educational heory

Volume XIV January, 1961 Number 1

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DEMOCRACY, EDUCATION AND ART*

B Y FRANCIS T. VILLEMAIN

W E A R E LIVING A T A T I M E W H E N IDEOLOGICAL SCHISMS A N D T H E I R R E I N F O R C I N G

C I R C U M S T A N C E S ARE PLAYING A MAJOR PART I N T H E G R O W I N G THREAT T O T H E CON-
T I N U E D E X I S T E N C E O F THE H U M A N RACE I N A N Y FORM WITH WHICH W E A R E
FAMILIAR. If philosophic reason can contribute to the amelioration of our plight,
it would appear that certain reformations of our great social quarrels may be in
order. 4 basis for hoping that our intellectual climate might submit to modi-
fication rests on the contention that an investigation into a neglected area of
study might provide findings capable of producing more fruitful disputes than
those under which we presently labor.
Virtually untouched in the history of thought has been the exploration of
the interrelations between democracy, art and mass education-indeed, the latter
two are usually thought to cast no light whatsoever on the great civilizational
problems of men. This assumption has yielded an intellectual tragedy, for it
has directed philosophic minds away from sustained analyses of esthetic experience
and its connection with educative processes and democratically-ordered social life.
The result has been truncated conceptions of both education and democracy as
well as the most superficial grasp of the nature and potential functions of the
several arts in schools and civilization. But this claim will not appear plausible
until it can be shown that the three conceptions can be fruitfully interrelated.
I.
The widespread assumption that analyses of artistic enterprises are not
particularly relevant to an understanding of the nature of education and democracy
is undoubtedly due to a singularly inadequate conception of art. The erroneous
notion may well be interpreted as reflecting an historic account of the socially
insulated status of certain art forms in various social orders. An examination
of the history of the arts reveals times when certain of the arts were employed as
symbols of political and economic power, of a way of life, and a set of values that
held the welfare of the entire group in contempt, of a social order in which the

FRANCIS T . V l L L E M A I N is Projessor of Education at the University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio.

*This is a copy of a paper presented at the Thirteenth International Congress of Philosophy,

Mexico City, Mexico, September 12, 1963.
1
2 EDUCATIONAL
THEORY

conspicuous consumption of elegances by an elite required the perpetuation of a

barren existence for the vast sweep of humanity.
Familiarity with this facet of the history of the arts seems to have led some
to conclude that art is something necessarily disconnected, independent, and un-
related in any significant way to the social order in which it occurs or to other
than artistic spheres of experience. The fallacy committed by this line of reason-
ing is not difficult to identify. Confusing an historical account of the arts, both
inaccurate and incomplete a t that, with a critically-forged conception of the
potential functions of the arts can certainly lead to the conclusion that art is a
passive mode of indulgence, an esoteric affair, a dandification of the trivial, un-
creative life, and a way of exhibiting the social status of an aristocratic, propertied,
or governing elite. Unfortunately, a popular view of art perpetuates this con-
fusion and thus perpetuates a theory of art that presupposes a social structure
built upon a division between a laboring, productive, active, practicing group
and a leisure, acquisitive, passive, non-productive group.
Building new societies, whether on the North American continent in the
eighteenth century or in Africa in the twentieth, depends upon creative, active,
productive processes. Since art is taken to be part and parcel of a life of passive
self-gratification, it is accordingly relegated, a t best, to a minor role. This aim
of active social participation and personal productivity has been joined with the
general welfare tradition of Locke, Mill, and Rousseau. Both ideals are grounds
for rejecting a social structure devised t o make paramount the self-indulgence of
a social minority a t whatever expense to the balance of the community. Thus
the social base required for implementing the distorted view of art is antithetical
to enlightenment thought from the seventeenth century to the present.

The idea that the function of art is to gratify inconsequential, if not anti-
social, impulses is often joined to the notion that art is generated and sustained
only in a social setting that maintains the hierarchial division between those who
consume and those who labor in their behalf. I t is no wonder, therefore, that
art would be suspect to enlightenment thinkers. If art is social froth obtained
in an aristocratically oriented society, then it surely holds no promise of con-
tributing either to the meaning or to the realization of democracy. And, if it
has nothing to do with what really matters in human affairs, then it certainly has
no significant place in education.
Such an outlook makes of art something we superimpose on experience-like
a dust jacket on a book. It is something nice to have but essentially superficial;
it is disconnected from the sweep of experience. It is something for filling up idle
moments. And to be engaged in the arts is, of course, a dilettantism, excusable
only if proper provision has been made for things of genuine consequence. Art
neither flows from, acts to modify, nor significantly contributes to the central
concerns of democratic men. It is delightful trivia.
This view of art was the product of social arrangements that democratic
thought rejects. Oddly enough in one form or another, the identification of art
with undemocratic social patterns persists. Its adherents are found in every
profession and segment of society. The institution and profession of education
is no exception. Here we find professors of education, school administrators, and
 EDUCATION
DEMOCKACY, AND ART 3

even art educators still holding to the view that art is a civilizational and educa-
tional luxury, something provided only as important social and educational mat-
ters have been mastered. Herbert Spencer states the position as well as any:
Accomplishments, the fine arts, belles-lettres, and all those things which, as we say,
constitute the efflorescence of civilization, should be wholly subordinate to that knowl-
edge and discipline in which civilization rests. As they occupy the leisure part of lqe,
so should they occupy the Zesiure part of education.’
It is only fair to note that a measure of democratization appears with the
qualification that art should be generously available to all. In keeping with the
general welfare idea that a human good should not be arbitrarily curtailed but
broadly distributed, art, the luxury item of a privileged few, properly becomes
a commodity for all to consume. However, this is but an addendum to the view
of art under consideration. The view itself remains unmodified and, i t is to be
argued, in error.
To recognize that this view of art is intimately associated with certain social
arrangements is not to claim that no other factors were involved in its production.
For some purposes it would be important to delineate a host of generating and
sustaining influences which gave rise t o the outlook. For the present and limited
purpose, however, it is sufficient to single out one factor. The focus upon pre-
democratic social arrangements will help to direct attention to the inadequacy
of the conception presently a t hand. Suggested is the idea that those who reject
the undemocratic social base which has supported certain art forms upon occasion
understandably overgeneralize their rejection. Limited data can lead one to an
unsound characterization and evaluation of art. Art forms have functioned as
extravagances and trivia in unacceptable social contexts and are, therefore, suspect
if accorded importance in life and education. But it certainly does not follow
that the only view of art consistent with the democratic tradition must depreciate
the artistic enterprise to the point that art is seen to have no vital connection
with the ongoing life of a civilization.
Quite another view is suggested by John Dewey when he says: “As long as
art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.’’2
One of America’s prominent philosophers and a major contributor to the literature
of democracy, Dewey claims that the ideal human community is dependent upon
its esthetic component. Rather than envisioning art as an “eiAorescence,” it is a
condition of the realization of democracy, conceived as an ideal that lends a distinc-
tive character to all aspects of life. If such a view is tenable, then significant
revisions in democratic educational and social theory are in order.
Dewey’s is a radical departure from historic accounts of art and its role in
human affairs. But i t is remarkably continuous with a development in thought
referred to by intellectual historians as the “modern mind.” The difficulties
in delineating crisply the “modern mind” are readily granted. But it probably
can be safely said that the modern mind in part is marked by a distinctive intel-
lectual structure. Such a structure assigns a central function to those explanatory
conceptions making reference to procedures, operations, processes.
‘Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physicat (New York: D. Appleton and
Company, 1896), pp. 74-75.
ZJohn Dewey, Art as Experience (Minton, Balch and Company, 1934), p. 344.
4 EDUCATIONAL THEORY

Modern thought continues to use familiar words as part of its basic

terminology. But here an important point must be noted. The meanings of
many of these familiar words have been transformed. With the change of meaning
comes a change in what is talked about. This shift in both language and subject
matters for inquiry has occurred not only in the physical sciences but in philosophy
and the social sciences as well. It has resulted in accounts of experience, of
intelligence and mind that are stated in what have come to be known as “behavioral
terms.” Dewey was prone to point out that the most appropriate words for
identifying and inquiring into human life, among them thought, mind, and intel-
ligence, are adverbs or verbs.

Within the framework of process, activity, and beliefs, art is differently

defined. Art no longer denotes things. It denotes a kind of behaving which
may involve painting, music, architecture and the like. Art is to be understood
as an affair of experience, or better still, it is an experiencing. On the other hand,
a caution needs to be noted. A behavioristic or process-oriented conception of
experience parts company with the historic account of experience as an organism’s
absorption of environmental stimuli. The new formulation holds experience to
be a purposive transaction between a homo sapien and its context. I t is an
affair of acting and being acted upon in unison, of functioning in a manner that
will yield, as a consequence of the activity, some sought-after outcome. Art as
experience, like any other achieved experience, is a deliberately controlled process.
It is purposive. And if experiencing includes the active role of purpose, then art
experience, upon examination, will exhibit means being so ordered that ends
sought after are obtained.

Still, if art is a behavior in which means are ordered towards objectives,

then how is art to be distinguished from experience which is not a r t ? In order
to gain a sound answer it will be useful to make focal in this analysis the matters
of primary interest to professional artists. For example: the musician has in
the foreground of his attention such matters as dissonance and atonality-the
architect; texture and horizontality-the painter; cubism and linearity-the
poet; grief and onomatopeia. These elements are often called the feelings or
emotions with which artists work. But such terms are usually defined with the
language of physiology, and thereby taken to refer to chemical, electronic, or
muscular states of affairs. Since such concepts do not direct attention to the
central concerns of artists, they should be avoided and more appropriate
terminology introduced. Accordingly, the working materials, the means or
“stuif” with which artists work, may collectively be called the qualities of experi-
ence. We speak of the loneliness of the moment, the Gothicness of a building,
the formalness of clothing. Tn such cases we name distinguishable qualities-the
various “nesses” of experience--discernible in a given experience. Artistic experi-
ence is primarily concerned with these sorts of matters. Art is the ordering,
manipulating, refashioning of these qualities toward still further qualities.

14nother term that has submitted to modification is intelligence. I t was and

still is restricted to the manipulation of the discursive symbols of knowledge.
However, it is appropriate to indicate that if intelligence is taken to be a behavior
in which all manner of means are methodologically ordered to ends-in-view, then
the above analysis of artistic behavior turns out to be an affair of intelligence.
 DEMOCRACY,
EDUCATION
A N D ART 5

When art is conceived as the constructing and organizing of the qualities of experi-
ence, it may be thought of as man’s qualitative intelligence.
This is philosophic heresy for those scholars in psychology, philosophy, and
education who tend to equate intelligence with cognitive processes. To compound
the heresy we may add the idea that art is properly defined as intelligence achieved
in the qualitative domain of experience, and the idea that cognitive operations
themselves depend upon this qualitative intelligence. Art is something which
filters throughout all occasions wherein man is purposive. We cannot have an
experience devoid of a “suchness,” a unique quality that sets it off from other
experiences. Indeed, intelligence achieved in cognitive processes is utterly
dependent upon the maintenance and ordering of qualities. The distinguishing
of one item from another under a microscope, the mustering and maintenance of
those qualities that permit concentration, the imaginative re-juxtaposition of
qualities that are the potential subject matters for fresh scientific inquiry and a
condition of the development of new hypotheses-all are facets of qualitative
intelligence lending support to cognitive processes.
T o say that art or qualitative intelligence pervades all experience is not to
suggest that everyone is an amateur musician, novelist, painter, and dancer during
every conscious moment. This is patently absurd. What we can empirically
defend is the claim that qualitative orderings, the ever-present esthetic component
of experience, are in a spectrum of relationships with cognitive activity. Qualita-
tive mediations are instrumental to focally cognitive operations at one end of
the spectrum, while on the other they become focal with cognitive elements assum-
ing the instrumental role. When qualities are of equal if not primary interest,
when they become the ends to be obtained, we have the experience of music,
painting, poetry, architecture, and the like.
Experience wherein qualities-the stuff of art-are focal is not reserved
for the concert hall or museum. It niay be gained in many contexts. When
living is designed with an eye to the qualities that ought to permeate the living,
and these qualities are prized as intrinsic goods, when we have the esthetic in the
foreground of our attention, the experience is as much an affair of art as that
obtainable in the presence of a painting.
Rather than construe art as an intruder in life, we do well to look upon qualita-
tive thought as that which makes the homo sapien become human. The act,
in a sense both primitive and sophisticated. of distinguishing a something from
a something else, a chair from a table, a me from a you, an X from a Y, requires
the perception, or more accurately the construction, of a qualitative di~crimination.~
Without qualitative thinking rational processes would not develop. Qualitative
manipulations are thus indigenous to human life. They may a t moments become
refined and elaborated into what we call “fine” art. (“Fine” art is, however,
an unfortunate term. Through the meanings attending the term we tend to
perpetuate the notion that other art experiences are less than fine-or that “fine”
art is somehow disconnected, preciously so, from the balance of life.) At other
moments qualitative thought acts as a back drop for cognitive thought.

3F0r recent studies in sensory deprivation which appear to lend support to this claim see Philip
Solomon el a/., Sensory Deprivarion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961).
6 EDUCATIONAL
THEORY

This conception of art is an alternative to views which use art to name some-
thing that is honored, taken as the epitome of degeneration, or about which there
is complete indifference. Art as qualitative intelligence simply locates a dis-
tinguishable phase of experience without offering a valuation that it is all worth-
while, all evil, or something in between. Art is thus stripped of any honorific
meanings. And it is this which sets the stage for valuational enterprises. Qualita-
tive processes are subject to assessment.
Frequently overlooked is the fact that some qualitative ventures curtail
and misdirect behaviors. At times they may lead to confinement in a psychiatric
hospital. Other focally esthetic undertakings foster and expand the entire domain
of intelligence. Some qualitative ventures, both personal and social, may well
be encouraged and sustained. Some art should be avoided like the plague, and
some art should be sought out and made the locus of the summum bonum. All
encompassing generalizations, whether t o the effect that art is a luxury, a frill,
or the sublime achievement of the race, fail to make these important qualifications
and hence are unsound. Upon occasion a given qualitative ordering may be
an “efflorescence.” But upon another occasion a differing esthetic process may
be the source of standards for an entire civilization. I n this capacity the achieve-
ments of our qualitative intelligence may act as a source of ethics. In so far as
artistic activity sets standards for experience not otherwise available, one can
grasp the significance of Dewey’s point that art may be “more moral than
inorali ties.”*

I1
The precarious and peripheral place now occupied by the “fine” arts and
those who teach them in our schools is partially due to the faulty conception of
art to which reference has been made. Yet, even if this notion is rejected, a
tremendous block to the extension of art still looms before us. The minor place
of the “fine” arts in the schools reflects the place they have in society. Also
reflected is a widely affirmed historic pattern of values. This historic value
pattern is diametrically opposed to a value system which holds some forms of
art experience to be of central if not supreme worth. Widely embraced are the
values which minimize or exclude artistic activity from schooling. Nurtured
in the young is a view of the good life that dismisses art from any vital role in
their own lives.
Perhaps the best way to lay bare these highly suspect values is to employ
an illustration gained from a mind tha t represents and is a product of American
democratic traditions. Professor George S. Counts on occasion will ask a class
to identify the type of man they would seek as a speaker for a graduation exercise
of a school. Invariably the president of the chamber of commerce, the director
of the local industry, the president of the bank, or a political figure will be specified.
Here are the leaders of the community, the outstanding men, or, if you will, those
who tend to have approximated the ideal. But what is being honored by these
choices? I t is the ability to manage property, humans, and monies profitably.
It is the amassment of either political or economic power, and the acquisition of
wealth. Surely these are not the defining characteristics of the good life.
416id.,p. 348.
 DEMOCRACY,
EDUCATION
A N D ART 7

Such values have had an awesome influence upon the curricula, the objectives
of education at every level, and upon programs of teacher education as well.
Their implementation has produced educational systems that forward the value
scheme of crass utilitarianism. When so oriented, education prepares students
with the competence required to obtain these valued ends in their adult years.
Although other and conflicting values are also operative, it seems undeniable
that in large measure the schools of the western world are preoccupied with an
educational experience that is directed toward the good life defined in utilitarian
terms. Since fine arts experience is of little use in gaining such ends, it has been
granted the most limited role in the curricula.

But consider the cost. As long as ideals are stated in terms of economic and
physical well-being or managerial and political power, then the esthetic dimensions
of experience will necessarily be neglected and left impoverished. To the extent
that crass utilitarian values remain operative in the schools of sovereign peoples,
to that extent these schools embrace the same sort of values that direct and provide
the philosophic bases for education in the Soviet Union. For, as we frame in
the minds of our young the horizons of the good life as political and economic
power and physical well-being, we move in an orientation that has much in common
with that of the Soviet school system. Both forms of utilitarianism are in-
compatible with the vision of the good life which holds the ultimate goods for
man to be located in the qualitie3 of an ever-growing shared experience. And
yet, this is a hallmark of a redefined democratic outlook. An essentially educa-
tional-esthetic conception of the good life holds the promise of providing learning
situations calculated to build the foundations of a democratic civilization. Any-
thing less may serve to jeopardize that which helps to distinguish a democratic
from a non-democratic way of life.

Plainly a democratic education must provide children with competences

which permit them to take part in the economic and political arenas of the society,
However, there is a crucial difference between a thoroughgoing democratic concep-
tion of the role of these areas of experience in life and that of sheer utilitarianism.
I n the democratic value framework, political and economic institutions and
practices are means to the good life rather than goods in themselves. The schools
of free men fall short of democratic affirmations when they, like totalitarian schools,
make political, economic, material, and physical states of affairs more than a
prelude t o the qualities of shared experience.

This weakness in education needs shoring up if we are to strengthen the arts

in the schools. A major problem is thus set for education. It is to help children
to see economic, political, and material matters not as goods in themselves but as
instruments of the good life. In this capacity they are appraisable as means to
adequate art experience. They are conditions to be sought, modified and justified
in the light of their contribution t o the attainment of the goods of human com-
munity. Until they are so conceived, the place of art experience in schools and
in society, when sanctioned at all, will be subordinated to the office of a means
in the service of non-art ends. When this is their major role, art experience is
truncated, its distinctive contribution to life is vitiated, its range of potentialities
is subverted.
8 EDUCATIONAL
THEORY

A prominent movement in education may appear to some as a resource in

the quest for a secure place for art. We are hearing voices of well-meaning men
who in increasing numbers are vigorously disparaging the technological-scientific
prowess of modern men. This is coupled with depreciations of the schooling
which produces professional men and cultivates the method of science and its
use upon the problems of contemporary life-both prerequisites to our maintaining
and extending industrial and technological achievements. In these circles the
term “specialist” is hardly a term of endearment. It is used as an epithet.

One segment of this group is troubled with the lack of concern with the esthetic
dimension of experience and sees science and professionalization, both in society
and education, as the enemies of the artistic. This group includes people of
worthy social purpose. Nevertheless, they are misguided in their attempts to
strengthen the role of reflection and the esthetic experience. To attack the
scientific movement and the specialization required in order to direct technological
advances is t o fight the wrong enemy. The problem is misconceived. There is
no need of curtailing specialization or scientific thinlfing in order to forward the
arts. If one sees art and science as interdependent and continuous spheres of
experience rather than as enemies, then the problem has shifted. I t becomes
one of infusing all types of education and our society with adequate art experience,
while a t the same time making use of the assistance that only science and tech-
nology can give. The problem i s not to curtail the obvious resource of science
and technology but to enlarge and redirect their problems so that they may more
effectively provide the conditions necessary for widespread art experience.

Apologies for our industrial might, our technological competences, and our
scientific mentality are out of order for those committed to the welfare of all,
and not merely to a self-appointed elite. In medicine, food production, shelter,
and hosts of other areas, science and technology have demonstrated their ability
to make tremendous contributions. Those who make educational proposals out
of an historical vacuum and hence look with jaundiced eye upon science and
technology fail to see the significance of events of the recent past. The western
democracies could not have survived the last world conflict without the help of
science, technology, and industrial power. Such resources made it possible to
defend and extend some of the finest ideals of western civilization, including the
right to disparage the contribution. We have no need to make the past the
authoritative source of direction and content for education. Nor need we deny
the obvious contributions to the general welfare of our technological-scientific
advances and rule these out of the schools. Neither group offers an outlook that
will properly build art into modern civilization. Both fail to see how only science,
technology, and an industrial civilization can provide not only the necessary
conditions for widespread art experience but also esthetic objects themselves.

Another group is asking us to hark back to previous eras for educational

patterns. This segment of the educational revivalist movement would have us
return to the three R’s as the fundamental elements of schooling. It is crystal
clear that such an education cannot provide a distinctively democratic education
for any civilization. Since the 3 R’s are also important to totalitarian schools,
such as those of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, to ground our education
on these elements is in n o way to guarantee an education which will strengthen
 EDIJCATION
DEMOCRACY, A N D ART 9

democratic values and foster the evolution of democratic civilizations. In our

time an education based only upon the three R’s is a disservice to the young.
Only a three R’s education does not fit the young for the moral responsibilities
of democracy; it does not provide the critical competencies or understandings
required for life in a community of free men; it does not build the loyalties basic
to a free civilization; nor does it provide for that prize of creative living, an art
experience that generates communication and continuous expansion.

There may be several things a t work t o drive pedagogues into such a proposal
for the schools. But one may well suspect that educators embracing such an
outlook may have lost the fortitude required to confront the issues, crises, and
disturbances of the contemporary scene. Teachers can avoid t h e poignant prob-
lems of the current international situation. Tn retreating to the sanctuary of
the three R’s, they turn their backs upon the difficulties found in the arena of
controversy, out of which is built the decisions that direct a democratic community.
Three R’s education is a simple education. I t provides a dangerously ,overly
simplified grasp of the problems and prospects of free men. Such education
reflects an amateurish, simple-minded grasp of the problems, responsibilities,
and potentialities of an education in and for democracy in the latter part of the
twentieth century. The three R’s movement is a direct challenge to those educa-
tors who would conceive art as central to life, who are committed to democratic
values, and who hold socially productive qualitative processes not only a condition
of the realization of a democratic society but also a supreme objective of this
distinctive human achievement.

A societal orientation to education reveals another source of opposition to

democratically-oriented educators. We are suffering under a sustained and
extensive assault upon the critical-creative processes of free minds. It has been
influential in the schools, in other vital spots in our civilization and throughout
the world. In some instances the attack upon free minds is being carried out
by those who camouflage themselves with the verbal affirmations of free men
but whose actions are calculated to breed conformity and uncritical acceptance
of ideas and practices. Intellectual inertia, a t heart the suffocation of constructive
criticism, is the result of the fear they sow and the coercion they effect through
a variety of means. To advance themselves they use the difficult movements
and problems of free men as occasions to advance their purposes rather than solve
the problems. While such men proclaim themselves as the enemies of the world-
wide totalitarian movement, communism, more accurately named Bolshevism,
they employ the methods of all totalitarians. With these practices they strive
to gain the twin bases of all totalitarian societies: the power to designate orthodoxies
and the power to command uncritical conformity.

What then is the significance of this move toward intellectual anesthesia

for those concerned with art experience which is conducive to the continuous
refinement and extensive shoring? History provides ample testimony to the fact
that leaders of economic, religious, and political groups have found it desirable
to channel thought carefully in both the domains of the “fine” arts and knowledge.
Perhaps the earliest recorded decisions on the part of both political and religious
leaders concerning the proper place and character of the arts occured during the
eighth and n i n t h centuries A.D. I n what is known as the iconoclast controversy,
10 EDUCATIONAL THEORY

claims a n d edicts were issues in which mosaics, sculpture, a n d other objects were
either held to be improper parts of church rituals o r exactly the contrary.5 I n
this dispute, esthetic adequacy a n d the proper functions of esthetic objects was
being determined by popes a n d emperors-not artists. These political a n d
ecclesiastical authorities evoked standards sanctioned by their religious beliefs,
and, incidentally, came o u t with competing conclusions.

It should be noted that while t h e emperor, Leo 111, argued against images,
a n d he is reported t o have appealed to Christian doctrine in support of his opposi-
tion to images in the church, historians have offered another explanation.

. . . Perhaps, however, the experience which he gained later on may have brought
him to the reflection, that the conversion of the Jews, which he so greatly desired,
would be made much easier by the removal of the images. Many suppose that, in
this way, he endeavored to make his Saracen neighbours more favourable, and to
pave their way into the Church?
T h e practice of turning t o political, economic, a n d religious doctrines a n d
ideals for criteria with which to regulate the work of painters, poets, a n d musicians
has been continued into the present. A good illustration of this sort of curtail-
m e n t of artistic activity is found in the text of t h e draft program of the Soviet
Communist p a r t y presented to its Twenty-second Congress held in October of
1961.
The party considers that the paramount task in the ideological field in the present
period is to educate all working people in a spirit of ideological integrity and devo-
tion to communism, and cultivate in them a Communist attitude to labor and the
social economy, to eliminate completely the survivals of bourgeois views and morals,
to insure the all-round, harmonous development of the individual, to create a truly
rich spiritual culture.
. . . The party calls for the education of the population as whole in the spirit of sci-
entific communism and strives to insure that all working people master the ideas of
Marxism-Leninism, that they fully understand the course and perspectives of world
development, take a correct view of international and domestic events and consciously
build their life on Communist lines. Communist ideas and Communist deeds should
blend organically in the behavior of every person and in the activities of all collectives
and organizations.
Soviet literature and art, imbued with optimism and dynamic Communist ideas are
great factors in ideological education and cultivate in Soviet people the qualities of
builders of a new world. They must be a source of happiness and inspiration to mil-
lions of people, must express their will, their sentiments and ideas, must enrich them
ideologically and educate them morally.
The high-road of literature and art lies through the strengthening of links with the
life of the people, through faithful and highly artistic depiction of the richness and

%ee: Henry Bettenson (ed.), Documents of the Christian Church (London: Oxford University
Press, 1943), pp. 129-130; H. J. Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees Df the General Councils (St. Louis:
B. Heder Book Company, 1937), pp. 141-156; Philip Hughes, The Church in Crisis: A Hisfory of the
General Councils (Garden City: Hanover House, 1961), pp. 145-163; and several papers in volume
Number Seven and Number Eight of the Dttnbarton Oaks Papers (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1953).
Tharles Joseph Hefele, A History of the Councils of the Church (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark,
1896), Vol. V, p. 270. Also see pp. 260-341.
 DEMOCRACY,
EDUCATION
AND ART 11

versatility of Socialist reality, inspired and vivid portrayal of all that is new and
genuinely Communist, and exposure of all that hinders the progress of society.’
When artists are required to conform to doctrines from political, religious,
or economic spheres, their range of experimental activity is seriously curtailed.
The birth of esthetic orthodoxy is evidenced by the suffocation of new departures
and new criteria of adequacy.
Still another relation between adequately conducted art experience and this
creeping paralysis of the mind is of import to those responsible for the nurture
of the young. Educators do well to recognize that in the long run one of the
most powerful resistance movements they can build to all forms of totalitarianism
is the mentality which is fundamentally nurtured in creative-critical processes-
the mentality built in adequately conducted art experience, A society habituated
in this process will not tolerate efforts to impose intellectual conformity, for the
creative-critical mentality is one that is perpetually appraising and re-making,
evaluating and reconstructing. Since this is a revolutionary activity a t heart,
socially responsible creativity is a major protagonist to all sorts of conformity
movements.

111
Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky, Schonberg and others have in recent years
developed modes of musical composition which have permitted an epoch-making
expansion of musical possibilities. Cezanne helped to evolve painting qualities
which opened the door to revolutionary developments in easel painting. Sullivan,
Gropius, le Corbusier, van der Rohe, and Wright introduced architectural qualities
by means of which other people were enabled to produce a range of pace-setting
architectural sty1es.
There is an empircial fact dramatically exhibited by these and other move-
ments. The employment of certain qualities induces the reconstruction, the
expansion, and refinement of man’s esthetic experience. It is precisely this
sharing, rebuilding, and extension of men’s qualitative intelligences that con-
stitutes educative experience in art. This may appear to be a misuse of the
word ‘cedu~ation.” However, in a generic sense of “education,” in a sense that
includes but passes well beyond schooling, esthetic processes are an affair of educa-
tion. Such is also the case in perhaps more important but less spectacular instances
than those mentioned above. The qualities evoked in an industrial plant or a
labor union office or even in the intimacy of a home setting, may perform as
genuinely educative functions as those of the “fine arts.”
Two major claims about esthetic processes may now be made to converge upon
each other. As suggested above, esthetic practice may generate esthetic develop-
ments; it may be educative. Also suggested was the idea that this qualitative
thinking is a condition of the successful initiation and maintenance of cognitive
processes. Art experience, as here defined, may be as thoroughly educative as
anything we can designate in human experience. Indeed, the two claims about
esthetic processes enlarge the scope to be covered by the term education.
?‘‘Textof Soviet Party’s Draft Program,” The New York Times, August 1, 1961, pp. 19-20.
12 EDUCATIONAL
THEORY

Although the conception of art as qualitative intelligence expands the meaning

and importance of the idea of education-indeed leads to a redefinition of educa-
tion-it does not specify which educative experiences are to be systematically
pursued. Both art and education are labels for something to be assessed. They
are not symbols that designate experiences having inherent worth, whatever their
character or consequences. They are not shorthand substitutes for statements
identifying something deemed a human good. The proposed conception of art
and the enriched conception of education do not solve the problem of selecting
and rejecting among alternative educative experiences, of giving direction to
educative practice. However, these conceptions do contribute to the problem
of developing an educational ethic. They permit a more precise designation of
the province for which educational valuations are appropriate. And it will be
shown that they also help to reconstruct that moral outlook whose continued
existence is now a t stake-the democratic ethic.

To suggest that the meaning of democracy is malleable approaches the

boundaries of blasphemy, in the eyes of some. They conclude that revisionists
are undemocratic. The historical record casts doubt upon this conclusion. One
of the early meanings of democracy referred to representative government resting
upon the foundation of a sovereign people. This essentially political conception
has not been abandoned but refined and augmented. A major shift in meaning
occurred when the idea of consent of the governed was fused with the notion that
human goods should be abundantly distributed among the governed. Here we
find the democratic idea taking a new dimension of meaning-it is a name for a
way of life in which human goods pervade the community. Thus we speak of
the democratic way of life and subsume under it a set of political meanings. I t
is plain, therefore, that the democratic idea has undergone mutations during its
celebrated history.

Several things need to be carefully noted about this latter-day conception

of democracy. When democracy is conceived as a way of life, it is an ethical
frame of reference knowing no limitations in respect to its application in human
life. This sweeping pertinence has helped create modern confusions about
democracy. The right to universal well-being, often expressed in the phase
“dignity and worth of the individual,” in turn requires a specification of the
nature of the goods to be realized through corporate activity. The advent of
what we generally call modern industrial society with its continuing crisis relation-
ship between nation states and the attending array of new problems and possi-
bilities makes the drafting of a bill of particulars exceedingly difficult. As it
stands, democracy does not spell out for man’s modern milieu what to seek and
avoid a t every point. This uncertainty about what is good and right for all men
in a world of unfamiliar events, things, difficulties, and potentialities seems to
cause some disenchantment with democracy.

Perhaps a further unfolding of the meaning pf democracy will help to resolve

the moral malaise of contemporary men. To be avoided is the popular idea
that democracy is a catalog of specific goods to be obtained. Democracy may
best be construed as a structure of ideas which releases and gives form to the
process of moral reasoning and judgment. This means that the delineation of
social goals should be a continuing affair. Tt is the function of the democratic
 DEMOCRACY,
EDUCATION
AND ART 13

ethical affirmation to provide a format which will sustain the process of restating
and enlarging goals and reconstructing the institutional and physical circum-
stances through which goals are brought into fruition, Take, for example, the
ideal of equality of opportunity and treating persons as ends and not as mere means
which are part of this format: nothing is said here about the character life ought
to exhibit for any one man or for all men. Such statements help to structure
deliberations that issue into substantive judgments about concrete situations.

This framework as well as the specifics are subject to refinement. Notable

contributions are now being made by such students of democracy as Sidney Hook,
Charles Frankel, and Edmond Cahn. In Cahn’s dissection of the anatomy of
democratic citizenship, he finds “prevention, reparation, and protest” as the
“tools and techniques by which responsibility expresses itself and builds outlets
for its own discharge.”s This conception is an excellent example of a proposed
refinement of the democratic ethical framework.
Another shift in the meaning of democracy helps to improve the effort to
designate human goods. The sound historic idea which holds each person deserv-
ing of a life worth living, of realizing a measure of well being, may be expanded
in the light of the preceding analysis of art. And if the conception of art as an
affair of intelligence is added to the historic affirmation of personal worth and
well being, then the locus of human goods becomes one with the qualities of life
available to men. The adequacy of these qualities is as one with their educational
consequences. The qualities which extend and refine the qualities of life, those
which foster shared qualitative enhancements, become the human good in a
democratic society. This is to propose that the greatest good to be obtained in
civilization is socially educative art experience. When human ideals are viewed
as esthetic-educational affairs, the democratic ethical framework turns out to be
a conceptual structure devised t o release men’s qualitative and theoretical intel-
ligence in the service of expanding art experience.
Now it may be said that the atomic impasse, the deeply troubled under-
developed areas of the world, set problems of such magnitude that we must delay
the deliberate cultivation of the artistic experience of men throughout the world.
If this is true, then we should set aside the meaning of democracy as here proposed.
However, the democratic ethic as stated above is not nostalgic sentimentalism.
If employed in thought, it clarifies our view of the problems we have in the world.
It is a tool for making a fresh analysis of the crisis situation in which we find
ourselves in the latter part of the twentieth century. The reformations and
interrelations offered for democracy, education, and art modify the usual intel-
lectual framework employed for making sweeping social diagnoses and prescrip-
tions. With the proposed changes, the characterization of the international and
national problems and procpects of men are significantly altered, and perhaps
more amenable to fruitful resolution and of greater worth.
Granted, with no reluctance, is the fact that the survival of all political
democracies is inexorably linked to the extension of political democracy in those
societies where it is absent. And most assuredly the fostering of political
sEdrnond Cahn, The Predicament of Dcmocrutic Man (New York: Macrnillan Company, 1961),
p. 49.
14 EDUCATIONAL
THEORY
democracy will involve revolutions. In the United States the growth of political
democracy was in significant measure due to the fact that it served to implement
the economic and religious interests of powerful groups. For a host of now familiar
reasons, Americans and others embracing political democracy cannot expect to
have their economic and religious patterns, or even their form of political democ-
racy, followed in regions of the world where there are vastly different histories
and traditions. This is particularly true in some culturally deprived areas of
the world. It is self-defeating for us to make such attempts. However, we can
help make the democratic ethic viable in the non or even un-democratic societies.
T o those who will listen we can demonstrate and cite historic evidence to prove
that it is the only instrumentality that serves to mold all manner of institutions,
procedures, and events to the realization of an ever-increasing availability of
worthy qualities of experience for men. Such an outlook should prove to be
contagious. I n addition, we can, through economic aid, the Peace Corps, trade
arrangements, cultural exchanges, and the like, help to sustain those groups and
social arrangements forwarding the democratic ethic and similarly hinder those
jeopardizing its development. In so doing, it is of utmost importance that we
be responsive to the qualities of life that are indigenous to each nation. Some
may well prove to be resources to other societies, and deserve to be imported.
Some we will do well to sustain and others curtail. And the utmost care must
be directed t o the selection of the qualities one nation attempts to introduce into
the life of another. America’s rock-and-roll is hardly a substitute for almost any
music of primitive peoples. The tourist souvenirs at vacation resorts in the
United States are hardly a substitute for the native arts of India, the Scandinavian
peninsula, or most African tribes.
Overlooked and underestimated is the importance of the educational influence
in the qualitative experience of other peoples that is exerted through the qualities
we bring to each other in person, through our artifacts, and those we create in
our international disputes. The appropriateness and adequacy of these qualities
may act to nurture or to surpress the development of democracy and its human
goals.
I n overly brief terms, we have here the long run frontier, international rela-
tions problem of democratic civilizations. And it is not, as we are accustomed
to think, primarily an economic, political, or military problem, however much
they are involved. It is an esthetic-educational frontier.
The growing edge within all modern civilizations, no less than in our inter-
national relations, is esthetic. From an historic perspective, it is fair to conclude
that by and large the scientifically and technologically advanced democracies
have succeeded in mastering their physical environment. They have successfully
forged their major political instruments. Their economy is no longer subject to
accidental changes. Their major industries are designed to produce for increas-
ingly large markets. They have become what Professor Galbraith has so appro-
priately called “affluent” societies.
Hopefully, the focal problems of these civilizations no longer will need to be
those dealing with their internal economic and physical matters, governmental
structures, and the mastery of scientific instruments. Accomplishments in these
areas have provided the conditions which will permit these societies to open up
another, a new frontier.
(Continued on page 30)
30 EDUCATIONAL
THEORY

be no genuine grounds for objections.25 Personally, I think that I have spoken

in the spirit of what he himself has expressed as his hope: that out of his work
“
... will come a more rational debate about teacher education than I have
listened to in the past, where all I hear is slogans based on half-truths and mis-
understandings.”26 T hope that I have been precise in stating what i t is to
which I object, and just why I object. But I also hope that the reasons for
these comments will not be overlooked: first, Conant’s work could have-per-
haps has had-a serious impact upon the things for which we stand; and, sec-
ond, it is evident that we must work still more conscientiously to know and
improve what is going on in the name of philosophy of education in American
colleges and universities. Part of doing the latter, I trust, consists in critically
dealing with accounts of what is thought to be happening in the philosophy of
education.

DEMOCRACY, EDUCATION
A N D ART
(Continuedfrom page Z4)
These societies continue to have great tasks to perform in such areas as health
and government. They also continue t o have major social and technological
problems attending the development of extensive production. New economic
and political relations with other nations continue to arise. But these matters
do not constitute the new fundamental challenge. In the latter part of the
twentieth century, mankind is on the threshold of a cultural renaissance. Now
present are the social and physical foundations upon which we can build an artistic-
educational expression of the highest order-an expression which could dip deeply
into the lives of all and which could produce unprecedented resources for extend-
ing the democratic ethic to mankind.

=Cf. Conant, up. cif., pp. 14, 38-9, 40, SO, 110, 122-3.
%From the author’s notes on a radio program devoted to Conant’s work: “Our Teachers-Edu-
cated or Miseducated?”, Public Affairs Department of CBS Broadcasting System News; Oct. 29,
1963; 9:15-1O:OO p.m. (CST).