Why Future Generalist Teachers Dont´ Like Art Education?

Art is an irreplaceable creative and expressive activity for young pupils, a means of cognition and abreaction, and its significance is also enshrined in the curriculum for primary education. Distant teaching in primary schools brought about by covid-19 has confirmed that art education is not a subject to which teachers, school founders or parents would attach high importance. The long-standing problem of underestimating art education in the junior primary school is made visible by the fact that teachers have not used or have not been encouraged to use the educational, creative, mentally hygienic or therapeutic potential of the subject. However, it also points to the attitude of primary school teachers to art education. Qualitative research conducted among final year teacher-training students completed in January 2020, a month before school closure, has showed that future teachers have a contradictory attitude towards art education, often shaped by their own negative learning experiences, as well as by the lack of confidence in their own knowledge and skills. Equipped as such, teachers are virtually unable to offer good-quality teaching in a standard teaching mode, let alone in the mode of distance learning. On the other hand, these findings suggest the direction in which to take the training of future teachers in primary education so that their own experience and low self-efficacy do not adversely affect their future teaching practice.