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| The Arts: A Decent Respect for Taste | ||||||
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| Frank Oppenheimer, Exploratorium Originally published in “The National Elementary Principal,” Vol 57, No. 1, October 1977 | ||||||
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| This article includes some remarks that Dr. Oppenheimer made on the occasion of the release, last May, of the volume Coming to Our Senses: The Significance of the Arts for American Education, published by McGraw-Hill Book Company in 1977. |  | |||||
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| Originally, this position paper was to summarize the discussions that took place during interaction Lab #2, at the 1977 National Convention of the National Association of Elementary School Principals in Las Vegas, Nevada. I had been asked to prepare a set of questions that would get these discussions started. Unfortunately, I picked a number of questions that would more properly have formed the basis for a lengthy series of discussions or in-depth research studies. The questions that follow, however, do reflect my own curiosity about the position of the paper. They were not answered at the NAESP Convention, and I do not know the answers. But I believe that in any consideration of the arts and curriculum reform, they are questions we need to consider. • Why do some societies and some individuals make art less central to their lives than do others? • How, if at all, does art expand or define our concept of beauty? • What kinds of aesthetic experiences are infants and children affected by? Can one deliberately shape the environment of young children to quicken their responses to such experiences? • Even very young children draw and dance and act and play with the flow of words. Do young children need to develop one or all of these activities as forms of expression? What | ||||||
| is the connection between these activities and the development of aesthetic sensibility in children? • What is the nature of the initiation process for children into an understanding of the language of the arts? Is the process the same for all of the arts? Does it resemble the process of learning to understand and use speech? • Why are young children sometimes bored in art museums? Is it because they have been inadequately initiated or because adult art is communicating things that are beyond their experience or comprehension? • Do children (or adults) who have been exposed to the various arts behave or learn differently than those who have had no contact with them? | ||||||