Some time ago, a 6-year-old girl was injured while practicing Xi lower back movements in a dance class, and was diagnosed with spinal cord injury without fracture and dislocation and paraplegia. This is not the first reported example of "paralysis". According to a data released by Guo Xiaodong's team from the Department of Orthopedics affiliated to Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, from 2005 to 2022, there were more than 1,000 children paralyzed in China due to improper lower back movements in Xi dance.
Behind the tragedy is the anxiety of parents. "If you have artistic expertise, you can get extra points" and "It's hard to find a job without talent" ......I don't know when our parents have been infected with "talent anxiety" in addition to "score anxiety". In order to cultivate children's talents, many parents send their children to various art training classes early, and require their children to be result-oriented when learning Xi art - learning the piano to get exams, painting to participate in competitions, dancing to win awards, once there is no result, they feel that their children have learned in vain.
The disadvantages of utilitarian art education are obvious. According to the law of dance education, children are only suitable for kneeling and lowering when they are seven or eight years old, and only when they are about ten years old are suitable for practicing standing and lowering, but now when they enter various dance training institutions, you can see children everywhere who begin to practice Xi and lower waist at the age of three or four. Children are so young, their bones and muscles are not fully developed, and it is easy to cause irreversible damage to the body by doing some difficult actions in advance. In professional dance schools, it is rare to hear of paraplegics due to dance practice, but in off-campus dance training institutions, "lower back paralysis" occurs frequently, because parents and institutions violate the laws of art education in order to produce "results" early, so that children bear too much unbearable burden.
Utilitarian art education will also stifle children's artistic potential and aesthetic taste, and even make some children "learn a skill and hate an art". If art education is carried out with a utilitarian purpose, children will inevitably be required to go to competitions, examinations, and win awards. Whether it is a competition or an examination, it will always be carried out according to certain standards, and those who meet the standards are good, and those who do not meet the standards are poor. Once framed into a certain "standard", children will follow the rules and train according to the "standard", and their artistic potential is likely to be suppressed, and it will be difficult for creativity to be brought into play.
In an interview for Beijing Renyi recruitment, Dean Feng Yuanzheng found that many boys' physical displays were Mongolian "chopstick dances", and these "chopstick dances" were taught to them by students when they were admitted to university four years ago. These students, who have been in college for four years, have not formed much of their own new things. Although they have gained short-term benefits from utilitarian art education, such as taking exams, winning awards, and going on to higher education, they have not jumped out of the framework set by utilitarian art education and have not cultivated their own artistic creativity, so it is difficult for them to get on the stage of Beijing Renyi, and they are destined to go further on the road of art.
With the increasing popularity of art education, it is becoming more and more unfeasible and unnecessary to carry out art education with utilitarian purposes. For example, more than 40 million children in China are learning to Xi piano, and the growth rate is 10% per year. When there are more and more children playing the piano, being able to play the piano is not considered an artistic specialty, and it will become difficult for children to have an advantage in education and employment by learning the piano.
Aesthetic issues are the core issues of art theory, the understanding of art is aesthetic understanding, the creation of art is aesthetic creation, and the appreciation of art is aesthetic appreciation. It can be said that aesthetics is the fundamental property that distinguishes art from other things. Therefore, art education is about the education of beauty, and the development of art education should return to the original intention of aesthetic education, that is, through art education, cultivate people's ability to understand and feel beauty, and then make people have the ideal of beauty, the sentiment of beauty, the character of beauty and the quality of beauty.
To bring art education back to the original intention of aesthetic education, we cannot just teach art skills in art education. Leo Tolstoy said, "Art is not a craft, it is the conveyance of the feelings that the artist has experienced." "Art education is not a simple teaching of skills, but a kind of flexible personality education and emotional education. In art education, attention should be paid to the cultivation of students' artistic interests, the shaping of artistic emotions, and the cultivation and enrichment of students' inner artistic literacy. At the same time, it is also necessary to strengthen the education of students' knowledge of traditional culture and modern science, because the vivid expression of art requires profound cultural cultivation to support. Although some artists are good at singing and dancing, they often make jokes about Zhang Guan and Li Dai, which not only affects their own image, but also sets a bad example for young people, which is the result of a lack of cultural literacy.
The essence of art is to create. Aesthetic education is not only to know and feel beauty, but also to discover and create beauty. To return art education to the original intention of aesthetic education, we should focus on the core of creativity, so that children can learn the methods of creation and feel the joy of creation through art, so that they can endure the hardships of creation and obtain the happiness of creation. This creation includes not only artistic creation, but also scientific creation. In reality, the generation of creativity of many scientific giants has been nourished by art. Yuan Longping, who has superb violin playing skills, once said: "In addition to scientific research, my favorite is **." Albert Einstein, who loved playing the violin, also summed up scientific research and the violin as follows: "* Unlike the origin of physical research, the goal is the same, that is, to pursue the expression of the unknown. "It's always like this that art and science break up at the foot of the mountain and meet at the top of the mountain. Therefore, art education should also interact with science and technology education, so as to cultivate new talents with strong humanistic spirit, deep scientific literacy and strong sense of innovation.
Art is slow art, art education is "slow education", and the improvement of aesthetic ability and creative ability is the process of accumulating steps to thousands of miles and gathering into rivers. Therefore, both parents and teachers should keep in mind that when carrying out art education, they should not be able to achieve it quickly, and it will be useless to be anxious.
Author: Wang Jingyi, Dean of the School of Arts, Zhejiang Normal University, Professor, Doctoral Supervisor).
*:Light**.