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| of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. On Saturday afternoons, I would "do" the galleries on 57th Street with my dates. My parents became special friends with J. B. Neuman, and through him they became friends and partial sponsors of Max Weber. During college in Baltimore, this kind of exposure to the arts continued. I spent much time in the Baltimore Museum of Art, where I got to know the wonderful Adele Breeskin and also Etta Cohn and her collection. Just after college, I worked for about eight months in the physics department at the University of Florence and spent every Thursday afternoon in the Uffizi. I have recounted this abbreviated summary of my own education in art and music to emphasize the enormity of the task you have set for yourselves at the conference to which you invited me. Even with the exceptional opportunities that were afforded me, there is much more that I could have learned about art and music - and, in fact, am still learning. Since I have never taught art or music, I will try to find any lessons that can be extracted from my own experience. I believe that there are some. In the first place, art must be made to seem important. An appreciation of its importance, however, cannot be cultivated entirely in the classroom. Furthermore, I think that the private emotional importance of graphic art to the individual may not arise in early childhood. It is, therefore, not clear to me whether it can or should be taught at this stage of development. This teaching process is a matter that I know very little about, but I would like to find out what has been learned. It is evident that art education involves a social process as well as a private one. The social process should include all the resources of a community - not just the schools. It requires contact with people who take art seriously, people who make it, live with it, sell it, display it, and who write and talk and think about it. Art, like music, can be enhanced when people join together to create it or to enjoy it (but not to the exclusion of private study, which has | occurred in the case of school bands). Any venture into art can be incredibly frustrating and confusing. Art education, therefore, probably needs to have more support and encouragement than any other form of education. The support must come from parents, teachers, friends, and, whenever possible, from strangers. Encouragement must also come from the tools of art. Learning to play on a junky musical instrument is a surefire way to kill interest and incentive. I believe the same situation must be true for graphic arts. For example, an inadequate selection of murky colors can be deadly, and good, durable paper is essential. Moreover, the specialness of art can be appreciated and heightened through an enjoyment of the tools and accoutrements of the artist. It also occurs to me that the way in which art is displayed, both for learners and professionals, ignores and even obscures an essential feature of art; for instance, if one picks the best single example of work done by a number of different children or artists to display on a schoolroom wall or in a gallery, the implication that art is a progressive and cumulative endeavor in discovery and creation is lost. This cumulative property of art exists in both the work of an individual artist and in the historical movement of art. Science, as well as art, is cumulative - but in a very different way. In science, the accumulation is obvious because it results in an ever expanding, coherent body of knowledge and experience that is accepted, more or less in its entirety, by the scientific community. Moreover, it can be summarized in textbooks and in encyclopedic articles. There is no such unified, condensable body of art; although it does share with science the property of having a moving forefront of perception, discovery, and synthesis. Both artists and scientists can relook at parts of nature that they or others have looked at before. They do not record what they find, however, unless something is there that has not yet been expressed to their satisfaction. The art of the present is built on the past, but it | ||