IMPENDING DEMISE OF FINE ARTS EDUCATION

THE fine arts education at the tertiary level (visual and performing arts) is currently in dire straits. They are accorded the lowest priority in terms of academic and intellectual recognition.

In the early years, the fine arts discipline thrived in the pioneer universities — Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Universiti Malaya and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia — and was recognised as contributing to the overall education process to nurture well-rounded character development.

There was much artistic creativity then as the lecturers who were artists par excellence and thinkers were not hounded by the key performance indicator (KPI), allowing creative minds room to pursue their artistic inclinations and inspire their students to excel in creative pursuits.

There was a vibrant art scene in these pioneer universities. Plays, dance and music performances, visual arts exhibitions and installations reverberate in the campuses. It was the high point of artistic expressions unencumbered by the stigma of the arts as bereft of intellectual quotient.

However, with the introduction of the ranking system that emphasises publications in tiers of refereed journals and the local Malaysian Research Assessment as indicators of excellence, theory and practice of artistic pursuits were left in the lurch.

This became more daunting when the university’s top management were from the sciences programmes who were ignorant of the nature and role of the fine arts in the educative process.

Fine arts, by virtue of its nature, creates visual publication that engenders non-verbal form of communication and explore meanings in the abstraction of forms that distils the essence of natural phenomena beyond the physicality of realistic manifestations into metaphysical and cosmic forms of expressions.

The arts besides expressing the beauty of movements, music (patterned sounds — sonic orders) and the vicarious experience of human emotions (as in plays) also has therapeutic application not only for the common man, but more so for special needs people.

USM was the first university to formulate an arts therapy programme for special needs children — spastic, autistic and dyslexic children. But the project met its untimely demise because of the lack of interest from the university and the lecturers who had to fulfil the KPI requirements. The remnant of this project is only a course on the theory of arts therapy.

The fine arts programmes in the public universities have remained calcified in the rudimentary theory and practice. It has not developed into a discipline that produces virtuosos, arts historians or critics. It is a mundane general appreciation of the arts.

If there is no attempt to revamp and revitalise the fine arts education in the universities, it will languish into oblivion, following the path of the now defunct philosophy programme.

And university’s administrators will not bat an eye nor feel the loss of a discipline that contributes to character development as well as in perceiving phenomena beyond the textual verbal aspects of cognition. For they are enamoured only with those disciplines that would contribute to enhancing the ranking position.

MOHAMED GHOUSE NASURUDDIN

Centre for Policy Research and International Studies

Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang