Education

Westerners tend to define learning cognitively while Asians tend to define it morally. Westerners tend to see learning as something people do in order to understand and master the external world. Asians tend to see learning as an arduous process they undertake in order to cultivate virtues inside the self. 
                                        —David Brooks summarizing the work of Jin Li,                                                  a Chinese scholar teaching in the United States
 

The North Dakota Museum of Art mostly evolved along the Eastern mode, forced by the nature of art itself. Locked into the Museum’s mission are the words, We study the arts because they make our hearts wise, the highest of human goals. Participating in Museum education programs won’t help you get a job. Rather, it will offer you beauty and pleasure. It will open windows to worlds outside yourself to be pondered, discussed, and finally rejected or internalized into the core beliefs that define you. For also ensconced in our mission is the premise that the arts teach us to make difficult decisions based upon abstract and ambiguous information.

Joy, pleasure, fun, and the promise of new friends all bid you to come, to join a class, to participate in a discussion, to bring a friend to see an exhibition, to live pleasurably. A follower of that ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus wrote, It is impossible to live pleasurably without living prudently and honorably and justly, and also without living courageously and temperately and magnanimously, and without making friends, and without being philanthropic.

We, like you, have our work cut our for us.