Megan Salazar and I met at the March 2022 National Symposium for Classical Education in Phoenix, Arizona. We shared animated conversations which we have continued since that time. She represents so well the passionate dedication that is fueling today’s revival of Classical education, particularly in promoting the essential nature of art and its power to transform lives. With pleasure, I am sharing this article by her. 

 

An Art Teacher’s Encounter with the Classical Education Community 

All educators have to think like engineers. We should design our curriculum as though we are drafting a wheel, striving to eliminate resistance, tuning it again and again, aiming for perfection. However, when we’re starting out, it can be quite a challenge to learn the craft, especially for the seemingly lost art of Classical education. Where do we find the blueprints for that perfect wheel? Who is out there to take us on as apprentices?

In the summer of 2010, I was ramping up to start my brand new art teaching career in a brand new high school, my hopes and ambitions for this job were vast and bright. While my hopes were high, I still had a case of imposter syndrome. I knew I was green, and I felt underprepared. Nonetheless, I believed it then and I still believe it now that this was my dream school, and I was meant to be here. Liberty Common is a classically oriented, college-prep school, geared toward fostering virtue and cultural literacy. I made it my mission to build this high-school art program from the ground up, but there was no blueprint, at least none that I could find. I didn’t know where to look. 

At this point in time, Classical schools were few and far between; I did not have much in the way of art education colleagues with whom I could confer. While I was confident in my own art-making and art-history research abilities, I had no Classical training. Contemporary art school had done little to equip me. I ended up having to outfit myself with the necessary content on the fly.

The main thing that drove me to press on was my firm belief in what we were doing in our school. I saw the profound impact of our classically based curriculum and character-education program. Our students displayed a literacy, awareness, and sense of virtue beyond that of most adults I knew. I was determined to fashion a visual-arts program that would rightly serve this special, young population. As I said, being a department of one, I had no mentor in art education to turn to. While I could structure my art-history courses around the required Core Knowledge curriculum, I was essentially given carte blanche for building a studio-arts program.

Fortunately, I had the sense to look to art history for inspiration. From my basic schooling on the academic art model, I remembered the basic structure of building skills (grammar) before progressing to concept (logic and rhetoric). “Ah-ha!,” I thought, “Maybe I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Maybe I can just look back and figure out what the masters did.” In attempting this, I did end up building a fairly good program based on what I thought the masters did. I also threw in the methods from the book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, because it felt academic in its promise of forming skills. In my program, most of my students went on to create excellent art and design. They gleaned a deep appreciation for the arts, and they knew their art history exceptionally well. However, somehow there was always a fraction of my students that just could not grasp drawing, even if I had them break it down into a grid as my books instructed. 

Retrospectively, I realized my error. I had looked back to history where I saw a beautifully crafted wheel, where the academic model for drawing churned out master draftsmen. I gazed back at the products of this system, straining to observe the impeccable engineering of the curriculum. Based on my observations, I attempted to build for my school a facsimile of the academic wheel (see fig.1), but it was a slightly flawed reproduction—it was based on shadows on the wall of the cave. After years of working in the shadows, I did have a wheel-shaped thing that moved us in a forward direction, but I could never quite hone it to roll freely on a perfect and predictable path. We rolled along this path, slightly askew, for years. Things did improve when my school brought on a brilliant scholar with an encyclopedic knowledge of art history to be my colleague. Nevertheless, since he was also a product of a contemporary art school, he was unsure about how to help give this wheel the full tune-up.

Enter Dr. Rob Jackson and the Institute for Classical Education: this past spring, the visionary Dr. Jackson held his annual National Symposium for Classical Education. This year, to my delight, it was entirely centered around the arts. I will be ever-grateful to my school’s administration for making it possible for every one of our art and music teachers (high school and elementary alike) to attend. It was here at this conference that we had the tremendous privilege and good fortune to meet whom I like to call the wheelmakers.

The conference speakers were, both, master artists and master teachers (including the ever-inspiring Prof. Carol Reynolds). For every question I had about art education, they had the answer. For every problem I had struggled with, they had the solution. The speakers I witnessed at this conference not only had intimate knowledge of how to teach the arts classically, but they also knew how to make art–and therefore Beauty–into a central focus in our schools.

I immediately felt a kinship with these passionate people. They understood something I had been longing to express: art is the hub of Classical education. If we truly want our students to be inclined toward Goodness and Truth, they must have access to Beauty. Beauty entices them to love, and Love pushes them toward forming habits of virtue. In addition to deeply understanding this core principle, the presenters coherently taught us how to fine tune our art-education programs with time-tested methods.

While I gleaned a myriad of insights from a plethora of speakers at the conference, I will highlight the teachings of Great Hearts Master Teacher, Brighton Demerest-Smith: 

Over the course of a single hour, Smith set right every misconception I had about teaching drawing. Immediately, he explained the detriments of “the grid method” and the Right Side of the Brain book. He, then, proceeded to name all the ways our drawing program was going awry. Although I was only one member of the audience, I felt like I was receiving a personalized diagnosis. He went on to prescribe the antidote, outlining a classically-structured drawing course pulling from traditional academic curriculum and citing the invaluable resource: Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters, by Robert Beverly Hale.

When I returned back to our school, I set to work immediately implementing Smith’s teachings. In just three weeks, I witnessed a dramatic shift in the whole mindset with which my students approached the challenges of drawing. They were not fooled that they might master the skills after a single lesson (as they would with the grid method). Instead, they saw observation drawing as a great challenge that was laid before them—they discovered its value, and they committed to the hard work. Even my most disadvantaged students with the lengthiest learning plans were dramatically able to improve their drawing skills in meaningful ways. The more advanced artists also found worth in these foundational exercises, because it pushed them to depict the subject even more accurately. All of the students were engaged and grateful because they could see themselves improving their skills, knowledge, and insight day after day. Even after the first project, my students were not only gaining skills, they were gaining sensitivity. 

Moving forward, I will continue to recalibrate my art program following the guidance that I received at the conference. Smith and the other speakers at Dr. Jackson’s conference showed me that there is, indeed, a wheel of Classical art education that has already been tuned to perfection (see fig. 2). The plan for creating the wheel is our inheritance, but we need to stop stumbling around in the dark trying to build it in the cave. We art teachers need to connect with the established Classical Education community. We need to find the wheelmakers, become their apprentices, and learn the craft. It’s time to stop reinventing the wheel.

Megan Salazar is Art Department Head, Classical Symposium Coordinator, and Chairman of Character Education Committee at Liberty Common High School, Fort Collins, Colorado.