Outstanding Artists as Educational Models – the Dilemma of the Pedagogy of Abilities

Abstract

The aim of the article is to discuss a serious problem in the pedagogy of abilities, related to presenting specific patterns and models of an outstanding artist to the pupils as types that determine the directions of personal development. In the first part, the author briefly describes the differences between the model and the personal pattern, grounded in pedagogy and sociology, and then moves on to a synthetic description of the main features of the outstanding artist’s model, derived from empirical research. Against this background, he presents his own concept of a pattern of creative attitude, which he considers worth promoting in the education of gifted children. The difficult dilemma of the lack of correspondence between outstanding works and the character of outstanding artists is illustrated with the example of two personal anti-models: the composer and murderer Gesualdo da Venosa, and the writer and denunciator Henryk Worcell. In the conclusion, the author suggests not to separate considerations about outstanding creativity from the qualities of the character of a given artist, and to treat these phenomena as an integral in the gifted education area. Lastly, the author formulates several questions for further research in this field.