The definition of art education is to create the theories, technologies and achievements created by human beings in visual arts into teaching materials suitable for different objects in accordance with the laws of education. It is an educational activity to educate students in beauty, judgment and creativity by scientific methods and means. Education must not be satisfied with just giving students a little knowledge and skills, but must put students in the position of life with dignity, personality and great development potential. Pay full attention to their development needs, their spiritual life, develop their creative potential, stimulate their innovative spirit, and constantly improve their quality of life and survival value, so that they can really prepare for their own happiness in the lively, positive and harmonious development process. This is a supreme goal and realm, which requires us to carry out a thorough and all-round reform of traditional education from ideology to operation methods.
The higher vocational art education in China, which has modern significance and forms, has experienced the initial stage and construction mode from the beginning of this century to the 1930s and 40s, the re-integration and reform from the 1950s to the early 1960s, the stagnation and recovery from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and the middle and late 1980s. In recent years, it has entered the stage of all-round development. The outstanding features of this stage are: the number of fine arts majors has increased greatly, the scale of running schools and the number of students enrolled have expanded rapidly, the professional structure has changed greatly, and the teaching reform has been deepened. As I said, modern art education started late and has a weak foundation. Many comprehensive universities that have long regarded art as a "quasi-science" also regard setting up art majors as a new idea to expand the scale and improve the structure of science education. According to relevant statistics, 1987 There are 140 majors in China's higher art education, which has increased to more than 300 in the past six years. Today's art education major has mushroomed and become a real "hot" major. However, blindly expanding the scale is not only a waste, but also a slander on art education. The original powerful art colleges in China are small in scale, with limited enrollment, and do not have the conditions. It not only leads to the depreciation of art education itself, but also leads to the vicious circle of art. The most fundamental principle to evaluate the effect of art education is to see whether it has cultivated high-quality and high-level art students who meet the needs of the times. Therefore, we should be calm and cautious about the enrollment expansion of art students.
"What is art education" and "What is the function and purpose of art education" have been discussed in theory for a long time. Cai Yuanpei had an incisive exposition on this issue. He believes that the fundamental characteristics of nothingness are universality and detachment. He strongly advocated art education and regarded it as the most important way and way of aesthetic education. Broadly speaking, artists and art educators are concrete implementers of aesthetic education, and art education is aesthetic culture education. The connotation of aesthetic education includes three aspects. One is aesthetic form education, which mainly cultivates people's ability to appreciate, identify and grasp the form and structure of beauty in nature and man-made; The second is aesthetic education, which mainly cultivates people's sound aesthetic psychological structure, including the improvement and coordination of psychological abilities such as feeling, perception, emotion, imagination and understanding. Finally, it is realized as keen aesthetic perception and appreciation, and the ability to create beauty; Third, sentiment education, that is, through artistic creation or appreciation, cultivates people's temperament, cultivates noble sentiment, perfects personality, and makes the developed personality organically unified and coordinated with the social groups to which it belongs. In fact, for a long time, professional art education has not effectively solved this problem in practice, and largely stayed at or focused on the first level, that is, focused on the description and understanding of the objective form of the object. In teaching, it is directly manifested as the supremacy of "technicalism", and professional teaching is still based on perceptual experience, focusing on the teaching of specific technologies and skills. This kind of inheritance is no different from the traditional "workshop-style" mentoring, helping and guiding. Therefore, it is often difficult for our higher art education to implement its effectiveness with the characteristics of aesthetic culture education, and more is vocational and technical education. Optimize the curriculum structure, strengthen the education of artistic knowledge and related humanistic knowledge, organically combine technical training with aesthetic culture education, especially in the course of Techniques, pay attention to guiding students to use some visual media to effectively convey artistic feelings and thoughts, so as to improve the perceptual ability of artistic literacy; This is an important topic in the reform of curriculum structure and teaching methods of professional art education. Without a reasonable curriculum structure and the conscious guidance of teaching psychology science, the teaching lacks modernity and culture, and is only the work of "artisans".
There is an irregular rule in art teaching in China, that is, model painting and demonstration are used instead of classroom teaching, and there is a lack of teaching materials for professional basic courses. So in the long run, the teacher's teaching content doesn't seem to matter. Some teachers simply don't take professional theory courses, or a course remains unchanged for many years, which means they lack common norms and personality. Adding design or craft courses on the basis of painting or fine arts lacks the pioneering nature of new majors and cannot meet the needs of the growing art design field. Most of the design majors set up in non-professional colleges are born out of painting majors, or students spend most of their time drawing the basics and the rest of their time just drawing design drafts. Drawing design scheme, students only know drawing, sketching and drawing scheme, but know little about design art, let alone the essence of modern design art, and can't understand what the basic knowledge of this subject is to solve or what it should have.
American modern art educator Eisner's educational idea of "subject art education" has given us great enlightenment. DBAE emphasizes the essential value of art education and the integrity and systematicness of curriculum structure. Students should not only learn how to make works of art, but also learn how to appreciate works of art and understand the relevant background knowledge of the times-the social environment in which works are produced. Due to the research, experiment and popularization of the Getty Art Education Center, this theory has had a wide impact. People expect that it can effectively improve students' artistic accomplishment, make them understand the relationship between culture and art, content and form, learn to evaluate works of art objectively, and have more artistic knowledge.
In any case, China's art education has ushered in a good opportunity for development and change. We should seize the opportunity to absorb and reform reasonable theories according to the requirements of quality education and the present situation of art education in China. Foreign things serve China. Promote the development of art education in China.