I am listening to a CBC program asking "Is classical music obsolete today?" What strikes me as interesting is its relation to school curriculum. If I was to ask the members of this class: Name 5 pieces of classical music you have studied in your school years. Or, for that matter, Name 5 works of art you have studied. -- how would you respond. Probably "nothing"? Yet we can all name the works of literature we studies, or the periods of Canadian history, or the topics of Math and Science that we took.
The arts have indeed been almost eliminated. And when they are taught, I wonder if the focus becomes production: choir, band, performance. Similarly in art or drama.
Indeed, I wonder if in my own field of technology we focus on the production side, the skill side -- wikis, i-Movies, blogs, etc. but not the culture side.
As I think back to this course, we can safely say that we did study works of art and music and cinema. Perhaps inadertently, but we did it nevertheless.
A case in point was last class analyses of Norman Rockwell's "The connoisseur" and Colville's "horse and train".
Both are fascinating works, which I would argue, thinking hypertextually, can be considered an integral component of how we think about curriculum, or at least as "texts" with "curriculum potential". What a wonderful term that one has turned out to be.
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It is sad to think that the arts have been so marginalized. When I went through my pre-service program, the math people were grouped with religion and drama students for general methods classes. What a treat for me. I gained an appreciation for drama that year that I previously had not had. I've always had a heart for music and art (especially drawing reality pics, how to portray the truth of what is being seen), and listen to classical music regularly (CBC DiscDrive with Jurgen Gothe). If appreciation of the arts or the study and development of them is now generally seen in society as valueless, then society has indeed been swallowed up by Poe's and McLuhan's maelstrom.
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