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Sit an untrained child in front of a piano and most of us would expect a discordant result. The same could be said for all of the ‘‘arts’’ taught in Australian schools.

Like music, creativity and accomplishment in the visual arts, dance, drama, and media arts is more likely to occur as a matter of coaching and cajoling students than it is of creative imagination.

Yet a proposed national arts curriculum could drastically slash the hours devoted to the visual arts and music available at the present in early high school in NSW and roll the five ‘‘arts’’ into a generic approach, allotting each discipline a trivial 20 minutes a week.

For NSW, which has achieved exceptional outcomes in visual arts education, the proposal undermines decades of progress under statebased syllabuses which have incorporated philosophical developments in the humanities and approaches to learning that acknowledge recent cognitive developments.

And it comes at a time when we can least afford to stall. Digital technologies are immersing us in an increasingly visual culture, which carries meanings and values beyond the appearances of things.

Specifically, The Arts: Initial Advice Paper, which forms the background to the soon to be released draft Shape Paper for the Arts, overlooks the current conceptual and practical demands of dedicated 100-hour visual arts and 100-hour music courses in NSW schools. Each years 7 or 8 student studies these courses, which lay an invaluable foundation for success in elective visual arts courses in years 9 and 10 and the HSC. Instead, the advice paper proposes a common approach to the arts, leaving the visual arts with about 13.5 hours a year in the first two years of high school.

What is proposed contradicts what we know about ‘‘best practice’’ in visual arts education. Creativity can’t be strictly taught or learnt. My own research shows that creativity flourishes in art classrooms when students form an ‘‘apprenticeship-like’’ relationship with influential and expert art teachers.
This ‘‘apprenticeship’’, while often overlooked, might be as everyday as a student asking a teacher’s advice, and being referred to a contemporary artwork as a reference point. Such exchanges are the daily reality of classroom interaction, which incrementally accrue as ‘‘investments’’ and contribute to visual arts students reaching their potential.

However, that’s not all there is at risk. Just as the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority is contemplating reducing the time and expectations of visual arts education, students are finding themselves bombarded by imagery as digital technologies reposition the way we communicate.

Today’s high school students live in an increasingly visual culture. These students tell their own stories with images on Facebook and swap images and video across phones and web platforms as a matter of course.

Ironically, curriculum makers do seem to understand the importance of the visual in other subject areas.

In the curriculum, as with the contemporary world, the meaning of the written word increasingly collides with the persuasive meanings of images made all the more potent by new media technologies. Students need to critically respond to imagery through language, but they are now often required to represent their own stories visually. Students might be asked to produce a cartoon on the cold war for History, or mock-up an e-magazine for Geography.

We know it’s easy to use these technologies to take an everyday digital photo, or to plan an ordinary web page. But it is more difficult to compose a sequence of moving images that anticipates how an audience will register meaning from the choice of a camera angle, for example, or to decide why a large graphic font doesn’t work, unless you have the disciplinarity of the visual arts to knowingly inform the design and aesthetics of what is produced.

Each of the five ‘‘art’’ disciplines packaged together under the national curriculum proposal is distinctly different, in how creativity is valued and judged by its respective field, and in the knowledge that students require to make creative works. Yet all would be cast in the same mould in the proposed curriculum, through a focus on experience as knowledge and an outof-date structure of common aesthetic processes referred to as generating, realising and responding.

 
In a genuinely ‘‘arts-rich’’ society, creativity enhances all our endeavours, just as the time invested in creativity in art classrooms helps students in their critical and practical reasoning in complex situations in other subjects and in their own lives. The NSW Board of Studies may be able to intervene but its influence may be compromised, given the government’s commitment to an Australian curriculum. NSW schools have spent decades building an internationally recognised visual arts curriculum; a dumbed-down national curriculum could undo this in one fell swoop. Dr Kerry Thomas is a senior lecturer in art and design education at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW.