The Arts in Schools - Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

Among these various symbolic modes of communication,by which we formulate and express our understandingsof the world, each is distinguishable from the rest. Eachhas its characteristic 'logic', its own 'grammar' and 'syntax'.In true language fashion, each generates its own 'literature'.Each is basic to human rationality in all its diversity.By "rationality' we do not mean merely deductive logicof discursive reasoning. We mean the many differentconventionalised ways in which, as human beings, wehave learned to communicate — through noises, marks,and signs — our ideas and feelings to other people. Someof these do not require verbal communication at all:there are whole 'languages' of meaning which have nodirect need of words. They are, nonetheless, exceedinglyrich and complex forms of talking to other people.The language' of dance is a sophisticated example ofthis.14 The Human rationality includes all these various forms of thinkneedfor ing, communication and action. If individuals fail to enterbalance into any of these 'communities of discourse', the developmentof their rationality will be, to that extent, lop-sided.In stressing this very point, W D Hudson (1973) goes furtherand remarks that someone who had no conception of beautyor of moral obligation would be, to that extent, sub-human.This is a hard saying, but we agree with the spirit of it. Indoing so we follow a tradition at least as old as Aristotle,who saw it as a mark of the educated person to be able torecognise the different ways in which our perceptions of theworld are organised and communicated and to understandthe various conventions and standards of judgement in eachof them. 1This thesis has recently been developed by a number ofeducationalists and philosophers, for all of whom the fundamentalpoint is the same: that human rationality comprisesa number of different forms or modes of understandingand communication through which we interpret and makesense of ourselves, of others and of the world itself. For SirHerbert Read (1957) there are four; for Paul Hirst (1965)seven; for the HMIs (1979) eight; for Louis Arnaud Reid(1957) an undefined number of ways in which we haveknowledge. The point is always the same — that some understandingof, and in, each of these is necessary if we are tohave that range of intelligences and feelings that enablesus 'to see life steady and to see it whole'. To be fully educated,as T S Eliot noted, is to have some sense of where everythingfits. 2 19