Books Received

Books 171 The Arts and Personal Growth: Curriculum Issues in Art Education. Vol. I. Malcolm Ross, ed. Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1980. 124 pp., iIlus. $12.75. ISBN 0-08-024714-8. Reviewed by Leonard J. Waks* This volume brings together papers from a 1979 conference on 'personal growth'. Most of them, however, are related to this topic only indirectly; their authors's concerns are with the associated distinctions between 'established' or 'high' arts, on the one hand, and individual self-expression, popular art and the artistic expression of urban ethnic communities, on the other. In The Responsive School, Michael Golby raises some familiar questions about the appropriateness of the curricular emphasis on the 'high' arts. Horace Lashley, in Arts Education, The Curriculum, and the Multi-Cultural Society, goes a step farther and challenges this emphasis, arguing that the ethnic minority communities have 'valid cultures' that primary and secondary, schools ought to protect by promoting a 'mosaic' of artistic pluralism. The distinction between the characteristic values of community art and the established arts of industrial societies is reiterated by John Lane in The Road from Wigan Pier. Lane contrasts the established arts with the arts of societies unified by a spiritual ideal, in which the artistic motive 'permeates' the life of ordinary people. By way of contrast he says, '[we have] divorced ourselves from our own deep, warm instinctive life .... However, with new technologies and shorter working hours we are bound to see a massive resurgence of self-actualizing craft work.' In Art Process and Product, David Spurling raises necessary challenges to Lane's historial and psychological assumptions. In the Arts and the Whole Curriculum, John Eggleston argues for a place for arts in the curriculum based on their significance for the environment, for promoting free expression and for aiding in the preparation for work. Roy Shaw in Education and the Arts defends traditional art appreciation against enthusiasts of 'creative self-expression'. The study of works of 'high' art, he states, is relevant to the needs of the masses. Meaningful experiences of these works are unavailable precisely because the *5014 Knox St., Philadelphia, PA 19144, U.S.A. masses are deprived of relevant education and, instead, are provided with less valuable substitutes, such as folk art and 'creative' free play. He does not specify the values that are to be found by studying the 'high' arts, however. These values are indicated in The Concept of Art by Victor Heyfron, who argues that the art education of a child consists in the child's acquisition of the concept of art as 'articulated and elaborated in public art objects'. Drawing on insights from Wittgenstein and Wollheim, Heyfron argues persuasively that a child's learning to make art leads it to grasp 'established artistic practices and procedures' and consciously subsume its own efforts under the concepts embodied in these. Though he does nut pursue the point, the concept of art that he develops undercuts the opposition between 'high' art appreciation and 'creative' self-expression that runs through the papers by Golby, Lashley and Shaw. Heyfron's essay explicitly leaves the question of emotion in art unexplored and concentrates on the role of public contexts and concepts. Malcolm Ross takes up the question of emotion in The Arts and Personal Growth. He proposes that artistic expression embodies states of feelings. These states, initially unconscious, can only be brought to consciousness through 'projection into expressive forms'. Hence, by artistic activity we enlarge our consciousness of our own feelings and raise our 'feeling intelligence', thus making more of ourselves available for directed and committed activity in the world. It may be pointed out that this account complements Heyfron's; an adequate account of artistic expression needs reference to both the private, unconscious emotional contents and the public norms and concepts that influence and shape these contents and their ultimate form as expressive products. I find some of the dichotomies running through many of these essays to be spurious. Take, for example, the concern for 'high' art vs 'creative' self-expression in the curriculum. This dichotomy obscures more significant concerns: What is personal growth and what are the intrinsic connections between it and making and/or experiencing works...