Abstract
Mona Lisa Smile illustrates arts education leading to an aesthetic experience, defined by Maxine Greene as breaking the student’s conventional reality structures, to achieve the spiritual. Conservatives see this kind of arts education as subversive. The film includes two poles of arts education: the relativist, “child-centered expressivism” up to the 1970s, followed by the “aesthetic field” approach which sought a firmer basis in the art disciplines, leading to normative notions of aesthetic and ethical values. The anachronism of setting the film in 1953 reveals the film’s educational point of view as one of socialization, reinforcing the audience’s commitment to contemporary values, like a woman’s right to a career of her own. True to genre, the innovative art teacher chooses to leave the school she sees as narrow-minded.
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- 1.
The appearance of a STEAM effort in 2016 (steamedu.com), which adds “Art” to the recipe, is welcome though it’s too early to gauge its impact.
- 2.
The end of the academic program in the church is signaled by the ringing of the church bells, which makes the flock of white doves in the belfry fly away. Are these the unsullied souls of the Wellesley women who cannot find a spiritual home in calcified Wellesley institutions?
- 3.
MLS is a transparent remake of Dead Poets Society (1989). In that film, the literature teacher exploits his subject matter to try and liberate his students from their suffocating upper-class lives, as he urges them to call him “Captain, my captain,” a direct reference to Walt Whitman’s poem about the martyred Abraham Lincoln, assassinated for freeing the Black slaves. See my article (2000) “Film Images of Private Schools .”
- 4.
Progressive educators taking their students on field trips to get them out of their rigid educational institutions has a long film history, beginning with To Sir, with Love (1967). Contrast the hyper-rigid, conservative principal in Worst Years of My Life: Middle School (Chap. 7) whose opinion of trips to art museums is “God, no. No. That’s a complete waste of time. We’re not doing that.”
- 5.
Addiss and Erickson (1993) note that “teaching about the visual arts can be rendered more effective through the incorporation of concepts and activities from a number of interrelated disciplines, namely, artistic creation, art history, art criticism, and aesthetics. The resultant discipline-based approach to art education does not, however, mandate that these four disciplines be taught separately” p. ix.
- 6.
Watson is shocked at the hoopla of the annual school-wide hoop race , the winner of which is believed to merit being the first to marry . A second race , for those already married , has the women pushing baby carriages, with the winner hoping to be the first to have a baby.
- 7.
In the same way, twenty-first-century viewers are bemused at the Wellesley nurse being fired for making birth control devices available to college seniors—another taken-for-granted contemporary woman’s right and hence more reinforcement for the wisdom of the current social order.
References
Abbs, P. (2003). Against the flow: Education, the arts and postmodern culture. London: Routledge-Falmer.
Addiss, S., & Erickson, M. (1993). Art history and education. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Bulman, R. (2005). Hollywood goes to high school. New York: Worth.
Chapman, L. (1982). Instant art, instant culture. New York: Teachers College Press.
Greene, M. (2005). A constructivist perspective on teaching and learning in the arts. In C. Fosnot (Ed.), Constructivism: Theory, perspectives and practice (pp. 110–131). New York: Teachers College Press.
Postman, N., & Weingartner, C. (1969). Teaching as a subversive activity. New York: Dell.
Resnick, D. (2000). Film images of private schools. Journal of Educational Thought, 34(1), 73–91.
Additional Films About Arts Education
Dance Billy Elliot, Strictly Ballroom, Take the Lead.
Literature Dead Poets Society, Finding Forrester, Words and Pictures.
Music Boychoir, Madame Sousatzka, Mr. Holland’s Opus, Music from the Heart, Whiplash.
Music and Dance High Strung.
Visual Art She’s All That, Words and Pictures.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Deborah Court and Barry Holtz for their helpful comments on this chapter.
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Resnick, D. (2018). Arts Education. In: Representing Education in Film. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59929-2_5
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