Practicing What They Preach

When I was in public school in the early 1960s, art education was a redoubt of nonconformists. And that seemed to me a good thing. In a school system where everything was about the system – rank, class, grades, discipline, standards, dress codes – art class was about freedom and individuality. Our male art teacher was obviously gay and our female art teacher was something of a bohemian, given to wildly colorful scarves and ostentatious hair ornaments. Their mere presence in the midst of so much buttoned-down conformity suggested to me that there was life outside and after high school.

Art educators these days, when “thinking outside the box” has become a clich