b'Character is choosing good for bad, beauty over whats uglythe connection to Art Education is clear. Art Teachers train students to find beauty and meaning in the world, create images that express those visions, and then present them to connect with others. Connection is a step toward community. Unfortunately, many expressions arent healthy or creative and never land. They miss the mark because they lack character. Its also questionable that artists could even make those kinds of connections count anyway. Community is about mutuality, but art cant share. It can give, but it cant receive. In this short essay, I suggest that art should not be an end in itself; instead, art is for a community, and the implications for Art Education are essential, even urgent. I argue that teachers must discourage students from indulging in emotions and instead encourage expressions that facilitate personal relationships. Art Education began with Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher. He emphasized virtue over vice and pleasure over pain in preparing young people for adult citizenship. Beauty was good, and ugly was bad, and students should learn the difference early on. If our youth are to do their work in life, he wrote, they must make these graces and harmonies their perpetual aim (Plato, 1999). The pattern for a persons character was found in natures balance and proportion, specifically in musics rhythm and harmony: There can be no nobler training than . . . musical training, where rhythm and harmony find their way in the inward places of the soul . . . making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful (Plato, 1999). For Plato, character training was practicing the arts, not just music, but also the art of the painter and every other creative and constructive art . . . weaving, embroidery, architecture, and every kind of manufacture (Plato, 2009). He was convinced that art could make virtue a habit and good choices would follow.Art Educator Herbert Read, more recently, added a modern perspective to Platos philosophy. Humans are organic beings, and aesthetic laws are inherent in the biological processes of life itself . . . They are the laws which guide life along, he wrote, and it is our business as educationalists to discover these laws in nature or experience and make them the principles of our teaching (Read, 1966). Read believed change came as a result of the students expressing themselves:We know that a child absorbed in drawing or in any other creative activity is a happy child, and we know just as a matter of everyday experience that self-expression is self-improvement. For that reason, we must claim a large portion of the childs time for artistic activities simply because these activities are, as they were, a safety valve, a path to equableness (Read, 1966).Community is not a place; its a people. Its persons sharing. Artists can make communities more positive because art forms character. TRENDS // PAGE 52PAGE 53 // TRENDS'