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MORRIS WEITZ
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2 / EDUCATIONALTHEATRE JOURNAL
in order to use them intelligently. It seems to me that we must dispel this myth;
otherwise, since we cannot define some of these terms, we are in effect rendered
speechless.
If we reject the myth of the need to define, we can return to the central concern
of aesthetic education and ask, What it it? without necessarily thinking that any
substantive answer will consist in a definition.
Aesthetic education, as a concept, differs from aesthetic and education or, for
that matter, from theatre or drama, in one important respect: it has no history.
Instead it was introduced, not too long ago, as a term to fill a certain need, to
cover and correct a certain deficiency which its inventors felt was threatening the
whole of the early educational development of the child. And what was (and is)
this need? The lack of recognition of the importance of the arts and all of their
potential in the normal education of the child. The term was coined with the
deep conviction that this gap must be bridged, the need fulfilled; the commitment
to the importance of art and the aesthetic as an integral rather than marginal
constituent of early education which was to be heard and shared by all.
Thus, I suggest, the way to understand what aesthetic education is is not to
define it but to state its great goal: of the enhancement of the full growth of the
child in which the aesthetic-as open as it is-would achieve at least an equal
status with the intellectual. Looked at in this way, we can clarify the concept of
aesthetic education as the attempt to extend the affective, imaginative, formal,
perceptual, and cognitive possibilities of the arts, in all of their individual
autonomy as well as their collective diversity to at least three types of children,
which indeed encompasses every child: (1) the underprivileged; (2) the undereducated; and (3) the underperceptive. For aesthetic education was conceived as
a total commitment to the arts and what they have to offer in human development
as an essential birthright of the child as he begins his education. The arts, traditionally regarded as an excrescence both in school and in society, a luxury, an
elitist endeavor, must be transformed into a necessity-as important as the
recognized disciplines of the intellect-in both the school and in society.
It is this conviction about art and its enormous potential for the child as a
person and as a responsive member of a social as well as physical environment that
best explains the diverse yet related roles of CEMREL, The J. D. R. Fund, and
the Rhode Island program. Each of these is dedicated in its own exploratory way
to bring the arts and the aesthetic to one or other of the groups of children of the
three mentioned.
The goal of aesthetic education also explains the various debates-and the
notorious difficulties surrounding these debates-about matters of curricula,
teacher training, and assessment techniques and criteria of the cumulative successes of aesthetic education. The issues involved in these debates cannot be
settled easily; great patience as well as fortitude are required if we are to do
justice to the goal and, more important, to the children as the center of the whole
enterprise.
Because aesthetic education concerns the child as a developing total human
being, it has at least one far-reaching philosophical implication that should not
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3/
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in its wholesale acceptance of a jargon, modelled on both governmental memoranda and scientific systems, that is incorporated in the language of aesthetic
education. I end, then, with the first principle of aesthetic education: If you are
to educate fully, learn to write well; if you are to write well, bow before your
medium as you do before what you are writing about. For unless we are willing
to love and revere our own children, we will never be able to respect the children
of others. And in the realm of language and communication, I remind you, none
of us is childless.
Jesus Christ Superstar, with scene design by Robin Wagner, costume design by Randy Barcelo,
at the Mark Hellinger Theatre, New York City. See Theatre in Review.
(Photo, Friedman-Abeles.)
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