Visual Arts, Ms Tamara Winikoff, who was part of the review steering committee, believes that the report is right in calling for an expansion of the visual arts curriculum.

Ms Winikoff stated that ‘there is no point just doing an analysis of contemporary popular culture without understanding the sources from which it draws its references and, equally, no point in only looking at art history, the formal territories of the visual arts, without seeing how broadly these apply across the full spectrum of communication’.

A copy of the report can be accessed from the Australia Council for the Arts website (PDF).

 

 

Back to News Page