The National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) in Australia, in a message to members, said that the proposed revisions to the National Arts curriculum means ‘a teacher could go an entire year without referring to a single living Australian artist’ and that Australian artists have a poor foothold in the proposed changes. Given that the work of contemporary artists is likely to be found in a variety of public spaces as outdoor sculpture, architecture and street art and that students will be exposed to it no matter what, it would seem that there is an argument here for the expansion of teaching methodology and access across the entire system from reception to year 12.

There is a reality, however. Primary teachers have little enough time to get through prescribed material in the face of competing demands from extra-curricular activities let alone prioritising the Arts – assuming that they have the interest, knowledge and training to deliver an effective program. There is no doubt that some do but the recognition of the need for specialist music, sports, science, and art teachers in primary schools comes down to funding. Some schools can afford to do so and others, not. Even an excursion to see a production or an exhibition may cost a student a handful of dollars if they live close enough to a city but for those in rural areas, it is basically a financial imposition. To do justice to Aboriginal art and culture, Asian art and culture and Australian arts means that something has to give. There are simply not enough hours in the day. The picture is not much better at high school level. Visual art happens as a semester subject at years 7 and 8 and a semester choice subject thereafter. Given the competition from an already overloaded curriculum, classes diminish in number and size the further up the system the student goes.

A semester subject sounds all well and good – lots of time. This is an illusion. Even with the best will in the world, a teacher in the visual arts is going to be able to initiate and complete little more than two to three projects in that time with the emphasis partly on making and partly on recording and analysing. A student would be lucky to encounter more than a handful of artists of any ilk in that time, let alone Australian, Aboriginal or Asian in other than a tokenistic way. Those that stay the course into year 12 are few and far between. Of an intake of say 250 in year 8 or year 7, perhaps 20 will still be there at the end. So, what happens to the remainder in this grand plan? In truth, whatever they encounter will be a matter of luck more than anything else with some parents seeing visual arts education as important and many other concerned only with immediate gratification via the accumulation of personal goods and wealth and the all-numbing addiction to streaming of Netflix offerings and live sport. Visual art continues to be seen as the province of a cultural elite.

Perhaps the bigger question is not how many survive but what we as a society expect as cultural parameters. Just what is important? Someone I know puts up a message on a regular basis  ‘’another day has passed when I did not use quadratic equations”. Considering that at least three and half years or her life [ the compulsory mathematical component], five lessons a week, was devoted to this and other mathematical systems, what does that say in the scheme of things? Some might suggest that so much of the school curriculum is actually irrelevant. Some might suggest that so much of lesson and homework time is simply time-filling. It all comes down to what is seen as important and no matter what the curriculum writers perceive this to be, in the end people vote with their feet and those journeys do not lead to art galleries any more than they lead to artist studios. Attending gallery openings will tell you who the active participants in the visual arts are – people in their 50s and beyond and the just-out-of-art school crowd who still retain that youthful optimism that all is possible. Those in between largely don’t care – they are made up of the 230 who didn’t make it to year 12 as part of a visual art course.

Our problem as a society is that we simply don’t know what is important any longer in the face of endless choice and diversity. Having all the world’s knowledge available at the touch of key sounds all well and good; having all of the world’s art available online sounds ideal; having students making and writing about the art they create is obviously better than never making or writing about anything but if all of that knowledge is seldom or never accessed because students don’t believe that it is important in the face of endless and overwhelming choice, what then is the point? Either we put real emphasis on the visible culture we seek to nurture and protect through constant and informed exposure, or we end up with just anaesthetised survival. The reality is that the only thing that distinguishes us from plants is our ability to create and to appreciate the importance of that ability. You can memorise all the mathematical formulae; the names of the capitals of every country; the whole periodic table; the words of noted poets; the litany of royal households or even the statistics of sports personalities and contribute nothing to the cultural awareness and legacy of the only factor that distinguishes one society from another – its visible culture. For all of the billions that perished from wars, famine and disease, it is only the surviving statue/painting/book/building and cultural artefact that tell us anything.

So, while curriculum writers and critics argue about how many Australian artists might be mentioned in classrooms, their endeavours will fall on deaf ears unless the visual arts are prioritised and not left to chance and competing curriculum demands of what becomes increasingly irrelevant in people’s lives. And, we know that isn’t going to happen any more than a federal government deciding that Arts funding is more than capital works on which it can hang its hat and hope that posterity has been paying attention. A sign on a building of the long-forgotten politician who carried out the opening and believed his or her reputation was forever enhanced by bricks, mortar and stainless steel, is little more than an exercise in bureaucratic ego massage.