THE ISSUE OF STANDARDS

It is generally recognized that a great many American children are not becoming educated. A considerable number of reasons are offered. Educators have pointed to social problems that schools are ill-suited to deal with – drugs, violence, and subcultures where education is not in itself a value. Educators also point to a lack of public willingness to pay taxes to fund education. California, which used to have the best educational system in the nation, has, since the conservative tax revolt of Proposition 13, dropped to near the bottom in per capita spending and has correspondingly suffered a massive loss in quality education.

Conservatives argue that the social problems that afflict schools are the result of permissive parenting and liberal social policies and can be solved by adopting a Strict Father model of the family, conservative political policies, and using private enterprise and competition to produce high-quality schools. Conservatives also argue that liberal approaches to education have lowered educational standards. They talk about "standards" as a hallmark of conservative thought.

Strict Father morality is very much about standards. The metaphors of Moral Authority and Moral Boundaries require absolute standards, imposed by a legitimate authority. Moral Strength and Moral Self-interest require self-discipline and work, enforced by a system of reward and punishment.

This is true not only of moral standards but of educational standards. The conservative recipe for a good educational system is simply to apply conservative principles and the conservative notion of standards. Teach conservative morality and the conservative notion of character, starting with self-discipline; this is called traditional morality. Set standards based on the classics of Western culture that are tried and true and have withstood the test of time. Make students work hard. Use a system of rewards and punishments: grade seriously and rigorously and fail people who deserve to fail. If there is going to be an elite, it should be an elite of talent, hard work, and achievement. Let those factors determine success. If students fail, they have to take responsibility for their failure, and either do better next time or go through life as failures.

Nurturant Parent morality also carries with it the notion of standards. You cannot grow up to be a good nurturer unless you are disciplined, work hard, and know all that you need to know. Discipline grows out of being raised in a nurturant environment in which you grow up with a responsibility to be empathetic and caring to those around you. Discipline is a no-nonsense matter: people you care about depend on you. There are standards of care and you must learn to meet them. Doing that is difficult every step of the way. You have to work at carrying out your responsibilities, and when others depend on you, you have to be disciplined enough to meet your responsibilities. Learning to cooperate and work with others and meet their standards is essential, and socialization is crucial to this. One of the goals of a nurturance-based moral system is the maximal self-development of each person, partly so that each person can best serve his community and partially so that each individual can feel the deep satisfaction that comes from doing well something that is important to him. Developing one's talents as far as they can go is not easy. It takes hard work and discipline and meeting standards of knowledge and skill.

As with Strict Parent morality, the Nurturant Parent notion of moral standards also applies to educational standards, which are just as real in both traditions. The difference is not in the standards. The difference is in the very concept of what education to meet those standards should be. Should it be competitive or cooperative? Should the goal be to make students question their teachers and learn through questioning? Or should students just learn to spout fixed answers? Will students learn via the system of rewards and punishments provided by strict grading? Or will students learn because they are interested, because it matters to them, and because they want to please their teacher and to function as well-liked, respected, and responsible members of the class? And what shall we do with less talented students? Should they just be left to fail and drop out? Or is it better to find a way to keep them in school and let them learn as much as they are able? The sink-or-swim approach of Strict Father morality says let them fail and drop out. The Nurturant Parent approach of maximizing self-development says find a way to let them learn as much as they can.

From the point of view of the Nurturant Parent approach, the issue of standards is a red herring. Everyone sets standards. The question is what standards to have, what should be done in the classroom to meet them, and what education is about. The two approaches say very different things.

In the Nurturant Parent approach to education, the ability to nurture successfully requires honest inquiry; we must know ourselves and our history, not only the bright side, but more importantly, we must know the dark side of America. We must learn the dark side partly so that we will not repeat it, partly so that we can appreciate progress and what is good about America, and partly so that we will not be self-righteous. A truly nurturant education is not a goody-goody education. It involves teaching honestly about controversial and socially volatile issues, and understanding why they are socially volatile. It does not distort either the past or the present to make us feel good. It tells the truth. It encourages questioning. It is not just a matter of learning facts. It involves understanding what those facts mean in a larger context – both a historical context and a contemporary one. It also requires understanding differences in points of view, in learning that there is not just one way to view events.

Art

Strict Father morality has major implications for the conception of art. Art can be seen as having a value if it serves a moral purpose, say, to build moral strength and character or to display moral modes of life. Let us call this morally correct art.

In Strict Father morality, art can also be something beautiful, appreciated for its craftsmanship, or otherwise enjoyable or uplifting. From this perspective, art is a form of wholesome, uplifting entertainment, and many newspapers and magazines include reports of art in their entertainment sections. As entertainment, art is not in itself a serious enterprise of social importance – it doesn't go in the public affairs section of the newspaper or in the section with science or business.

Art, as a source of pleasure or entertainment, also makes sense as a commodity, something produced that plays a role in the economic system. Seeing art as a commodity makes the prices commanded by works of art newsworthy, and we constantly see news stories about how much a work of art has been sold for.

Moreover, good art, as a source of pleasure and/or inspiration as well as a solid investment, becomes a symbol of success. As a source of pleasure, it is a reward for hard work. And as a good investment, it is a measure of your ability to make such an investment. That is why owning an original artwork is a symbol of success. The value of art, in Strict Father morality, lies either in its moral value, its entertainment value, its economic value, or its value as a success symbol – a sign of belonging to an elite.

All these views of art impose on art a set of standards – moral standards; standards of beauty, craft, or entertainment value; and standards for lasting economic investment. And since Strict Father morality requires that standards be absolute and lasting, it is not surprising to find conservatives applying such views to art.

The best known conservative art journal is the New Criterion, edited by Hilton Kramer, former art editor of the New York Times. The word "criterion" was chosen carefully. The purpose of the journal is to impose and uphold standards for "worthwhile" art. It also has the purpose of criticizing what it sees as immoral, unbeautiful, unskillful, unentertaining, or of no lasting value. The best art is seen as moral, beautiful, uplifting, and lasting.

Nurturant Parent morality also motivates various views of art. As a moral system, it approves of art with a moral purpose, art that serves Nurturant Parent morality, art with the right kind of social message. In this way, it is like Strict Father morality, only the message is different. It has another form of morally correct art, art that looks at the moral system from the outside and says, "This is the correct moral system to have."

But there is a difference between art that is about the choice of a moral system and art that is motivated by the internal workings of that moral system – art that is about the choice of nurturance and art that is nurturant, in one of a number of ways. The first is art with a liberal message. The second is art within a liberal artistic tradition.

The idea of morality as happiness gives rise not just to art that is beautiful and pleasurable, but also to art that is playful and fun.

The liberal tradition in art, since it derives ultimately from nurturance, promotes the kind of artistic thought that true nurturance requires: it promotes art that is questioning and probing, that forces one to look at the dark side of life and won't allow denial, that forces one to face unpleasant truths and leads one to undergo self-exploration and reevaluation.

In addition, since Nurturant Parent morality promotes self-nurturance and self-development, it supports the notion of art as a meditative experience, a development of one's imaginative capacity, an exploration of perception, and an exploration of form and of materials.

Considerations of empathy, which are central to nurturance, lead to an art of exploring the other – other cultures, other subcultures, unusual people or places or events. Part of this impulse is multicultural art, which places us into another worldview. The application of nurturance to art also leads naturally to art as a form of healing, perhaps as a self-expressive therapy for the artist, perhaps as a form of healing for the culture.

Finally, some artists, reacting to the commodification of art that they identify with the conservative tradition, prefer art that is de-commodified – nonobject art, such as conceptual art or performance art. The idea here is that art is a matter of experience and need not be a commodity.

Much of contemporary art falls under one of these categories, and can be seen as deriving from some aspect of Nurturant Parent morality. From the perspective of Nurturant Parent morality, such forms of art are moral enterprises. If liberalism is the application of Nurturant Parent morality to politics, then there is a good reason why most artists in these traditions are political liberals.

Since education about contemporary art is abysmal in this country, most citizens – well-educated liberals included – know very little about many forms of the art discussed above. Moreover, tastes differ. Some liberals like morally correct liberal art and find it uplifting; others hate it as being crass. Some simply like art to be beautiful or pleasurable. But only a small minority of liberals are educated as to most of the forms of contemporary art listed above. As a result, most liberals do not know or care enough to defend it from conservative attack.

And conservatives do attack art in this tradition. Highbrow attacks come from Hilton Kramer and his colleagues at the New Criterion. Political attacks come from Jesse Helms and others in Congress who want to destroy the National Endowment for the Arts. Conservatives, not surprisingly, hate morally correct liberal art and prefer morally correct conservative art. That is, they hate art promoting feminism, gay rights, multiculturalism, government programs, and so on. Robert Mapplethorpe's beautiful, moving, and sometimes disturbing photographs of gay men outraged conservatives. Conservatives also hate art that probes the dark side of American life and American history and forces us to confront the not-very-nice facts about our country, as well as art concerning deep conflicts within our culture. Andre Serrano's crucifix immersed in urine is a physical metaphor for a Catholic's rage at his own church. For those who see art from the perspective of Nurturant Parent morality (and not all liberals do), this piece raised questions about the dark side of the church's role, not only in the artist's life, but also in the lives of its communicants and in society in general. But to conservatives, for whom raising such questions is not a legitimate function of art, Serrano's work was seen as no more than an insult to religion. Other works – say, works of conceptual art or explorations of form – are incomprehensible to the conservative value system. Conservatives only express puzzlement and cannot see why they are art at all, rather than silliness or self-indulgence. Indeed, from the perspective of Strict Father morality, they are not art. The only option open to conservatives is dismissal – to see such art as a product of a "cultural elite" – "effete snobs" whose values are illegitimate. It is thus no surprise that conservatives want to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts.

The term "cultural elite" must also be understood in terms of Strict Father morality. The word "elite" has one sense which indicates superiority and prestige, often with the connotation that the prestige is undeserved and the superiority illusory; it also has the sense of a prestigious, self-sustaining in-group. Strict Father morality subordinates culture to morality, its own morality. The idea of a real cultural superiority that isn't moral superiority makes no sense from their perspective. For this reason, the term "cultural elite" can only be ironic, referring to a self-sustaining influential group with false claims to superiority. The implication of the very use of the term "cultural elite" is that the truly superior people are those who are morally superior, namely, those who abide by Strict Father morality. They are the true elite who should be culturally celebrated, while the so-called "cultural elite," who do not place Strict Father morality above other cultural values, are immoral and should be brought down.

Art in America is seen from a moral perspective. It can be seen as serving a moral system, as in morally correct art, or it can be seen as serving some function within a moral system – a pleasurable reward, a commodity, a sign of success, a form of questioning, an exploration of perception, a mode of healing.

Because of the centrality of art in our very notion of culture, art is bound to be a battleground in the culture war, a war that conservatives are pursuing vigorously, and a war which they perceive, perhaps accurately, as one of self-defense.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 860