Everything Old is New Again

Enjoyed working with outstanding educators today in my New Literacies in Practice class at Kent State. These are educators of all levels of students and there was a common refrain that we need to be trying these new/old ideas. I was thinking later of John Dewey's book Art as Experience and how, in it, he talks about how the ancient civilizations had a much closer tie between their art and their daily lives. Instead of art being cordoned off in a museum, art could be on the cup they used for their daily drinking or on some utilitarian tool. If anything, post-modernism has led us (perhaps) to a return to a less hierarchical view of forms of representation. A comic strip may be viewed on the same level as a great novel, and a Brillo soap box can be immortalized. Will schools ever catch up to this/return to this?