The Soul of Itten

I have been in many conversations, at the start of the school year, on what the "foundations" of art should be in a 21c context. As one can imagine, this discussion reveals the values, experience, and training of the person having the opinion. A post-modern task, in general, is to sort through inherited knowledge for value while at the same time reflexively juggling the agendas of contemporary pluralism, accelerated time, new technologies--what Ostrow refers to as "the shifting platform." Stuck between modernism and post-postmodernism myself, I struggle with "foundations" and the notion of exposure and teaching for inquiry/curiosity versus deeper processing and understanding or even didactic technique-building and materials awareness that, ethically speaking, can give beginning art students the ability to communicate meaning. In my course research, I found a copy of The Education of Vision. It is an influential text from the early 1960s edited by Gyorgy Kepes. Johannes Itten  contributed a piece that describes the formation of the foundational courses of the Bauhaus. Is his approach ageless? Is there a clue to what has been and always should be in the repertoire of the college art teacher? Perhaps.
His basic goal was "the development of the creative personality." "Each student had to realize himself (sic).. and "the original works had to be genuine." (p. 104) Like today, he struggled with "scientific-technological civilization." The impact of war on his thinking resulted in his "creative automatism" which was a type of spiritual pursuit. Reading about the pedagogical philosophies of noted historical figures only make the task more difficult, but it really is interesting!