Controversy- You gotta love it.

12 Dec 2006 20:45

If I haven't put up much writing in my blog lately it's because I have been writing so much for my classwork lately. By the time I get here I'm too tired, don't feel like writing more or don't have time. But I wrote another little piece for class tonight that I thought would work here too.

A couple of the discussion topics in class this week have been "teachers as
role models" and the "hidden curriculum": messages we impart to students
through the ways we do or do not do things, things implied although not direcly spoken or necessarily even consciously realized. I read this story in the news tonight and thought it would generate some interesting further discussion related to both
of these issues so I threw my comments and the link into the mix tonight.



Ok how's this for controversial?
Read this before going to the link.
On the one hand, as fine art I think it's kind of silly. However, he apparently does have people paying several hundred dollars a painting for these things, so he can certainly claim legitimacy as a commercial artist. Bear in mind that it's in the very nature of art and being an artist to push the limits and try to do things in a different, creative way. He's not working with little children, his students are in high school. He's kept his work and real identity separate from his role as a teacher. One can make a very legitimate point that he has walked the fine line between promoting his product and keeping his professional life separate from it and should be allowed to continue his work. Note that it is the adults, not the students who have a problem with this. Is this not only a free speech and personal rights issue but also a chance to look at yet another hidden curriculum that our society tries to impose? We are very hypocritical about the human body. We want to study it scientifically. We want to demystify it and take away the myths and rumors so our kids do not have unwanted pregnancies and diseases that they have acquired through misinformation. We admire the beauty of it in classical art and twitter nervously about the reality. Through our fear of the religious right and controversy, we enforce a very puritanical attitude that ends up perpetuating the very confused mixed message conditions that help ensure that our kids will continue to grow up confused and misinformed about issues relating to the human body and its functions. Why are they all twittering like first graders over a butt? Perhaps he isn't so silly after all. It is the job of the artist to make us look at ourselves and ask the hard questions. Is it our job as educators to lie to high schoolers and tell them the job of the artist is to be a Thomas Kinkade who makes something very pretty that doesn't require you to think? Or is that decoration rather than art?

[ link ]

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