Reimagining Art

Relooking at ART EDUCATION in schools to re integrate art and knowledge, retaining the integrity of experience, retaining the wholistic nature of the world and creation of true learning mind

Re imagining art as a means to connect with the beauty of the world

Art as a means to see, feel, make and become the world

Re imagining art is a proposal to explore how to awaken the aesthetic sensibility in children by creating situations for them to connect with the beauty of nature. Senses are the tools that are connected with beauty as well as cognition. This approach could also help children to retain the integral nature of aesthetics and cognition.

The program is to be established as a research in 4 to 5 institutions around the country. The first step is to organize a workshop with each of the schools so that the teachers are totally involved in the program.  The 'teachers' of the participating institutions will be encouraged to be involved in the observation, study, documentation and reflection.

Why

Beauty of the world/ nature/ life is what should be the source for the children for the awakening of their aesthetic awareness.

The most important and crucial period in human life is childhood and it is here that the utmost importance should be paid so that the total human potential is awakened. Modernity in general and education in particular takes children away from the real world and it is replaced with it's simplified, codified, miniatures and distorted version (the way adults do baby talk, the silly songs and stories adults tell children, toys, children's books/ digital tools, comics) and are treated as idiots by the modern people.

Development of values in children will depend on how we treat them. Children need to be respected and treated with dignity and they will grow up with respect and dignity. Even though they are fragile, vulnerable and helpless they must never be given these feelings. Instead treat them as if they are completely capable and children will respond accordingly.

How

Drawing as seeing the form, coloring as seeing the colors in nature, making as feeling the world, playing as re-experiencing the world and theatre as imitating the world.

By ensuring that children have more and more opportunities to pay attention to the beauty, workings of the world, the cognitive aesthetic awakening will happen on its own.

It is important that at early stages children need maximum autonomy for their independent evolvement of various attitudes and abilities. So no instruction as much as possible! Provide opportunity for various activities.  This will lead to the natural and organic development of both the inner world as well as their construction and understanding of the outer world.

Issues addressed

1. Re imagining art as a means to learn the world instead of the world.

2. Integrating aesthetic and cognitive experience. (It is as if beauty and creativity belong exclusively to art and all the other subjects are ready-made and just have to be stored in the student's brain either by memorizing or by reasoning)

3. Making use of the natural cognitive possibilities in children. (Children are biologically equipped to learn the WORLD but through schooling they are trained to learn the WORD. This damages/ rewires their cognitive system)

4. Making the world the cognitive source or the formative source from which children are formed as per their real nature. (We become what we learn or we are formed by the object of our 'learning')

Conclusion

It is important to delve deeper into the mechanics of how children imbibe or awaken their sense of beauty and also what is really the function of beauty. Can this be taught? Is sense of beauty rooted in the being? Is it rooted in the material? Is it rooted in the context of where we live? Is it part of our biology? Or is all of this together influencing the formation of aesthetic sense? 

Then the question is what kind of cognitive space needs to be created so that every generation is re awakened by the first principles of beauty that enables them to be authentic and rooted and at the same time learn from the abstracted knowledge.