Thursday, January 7, 2010

Art,childhood and school





While I was home for Christmas, I found some old drawings I did from the age of 5 until the age of 13.I always found children's drawings very interesting because they don't try to make them perfect they just draw whatever they feel like.They write random words on them and then smudge them all over and then sign their names and they're very happy about their little pieces of art.
I wish I'd taken painting and drawing lessons when I was a kid because we had nothing like that at school.In public schools in Greece, Art is not an important subject(at least it wasn't when I was a kid in the 1990's).In primary school we usually had art on Fridays at the last hour of a school day so the teachers always told us to draw whatever we want while they were correcting our homework or something.We used to call it 'fun hour'because nobody really sat there drawing.At the first ten minutes there was an attempt to draw something but after a while everyone was running around,playing,shouting at each other,smudging each other's faces with colour pens.At the end when the teacher used to have enough he'd tell us to pack our stuff and go home.
When I went to Middle School or Junior High or whatever they call it,we had about 10 art lessons.Our teacher was pregnant and had to leave and of course nobody ever replaced her.Instead we had two hours of wandering around at school doing nothing once a week.
In High School,there was no Art.There was no time for that.There were so many important subjects to prepare us for our 'future' and Art wasn't that important.There was Art History in the final year of High School as an elective but the only problem was..there was no teacher.Well there was a teacher but she had been very ill the whole year and she only showed up the last month of the school year.
Anyway,there are so many unemployed people(including me)with useless degrees so why should schools in Greece or anywhere take Art or Drama(which we didn't have either despite the fact that it comes from Greece)or Music(and no Music of course)more seriously???
Well,in my opinion even if someone doesn't want to have a career in any of those things it's nice to study something different between all those hours of Maths,Physics,Chemistry,Ancient Greek and Latin.Even if it's not going to help him/her to find a good job when he/she is older.



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