Leena Hyvönen
Background 1: Personal Starting Points
My ten-year-long discussion with phenomenological literature focussing on the essence of experience has brought forth in me a new kind of relationship between me and myself, others, and the world, in other words, existence. Maurice Merleau-Ponty was the phenomenologist whose writings lit in me from the very fi rst reading an intriguing sense of signifi cance. I have often since wondered how that was at all possible, as Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1962) does not easily yield itself to the reader, especially not as an initial contact with phenomenology. I, however, caught the contagion and slowly began to familiarise myself with Merleau-Ponty’s production, supported in this endeavour by commentary literature and a reading circle. Now that my world view has changed into a Merleau-Pontyan perspective, I play with the thought that I caught the contagion through pre-refl ective understanding that was formed in my childhood piano playing practices.
My teacher, a village cantor, did not introduce me to any theoretical information that would have disturbed the formation of an unaff ected relationship with music, which made playing the instrument a comprehensive – with my present learning I would say – mind-bodily enjoyment. I did not learn music theory and other associated skills (so called Satz topics) until studying at the Sibelius-Academy, but even there the most important thing was the comprehensive experience brought to me by making music.
I first came across scientific thinking during the course of my studies in education required to qualify as a teacher. I got into contact with the discourses and history of Western thinking – fi rst and foremost from the point of view of educationalists, but also on a more general level. Later, when working in teacher training, I carried out an investigation in my own fi eld of study, music education, on the basis of cognitive and empiricist paradigms which, at the time, reigned within education and educational psychology1. However, my sense of that the instruments and subjects of study were at odds increased. The feeling grew even stronger when the teachers in arts and crafts education within teacher training initiated close
co-operation. I began to doubt the applicability of paradigms that form the foundation of education to arts education and, consequently, fi rst found the narrative method of study and then phenomenological philosophy. Having started from the Merleau-Pontyan thinking, I have since ventured on expeditions to diff erent directions on the phenomenological-existentialist-hermeneutic fi eld and found that, at least to this point, it has lived up to my high expectations.
My own experiences have formed my way of experiencing, thinking about and studying the world. In the present paper I chose to investigate only a limited section of Finnish education, training and arts education that is connected with comprehensive school and teacher training. I will fi rst explain how the position of arts and, in a wider sense, arts and crafts has changed beginning from the 1970s great school reform2. This will provide a context for my fi rst question: Why have arts been and continue to be at the margin of education? I will search for the answer in the generally dominant scientifi c paradigms and their eff ects on general opinion, education, teacher training and education-related decision-making.
I will also consider what arts education has gained and what lost when adapting into the dominating paradigm atmosphere. Another question will address the possibilities of phenomenological-existentialist thinking to provide a theoretical basis respecting the essence of arts for arts education in schools.
Background 2: Reforms of Education and Arts and Crafts Education
When the Finnish national primary school curriculum was being developed in the latter part of the 19th century, art and craft subjects3 were given a prominent position on the basis of their practical and ideological applications. This position was, however, increasingly weakened after the wars when structural, political and cultural issues forced many changes in the society. Changes in values and attitudes became blatantly obvious when the comprehensive school system was developed at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. Art and craft subjects no longer possessed a similar intrinsic value in the school system as theoretical subjects. While theoretical subjects represented disciplines that existed on a continuum extending up to the university and the highest academic degrees, the educational status of art and craft subjects was left on a lower level. The name “practical subject”4 is, perhaps, an apt description of the public opinion of the nature of these subjects at the time when
their concrete usefulness was questioned in educational policy decision-making.
Those who defended the arts replied with protests on the necessity of arts education.
The Finnish music magazine Rondo participated in the discussion on national core curriculum for comprehensive school by publishing the following, at the time new and fashionable arguments, in its editorial:
. . . arts education has both other aims and other contents than the ”singing lessons”
of the past. At present it is more about developing one’s creativity, about freeing one’s personality into expressing oneself – even about therapy. (Anon 1971) 5
The defences were understood within arts education but were left unnoticed there where decisions were made. Discussion concerning the distribution of hours in comprehensive school was concretised into curricula used in the experimental phase in 1967–70 and, fi nally, the national core curriculum. The report of the committee for the national core curriculum includes a close description of the experiment phase during which there was a heated discussion on how the art and craft subjects and a second foreign language could be fi tted in the distribution of hours (Komiteanmietintö 1970, 19–28). Art and craft subjects lost the battle, which marked the start of their resources being cut and their position weakened, which has hence continued in diff erent phases of school curriculum reforms (see Kouluhallitus 1985, Opetushallitus 1994 and Finnish National Board of Education 2004), causing at times raging public protests by arts educators. The protests were answered by organising possibilities for focused arts and crafts practise outside the comprehensive school. The fi rst to emerge was the music school system, which became quite extensive on a regional level and had systematic aims, and later came a number of diff erent kinds of art schools.
This is how the problems of compulsory school arts education have remained hidden from the public eye. All education in arts and crafts provided outside the school was unifi ed into extracurricular basic education in the law reform concerning all fi elds of schooling at the end of 20th century (Laki/Act 633/1998; Asetus/Decree 813/1998; see also Education and research… 2004, 36).
Another signifi cant change also took place in the early stages of basic education as class teacher education was fi rst transferred from seminars into universities (Laki/Act 844/1971) and, later, at the end of the same decade, raised onto Master’s level to equal the degree earned by subject teachers (Asetus/Decree 530/1978). This also marked the start for diffi culties to art and craft subjects in teacher training.
There were increasing reductions in art and craft subjects both with regard to student admission and compulsory courses in the curriculum in multidisciplinary universities’ faculties of education. This is, even at present, the trend in most faculties. Nevertheless, students can gain quite good knowledge of these subjects provided that they have talent and/or previous studies in the subjects and have selected art and craft subjects as minors. A student will, however, be qualifi ed to teach these subjects in the fi rst six grades of basic education after having passed the compulsory courses that have shrunk in extent to 2–6 credit units per subject with some variation between diff erent faculties.6
The above goes to show the neglect of arts in education in Finland from the 1970s onwards when two signifi cant and progressive reforms, that is, basic education realising the idea of social equality and raising the education of primary school teachers onto a Master’s level, were realised. Another reform taking place at the same time must also be mentioned in this context: Finnish art universities were placed on an equal level with multidisciplinary universities and their degree structures made identical. Acts pertaining to the Sibelius Academy and the University of Art and Design Helsinki (Asetus/Decree 948/1978; Laki/Act 1068/1979; Asetus/Decree 561/1980) made subject teachers in arts equal with subject teachers in scientifi c subjects.7 The reform also had an eff ect on the quality of teacher training in arts.
It is noteworthy that as the new position now required art universities to conduct research, discussion on arts education begun to consider grounds for actions, background theories and philosophical frameworks.
I have above provided a presentation of the status and changes in it of art and craft subjects in Finnish basic education and teacher training and pointed out some diff erences compared with scientifi c subjects in educational policy decision-making. The following discussion on reasons for this will employ the term ‘art subjects’ instead of the above ‘art and craft subjects’. As the Finnish national core curriculum and school practices traditionally combine the two, it was convenient to use the term when discussing the administration of education. However, I will use the term ‘arts’ or ‘art subjects’ in the following discussion when considering the role of arts in the fi eld of sciences. This does by no means reduce my subject of study but rather extends it to cover arts in general in the school curriculum. Music, visual arts and literature are forms of art appearing in the names of school subjects, and the curricula of diff erent subjects allow for the following forms of art: word art, drama/
theatre, dance, fi lm, media arts, design and architecture.