Baby Einstein vs Baby Van Gogh

When my son was in kindergarten at the neighbourhood elementary school in California, he could rattle off all the major organs and glands in the human body — and correctly point out where his own liver, kidneys and pancreas were, something I still can’t do with accuracy. It’s not that he was particularly bright — just that his teacher devised a project on the human body that was so much fun, that he couldn’t help but learn.

All children laid themselves down on oblong brown paper sheets and their five-year-old partner cut out the shape of their body. Then each child cut out the shapes of all major organs, the heart, lungs, intestines, stomach as well as the skeletal system from white sheets, labelled and stuck them on the cutouts. Finally, on a separate, long sheet they cut out the shape of their clothes and pinned them over to cover the innards. Teacher Adrienne then hung these paper clones all around the classroom walls for the rest of the term. By the end of that period, there wasn’t a child in the classroom who couldn’t tell you where his gall-bladder was. No books, no rigorous, rote learning, yet these kinders could compare with third graders in terms of their knowledge base.

The following term, these kinders came home with their own versions of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The colours were remarkably close to the original and the kids had tried to keep to the broad outlines. The next week they painted Sunflowers, then Irises, before moving on to other Impressionists — Monet and Pissaro’s landscapes, Cezanne’s watercolours — and from there to the Cubists, learning bits about their lives and their art every week, coming home with childish versions of their paintings. And theirs was no expensive private school, but a down-to-earth, public-funded school, free for every local resident.

Most schools in developed countries give equal emphasis to art education, offering budding Van Goghs as much of a chance as budding Einsteins. And it is amazing the repertoire of art knowledge a five-year old begins to build from that early age. At this rate, by the time my kids were my age, classic art appreciation would be embedded in their DNA.

Parents were equally emphatic about the place of art in the lives of their offspring — every time the local Palo Alto Arts Center had an interesting exhibition, parent volunteers would help teachers organise field trips. In contrast, there was an exhibition of Anish Kapoor’s works in New Delhi recently that ran over two months and hardly any schools showed up — not even the expensive, private ones.

In a country with an overwhelmingly rich past and a growing body of fine contemporary artists who are able to command increasingly high prices globally, art education is still not taken seriously enough. Indian artists face the unique challenge of addressing their works to a still mostly unaware, indifferent audience, one which is more interested in the price of the artwork than its intrinsic artistic value.

Yes, the Indian economy is booming, and art is the new investible, more subtle than gold yet easier to display — the Gaitonde on your wall can say “look at the most thought-provokingly beautiful Rs 3 crore you have ever seen!” And this is exactly why it is very important to have a well-educated body of art professionals — qualified curators, restorers, critics and appreciators, as well as collectors, enduring institutions of learning, galleries to display private collections, art and design labs, museums, storage infrastructure and other supporting cast. These bring greater depth and sophistication and create a thriving and enduring art scene.

In India, most of these have to be created from scratch, which brings us right back to the concept of building a strong base in art education from an early age. Art has lived far too long in the rarefied world of the uber rich, and the best way to make it more accessible to the general public is to begin its introduction at an early age — in elementary school — with lots of exposure, education and support along the way.

Writer and journalist Jyoti Pande relocated from Calilfornia to New Delhi