What did Albert Barnes really want?

A most peculiar way
to teach democratic values

ROBERT ZALLER

A reply to Gresham Riley and Charles Morscheck:

I too believe the public was well served by our May 21 debate at Drexel. I note that it was the first such debate to be held since the Orphans Court decision in 2004 to permit the Barnes to move. The reason for this lack of discussion is not far to seek: Proponents of the move, including the philanthropies to which you refer, have not only been unwilling to submit their claims to public debate, but have actively discouraged such debate by essentially foreclosing print and media outlets (the Inquirer; WHYY) to views that conflict with their own. I myself have experienced such pressures. An article I wrote at the behest of Philanthropy News Digest last fall, which had been accepted for publication by its editor, was killed by the Digest’s board.

This is an important point, for while we are talking about promoting democracy through education, we might remember that its lifeblood is public debate. Gresham Riley is the only proponent of the Barnes move who has been willing to debate the issue. At the Fairmount Park Commission hearing this week, I invited Derek Gilman to such a debate. He declined.

The ‘done deal’ argument

The most frequent comment I hear about the Barnes move is that it is a “done deal.” I take this to mean that there is no point to further discussion because the powers that be have decided the matter, and whether the move is desirable or not, nothing that can be said or done will alter the decision.

This is a most peculiar way to teach democratic values, although it is a very good way to impose autocratic and elitist ones. If the views I held were mine alone, they might be dismissed as idiosyncratic (which would not, of course, in the least refute them). But critics such as Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker, Hilton Kramer in The New Criterion, Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times, and Philadelphia’s own Edward J. Sozanski in the Inquirer (which has published him much less frequently of late, and not at all on the subject of the Barnes) have all eloquently appealed against the move. So has Ellen K. Levy, the immediate past president of the College Art Association; prominent art dealers such as Richard Feigen; and public figures such as Julian Bond, whose father was president of Lincoln University.

Riley misunderstands Barnes’s vision

I thank Gresham for fleshing out the ideas he suggested at our debate (click here). With his account of the state of education in our country and its disastrous consequences for our democracy, there can be no argument. He has, however, misconstrued the intent of Albert Barnes’s own vision for his foundation and the practical possibilities it represents, whether in Merion or on the Parkway.

Gresham suggests that the Barnes Foundation open itself to grade-school children, and that it partner with Project Forward Leap in addressing students in grades 6-8 particularly. He asserts that “the Barnes Foundation has not been serious, up to this point, about implementing Albert Barnes’s stated objective,” and suggests that “many of the new cadres of students will be school-age children [whose] basic skills . . . will be underdeveloped.”

If the Barnes Foundation hasn’t been serious about realizing its stated purposes, however, then neither was Dr. Barnes. Never at any time did he regard his curriculum as suitable for schoolchildren. His was a program of adult education addressed to a general but fully mature public. At no time did he open the Barnes to grade-school visitation during his lifetime, or provide for it after; neither he nor John Dewey would have seen any more purpose in this than in trying to teach nuclear physics to grade-schoolers by promoting visits to Livermore or Los Alamos. The curriculum he and Dewey devised was appropriately rigorous, and called for developing the kind of aesthetic and visual sophistication only possible to adult minds (though not necessarily formally educated ones).

Serious education, or consumerist dumbing-down?

The Barnes has in fact implemented a K1-12 program in recent years, and does now admit grade-school children. This has nothing to do with the educational program that Barnes developed and is still taught to adult classes. It’s merely the kind of pass-through exposure to art that many public museums offer to children.

Such exposure doubtless has benefits (or would if it were connected to serious programs of art education); as things are, it is merely a part of the consumerist dumbing-down of our culture, an indoctrination in passive viewing that reaches its logical conclusion in paying adult customers who are herded through blockbuster exhibitions, their ears stuffed with packaged explanations of what they’re seeing while their eyes glaze over. This is the very opposite of the critical and independent awareness the Barnes program seeks to instill.

The ideal location

Contrary to Gresham’s assertion, therefore, art education has not been a “fantasy dream” but a living reality at the Barnes for three-quarters of a century. This kind of education can’t be conducted en masse; nor can it substitute or compensate for the abysmal lack of elementary skills or knowledge in our school-age populations.

Barnes chose the site of his school carefully: close enough to Philadelphia (almost literally on the city’s boundary) to enable the “plain people” to visit and take part in his program, but spacious enough to accommodate a garden and arboretum fully integrated into the program, and affording those who “daily toil” a retreat for aesthetic contemplation and discovery.

The Barnes Foundation is just where it ought to be, as ideally located (and even more accessible) than it was 56 years ago when Albert Barnes died. Awkwardly and destructively transplanted to Center City, with its unique and inimitable ambience shattered, it will be just another fairway attraction in a city gambling that tourist dollars will offset a moribund economy and an uneducated workforce.



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