Education Commons^™

Design: A Critique Of A Metaphor, Nancy R. Johnson

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Teaching art is basically a process of sharing socially derived knowledge about art with other persons. In order to communicate the cognitive configuration of art as it appears in our culture, it is necessary to use language. In art education, the visual arts are often thought of as a non-verbal symbol system for encoding experience. For this symbol system to be socially known about, however, it must be codified in language. As Hertzler has pointed out, "The key and basic symbolism of man is language. All the other symbol systems can be interpreted only be means of language?". Language is …