the case for art education . by H S Broudy . it irks the art teacher to have art regarded as a luxury item on the school &apos;s bill of fare . for one thing no one likes to think of his life &apos;s work as easily dispensable , and experience has shown that when school money is scarce art is among the first activities to be dispensed with . nevertheless , fine and highly cherished objects are regarded as luxuries , and one may question whether the attempt to convince the public that art and music are as useful as arithmetic and science would be wise strategy even if the claim could be justified . the claim has dubious validity . that artistic activity produces important results is true . individual enjoyment is one such result and social control or discipline is another . but the sort of art that does this for most people most of the time is not the kind that has to be studied in school . the popular arts via the mass media furnish massive doses of enjoyment to the masses of people and likewise shape their feelings with respect to what in our culture is to be cherished , admired , loved and hated . we learn how to feel about love , death , success , war and peace in the movies , popular fiction , the top 20 tunes in the jukebox , the advertising layouts in our magazines and newspapers . these arts present in perceptual form images or models that objectify and exhibit the current fashion in what is desirable and repulsive . the popular arts of a people , whether they set out to do so or not , celebrate the values of that people . when these values are put into song and story they evoke feelings that become stylised and serve to educate the young and the old alike . advertisers use art media to make the public yearn for their products ; governments can , if they put their minds to it shape the feelings of their people with respect to leaders and their policies . but to reiterate , this use of art demands no formal training on the part of the young . living in the group they will be controlled by the arts forms of that group . the teaching of art in the schools makes sense only if there is an art to which ordinary daily experience does not give the pupil access ; if access to it will give him something not to be found in ordinary transactions with popular art , and if this requires formal training . is there an art to which ordinary routines of life do not give the pupil adequate access ? in one sense the answer is no , because anyone , if he tries hard enough , can visit museums and libraries ; listen to concerts and recordings . we are justly proud of the accessibility of all types of art objects and the techniques of the mass media deserve much of the credit for it . in another sense , however , certain realms of art are effectively closed off from many people . when considerable facility or acquaintance with the methods of making or viewing an art object are required for appreciation , ignorance is as effective a bar as a wall . poor readers can not do much with Proust &apos;s novels and a lack of familiarity with Greek mythology makes for a frustrating experience with Milton &apos;s paradise lost . that is one reason for the irritation of the untutored viewer vis a vis abstract painting . he looks for what is not there and he does not know what to do with what is there . this irritation is sometimes relieved by suggesting that the painting be viewed as a piece of wall paper or floor covering . hard as this is on the soul of the artist , it does , however , halt the viewer &apos;s frantic search for familiar themes and objects . serious art , by and large , does make demands that popular art does not : sensitive discrimination , awareness of form , some familiarity with technique , and , above all , an active and concentrated attention . in so far as this is the case , serious art is not easily accessible to the untutored . because facility with serious art requires skill and knowledge not acquired incidentally , it makes sense for the school to offer a programme of art education . but because such training entails effort that the child may be reluctant to exert , to require it of everyone calls for a promise to the child and to society . to the child must be promised enjoyment and satisfaction above and beyond those afforded by the popular arts ; to society must be promised a strengthening of the people &apos;s commitment to its ideals and aspirations , and what may be even more important , a constant examination and evaluation of them . there are two lines of argument that we can follow to justify these promises . one is that in the experience of the race , epoch after epoch has produced men who testify to the power and value of serious art . why one can not predict that some of our children and perhaps all of them will experience the same sort of reaction after similar training is hard to understand , yet so convinced are educators that aesthetic experience is no more than a capricious and individual matter of taste that they find this sort of evidence unconvincing . the other line of argument consists in putting forward a theory that tries to show how art in general and serious art in particular functions in man &apos;s attempt to achieve the good life . from the days of Plato to our own times many have tried to interpret what art does . for Plato himself , art by embodying harmony and order in delightfully sensuous forms induced harmony and order into the individual soul . so potent did he believe art to be that he insisted on having the stories and poems taught to the young censored . he was afraid lest certain types of music make boys effeminate . nor did he believe that stories depicting gods and heroes in immoral escapades would do much for character education . Susanne K Langer speaks of art as shaping our inner life . art introduces order into the chaotic realm of our emotions by holding up before us images of shaped feelings . Freud and Sir Herbert Read , among others , see art as stemming from man &apos;s struggle with his submerged animal impulses to love and destruction . art on this view somehow plumbs the nether region of the unconscious and performs for us the rite of ennobling our unconscious transactions with our primordial lusts . the artist , so to speak , is our substitute for neurosis . Gyorgy Kepes notes that we respond to the images of the artist because their forms and harmonies touch us at various levels of our being : sensational , rational , and emotional . as the industrial revolution swept into high gear William Morris warned that the rhythmic joy of work had been destroyed . repeatedly we have been told that everyday life in our times no longer provides us with the models of wholeness and harmony that were once vouchsafed to the peasant in his natural setting . art is more and more relied upon to restore the wholeness of human experience . summing it up , the theoretical justification for education in serious art lies in the claim that it trains the feeling side of life just as other studies train the intellectual side and still others perfect bodily skills , and that it does so in a way that goes beyond the educative effects of popular art . two problems seem to emerge if we take this line of persuasion with school boards and parents . first , whether even with respect to serious art the school need do more than provide an environment in which the child &apos;s natural expressive impulses are allowed to manifest themselves in paint , clay , etc , with a maximum of freedom and a minimum of technical requirements . if this is the case , then it need not require much more than time in the programme , a wide variety of materials , and an encouraging teacher . the upsurge of Sunday painting indicates that perhaps not even this much is a prerequisite for adult artistic activity . casting doubt on this approach is the well-nigh universal testimony of artists and connoisseurs in all fields that their achievements do not come naturally . on the contrary , they complain with almost tedious uniformity about the hard work their artistic endeavours entail . serious art on the producing or the appreciating side is not for the lazy , nor presumably for the untrained . if , however , there is nothing systematic to teach , no special way of teaching it , and no effort required in learning it , the fuss about the art programme is much ado about nothing . the second point is that a programme of art education which proposes to train pupils for the appreciation of serious art is not innocuous ; it can be dangerous . serious art presents us with models of feeling that are neither so familiar nor so safe as those presented by the popular arts . popular art gives aesthetic form to the values that most of the people are enjoying or would like to enjoy in a manner approved by the social order . just as there are standard ways of feeling about love , war , marriage , death , home , etc . in the popular song , picture , photograph , movie , and story the average man recognises his everyday problems and the standard solutions . serious art , on the other hand , tries to disclose modes of feelings that in our ordinary life we rarely experience , and would probably prefer not to experience at all . most of us do not want to engage in heroic episodes of love , war , or politics , but in every epoch a few works of art depict mankind in such heroic and convincing roles that we see in them our species at its best . these works become certified as great works of art , but not always by their contemporary publics . contemporary art , when serious , criticises the values of its culture . sometimes this criticism is in the form of a protest ; at others , it simply experiments freely with emotions and their expression in unusual forms . serious art , whether in its classical or contemporaneous form , whether freely experimental or definitely idealistic , confronts the child with models of experience and feeling that are not typical of the life going on around him . the images it offers the child are not mirrors of life but projections of what life might feel like . all of these images are distortions . some are interesting and important ; some border on the insane , and a few disclose visions of feeling that haul mankind up another rung on the ladder of civilisation . all of which means that when the school takes serious art seriously it can not expose the immature pupil to anything and everything , and this in turn presupposes a high order of aesthetic sophistication and competence on the part of all teachers who have a part in the programme . so conceived and defended a case can be made out for art education as an integral part of general education . that school boards and other appropriating agencies will be convinced is not so certain . they represent the tension between the conventional and the experimental that is never absent from a changing society . the artistic experience is intermittent and celebrative ; it gives meaning and glow to life but it neither creates life nor sustains it . the school must pay attention to all aspects of living - economic , intellectual , moral , and social - and if it must make a choice between preserving and sustaining life , on one hand , and making it glow , on the other , there is no question as to what it will have to choose . but we no longer face such a hard choice . if we did , we would not be discussing art education at all . from myth to fairy-tale and folk lore . by J M Grant . as far as it is possible for me to do so I have acknowledged my indebtedness to particular authors for particular information . where I may inadvertently have omitted to do so I hope that the authors concerned will accept my general acknowledgment of the interest I have sustained in their writings and for the help I have gained from them in the fascinating study of mythology , fairy tale , and folk-lore . 