Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research

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Art Education as a Trap

Marjatta Saarnivaara & Juha Varto

To cite this article: Marjatta Saarnivaara & Juha Varto (2005) Art Education as a Trap,
Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 49:5, 487-501, DOI: 10.1080/00313830500267952

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Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research
Vol. 49, No. 5, November 2005, pp. 487–501

Art Education as a Trap

Marjatta Saarnivaaraa* and Juha Vartob
a
University of Jyväskylä, Finland; bUniversity of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland

Art education is often talked about as a general good that will solve problems of every description
and meet the most varied current problems. In Finland, for example, art education tends to be seen
as something that fosters human growth, teaches aesthetic and ethical values, promotes self-
expression and social skills, and meets the challenges of the media age. Any problems that might
emerge stem simply from insufficient resources. Instead of continuing what is, probably, a
generally known and shared discussion, we want to ask ourselves and others what are the traps art
education might conceal, possibly in part under precisely such rhetoric. Our phenomenological
perspective emphasises presence, the importance of the sensory, and an opportunity to seize
contemporary art and fleeting moments. Given this, however, we must also ask what is feasible at
school in the first place when its activities and everyday practices are considered from the
perspective of hierarchical and symbolic exercise of power and in terms of the adult–child
relationship. Our aim is to arouse discussion; we are not offering answers.

Keywords: Art education; Discursive strategies; Qualitative methodologies

Introduction
The title can be understood in two ways. A trap is something where something
important, even vital, is caught, allowing people to seize it. In many parts of the
world this was, for a long time, truly vital because it was how people earned their
livelihood. This also gave rise to many metaphors concerning experience, perception
and one’s relationship with the external world. In Finnish, the verb ‘kokea’ refers to
inspecting traps to see if one had caught anything. The same word, more specific
than the English equivalent ‘‘to check’’, came to also denote the act of experiencing
and perceiving.
A trap is an important means of capturing things. One can lure an elusive quarry
into a trap and thus catch hold of it. A trap can be set in a way that allows one to seize
just those elements of the fleeting moment that one wants to seize. From this
perspective, understood as a trap, art education serves a child, a young person, and
an adult as a means of capturing, from the flow of time, those experiences and
perceptions that are significant for human growth and for one’s relationship with the

*Corresponding author. Institute for Educational Research, 40014 University of Jyväskylä,

Finland. Email: marjatta.saarnivaara@ktl.jyu.fi
ISSN 0031-3831 (print)/ISSN 1430-1170 (online)/05/050487-15
ß 2005 Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research
DOI: 10.1080/00313830500267952
488 M. Saarnivaara and J. Varto

world in general. This is the birth of creativity, where people learn to develop and
change their way of gaining hold of those aspects of the world that are important as
factors making existence meaningful.
But changes in the way in which people lived also changed their ideas about the
nature of traps. Someone laying traps for the world also became a potential victim. A
trap began to refer to a bad situation not easy to escape from. This is a significant
change that reflects a real shift in people’s relationship with reality. Art education can
similarly function as a trap when it too knowingly, too definitively, as if on the basis
of a completed world, indicates where creativity and development lie, where the
world is. Art education of this kind reduces living art to museum pieces, props up the
status quo and serves reactionary values.
There are many models of art education, all of which nevertheless have one shared
task: achieving something good by means of art as linked with education (see, for
example, Pääjoki 1999, 2000). Sometimes the responsibility that this entails seems
too heavy when compared with the other school subjects. Thus, art is a central aspect
here even if art education is also many other things, because without art there would
be no art education in the first place. Creativity, working on one’s own experiences,
or being free to express oneself, are part of the ‘‘aura’’ generated by art. However,
education is controlled by completely different aspirations and aims, served by a
variety of social institutions, such as comprehensive schools or art schools.1
As a word art education is a paradox. Or is this really a matter of the word alone?
The word covers art and freedom and, on the other hand, education and power.
What kind of equation do they make up?

The Paradox of Art Education

The tradition of teaching is still based on the Enlightenment dream of an

increasingly emancipated human being. There is this belief that from small
beginnings there grows, through supervision, something bigger, more extensive,
better. Struck by this belief we have for a long time been performing experiments on
living humans—vivisection in the exact sense of the word—actually so long that one
would expect that the experience and knowledge thus gained would exert an
influence on teaching as well. But there are problems with this, particularly in art
education.
The problem of teaching stems from the fact that in art education a teacher needs
not only knowledge but also skill [tekhné] and that in order to gain this skill the
teacher must reflect on the nature of human beings from completely new
perspectives. Emancipation must be thought through in relation both to knowledge
and skill, and in one way or another one must provide a reasoned explanation of the
relationship between the two. In education and at school, however, there have not
even been attempts to do so. We are simply accustomed to trust, in this area, to
the established institutions, hoping that they are carrying through the desired
programme.
 Art Education as a Trap 489

School, for example, is school because people have learned to think about it in
certain terms and to act in accordance with these terms. School is also there as a
complete and finished institution awaiting each newcomer.2 However, established
social practices do not directly determine the shape of a person’s life even if freedom
has its limits. Belonging to a community and a culture makes resources available and
creates restraints, provides a certain script serving as a basis on which one negotiates
one’s own way of ‘‘being something’’ (what it is to be a child, pupil, visual art teacher,
researcher, and so on). However, children’s scope for negotiating what it is to be a
child depends on how adults understand childhood and what are considered
activities appropriate for a child in any given environment. At school, for example,
children have little room for negotiating their position because the adults are
expected to socialise the child within the framework of how they understand what
children can, may, and should do (Mayall, 1994).
Ojakangas (1997) speaks about the ‘‘cultural history of a tamed childhood’’, where
the teacher’s authority has been a central source of control and discipline. Discipline
has been a means of taming the child’s nature. The starting point of socialisation is
the idea that the child must be brought up and educated and that this is done in the
child’s own best interests. However, apart from discipline there are also other kinds
of power; power to mark, assign, and classify; the power to represent someone or
something in a certain way. It includes the exercise of the symbolic power (Hall,
1997, p. 259). The child’s ‘‘otherness’’ has been produced and is being constantly
produced in the same way, through representational practices.
Where, then, should we turn our attention in order to see how power has created
the current situation? One possible area is the relationship between ethics and
aesthetics. How do the good and the beautiful meet? They are no longer actualised,
in the classical manner, as goodbeauty because we have separated them
experientially and conceptually in order to be able to use them to manipulate the
production of ‘‘otherness’’.
But this does not mean that they really are distinct things. On the contrary, there is
a great deal of evidence that the opposite is true. Brodsky (1997, p. 56) recounts a
telling example: when an adult approaches a child’s push-chair and thrusts his or her
too large head ‘‘sweetly’’ towards the child, the reaction is as a rule immediate: the
child either laughs, smiles, or bursts into tears. Brodsky is convinced that the child
perceives the adult’s attitude and reacts to it. Evil is visible. We do not, however,
usually teach a child or young person to trust in such sensory immediacy. On the
contrary, we teach them the exact opposite.
Naturally, one of the problems is the unspoken morality involved in bringing up and
educating children. What is a child educated for? Who knows the purpose?
Psychologists, clergymen, and educationalists hold a strong view on these matters, but
it does not match lives all that well. So has the purpose been spoken aloud somewhere?
The issue could also be approached by asking ourselves whether we are what today’s
children should be brought up to become. Everyone can take a look to the side and
consider whether some child should be brought up to become someone like that.
490 M. Saarnivaara and J. Varto

Power has also interdicted the flesh. It has forbidden us even to ask whether the
child’s flesh might carry knowledge that under the present regime of educating
children will remain untapped as a resource for their development. We teach
children to identify and, at the same time, distinguish between five senses, but
simultaneously we make them doubt themselves as perceiving beings, their
immediate relationship with reality. If reality is of the same flesh as we are, why is
this other flesh given so little weight? Human beings are born as flesh and eventually
dwindle to flesh, but in the course of the last 200 years we have been talking about
humans as if they were made up of spirit, culture, soul, identity.
As for art, we have become accustomed to locate it in objects and institutions. It is
increasingly rare that we ask ourselves whether art is a part of the same world as I am,
as nature is. However, from the viewpoint of art education it may make sense to ask
such a question. Surely an object or an institution cannot be capable of constantly
generating new things, passion, fire, impetuosity?

The Promise of Contemporary Art

Art is free, shameless, and irresponsible. From the viewpoint of the world of art, the
shamelessness of art is manifested in, for example, the fact that art refuses to keep
within the boundaries and definitions that the discussion about art and non-art
attempts to construct or that various theories of art seek to legitimise. Nevertheless,
even though the boundaries of art are constantly being called into question and new
boundaries are being outlined, today the broad public still finds modern art too
modern. Does this mean that we have failed to grasp that which is essential or that
we have failed as intermediaries? Where is the place of art education in all this? Must
it busy itself with the past or is it possible also to reach, through contemporary art,
for that which is taking place just now?
Rautavaara, a famous Finnish composer, observes (1998) that he finds it ‘‘a
mystery how any musician can stand to learn and rehearse dead music, a museum
piece that has long ago lost its ancient spirit, become banal’’ (p. 81). Later he rounds
off his thought by drawing a caricature:

When art is taught, the only thing that can be taught are things no longer needed—tricks
already used, second-hand techniques and dead forms. Of course this is how it is, it is
natural because things that can be written into a book […] or what can be turned into a
complete doctrine […] that is already institutionalised history, away from the goal.
(p. 150)

Nevertheless, there is a strange conviction that contemporary art is only

peripherally a part of art education, as its last stage, after everything else. As if
starting with it would be madness. One would think that precisely the fact that art is
different from knowledge would compel us to choose other than starting points and
means that are considered infallible and that have been canonised. The function of
sensation in art alone would confirm this. Starting with contemporary art would
 Art Education as a Trap 491

mean taking seriously the world where the child, the young person, and we are living
just now. The art of the moment, that which is now being offered to the ear, the eye,
and our sensory experience as a whole tells us about reality and about ourselves.
But a suggestion that children might be familiarised first with contemporary art
will be countered with a standard response: there is so much that is important in
older art. Of course there is! What is more, the educator will not be obliged to take
the risk of misjudgement. In older art everything has already been evaluated!
By contrast, when they confront contemporary art, the educator and the person
being educated are, at least to some degree, in a position of equals, both being
seekers. In such a situation, education can gain the power and significance of
dialogue. This may also generate activity of a wholly new kind.

The Promise of an Artist

But there is no activity without agents. Art education is not about training artists, but
we shall nevertheless start with the work of an artist. Discussing his artistic work,
Bergman (1995, p. 14), a celebrated Swedish director, observes

I suddenly realised that my movies had mostly been conceived in the depths of my soul,
in my heart, my brain, my nerves, my sex, and not the least, in my guts. A nameless
desire gave them birth. Another desire, which can perhaps be called ‘‘the joy of the
craftsman’’, brought them … that further step where they were displayed to the world.

Naturally, it is possible to argue that this is a special case that allows no

conclusions concerning art education. But it is equally possible to defend an opposite
standpoint: a special case is capable of revealing something essential about the
phenomenon under scrutiny. Accordingly, we go on with our quotation from
Bergman’s essay entitled ‘‘The Snakeskin’’ (1995, pp. 46–51). What follows here is a
‘‘prose poem’’ constructed from his text (for poetic writing see Ellis, 2004;
Richardson, 1992, 2000).

My movies
a nameless desire gave them birth
and the joy of the craftman
manifested as hunger -
a very early childhood memory:
my strong need to show off whatever I had accomplished
my means of expression
a language which transcended the words I lacked
opportunity to communicate with world around me
almost sensuously, escaping the restrictive control of the intellect
to be completely honest, art (not just the art of cinema) is for me unimportant
a snake’s skin full of ants, full of bustling life
limitless, never satisfied, ever renewed, unbearable curiosity
drives me forward
492 M. Saarnivaara and J. Varto

like a prisoner who, after a long detention,

suddenly stumbles out into the hurly-burly of life -
to be an artist for one’s own sake
to share his condition with every other living being
who also exists solely for his own sake
on our warm and filthy earth
beneath a cold and empty sky.

Has the conception of human beings implicit in education ever been spelled out
with such clarity? Education is underpinned by a fear of the animal, of the beast
which bursts out and disturbs maturity and adulthood, an achieved state that is
fragile but stable.
It would be possible to ground art education on another kind of idea, which takes
seriously loneliness, selfishness, the flesh, direct communication unobstructed by the
stiffening effect of concepts and words, free of the distancing cramp of reflection
learned by rote. If we adopted this idea we might once more experience the
miraculous, not as the personal miraculousness of a genius but as the miraculousness
of the reality that unites us, where the educator does not know better, and is no more
mature than the person being educated, even if one has more experience and
knowledge than the other.

A Hidden Frame of ‘‘Otherness’’

What kind of script does school offer for realising the ideas described above in a
situation where adults assume the right to understand, interpret, and explain the
child and children’s behaviour from their own adults’ perspective? We shall consider
the question, looking at the accustomed picture from an angle that robs it of its
comfortable familiarity, from the perspective of the production of ‘‘otherness’’,
because this approach helps to become aware of things that in everyday life are taken
for granted (Delamont & Atkinson, 1995). We shall draw on Hall’s analysis of the
production of colonial relations. The subject of such an analysis is the hierarchical
construction of power and the perspective thus opened from which things are
named, classified, and evaluated. This approach can be used to make visible various
power relations, including those prevailing in school.3
In the reality of school the production of ‘‘otherness’’ is similarly linked with a
power relation manifested as an adult–child or a teacher–pupil relationship. Being a
pupil is determined through the pupil’s relationship with the teacher. The teacher is
the agent who defines the teaching period, the pupil, and the pupil’s role in the
classroom activities. The power relation implicit here structures the lived and
experienced reality of school (Laine, 2000, pp. 43–43). It is a question of ideology
and the exercise of power: someone (parents, nurses, doctors, psychologists,
teachers, researchers) defines, represents, or speaks for others (the child, the pupil).
Hall (1994, 1997) discusses such processes under the heading of discursive
strategies.
 Art Education as a Trap 493

Discourse can be understood as a particular way of representing someone or

something. Representation is not about what the child (pupil) is like in herself. What
is essential is how one sees the child or how one wishes to see the child, that is, what
kind of goals one sets for education. The cultural texts representing the child and
childhood (curricula, study materials, the teacher’s talk, schools’ operational modes,
practices structuring time and space, various stereotypes, conventions, beliefs, ideas,
recurring features accepted without being questioned) do not merely describe but
also produce reality. In our various ways, we are ‘‘talking’’ the child into visible
existence as a being of a certain kind. Discourse is about the production of
knowledge through language. Conceptions of the child and childhood originated by
adults represent children as recipients and as immature. Such conceptions condemn
them to the role of an ‘‘other’’, a non-adult (Waksler, 1986). Discourse is a group of
statements, which provide a language for talking about a particular kind of
knowledge about a topic (Hall, 1994).

Discursive Strategies for Producing ‘‘Otherness’’

According to Hall (1994), there are four strategies for producing ‘‘otherness’’: (1)
idealisation, (2) the projection of fantasies of desire and degradation, (3) the failure
to recognise and respect difference, and (4) the tendency to see difference through
the modes of perception and representation of the western culture.4 Below we offer a
brief description of these four strategies as transferred to the reality of (art)
education.5

Idealisation

In colonialist discourse, the main object of the process of idealisation is Nature. The
cultural difference between black and white people was linked with Nature, thus
making the distinction appear permanent and natural. This is naturalisation or
reducing differences to the biological. Thus was ‘‘born’’ the idealised ‘‘noble savage’’
or ‘‘child human’’ living an innocent and simple life in a pure state of nature.
The same strategy is operating when we emphasise the child’s ‘‘nature’’ and
naturalness, with the difference, however, that an inevitable process of change will
propel the child into adulthood. Nothing similar happens in the case of race. This
natural, biological growth process must not, however, prevent us from asking what
else in the distinction between a child and an adult is ‘‘natural’’ and what is not.
Speaking about the child’s needs is a way of legitimating the child as biological and
psychological nature when these needs are described as timeless and universal. In
this way such needs, despite being cultural constructs, are made to appear a part of a
normal natural order (Woodhead, 1990).
Idealisation results in a picture of childhood as a stage where life is simple and
innocent. We talk about the golden days of childhood. The child lives a simple
innocent life unburdened by the worries that beset adults. The child is an ‘‘other’’,
494 M. Saarnivaara and J. Varto

that is, everything that the adult has ceased to be. Among the adjectives used to
describe the child are ‘‘innocent’’, ‘‘willing’’, ‘‘creative’’, ‘‘spontaneous’’, ‘‘authentic’’.
And if the child refuses to fit into the picture constituted by these attributes, they are
cruel, a rascal, or a troublemaker (Saikkonen & Väänänen, 2000).
However, adults and children may have very different versions of childhood. A
hint that this is so is given by, for example, Rautavaara (1998) even if he is looking at
things through the lens of adulthood. When he later revisits New York, where he
studied in his youth, he has a strange sense of returning to the experiences of his early
years, remarking

Not that I felt any nostalgic longing to return to some ‘‘golden years of youth’’, Heavens!
[…] All that time I was fervently hoping to be rid of it. The only thing that had been
worse were the horrors, fears and mythical helplessness of childhood. (p. 288)

It is hard to imagine that something could have become essentially better as

compared to a childhood of decades ago—on the contrary. All the same, childhood is
again and again idealised and made an object of nostalgia.
The adult–child relationship is determined on the basis of innocence. The child
needs protection, which justifies the adult’s patronising attitude towards the child.
Worries about the materialisation of a natural order have led to an intense
preoccupation with anticipating and monitoring the child’s natural developmental
and growth factors. The experiences of early childhood are being judged against later
mental health or social adjustment. Educational needs are similarly represented as the
children’s needs even though they are a matter of which childhood experiences society
values highest (Woodhead, 1990). Pedagogic practice is permeated by stages that
normalise development. The child is seen as an object, a locus of abilities whose
development is being regulated (Walkerdine, 1984). This also applies to theories of
child development in art. However, various sociocultural models which question the
established picture of one-dimensional artistic development are emerging alongside
traditional views (see, for example, Parsons, 1998). But the new views must penetrate
cultural patterns of thought and awareness in the same sense as today’s hegemonic
conception of development before there can be any real pedagogic changes.

Projections
In colonialist discourse, people of another race represent the forbidden fruit, a taboo.
Desire for the ‘‘other’’ is, however, ambivalent in the sense that it involves feelings
not only of attraction but also of aversion. Descriptions of how beautiful
representatives of a certain race are can be understood as the aestheticised
dimension of attraction and desire. Hidden behind the taboo lies the fear of cultural
contamination. Civilisation longs for nature and perceives it as a threat, seeks to
master it, and to harness it for useful purposes.
Adult–child relationships display similar discursive features: the child’s sensuality
and the fears that it arouses. As an object of sexual desire the child is a powerful
 Art Education as a Trap 495

taboo. Accordingly, descriptions of the child include an aestheticising dimension

(beautiful, darling, sweet, and so on) that expresses adults’ fascination with the child.
In her strangeness the child is exotic and desirable but also disquieting, free of
internalised norm-based restraints and unpredictable. Adults distance themselves
from the child through discipline, which helps them to preserve a feeling that they are
in control of the situation.
The context of education highlights other kinds of desire too: the child is an object
of adults’, parents’ and, why not, teachers’ desires as the one supposed to realise
them. This can happen in art education as easily as in sport. The following remark by
a psychiatric child patient probably represents the extreme in this respect: ‘‘It begun
when Father started this my swimming’’ (Puhakainen, 2001, p. 54). The child is seen
as a certain kind of resource that is subordinated to one’s own plans. Such plans may
be about skills, interests, and career choice, but also about experiences that one
wants to offer to the child.

The summers brought no relief to the oppressiveness of life, not by any means. Because I
was a hopelessly urban young person, summer was not a time of renewal in the midst of
nature or eternally remembered country evenings. Summer was leaving for some
farmhouse as a ‘‘summer guest’’. It was a room and a kitchen permeated by flies, a lake
with muddy shores absolutely too far away, cowpats in the yard and horseflies
everywhere. Sooner or later you would be obliged to take part in haymaking on the farm.
That was because Father at least and possibly Mother too perceived it as a holy ritual
where they went back to their own childhood […] I learned to heartily dislike the
‘‘scenery of Finland’s inland waters’’ where my parents’ nostalgia always led them to
recall their roots. (Rautavaara, 1998, p. 17)

Like parents, the teacher can similarly appeal to experiences that originate in the
teacher’s own childhood and experiential world, meaning that seen from within the
pupil’s world they appear unfamiliar and strange. The situation might be like this, for
example. The teacher grows impatient because ‘‘today’s children cannot imagine
things any more’’ and attempts to stimulate the child’s imagination by inviting them
to ‘‘imagine what it feels like when you are angling’’. However, we could ask
ourselves why the child should imagine itself just angling. How many town or city
children of today have a reality that includes angling? Or does the invitation stem
from an underlying assumption that imagination is an activity that needs no contact
with one’s own experiential world?
Art educators can also expect their pupils to adopt as their guidelines the
educator’s own current predilections or interests. However, the essential thing is the
pupil’s own choices and interests, which should be encouraged. At the same time
the teacher’s duties include expanding the range of options available to the child also
in the direction of different styles and working methods; including those that the
teacher may not themselves much value. Otherwise the teachers are producing new
versions of themselves. The essential thing is to recognise and acknowledge
differences, a factor closely linked also with the following discursive strategy.
496 M. Saarnivaara and J. Varto

Ignored Differences
In colonialist discourse we easily lump the representatives of a particular ethnic
group or race together, for example by remarking that ‘‘all Chinese look alike’’. In the
adult–child relationship such inability or unwillingness to appreciate distinctions is
seen when differences between children are ignored. For example, the fact that
school is attended not by boys and girls but by pupils often involves a discursive
effacement of the other sex (Lahelma, 1992). The same applies to differences
between individuals—this despite the fact that art education is a subject where it
would be possible to foreground the preservation of the pupils’ personal
characteristics as a guideline.
Adults find it difficult to recognise and value a child’s distinctive nature because
difference often leads to a comparison between adults and children where the child
emerges as someone who is less experienced and knows less than adults. In practice
this means that children have fewer rights; they need not be taken seriously because
they are not as important as adults are (Waksler, 1986). A group’s morning visit to
an art museum to see an exhibition is a telling example. The children were asked to
take off their shoes ‘‘because people will be coming when the museum opens at
eleven and the floors must be clean’’.6 However, from the perspective of the planned
programme and the danger of slipping, it would have been safest for the children to
keep their shoes on, to say nothing of the idea that when the museum opened the
adult visitors would have been asked to take their shoes off so that the floor would be
kept clean for later visitors.

Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism is marked by a tendency to apply the categories and norms of one’s
own culture everywhere, that is, one uses one’s own culture as a standard by which to
judge other people and cultures. Art education is similarly capable of maintaining
colonialist relations and constructing a eurocentric approach. This happens when,
for example, social (e.g. the nuclear family) and aesthetic (‘‘but everyone likes
Beethoven’’) values are used as criteria when evaluating things in a multicultural
classroom.7 A particular problem emerges when classics or masterworks of western
art represent another and distant culture in an idealising or mystifying manner
and this is allowed to pass without comment because it is considered ‘‘natural’’. In
addition, art from other and distant cultures can be discussed in the classroom
without reference to its own cultural categories, making western art a universal frame
of observation and reducing the art of the other culture to an undifferentiated mass
(Saarnivaara, 1999). Museum pedagogy is another field where the teacher can
inadvertently turn into a ‘‘colonialist’’.
From the perspective of the adult–child relationship, this is once again a matter of
the child being defined in relation to the adult, that is, in terms of what the child does
not know or cannot do. Being a child means being constructed as a group incapable
of acting like adults. As a result, children share the goal of ‘‘becoming something
 Art Education as a Trap 497

else’’. This involves a process of ‘‘normalising childhood’’ where controls are used to
guide the child towards a normal and proper model of action in accordance with
socially defined objectives.
For example, a study by Rantala (1999) reveals that the young people attending
schools of visual arts have assimilated the rhetorical discourse about themselves and
their actions that their teachers use to formulate the aims of and rationale for their
own actions.8 However, the child should be seen as someone who is living her life
here and now, not as a future adult; the child should be seen as capable of observing
her own life. Bergman (1995) describes aptly how he was never given enough
support for the manifestations of his presence in the world. His parents’ attention
was turned elsewhere—to the project of becoming an adult as seen from a
perspective that they themselves considered important. ‘‘My parents spoke of piety,
of love, and of humility’’ (pp. 48, 56). Thus, discourse is something that limits a
perspective and makes it more one-sided, shutting out a great many phenomena not
considered real, worthy of attention or, even, as actually existing (Mills, 1997).
Discourses narrow down the range of possible ways of constructing a subject. They
are grounded on the principle of exclusion. That which is considered ‘‘natural’’ is the
result of an act of exclusion. This is a question not of scientific fact but of ideology.
Discourses produce knowledge that shapes perceptions and practices. Those who
produce the discourse also have the power to make it true: Discourses have
consequences for both those who employ it and those who are ‘‘subjected’’ to it
(Hall, 1994, pp. 295, 318). A philosophy of exclusion and control is expressed in
terms of what children need. However, the things that are presented as what children
need may reflect, rather, adults’ need to control children and turn them into adults.

Art Education in/as a Trap

From the perspective of art education or education generally, we face here the
question of what are we doing about the situation. Shall we consciously create
practices that will deconstruct discursive strategies or are we so entangled in existing
practices that we shall not attempt to do anything else? Among the answers offered to
this question are various child-centred theories of education. But even they share the
starting point of the child’s needs and of understanding the child’s development.
Despite its emancipatory rhetoric, even child-centred thinking is bound up with
social control and direction, only here it is assumed that self-regulation is more
effective than external control because self-regulation creates the impression that one
is free and choosing freely (see, for example, Burman, 1994).
All too often, people are kept busy at being creative as a means of spreading
conventional attitudes. One day positive, developing, happy emancipation turned—
like a dream going over to a nightmare—into control, one-dimensionality, playing at
art, with psychologists, therapists and other gatekeepers of the normal and the
abnormal serving as its police force. Their policing duties involve less Truth than the
fixing of boundaries: No Access beyond This Point! This is, this is not, Proper!
498 M. Saarnivaara and J. Varto

How come nobody remembers any more that in the final analysis, we none of us
know better than anyone else what awaits a human being, the complexion of and the
truth about becoming human.
We should be happy that aesthetics was never admitted among the sciences.
It remained confused, impressionistic nonsense, animating those who refuse to
allow themselves to be reduced to consumers. Aesthetics is still capable of opening
messing around, creativity and other virtual stations up towards the world, sensory
existence.
If art education is a trap in the positive sense of the word, it really opens us up for
the world: for the unfamiliar, the strange, the uncontrollable, the not-I, non-culture,
the wild, evil, flesh, sex, noise, and death. Fortunately, there are people who still
want to open up for the world to see what’s up! And they see instantly that a great
deal is up; there’s always something up. As a rule we poor humans are at a standstill,
stagnating, a constipation of the soul afflicts us daily. We are afraid, stuck, rigid with
hate. But in the hour of our greatest need help is at hand: the world is always there,
our ever-available deliverance. New challenges, the different, the unfamiliar, the
‘‘other’’ revivify us once more, make us bring forth something good. As long as we
are prevented from cooking slowly in our petty-bourgeois stagnant water, the good
happens.
Only, from our childhood we are encouraged to reflect, analyse, learn discourses—
and finally we learn and believe that that’s all. Understood as a trap in the positive
sense of the word, art education guides the child and young person, sometimes even
the adult, to their own experience—and out into the world. This encounter brings
the conviction that experience contains everything: deception, error, wrong, and
naivety on the one hand, but, on the other hand, the beautiful, the new, that which is
shared, and hence communion with other human beings.
School reforms in Finland have increased flexibility and student choice, and
emphasised the pupil’s individuality. Particularly in art education, the teacher can
now allow pupils to put forward and carry out their own ideas. However, there is a
particular risk here, the creation of a certain kind of culture of fun and games, with
power concealed behind vague good things, being busy, self-expression, carrying out
one’s own ideas and working on one’s own experiences (see Laine, 2000, p. 162). All
the same, the power embodied in the teacher remains intact as unquestioned
practice. Classroom activities are still initiated by the teacher, with the pupils
responding to the teacher’s opening moves. The degree of reciprocity remains the
same as before.
Switching to self-initiated work would mean going beyond institutional roles,
orders and models. At school social reciprocity has been subordinated to structural
passivisation (Laine, 2000). However, in education it is not possible to give up
authority, and instruction depends on energy generated by an encounter between
two powers. However, today’s institutional structures, routines, beliefs, and patterns
of thought generate schooling that resembles a furnished room where freedom is
limited to moving the furniture around.9
 Art Education as a Trap 499

School both reproduces and changes conditions. The article, however, has
foregrounded schools’ hidden and shadowy aspect, making visible the power
relations that produce the child’s ‘‘otherness’’. This is also a part of schools’ reality
and script, contributing to the fact that many emancipatory ideas are often realised
only on a rhetorical level. The school of old and old practices are merely dressed up
in new clothes.10 No additional resources will solve this problem unless the basic
assumptions involved in education are themselves subjected to scrutiny.
Art education is in a trap, but art education is also in itself a trap. It uses rhetoric to
conceal how school structures an asymmetric adult–child relationship, maintaining
an illusion of freedom, self-expression, and a grand mission (see Rantala, 2001, for a
more detailed discussion). And what about learning as such? To speak pointedly, is it
nothing more than condensing, elaborating and reorganising cognitive structures in a
constructivist spirit (cf. Saarnivaara, 2000)? What does this approach have to offer
art education? Where is skill [tekhné] and corporeality? Is there room for mystery or
are we in the process of building a new prison of the mind?

Notes
1. In Finland, children and young people attend art schools on voluntary basis. However, in both
systems the educational objectives are based on a national curriculum approved and
supervised by the Finnish National Board of Education.
2. For a more detailed discussion of the social construction of reality see Berger and Luckmann,
1967 and Velody and Williams, 1998.
3. Compare Hall, 1997, p. 225: what is said about racial difference could equally be applied in
many instances to other dimensions of difference, such as gender, sexuality, class, and
disability.
4. See also Hall, 1997, pp. 223–279. For his analysis Hall drew on Said’s 1978 study of
orientalism. Löytty (1997) has applied Hall’s discursive strategies in an examination of
representations of Africa in colonialist fiction.
5. Saikkonen and Väänänen (2000) have used the idea of discursive strategies in their analysis of
the child discourses of child-oriented school.
6. Tarja Pääjoki, personal communication, 28 March 2000.
7. In Finland, multicultural classrooms began to be established in increasing numbers only in the
1990s, and even then only in major cities. The major questions involved in multiculturalism
still lie ahead.
8. Things appear in a different light from young people’s own experiential perspective: as they
themselves see it, they are shaping their own reality and master at least this particular area of
their life—the making of images (Rantala, 1999).
9. The metaphor has been borrowed from Rautavaara’s text, p. 154.
10. The phenomenon itself is a general one, although we refer here to changes and reforms that
have been undergoing throughout the 1990s in Finland. See, for example, Saarnivaara, 1990.

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