"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge."
- Albert Einstein
I've been an educator for more than a dozen years and in recent years have been sharing what I know about sculpting, sculpting practices and art history with students from all walks of life. This includes older adults, young adults and online learners. Over time, as an educator, I've morphed into working as a sculptor whose background incorporates a solid pedagogical approach to education that also incorporates practical and real life examples to share that enhance student learning. Bringing these experiences to my interactions with students has had a direct effect on how much they choose to learn and how enthusiastic they will be to want to learn. It's important that my students know that I possess an enthusiasm for supporting their growth as an artist.
Thus, it is disheartening for me as an educator to see programs that benefit the arts to be in a constant struggle of survival just to stay afloat. The dilemma of survival often comes down to the issues of available money and access to funding sources. Often we see that the arts are the first to be cut from school programs when the budget ax is in full swing. The arts that were once considered essential to the fabric of a vibrant culture are sometimes considered today to be extraneous, not needed, a frill and certainly non-essential.
However, the arts are the most primal foundation of our human experience. For example, the cave painting of horses and other forms of animals found in the Chauvet cave in France date back to about 28,000 BC. It is from early sketches, sculptures and structures that we derive much of our knowledge of what life must have been like for our early ancestors. Cave paintings suggest to us today that a need to communicate to others was a primary motivation to paint what they "saw." Some scholars have suggested that the paintings may have had a spiritual or religious purpose since they are located in difficult to reach places.
We have learned from these primitive forms of art (dating over 25,000 years old) that visual images (art) were the first forms of language used by human sapiens. What makes us uniquely human is our ability to communicate with one another through the tools of various forms of language. Ancient and primitive cultures painted images of animals and humans on cave walls as an artistic expression of their form of communication. Today, people are still communicating through art and through the images of art. Art, quite simply, has helped us to know the world, the people who lived before us and are living, creating and expressing themselves today.
