By Tommy Kelleher
Staff Writer
University of California arts requirements should include more classes in order to represent students’ best interests.
UC colleges require students to take one year of a visual or performing art in high school to graduate. These traditionally included classes like drama and studio art, but now they have opened up to classes including web design. In order to get classes approved, teachers must submit forms describing the class. The UC board then decides if the course should be accredited.
Both computer teacher Ed Braskin, who has recently had a web design class approved for art credit, and Principal Dr. Ben Dale expressed excitement over the new possibilities for classes that satisfy the UC art requirement. In reality, UCs need to abolish the arts requirements, or at least greatly revise them to incorporate more classes.
According to the UC website, the goal of arts requirements is to create artistic habits of mind and teach creative practice. The reasoning behind UC art requirements does not correspond to the types of classes that are generally accepted as arts. In fact, the stated objectives behind art requirements would consider many subjects and electives to be art.
Artistic habits of mind and creative practices are not limited to drama, orchestra, band and art. Nor is it limited to the newer changes that UC has made.
Costa classes such as Model United Nations, Yearbook and Journalism all require creative practices, though they are not arts in the traditional sense. And the phrase “artistic habits of mind” has no uniform definition. Using the word “artistic” simply restates what the requirement is without providing any clarity.
Many Costa students take a summer art course to fulfill the requirement because they are enrolled in another elective class during the school year. When students enroll in summer school to fill a requirement, that indicates students would not take these classes without the requirements. However, if the art requirement included more classes, otherwise uninterested students would be able to find an art course that would fulfill the requirement and satisfy their interests.
According to the UC website, another objective of the arts credit is to help students express themselves without the use of language. In the case that UCs truly wanted to see this, however, film and drama would not be accepted as arts credits. Rather than the term arts, which could indicate poetry and fiction, the requirement should be aptly renamed “non-linguistic expression.”
Take any other definition of art, and the UC’s system still does not work. If it is the expression of human emotion, then the literature from English class would render the art requirement unnecessary. If it is the presentation of beauty, then English literature poems could also fit that requirement.
Perhaps the UC’s lack of an actual reason for the arts requirement is what causes the course approval system to be so capricious. Rather than giving administrators clear definitions for art classes, UCs unjustly just approve or do not approve them based on the course description without any clear published standards.
UCs want students who have taken a year of arts, but they cannot justify why without drifting into vague verbiage. UCs should clearly specify their definition of art to the general public or justify why they feel that the current system possesses value beyond the empty platitudes they have provided or get rid of it.
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