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| Most societies have used the arts for the acculturation of new generations. In ours, to accomplish this purpose, the arts must surely be more firmly rooted in the schools than they are now. The process of rooting and planting will surely cost - but if the arts, by this process, become interwoven with other parts of learning, then the new cost will make each currently spent dollar vastly more cost-effective. If anything is to change in the schools, they will need help - from museums, community organizations, and the media, as well as from artists, scientists, and parents. Where to begin. I believe that one must begin with the conviction that art is important despite an accompanying realization that one cannot understand quite why it is important. If art is important, then ultimately, during a lifetime, it must be desirable that people learn to communicate through the various arts - to "read" and to "write" the arts. But this communicative ability is not necessarily the beginning. If art is important, then it must also be true that the aesthetic choices involved in decision making are important. One must be aware of and respect taste. One must, at the outset, recognize and cultivate, especially in the behavior of children, those activities that form the aesthetic building blocks of the arts. The why of these building blocks is obscure, but many of them have been identified; for example, the crescendos and diminuendos of music, the changes of scale of the zoom lens, the tension and relief of tension in music and drama, the order-disorder transitions of the dance, the appropriate coordination of form with visual and tactile texture in the graphic and plastic arts, the successive reductions and elaborations of theme and pattern in music and in painting, the symmetry and breaking of symmetry in all the arts, and the alliteration and repetition in the refrains of poems and songs. I have been fascinated in recent years by watching very young children through new | eyes, and by perceiving that many of their choices and many of their delights are based on these seemingly sophisticated elements of aesthetics. It is said that travelers in foreign lands see what they expect to see. During World War II, I lived for some time near Knoxville, Tennessee, and was appalled and horrified to see the state of abandon and disrepair of the farm homesteads in that region. Then I read David Lilienthal's book Democracy on the March, in which he pointed out that homes to which electricity had arrived were changing, the houses were being painted, the yards cleaned up, the fences repaired. Thereafter, when wandering around that countryside, I could see a spirit of hope and a building of self-respect. | |||
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| I think that we need to look at children with new eyes. It is not a matter of building new and more curricula in the arts or of encouraging arts activities and expression. One can recognize that aesthetics enters into the choices and behavior of children at the earliest age, and that it is we who denigrate and discourage their reliance on aesthetic grounds for behavior and decision. Why do we self-righteously ignore (and even berate) children's intense discrimination among textures and tastes of food or object to their enjoyment of the feel of food on their hands and faces? Why does a group of adults invariably laugh at children when, as two-year-olds, they begin to move in response to music? Why do we refuse to recognize that knocking | ||||