Folkert Haanstra

Effects of art education in secondary schools on cultural participation in later life

This paper reports on the effects of art education in secondary schools on the cultural participation of Dutch students 10–20 years after leaving school. We draw our conclusion from a sample survey among 1034 students from 31 schools, half of whom took art as a subject of examination. Art examination subjects were more often chosen by students who were already active in the arts, come from culturally active families, and who more often chose languages and other humanities in their examination package. However, in spite of their affiliation with art prior to choosing an examination package, training in the arts during secondary school was found to add to their participation in cultural activities ten to twenty years later. The effects are restricted to the same art discipline as the art lessons attended, and apply to both receptive [enjoying art of artists] and productive [producing art] cultural participation.

Short-Term Effects of Compulsory Multidisciplinary Secondary School Arts Education on Cultural Participation in the Netherlands

In 1999, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science introduced a new kind of compulsory arts education in secondary school aimed at stimulating cultural participation among Dutch youth. This article examines whether the course, called ‘Cultural and Artistic Education,’ succeeds in doing so. Data on 3,851 secondary school students (ages 14-16) in the Netherlands reveal that enrollment in Cultural and Artistic Education stimulates participation in high culture and, to a smaller degree, popular culture. The effects apply equally to students with different gender, ethnic minority, and family background status. A positive effect on attitude toward art only partly holds and is less convincing. No effects were found on the complexity of the attended cultural activities.

Visitors’ Learning Experiences in Dutch Museums

Through audience surveys much is known about visitors’ characteristics, but still little is known about how visitors perceive and experience the museum and how this influences their learning. This chapter presents the results of two empirical studies on personal learning experiences of museum visitors. Quantitative and qualitative instruments are used to get more systematic information about the learning experiences. Data were collected in Dutch museums with mixed collections of art objects, historical objects and ethnographic objects. Three dimensions of museum guidance are distinguished: a cognitive dimension (clarification of subject matter), a meta-cognitive dimension (information on the goals and the set-up of the exhibition, the routing etc.) and an affective, emotional dimension.

Interestingness and Pleasingness of Drawings from Different Age and Expertise Groups

Student groups with different levels of art expertise (art students and psychology students) judged a collection of drawings produced by people from different age and expertise groups (5-, 8-, 11-, and 14-year-old children, and adult artists and non-artists). Three assessment criteria were used, namely “interestingness,” “pleasingness,” and “overall quality” (good-poor). Previous studies had demonstrated that art experts value drawings by the youngest children and artists more highly than drawings from the other groups. In other words, they produce more U-curve appreciation patterns. Here we show that unlike in the case of naïve students, the mean judgment pattern of art experts for the criteria pleasingness and interestingness indeed form a U-curve. Furthermore, expert judges exhibited greater interdependence than naïve judges in their ratings of pleasingness and interestingness. The results are discussed in relation to contemporary models of aesthetic judgment.