Teachers, Leaders, and Schools: Essays by John Dewey

Art in Education (1911)

Art in Education (1911) A STUDY OF EDUCATION IN its earlier forms, not only in savage communities , but in a civilization as advanced as the Athenian, reveals the great role played by the arts. Anthropological investigations have confirmed the obvious educational influence by showing the great part played by the arts in the life of the community and in determining progress. Psychology adds to these convictions the fact of the fundamental character of the impulsive tendencies which are the physiological origin of the activities that lead to the arts. All of these facts are opposed to the common assumption that the arts represent a kind of educational luxury and superfluity. Various classifications have been made of the arts,—they have been subdivided into the spatial and the temporal, arts of rest and motion, of the eye and the ear, etc. However correct for their own purposes, these divisions are educationally defective in that they start from art products rather than from the psycho-physical acts from which these products originate. More significant from the educational point of view is the classification of Santayana according to which arts are distinguished into those that spring from automatisms, i.e. organic or “spontaneous” movements which, when rhythmically ordered and accompanied by intensified emotion, themselves constitute acts, and those in which the movements, even if similarly induced originally, terminate in effective enduring modifications in natural objects. The dance, pantomime, song, music, etc., belong in the first class; the second class Santayana terms “plastic,” including in it architecture, sculpture, painting, and design. Anthropological and historical inquiry have fairly established the following principles: first, that art is born of primary impulses of human nature when the activity, whether automatic or plastic, has social value; second, that this 95 First published in A Cyclopedia of Education, ed. Paul Monroe (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 1:223–25. 96 The School Curriculum social value is conferred by the tendency of the activity or its product to spread an emotional mood favorable to joint or concerted action. Otherwise put, the arts, in their origin, tended to contagion or communication of an emotion, that produced unity of attitude and of outlook and imagination. From this point of view, no sharp line divided the fine and useful arts from each other. Any useful object—a piece of pottery, of weaving, an implement of hunting—that provokes social reminiscences and anticipations attaches contagious emotions to itself, and acquires aesthetic quality. The marked distinction between useful and fine arts is chiefly a product of slave labor or of commercial production, making things for a market, under circumstances where the factor of shared emotional life is eliminated. Another significant trait of the arts in their simple and more natural form is the prominence of the festal element. Tribal dances are the background, out of which music, poetry, and the drama all gradually differentiated. These pantomime dances were either occasional or ceremonial, i.e. they were either community celebrations of more or less choice episodes happening to attract general attention, or else were stated and recurrent celebrations of important tribal traditions and customs, attaching to changes in the season, return of food animals, gathering crops, war expeditions, etc. Some of the educational bearings of these considerations, psychological and ethnological, come out conspicuously in the older Athenian education. Music (in the Greek sense) and gymnastic were, in general, and in many of the details of their educational use, very direct outgrowths of the role of the dramatic and communal arts of more primitive societies. It is not difficult to detect in Plato’s treatment of gymnastics in the Republic and the Laws the fact that dances, etc., originally associated with industrial and military crises in the life of a people, had become so saturated with elements of rhythm, measure, and order, and with social memories and hopes, as to present great value in the training of the young; while music was frankly a vehicle for carrying what was of typical or idealized value in the traditions of the Greek people, by enhancing their emotional value so that they would deeply, though unconsciously, modify the character of children’s tastes and likes and dislikes in the direction that reason would later consciously approve. If we attempt to summarize the meaning of the facts mentioned in this brief summary for present educational practice, the following points stand out clearly:— 1. There has been great loss in relegating the arts to the relatively trivial role which they finally assumed in...