VIIIEDUCATION IN TASTE
There is a naïvely systematic way of teaching artistic appreciation to the students of many of our city schools. To each class is allotted a famous painter. The class is then taken en masse to the art museum, and, under the guidance of one of the official show-women, confronted with the masterpieces of its proprietary genius. The children hear the dates of the painter’s life, details of his career, the significance of his pictures, the particular beauties of his styles, and any other loose fragments of knowledge that may appeal to their guide. After they have been exposed long enough to the pictures to give confidence that appreciation has taken place in them, they are allowed to exchange painters with another class, and in rigid platoon proceed to appreciate their new idol in the same way. Presumably their appreciation finally flows over the entire museum, and they take their places among the cultivated of the land.
The other day in a New Jersey school I was shown some wall-paper designs that had just been made in a class of the youngest children. A simple figure had been given them with which to cover a sheet of paper in any pattern they chose. The thirty papers presented the most astonishing variety. They ranged from mere blotches to orderly and regular patterns. Some children had merely reproduced the figure in parallel lines across the paper. Others had alternated their lines and made a more pleasing scheme. Here was a living demonstration of the variety of artistic skill, but I was more interested in the appreciation. The teacher told me that she had pinned all the designs on the wall, and without any suggestion to the children had asked them to choose which they liked best. There had been a large consensus of liking for the alternate lines, the pattern which was obviously the most regular and the most pleasing.
In that museum system of class-painters who were to be duly “appreciated” I had a perfect example of the old unregenerate cult of the best. But my New Jersey school convinced me that these vestal virgins of the museums were guarding a decaying fane. The young teacher in the classroom had the beginnings of whatwould be a genuine education in taste. If that same critical and discriminating spirit could be carried forward with these littlest children all through their schooling, most of them would get a robust sense of values that would be spontaneous, that would never have to be cajoled, and that could not be threatened. Might not this process of refining taste be woven into our elementary education? Already we have its embryo in these kindergartens and lower grades. It is a question of emphasis, of making the teachers see that the constant challenge to taste is one of the most important functions of the school. Types of school such as the Play-School make expression and selection the basis of their life. The most valuable feature of the Montessori school is the training of the senses, the quickening of response to sounds and colors and forms. Suppose a child were brought up from his earliest years in everyday contact with forms and colors, without its ever being hinted to him that some were “good” and others “bad.” Suppose the child were urged to choose and to express his likes and dislikes, not giving his reasons but merely telling as he could what he saw or heard. Suppose this attempt were made through the course of his school life to clarifyhis appeals and repugnances, not by rationalizing them but by synthesizing them. Would not something like taste evolve out of it all?
Emphasis on what the pupil likes instead of what he ought to like would change the tone of school or college. The average mediocre student under our present regime gets an almost uncanny desire to do things “right.” Since success in school depends on doing what the teacher thinks is right, education becomes on the child’s part a technique of accurate guessing. Anyone who has spent much time in high schools knows how eagerly children will pounce on any official judgment concerning a book or person or picture or idea. The study of English classics in most schools becomes a festering bed of hypocrisy. And it is often the intrinsically amenable who are the most conscientious and who therefore most hopelessly overlay their own reactions with other people’s judgments. The modern school recitation has degenerated into a skilful guessing on the part of the child of what the teacher “wants” him to say. And this is a symbol of the general attitude, in school and out, towards cultural things.
A laudable attempt has been made in the colleges to teach the student to think, but I wondersometimes whether it has proceeded very far beyond encouraging him to find reasons for ideas and attitudes which he is persuaded he ought to have. For most college students it is already too late. Expression and discrimination are the last things which the primary and secondary schools have been emphasizing. The boy and girl come to college with no background of taste or selection, and the old docility, the old unconscious hypocrisy, must dog them all through their course. I would make a larger part of the process of thinking in school and college the discovery of what one likes and wants, the control and direction of desire. Almost the whole object of education should be to know what one truly and wholeheartedly likes and wants.
Yet the modern school is just the place where this critical, discriminating attitude has a chance of being cultivated. The secret of all the current tendencies towards the “school of to-morrow” is the increasing participation of the children in the work of their own school. The Wirt plan, where the children help the mechanics decorate the rooms, and dramatize their school-life in auditorium exercises, perhaps carries this coöperation farthest, but in numberlessschools that have shopwork, gardens, dramatizations, etc., the same evolution is apparent. Now every touch of dramatic, artistic and literary expression made by the children in the school affords material for education in taste. Expression and criticism play into each other’s hands. Any expression which passes without a reaction from some part of this little school public is expression wasted. If the child does not learn in the school to observe and reflect upon and react to the expressive life that flows around him in the school, he will never react intelligently to anything outside the school. His childish criticism will of course be as elementary as the expression is elementary. But the emphasis of teachers should be there. Taste must flow naturally and spontaneously out of the experiences of everyday life.
Such an effort in the education of taste has a much better chance of success than has our traditional guidance. To impose canons on a younger generation, to make students appreciate the best in the arts, we need hosts of teachers who are finely tuned to these appreciations themselves, teachers whose tastes naturally coincide with what has been consecrated by time, and who can communicate their admirations.Experience has proved that we shall never have those hosts of teachers. We should never have enough Matthew Arnolds to go round. What art education suffers from in this country is teachers who have only the mechanics of appreciation without the inner glow. And it is futile to expect that we shall ever have enough with the classic inner glow. In this new direction, however, the teacher need not be mentor, but guide and provocative. Never being called upon to impart judgments or appreciations to the student, what he requires most is not judgments and appreciations of his own but curiosity as to the student’s reactions. He need only be saying constantly to the student, what do you like and how does it compare with something else that you like? He need provide only the paraphernalia of art, the materials and processes, for the student to do his own work. If the teacher is of sound original taste, he can give the student criticism and aid him in his analysis and comparison. If he is not, he is at least prevented from making the student’s taste hypocritical.
If this attitude became general in our æsthetic education, it would not be long before results became noticeable. We should get avariety of tastes—some of them traditional, some of them strange and new, but most of them at least spontaneous, indigenous. At present we have no way of knowing whether any particular manifestation of public taste is conventional, fashion-induced, imitative, or sincerely felt. Much spontaneous taste might turn out to be traditional. The majority of children trained in discrimination might prove to be incipient Brahmins. On the other hand we might get strange and vigorous expressions like the contemporary architecture and sculpture of Germany. I am assuming that taste and creation will fertilize each other. For this fertilization we must have a liberation of taste from the sterile control of the “best.” This does not mean that every person would become endowed with original taste, but that we should have a chance to find original taste out. We should have done all within human power to create public taste, as our present ideal does everything to prevent it. As a result we should have a chance of some kind of integrated culture. In each art we might find several very strongly marked directions of style and taste which should appeal to different people. It would then be the task of criticism not to choosebetween them but to discover their sincerity and significance. Style is a matter of right relations. Things have style when their parts make each other and the whole significant. Indigenous style is the only art that really means anything. Out of an education in taste will grow creative art as a flower from rich soil.