ABSTRACT
It seems globally, art and its education is currently undergoing increasing pressure by state, provincial and national governments to change its ‘mindset’ as to its place in the school curriculum. This ‘mindset’ (core belief) has traditionally been a ‘humanist’ one where expression of the ‘self’ has dominated the field, and where its so-called ‘therapeutic’ benefits could be acknowledged in terms of children’s mental growth and development. However, the field of art education is undergoing a paradigm shift as screen technologies have encroached into education to the point where they can no longer be ignored. The core ‘humanist’ studio courses (painting, drawing, printmaking) seem to be almost quaint exercises of bygone years if they are not supplemented by considering the interventions of digitalised photography, the moving image and the architectonics of installation. Ceramics, for example, has continually to justify its existence in relation to its primal material (clay, earth), the chemical experimentation of glazes, and its worth as an activity that does not simply fall into an exercise of ‘craft’. I am reminded of Victor Burgin’s (1986) comment many years ago when he spoke of the relegation of stained-glass studio, the transcendental art form that ‘translated’ the light of God in the high Gothic, to the basement of the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, as perspectival painting became the paradigm art of the Enlightenment.
