The Arts in Schools - Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

arts — is 'merely subjective" and therefore gravely suspect.This picture of knowledge is in need of radical reappraisal.Like others before us, we reject the view that the onlyvalid kinds of knowledge are those that are open to deductivereasoning and empirical tests. The ways of getting knowledgeare not limited to the intellectual, book-learning or scientifickind. The aesthetic, the religious and the moral realms arequite as powerful as these others at conveying knowledge.In our view, public education has been too devoted toparticular kinds of knowledge at the expense of others whichare of equal importance.Our knowledge of the world is organised in many waysbecause it comes to us in many ways; not only throughlogical analysis or experiment but through intuition andfeeling, through direct experience and action. We want toemphasise three points here. First, we are pressing for formsof education which recognise the range of such capacities inall children. We include the powers of deductive reason here,but we do not set it above all else as many have come to do.Second, one effect of the widespread interest in dissectionand analysis in schools has been to emphasise differencesbetween subjects. We want to see a wider recognition of whatthe different ways of knowing, in arts and sciences, forexample, have in common. Discovery in science is not 'astrictly logical performance" any more than work in the artsis simply the expression of feeling. The scientist relies asmuch on intuition and creative insight in parts of his work asthe artist relies on discipline and application to detail inparts of his. Indeed, in talking about artists and scientists weare not necessarily talking about different people at all butabout the exercise of different capabilities existing within thesame person. It is one of the tragedies of contemporaryeducation that the relationships between these capabilitiesshould have become so neglected.Third, and this will be clear by now, we are not justpressing for the arts for their own sake in schools. Ourconcern is broader — with the development of those basichuman qualities and capabilities — including the power ofcreative insight and activity and a concern with relationshipsand questions of value, which give rise to the arts in thefirst place.25 Two We noted above that the existence of more than one mode ofmodes of intelligence has been recognised by many educators andconsciousness philosophers. Further support for this is now coming fromstudies into the physical structure and workings of thebrain. These suggest that the two hemispheres of the brainhave notably different, though related, functions. In The24