Robert Gillan

The SEAL of Art

There is a widespread belief in the world of learning that the new methodologies are revolutionary and are enabling us to learn more effectively than ever before.

This belief is only partly true. One of the oldest and most effective forms of teaching and learning is art. Art is a system of communication, the aim of which is to change the way that we think, feel, believe or behave. What is this if it is not teaching and learning?

This session took a number of examples of art and showed how it is that art teaches. We saw, for example, that brain hemisphericity (the distinction between the thinking patterns of left and right brained people) had been known to the Ancient Greeks and had many manifestations in art. We saw how the techniques proclaimed by Suggestopedia were used so powerfully by artists of the Baroque era in the 17th Century. We saw how the NLP principle of modelling was to be found in the apprenticeship system which was the basis of all art training. Above all, though, we looked at the methodology of art and how, by ordering its information in a particular way, it was presenting that information to the brain in the most efficient manner possible.

It has been a sad indictment of education, certainly in the West, that the importance of art has been ignored for so long. It is that ignorance which has resulted in teaching and learning having gone so far astray during the 19th Century. Let us hope that art may once again be accorded its place as one of the most effective ways we have with which to learn and to teach.