Recently, AT&T has developed a campaign with the slogan “Rethink Possible.” One commercial takes the audience back to childhood and imagination. As children’s drawings come to life in a major city, the voice-over says, “Remember when you were five and anything was possible? Happy fifth birthday, again.” I believe art education is founded upon the same mentality. While I am neither promoting AT&T, nor funded by them, I do support this slogan. Rethink Possible. This sums up what art education is. When you peel back the layers of history, movements, ideas and physical manifestations of art, you find the very bone of it: possibility. Art allows for endless possibilities, which are only confined by the parameters of the imagination. It’s the job of art educators to expand those parameters, and instill in every student that through art anything is possible.
Art education awakens in our students the drive to create, to explore, to discover and to learn. But in our society’s current state, the arts are being placed in the back of the shelf, only to be used as an extra ingredient to the curriculum, not an essential one. However, the known truth among art teachers is that it is essential. Howard Gardner describes five minds for the future: the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, the creative mind, the respectful mind and the ethical mind. By nature, all of these ways of thinking are a part of art. So perhaps the culmination of these minds is the artistic mind and in that lies the future.
We must nurture these artistic minds. Art education teaches students about the world around them through culture and history, through experience making, through art making, and through understanding the invisibility of the everyday. As art educators, we have the responsibility of assisting our students in becoming active participants in their world, instead of passive observers; and to explore the deepest parts of their imagination and realize that they too can be creative. They too can make something out of pure passion, emotion, knowledge, skill and innovation. Art for our students can be like celebrating their 5-year-old birthday, everyday; like celebrating possibility. So rethink possible, and discover it through art.
The commercial really is fantastic. Check it out!
