The drawing and music, or the graphic and auditory arts, represent the
culmination, the idealization, the highest point of refinement of all
the work carried on. I think everybody who has not a purely literary
view of the subject recognizes that genuine art grows out of the work of
the artisan. The art of the Renaissance was great because it grew out of
the manual arts of life. It did not spring up in a separate atmosphere,
however ideal, but carried on to their spiritual meaning processes
found in homely and everyday forms of life. The school should observe
this relationship. The merely artisan side is narrow, but the mere art,
taken by itself, and grafted on from without, tends to become forced,
empty, sentimental. I do not mean, of course, that all art work must be
correlated in detail to the other work of the school, but simply that a
spirit of union gives vitality to the art and depth and richness to the
other work. All art involves physical organs—the eye and hand, the ear
and voice; and yet it is something more than the mere technical skill
required by the organs of expression. It involves an idea, a thought, a
spiritual rendering of things; and yet it is other than any number of
ideas by themselves. It is a living union of thought and the instrument
of expression. This union is symbolized by saying that in the ideal
school the art work might be considered to be that of the shops, passed
through the alembic of library and museum into action again.
Take the textile room as an illustration of such a synthesis. I am
talking about a future school, the one we hope, some time, to have. The
basal fact in that room is that it is a workshop, doing actual things
in sewing, spinning, and weaving. The children come into immediate
connection with the materials, with various fabrics of silk, cotton,
linen, and wool. Information at once appears in connection with these
materials; their origin, history, their adaptation to particular uses,
and the machines of various kinds by which the raw materials are
utilized. Discipline arises in dealing with the problems involved, both
theoretical and practical. Whence does the culture arise? Partly from
seeing all these things reflected through the medium of their scientific
and historic conditions and associations, whereby the child learns to
appreciate them as technical achievements, as thoughts precipitated in
action; and partly because of the introduction of the art idea into
the room itself. In the ideal school there would be something of this
sort: first, a complete industrial museum, giving samples of materials
in various stages of manufacture, and the implements, from the simplest
to the most complex used in dealing with them; then a collection of
photographs and pictures illustrating the landscapes and the scenes
from which the materials come, their native homes, and their places
of manufacture. Such a collection would be a vivid and continual
lesson in the synthesis of art, science, and industry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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