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ENLIGHTENMENf, ART, AND EDUCATION: BECOMING FULLY HUMAN

Isabelle Basmajian

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

@Copyright by Isabelle Basmajian 1998 National Library Bibliothkque nationale I*m of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographic Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaON K1AON4 Ottawa ON K 1A ON4 Canada Canada

The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordk une licence ncm exclusive licence allowing the exclusive pennettant a la National Library of Canada to Bibliotheque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, Qstribute or sell reproduire, preter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thbse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format electronique .

The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriete du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protege cette these. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celleci ne doivent &e imprimes reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. To the Memory of my father, Kamer Ohannes Basrnajian and my brother, Shaunt Basmajian. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract

Introduction

CHAPTER I Full Humanness: A Personal View and The View Implied in Ontario's Public Schools Introduction On Being Fully Human A More Concise Concept of Full Humanness Making Connections Looking For Full Humanness in Our Schools The Impact of Art

CHAPTER 11 Obstacles to Full Humanness Introduction Fragmentation and the Modern Mindset: A Synoptic View Instrumental Reason's Role Dehumanization of Humanity

CHAPTER 111 Changing Arts, Changing Society: Changing Society, Changing Arts Introduction In the Beginning Relating to the Beginning Cherchez I'art The intellectualization of the Arts The Rematerialriation of Matter The Reduction of Art

iii CHAPTER IV The Nature of Art and Elementary Education Introduction The How and Why of Thi.-?k!~nand Feeling: Equal Partners in the Eniightened Being A Sketch on the Nature of Art: Getting Closer fc an Explanation A More Precise Explanation of the Why of Art The Quest for Magic: Art in the Elementary Curriculum On Disciplined- Based Art Education

CHAPTER V Learning Through Art: Experiences in the Early French Immersion Program Introduction 239 Some Background Information on the French Immersion Program 242 A Brief Discourse on Method in EFI: Putting it in Perspective 246 On the Curriculum in Primary Grades 249 Implementing the Curriculum in EFI 255 Assumptions of EFI classes 256 Learning Through the Arts in a Grade One French Immersion Program 268

Summary 281

Notes 290

References 305 Acknowledgements

My deepest gratitude goes to my thesis supervisor, Professor John

Eisenberg, for his consistently heartening support. My meetings and

discussions with him were always lively, stimulating and inspirational! I

left them with a rejuvenated enthusiasm towards my work and a clearer

understanding of my task. My sincere appreciations as well to my thesis

committee members, Professors Jack Miller and Johan Aitken, for their

encouraging critical remarks and suggestions. Also thank-you to the other

members of my Examination Committee, Professors John Davis, Bernie

Warren, and David Booth for their valued and useful comments. I would like

to take this opportunity to express my thankfulness to the Federation of

Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario for honouring me with the

Florence I. Henderson Doctoral Scholarship as I embarked on the first year of my Ph. D. studies. I should also like to mention a posthumou.s note of gratitude to the late Professor Richard Courtney who gave me the welcome boost of confidence I needed as I began my work. And last, but not least, thank-you to my sister Silva and the rest of my warm and generous family for their unwavering affection and help. Abstract

Enlightenment, Art, and Education: Becoming Fully Human

Isabelle Basmajian, Ph. D., 1998 Curriculum Department Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University c! Toronto

In this thesis I argue that modern Western society has changed the practice of art and in so doing has thwarted its role as an important contributing element to the development of fully human beings; that is, persons with equally balanced faculties of thinking and feeling and all that these imply. Prior to the Renaissance, the practice of art was an integral feature in the life of the majority of the people in the West; an experience that allowed its participants to access their feelings and by bringing them into consciousness provided the opportunity for self- actualization. Subsequent to the Renaissance, art became subserviant to the causes of instrumental reason, a particular mindset likened to Weber's notion of Zweckrationalitat. An emphasis on developing such a limiting form of thinking reduced the role of the arts on many levels, stultifying in the process an aspect of natural human growth for those who ceased to

"engage" in art. Such is the role of art that is reflected in our schools and communities. This thesis attempts to substantiate such claims by presenting a personal understanding of what it is that makes us fully human and, within that context, examine the role art played in the past and plays today in the West. My suggestion is that the reintegration of the 2 practice of "authentic" art in the life of individuals and the community will help humanize our societies, its continuing absence dehumanize; and that the artistic experience, whatever form it takes, is a valid form of inquiry and perhaps the only way that may enable humans to illumine the self and educate the feelings. Towards the end of the dissertation, an argument is presented that suggests the role of art be rethought, reworked and reconsidered in the public school system; deliberations that are specifically located within my greatest sphere of teaching experience, the Early Total French Immersion Program. INTRODUCTION

Every child starts off with the capacity if not the opportunity to unfold and to turn every experience of living into new growth ... The instinct is toward love and laughter, compassion and kindness, to live in the light and by the light. 1

N. J. Berrill INTRODUCTION

The ultimate intent of my thesis is to try to find a feasible way by wh~ch

our education system may contribute to the development of fully human

beings; an outcome which I believe to be a tacit mandate of any human's education. However, my suggestion is that we are not particularly successful in helping develop enlightened beings, a term, amongst others,

I use synonymously with being fully human. I contend that our Western society mostly values human beings with specialized thinking faculties and that is the primary emphasis in our schools. My proposal is that to become fully human both the faculties of thinking and feeling need to be developed equally in a person. An overlooked area of the curriculum which may be used for this purpose is art.

My position is that art is an indispensable element in helping a person become fully human, but not as art is generally thought of or practised today. It is my contention that art's role has been restrained and altered by certain factors in Western society and culture, factors that have become obstacles in maximizing the conditions that allow for humans to develop fully. To be able to realize my ultimate aim, my position, propositions, and contentions will have to be substantiated and clarified.

The bulk of this thesis will be concerned with doing just that. 5 The discussion in the first chapter will begin with an attempt to define

\w!?zt it is that makes us fully human. The argument will use as its

starting point, Abraham Maslow's notions of peak-experience and self-

actualization, a term first coined by Kurt Goldstein which Maslow sometimes uses interchangeably with full-humanness. Although I do not adhere to all of Maslow's theories, some of them do contain the foundational elements upon which I will build to make my case for what it is that makes us fully human; propositions that are not claimed to be true or false but rather serve as the premise upon which will hinge the discussions that will follow.

I will show that as humans we all strive to self-actualize, thus qualifying this quest as a natural part of human growth, and as we achieve this growth, we gain the enlightenment or wisdom needed to shape our lives, which will allow us to aim for a higher plane of existence each time; to move "upward," as Maslow puts it. To expand the construct, I will bring into the discussion other voices, other thoughts, filtered through my own lenses. 1 will argue that full humanness is something that we can all achieve in one way or another during our lifetime and that the "far goal" of education should be to help each person strive to attain this form of ultimate realization of self; that is, the ultimate realization of self is the ultimate expression of being fully human. 6 However, it is quite obvious that for many full humanness is an elusive

state of being. If we do achieve it, it is oftei; a corrupted or a

contaminated version; for example, self-indulgence masking as self-

actualiza:ion or instrumental reason masquerading as enlightenment. I

will demonstrate that such stances and practices prevent us from

balancing our thinking and feeling functions, thus impeding our

development to become fully human. The point is to try to understand what

forces are in play that pose obstacles to this natural quest for self-

actualization so that they may be surmounted.

The second chapter of the thesis will explore the main obstacles which stand and have stood in the way of a person's trying to become fully

human. These forces are placed under the rubric of "instrumental reason" or Zweckrationalitat. I use this notion of Max Weber's to indicate the

rationalization, in a calculating manner, of the most efficient means to an end, without regard to the sanguinary and destructive effects on human life, and all that touches human life, that may be created in the process.

The intent here is not to point fingers in a strident manner nor to propose a "conspiracy" theory, although it may sometimes seem a if I am doing so; the aim is to try to understand why so many of us, the inheritors of those thinkers who gave us the tools for what we believed to be enlightenment, are caught up in a vortex of self-delusion, and perhaps even self- destruction, when we ought to be alight with wisdom. To help me develop 7 my arguments, I shall bring into the discussion, John Kenneth Galbraith's

idea ot the culture of contentment, Paulo Freire's concept of ontological

vocation, and Noam Chomsky's notion of manufacturing consent. The voices

of other eminent thinkers shall echo here whenever necessary as well.

However, I should like to point out that references to the ideas of some

authors should not be construed as my attempt to analyze their theories or

advocate their ideas. My purpose in invoking their thoughts or using their

research is strictly to garner support for my own arguments.

The second chapter will act as the framework upon which I will base my historical narrative of the changing role of art that will be explored in

Chapter Ill. 1 want to demonstrate that art, as appropriated and recreated by and for the modern rnindset, made it an exclusionary "activity," putting it out of reach for the majority; in effect, separating art from life. I hope to establish, through a brief examination of what we know of the early history of art in the West, the natural propensity of humans to want to create or engage in art as part of natural growth. Subsequently, I will attempt to show how the obstacles erected by instrumental reason have had a deleterious effect on our practice of art and, as a result, on our development as humans.

Once this has been demonstrated, I will go on to the fourth chapter of my 8 dissertation to explore the question: "what is the nature of art that it may

enlighten us, help us become more fully human?" Although this chapter has

been inspired by Robin Collingwood's Principles of Art, it will rarely refer

to his philosophy or his ideas of what art is. To paraphrase what he writes

in the preface of his book: I do not think of aesthetic theory as an attempt

to investigate and expound eternal verities concerning the nature of an

eternal object called Art, but as an attempt to reach, by thinking, the

solutions of certain problems arising out of the situation in which

humans find themselves here and now. Everything written ...has been

written in the belief that it may have a practical bearing, direct or

indirect, upon the conditions of education in Ontario's elementary schools

with the hope of interesting those interested in the education of children.

Hardly any space is devoted to criticizing other people's aesthetic

doctrines; not because I have not studied them, nor because I have

dismissed them as not worth considering, but because I have something of my own to say, and think the best service I can do to a reader is to say it as clearly as I cam

To say it as clearly as I can, unlike Collingwood, who states that his

"business" is to answer the question: What is Art? I feel that the business of this chapter, and indeed the whole of this dissertation, is to answer the question: Why art? The answer to this latter question is the more appropriate and immediate one in ascertaining the nature of art, for my 9 purposes as a teacher. Why do we do art? This is the question, amongst

others, that I hope to discuss in this chapter with reference to elementary

education. The main thrust of the discourse will be that our emphasis, in

the past few centuries in the West, on what art is and is not has been

misplaced. Such an emphasis should not matter much at all unless one

subscribes to what Collingwood calls the "technical theory of art," which

is exercising a skill to realize a given end, as in artisanat; or unless one

goes into one of the many businesses that revolve around the arts.

I want to propose that what makes art art is how a human being uses a particular medium, be it a tangible thing, or an elusive and ineffable non- thing, or a "mental thing," as Collingwood calls it, that expresses and/or creates and/or discovers a being in the process of becoming; a process which helps a human gain an understanding of the self and thus the world and how to be in the world--an essential role art may play in each person's life. But because the various forms of what are called the arts, at present, have limited active participants, the benefits are accrued to only a small number when it could be expanded to include more.

Art happens, can happen, in any form whatsoever, only when it is, and not only when it necessarily represents, an authentic experience of the human being engaged in the defining and/or discovering activity itself. My meaning of art then is not relegated to any specific form, it is one that 10 may include a variety of forms that are created or recreated, discovered

or rediscovered in the process of one's being and becoming; in this, art is

very much like a persona! !anguage, with its own personalized symbols

that may assume an indeterminate myriad of forms. However, unlike

speech, it is a language that cannot be reduced to quantifiable or

measurable identifiers, unless arbitrarily done so or assigned; and it is a

language emanating from an undiscernible, undenotative source whose

symbols are created anew with fresh meanings every time they surface

making it a process that is always in a state of flux. I will be arguing that

to be deprived of the practice of this language, a language of the feelings

which I locate in the "spiritual dimension," is tantamount to committing

"psychical" suicide; without its use, an aspect of one's growth atrophies.

Art is an integral element for the growth of a human being and should be

practised as such; this may be done without hindering the practice of the

many other roles of art we have developed over the centuries in our society, a concern which is outside of the discussion of this thesis.

In the final chapter of the thesis, I will place the discussion of the role of art I am propounding within the Early Total French Immersion Program.

This will endeavour to show how the intertw ning of art within a specific program may be used to satisfy the cognitive demands and goals of the program and help to implement the tacit goal of developing fully human beings; in other words, help children to think and to feel with all their 11 being. Children, particularly preschoolers, practice art naturally, joyously and unselfconsciously, while continuously being and becoming; it is an important element of their growth. As a teacher, it is frustrating to know that most children lose this side of themselves as they grow older; that on their way to adulthood this side of their being may be stunted, eventually withering and dying. I will be proposing then, that it is important to change, or at least rethink, the role of art in our schools; that art be included in the curriculum not solely for reasons that it impacts positively on a child's cognitive development, as the emphasis seems to be at present, but also because art is an indispensable element in helping the individual self-actualize, become fully human. CHAPTER I

Tout raison se reduit au sentiment. 1

Blaise Pascal CHAPTER I

FULL HUMANNESS: A PERSONAL VIEW AND THE VIEW IMPLIED IN ONTARIO'S PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Introduction

The task of this first part of my thesis is to try to present a clear

understanding of how I perceive what it is to be fully human and the

general implications of this as they pertain to public education in Ontario.

Obviously it is of intrinsic importance for each of us to have an

understanding of the notion of who we are, where we are going and what we can become. A clear grasp of these ideas is of paramount importance in an educational setting, as well. It is, after all, how we view what it is to be human that underlies how we set and undertake those actions we need to achieve our educational aims and goals. The latter is also intimately intertwined with the vision of our society, thus impelling us to decide what values, skills and attitudes, amongst other attributes, we want our students to be exposed to and develop in order to create such a society.

An educator's work involves mostly communication with various groups of humans engaged in different modes and levels of interaction designed with definite aims and goals in mind; another way of looking at this is that teachers and students are often engaged in some form of "dialogical 14 encounter." These forms of encounters may often be circumfused by policies and guidelines wherein are written the generalized aims and goals of education. Public school teachers, licenced by the Province of

Ontario, are legally bound to practise their profession following such policies and guidelines instituted by the Ministry of Education. Although at times, certain goals are explicity stated, the idea of what it is to be human is mostly implicated or tacitly understood in these documents.

Nonetheless, it is generally assumed that teachers and students strive for excellence at all times, whatever is done. Similarly, it follows that one should always aim for being fully human--that is, use all of one's given and developed capacities to be the best that one can be and to do the best that one can do which has nothing to do with trying to be, what some perceive, as a perfect human being. On the contrary, it is only through awareness of one's positive as well as negative, or desirable and undesirable qualities can an individual strive to be the best and do the best of which he or she is capable.

In the past few decades, policies and guidelines have continuously been altered to reflect new findings or re-evaluations in the field of education and changes in our society, mostly of a demographic, environmental, political or economic nature. A clear vision of the kind of society we want or what is understood by being human, let alone being fully human, is becoming harder to glean from these documents. More than ever, this has 15 confused the issue of who we are, where we are going and what we can become individually and as a society. Such confusion, as a result, has led to misunderstandings and conflicts about our goals and aims in education.

One of the major areas of increasing conflict and confusion is a war of words of sorts composed predominantly of two camps, that seem to stretch across a wide continuum, with variations in between, where each camp claims that its educational "ideology" is the one which will best educate the children in this province. On one end is the camp that propounds what is commonly referred to as a "back to basics" form of education; that is, an education that emphasizes, above all else, teaching the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic within a rigidly structured environment that seems to harken back to an era that no longer exists, the kind of education that stresses what is believed to be

Thinking, at the expense of everything else. Meanwhile, the group at the other extreme champions the notion of what may be termed a "laissez- faire," "child-centred" education; that is, where pupils choose activities that allow them to learn a variety of skills, as they experiment, explore, and interact with peers in an unstructured setting prepared nonetheless by an instructor who intervenes but minimally. In such an environment,

Feeling, is the preponderant value. These contradictory manners of learning inherently encompass different views of what it is to be human.

The former suggests the view that humans are indeed born blank slates, f 6 ana much like machines may be programmed to serve a spccific purpose or

live a certain kind ot life (one decided by society, a parent, or someone or

something e!se); the latter sees humans as bning completely autonomous

creatures who are able to learn and live by instinct and intuition alone,

which seem to be regarded as the natural founts of wisdom.

I am not going to take a position as such along the continuum which I have briefly outlined above. The reason I am not going to do so is firstly, differing opinions on any matter are inevitable and may prove to be the catalyst needed to engage adversaries in productive and informed exchange and dialogue. My presumption is that the tacit or implicit goal of education, in a pluralistic, democratic society such as ours, is to help humans evolve what Aristotle called sophia, also referred to as philosophical wisdom, and p h ron e s is, also referred to as practical wisdom. Philosophical wisdom is that which helps a person understand and gain an overall view of the world, whereas practical wisdom helps the human guide his life and actions vis-a-vis his view of the world. In other words, the role of our schools is not to indoctrinate students but help them acquire the wisdom needed to illumine their lives and in doing so eventually their communities and societies; the assumption here is that wisdom or enlightenment is acquired and not a given and that it is not age specific. Informed exchanges through various forms of discourse may help in the acquisition of wisdom. Secondly, I see the various ideological 17 positions on education as a manifestation of a deeper problem that exists

in our education system, which is, in turn, a reflection of the general

framework of Western society.

Our society has at either end of its extremes, "thinkers" and "feelers." The

problem is that we have structured our society in such a way that we

often do and accept the doing of what may be detrimental to our

humanness sometimes without consciously reflecting upon it; or

sometimes in a cloud of deception; or sometimes knowing full well the consequences but proceeding anyway. Instances of the latter are numerous and well-publicized. Obvious examples are our wastclful abuse of non- replenishable natural resources, such as fossil fuels, or the destruction by humans of native habitats of flora and fauna, such as logging and mining in various forests of the world, upsetting often a delicate ecological balance. All of these have now or eventually will have negative repercussions on how we live our life as human beings. I find the work of

Toronto clinical psychologist, Barbara Killinger serviceable in presenting my thoughts in this regard.

In her book, The Balancing Act: Rediscovering Your Feelings, Killinger makes a case for a balance between thinking and feeling as the means to healthy functioning. She writes, quoting Isabel Myers, that thinkers

"contribute to the welfare of society by intellectual criticism of its 18 habits, customs, and beliefs, by the exposure of wrongs, the solution of problems, and the support and research for the enlargement of human knowledge and understanding."2 Quoting Myers again, she writes that feeiers "contribute to the welfare of society by their loyal support of good works and those movements, generally regarded as good by the community, which they feel correctly about and so can serve effe~tively."~The consequense is serious however, if either one of those functions becomes dominant while the other is repressed. Killinger states:

Thinking without feelings of compassion and empathy to temper its wisdom allows one to justify and rationalize deceit and to condone unethical behaviour. Uncensored, wilful thinking permits one to commit dangerous, even evil acts ... The defences of intellectualizing, rationalizing, projecting blame, dissociation, and compartmentalization, ... can all be used to justify and excuse insensitive and destructive dysfunctional thinking.

She continues:

Feeling without Thinking to guide and inform it leads one to remain naive, irresponsible, even ignorant.4

Our education system, willingly or unwillingly operates somewhat in the same manner as our society; that of doing and accepting the doing of what may be detrimental to our humanness mostly through championing

"Thinking" only and indirectly keeping the rest of us as "Feelers." The principles of democracy and plurality suggest that a balanced combination between thinking and feeling is desired.

In terms of education, the root of its conflicts stems from a system 19 which, on the one hand, philosophically seems to subscribe to and promotes objectives that are holistic in essence, where a balance between thinking and feeling is de rigueur, but on the other hand, seems to be practising them in a milieu that is the antithesis of holism--oftentimes steeped in an environment and by persons that reflect the values and traditions of a fragmented society.

A holistic educational stance, as John Miller has written, may be identified as a "transformative" curriculum position. Miller writes: "The transformation position concentrates on personal and social change. In this position there is a holistic emphasis, and the student is not just viewed in the cognitive mode, but in terms of his or her aesthetic, moral, physical, and spiritual need."^ Thinking or feeling are implicated in all of these. Maslow embellishes this position when he pronounces:

...what I am suggesting here is a pervasively holistic attitude and way of thinking. The experiential must be not only stressed and brought back into psychology and philosophy as an opponent of the merely abstract and abstruse, of the a priori, of what I have called "helium- filled words." It must then also be integrated with the abstract, and the verbal, i.e., we must make a place for "experientially based concepts," and for "experientially filled words," that is, for an experience-based rationality in contrast to the a priori rationality that we have come almost to identify with rationality itself.6

What I am implying here is that we have developed a holistic philosophy of children and how they ought to be taught, .going back perhaps to Jean

Jacques Rousseau's stance that looked for the child in the child and not the adult; but in practice, we treat and teach him in an atomistic manner, 20 adhering to an "a priori rationality," much in the style with which we conduct our affairs in e~ciety.The form of rationality I am thinking of here is of the same sort that John Eisenberg argues against in The Limits of Reason where humans are treated in mechanistic and rigid terms based on a deterministic philosophy.

It is the operation of our lives rooted in such philosophies that has caused fragmentation in our society and in humans. To gain an insight as to how this happens, why this has happened and continues to happen is dealt with in the second part of my thesis. In this first chapter, my task is to try to develop what I understand by the concept of full humanness; I shall have to do this because the underlying assumption of my thesis is that it is ours and society's desire that our educational system provide the conditions for each of us to become fully human. As this thesis is written in an institution whose purpose is to expand the knowledge and advance the causes of education, learning and teaching, and being a public school teacher committed to these endeavours, I think it only fitting that the discussion of what it is to be fully human be set within this context; that is, determine how the educational collective views the notion of what it is to be fully human and how its aims and goals serve this view.

And because I believe art plays or may play a major role in the growth of a fully human being, I will briefly introduce a discussion as to how art fits 21 within this framework; the discussion wi!! be amplified in the third and fourth chapters. To facilitate the task further, I will situate my discourse specifically within the public elementary ed~cationsystem in Ontario, where I have spent the greatest amount of time teaching. But first, a view of what it means to be fully human.

On Being Fully Human

There are many ways one may characterize what it is to be fully human.

The notion of possessing philosophical and practical wisdom, appropriate to one's development, encompasses it well for my purposes. This may be equated with having a balanced life; one which would include the functions of thinking, feeling, sensing and intuiting (along with a host of other functions such as playing and imagining which may be thought of as subsumed in one of the four functions listed above). Carl Jung explains:

Thinking should facilitate cognition and judgment, feeling should tell us how and to what extent a thing is important or unimportant for us, sensation should convey concrete reality to us through seeing, hearing, tasting, etc. and intuition should enable us to divine the hidden possibilities in the background, since they too belong to the complete picture of a given situation.7

Being human obviously involves complex functionings, primarily of a thinking and of a feeling kind, which may allow one to participate fully in life and living with all its joys and pains and to develop the freedom of 22 mind to pursue and seek answers to the questions of who we are, where we come from and where we are going; the age old philosophical quest of acquiring and possessing wisdom, of being enlightened.

I would submit many of us are in the dark as to who we are and we do not consciously think about it nor think it important to do so. Nonetheless, knowing and understanding genuinely, with our own limited capacities, what and who we are is transferable to knowing and understanding the cosmos. In other words, knowing one's self, is knowing the world and knowing how to be in the world; whereas assuming an imposed identity

(wittingly or unwittingly) is assuming another's experience of the world- it is second-hand existence at best, or should I just say subsistence.

It is perhaps easier to accept a self that requires minimal effort; that is, to assume passively an identity without taking an active role in creating and discovering it--my view is that we discover and create in tandem who we are. We are all capable, or ought to be given the opportunity, to create and discover what and who we are. The intellectual, spiritual, emotional, biological and physiological quest for who we are and what we can be, is being human. And the journeys this quest takes us on, if such journeys are undertaken, help us shape and understand who we are, as individuals and 8 as human beings, and in a larger sense, help us shape and understand our world, again in our own limited ways. 23 Once we have achieved this understanding and transcended that plane of

existence that is circumscribed by either self-imposed, or culture-

imposed, or other-imposed arbitrariness, we have achieved what I view to

be enlightenment. Being human, then, is questing for enlightenment; and

being fully human is achieving enlightenment. A different way of

understanding this search for enlightenment, is by substituting the word

'growth.' In other words, striving to grow in all of our dimensions, as a

member of the human species, is being human, and achieving growth,

which is the act of growing, is becoming fully human; a growth, moreover,

which is never-ending--there is always another level that may be reached.

Although all living organisms, without exception, seek to grow and survive, humans, unlike most other organisms, may grow in dimensions that are, as far as I know, only specific to humans, such as intellectual, spiritual and emotional growth; and it is experiencing growth in all such particular "human" areas, areas which are ineffable in so many ways, which help us become fully human.

It is a crucial need for humans to seek enlightenment; putting it another way, human beings initially have a great impulse for growth in all directions and manners, not just growth relegated to one dimension. This urge for omnidimensional growth is a documented fact observable from the time humans are infants. Unfortunately, it is also a documented fact that, for many, this desire dissipates rapidly as the child matures. 24 Growth, especially personal growth, implies knowledge; a multi-levelled

form of knowleuge that is "digestable" and understandable. My assumption

here is that we each have our own way of understanding certain things, or,

we have our own way of growing and learning. Take away our desire for

knowledge (or growth), and we are indeed reduced to tabula rasa, or

automatons, or machines, ready to be programmed by someone or

something else-where our growth is, at best, stunted and our chances of

reaching enlightenment, nil. The point I am making here seems to be

reinforced in the following observations by Abraham Maslow:

Human life will never be understood unless its highest aspirations are taken into account. Growth, self-actualization, the striving toward health, the quest for identity and autonomy, the yearning for excellence (and other ways of phrasing the striving "upward") must by now be accepted beyond question as a widespread and perhaps universal human tendency.

These points made by Maslow I see as markers of enlightenment or full humanness, and accept his conclusions based on his copious research and the writing of other researchers in the field, such as Carl Rogers. Maslow goes on:

And yet there are also other regressive, fearful, self-diminishing tendencies as well, and it is very easy to forget them in our intoxication with "personal growth," especially for inexperienced youngsters. I consider that a necessary prophylactic against such illusions is a thorough knowledge of psychopathology and of depth psychology. We must appreciate that many people choose the worse rather than the better, that growth is often a painful process and may for this reason be shunned, and that we are all of us profoundly ambivalent about truth, beauty, virtue, loving them and fearing them to0 ...8

Maslow's recommendation that we verse ourselves thoroughly in 25 psychopathology and depth psychology to help us choose the better rather

than the worse path for growth is of course impractical, unless we are all

practising psychologists; ah, the majority of us are not.

The questions that come up then for teachers are, how can we motivate

our students to continue to keep alive that desire for growth, "the striving

toward health, the quest for identity and autonomy, the yearning for

excellence," in short, to help them towards enlightenment/wisdom and

following that, how can we help them become fully human? My one word

answer is: art.

Art is not the full answer of course--it is necessary but it is not sufficient. Nonetheless, the practice of art is one of the universal means by which we may express and discover our full humanness. It is one of the ways by which we may discover and create that which will help us strive

"upward;" it is a vehicle by which we may learn about "truth, beauty and virtue," and in learning about them perhaps learn to "fear" them less.

These notions will be expanded on mostly in the fourth chapter of my thesis. For the time being, however, I will explain the way enlightenment and wisdom are being used and understood in this particular context. A More Concise Concept of Full Humanness

Currently, there are various definitions, uses and comprehensions of the terms wisdom and enlightenment. I am using these words as synonyms for

the notion of being fully human, a term borrowed from Maslow. He has used

"fully human" or "full humanness" interchangeably with self-actualization, which he describes as being:

...an episode, or a spurt in which the powers of the person come together in a particularly efficient and intensely enjoyable way, and in which he is more integrated and less split, more open for experience, more idiosyncratic, more perfectly expressive or spontaneous, or fully functioning, more independent of his lower needs, etc. He becomes in these episodes more truly himself, more perfectly actualizing his potentialities, closer to the core of his Being, more fully human.9

Self-actualization reaches its zenith with the peak experience which is characterized by Henry Geiger as "what you feel and perhaps "know" when you gain authentic elevation as a human being... it tells human beings something about themselves and about the world that is the same truth, and that becomes the pivot of value and an ordering principle for the hierarchy of meanings.. . Its typical recurrence for his self-actualizers became for Maslow scientific evidence of what may be the normal psychological or inner life of persons who are fully human.') 0

The above generalized depiction of the inner life of a fully human being is the way I picture that of an enlightened and a wise person; that is, one, 27 who through a particular experience, which may be transient, lengthy, brief or repetitive, powerful and mystical, or not, uncovers, in a zone of no time or space, something about herself and thus about the world "that is the same truthH-- a truth that can only be discovered personally by one's active participation in the experience. And this revelation, this

"truth" which helps one develop an understanding of the world, may give meaning to one's existence in the sense that it helps to formulate how to be vis-a-vis the world; it helps a person illumine his passage through life.

Yvonne Kason, a practicing medical doctor in Toronto, has had such a transformative peak experience.

In 1979, at the age of twenty-six, while doing her medical residency at the University of Toronto, Kason had a Near-death Experience when the small airplane in which she was transporting a patient, crashed in a remote frozen region of northern Ontario. The experience transformed

Kason's life much in the same way Geiger describes above. Kason has recorded her experiences, and that of other "peakers," in her book entitled,

A Farther Shore. She writes:

Each person's life journey is unique. Still, certain types of remarkable experiences are shared by a great many people at different times along the way. These experiences often seem to punctuate the spiritual journey we all share and have a powerful effect on the individual. If there is any one thing common to them, it is that they bring about personal change, particularly when the onset of--one or many--of these experiences is sudden or dramatic. Such an experience often challenges a person's entire world view and, as a result, their ideas, values, priorities, and beliefs change. They think, feel, and see the world differently. I often hear people say after one of these experiences that their perception of reality--and 28 their whole personality--has been transformed and propelled in a iar more spiritual direction. For this reason i have come to call them Spiritually Transformative Experiences. 1 1

Kason's experience eventually led her to research, in a scientific manner,

spiritually transformative experiences, which she abbreviates as STE. The

more intense and powerful STEs she calls STE peaks or STEP. This is how

she describes the effect of her experience on her own life:

The months of transformation that occured after my Near-death Experience left me psychologically strong, clear, and centered. I felt tremendous inner strength and the courage to speak honestly. The experience still remains a source of tremendous inspiration ... More important, it began a process of personal transformation that has continued to this day.

After years of study and research I have come to think that STEs are part of a transformation and expansion of consciousness in which we become intermittently capable of perceiving other levels of reality, including what we might consider mystical or paranormal dimensions. STEs appear to be signs that this process may be accelerating.12

The intent of Dr. Kason's research and work in this area bears a similarity

to and seems to be an extension of Maslow's work. Maslow's prolific

research and writings of his theories led him, near the end of his life, to

conclude that his humanistic philosophy, which he also called Third Force

Psychology, was a preparation for a still higher form of psychology which

went beyond self-actualization and the like; a psychology which he deemed to be transpersonal and transhuman, centered in the cosmos, not

unlike what Kason implies in her work. As a matter of fact both Maslow and Kason acknowledge and support the Canadian physician/psychologist

Maurice Bucke's work in this area. 29 Bucke developed a well-supported theory of cosmic consciousness, in the

final years of the nineteenth century, which he described as being "a

higher form of consciousness thc;: that possessed by the ordinary man." He

suggested that humans were evolving !heir consciousness, and in so doing

were developing and expanding greatly their state of consciousness. Bucke

thought the human race was relentlessly heading towards the time when

everyone would attain cosmic consciousness.

Bucke thought there were three forms of consciousness. The first he

called "Simple Consciousness," which he suggested was possessed by "the

upper half of the animal kingdom." The second he called "Self

Consciousness," which he explained as being a faculty by which: "man ...

becomes conscious of himself as a distinct entity apart from all the rest

of the universe. ... becomes capable of treating his own mental states as

objects of consciousness. The animal is, as it were, immersed in his

consciousness as a fish in the sea; he cannot, even in imagination, get

outside of it for one moment so as to realize it ... The possesion of self

consciousness and language (its other self) by man creates an enormous

gap between him and the highest creature possessing simple

consciousness merely." Bucke explained the prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness to be:

... a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe... There are many elements belonging to the cosmic sense besides the central fact just alluded to. Of these a few may be mentioned. Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs 30 an intellectual enlightenment or illumination which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence--would make him almost a member of a new species. To this is added a state of moral axaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevatio~, elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully as striking and more important both to the individuai and to the race than is the enhanced intellectual power. With these comz what may be called a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he has it already. 1 3

Maslow, Kason, and Bucke would have probably, or even may have only, called the attainment of the transpersonal state of cosmic consciousness, enlightenment; a state which is like the condition of enlightenment that is often featured in Eastern spiritual traditions, such as Buddhism and sometimes referred to as "perennial cosmic cclnsciousness." They may not have equated enlightenment with the notion of being fully human, which within this discourse, I am doing. My definition of enlightenment is equated with full humanness as found in the self-actualized person--a healthy form of growth in all human dimensions whether they be biological, physical, spiritual, intellectual or emotional, as well as what we have not yet discovered and given names to. Of course, the transpersonal or transhuman aspects of enlightenment, as mentioned by

Maslow, may be included in this definition but for my purposes, it is not necessary.

I want to insert here another view of self-actualization, that also incorporates how I see a fully human being. It may appear to contradict 31 what I have already outlined, but I think it approaches differently what I have already described as self-actualization. It is a view articulated by

Viktor E. Frankl, who incorporates it in his theory of logotherapy. The latter is a theory of psychotherapy that concerns itself with the meaning of human existence as well as the human's search for such a meaning.

Briefly, being human, according to Frankl's philosophy , is being directed or pointed to someone other than oneself or to something else, fulfilling a meaning or encountering someone else, or serving a cause or loving a person. Frankl often repeats as his leitmotif, Nietzsche's phrase: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." He states:

By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic "the self-transcendence of human existence." It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself--be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself- -by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love--the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence, 1 4

I do accept Frankl's idea that self-transcendence leads to self- actualization in the sense that one has to have an "experience" of sorts that transcends what may be thought of as the norm. Nonetheless, I find problematic Frankl's idea that "the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a 32 clcsed system." ! think of "man or his own psyche" as being part of the world, 2nd as being ir- flu en cod or shaoed in part by interaction with the world; as such it could never be a closed system. Furthei, to be able io

"actualize the potential meaning" of one's life, one has to know one's psyche, what is often referred to as the self.

I fully support Frankl's notion of the giving of one's self to a cause to serve or another person to love, but surely, to do so, one has to "know" whether the giving will truly "serve" or whether the feeling is genuinely

"love." I am sure that many people who have "forgotten" themselves and

"given" themselves "to a cause to serve" have in the past or are presently engaged in conduct causing great harm or suffering to others or the planet;

Hitler would be an obvious example. Being more fully human, in my understanding, means helping to transform the self and the world in order to reduce pain and suffering, or increase happiness to the self and others, however small the impact.

A similar thought is in part found and elucidated in Paulo Freire's theories, with which my notion of enlightenment is also allied, specifically with aspects of his concept of ontological vocation.

Freire's concept is described by Richard Shaull in the following manner:

Man's ontological vocation ...is to be a Subject who acts upon and transforms his world, and in so doing moves towards ever new 33 possibilities of fuller and richer liie individually and zollectively ... Coupled with this is Freire's conviction ... that every human being, no matter how 'ignorant' or submerged in the 'culture of silence' he may be, is capable of looking critically at his world in a dialogical encounter with others. Provided with the proper tools for such encounter, he can gradually perceive his personal and social reality as well as the contradictions in it, become zonscious of his own perception of ?hat reality, and deal critically with it ... As this happens, the word takes on new power. It is no longer an abstraction or magic but a means by which man discovers himself and his potential as he gives names to things around him. As Freire puts it, each man wins back his right to say his own word, to name the world1 5

The term "cultural silence" is used by Freire to mean the growth of a

rapidly advancing technological society that is making objects of us and

programming us to the logic of its system. Freire in his text implies that

a culture of silence is a dehumanizing culture. The right to "saying your

own word, naming the world," is akin, in my mind, to exercising your right

to become fully human--to know your self, thus to know the world and

know how to be in the worid.

The concept of full humanness I have embraced is one that integrates aspects of Maslow's theories, with parts of Freire's notions and also with the specific definition of enlightenment the German philosopher lmmanuel

Kant expressed in a paper written in 1784, entitled What is

Enlightenrnent?l6

In that paper, Kant describes an enlightened person as one who has the ability to emerge from a form of self-imposed immaturity; the way I 34 construe it, an intellectual and psychological obscurity of sorts. He

explains that immaturity is the lack of courage and resolution to use one's

own understanding without the guidance of another. nason's remarks, as

quoted above, regarding "the courage" and "strength" she felt "to speak

honestly," to dare take a risk, after her transformative experience is the

kind of thing I am imputing to Kant's definition. Sapere aude! Dare to Know!

Have the courage to make use of your understanding! Kant exhorted.

Simply, I interpret Kant's message as one that presses us to develop our

faculties for critical thinking and to have the courage to take those risks

that will enlighten us. What of course Kant does not explicitly tell us is

where precisely we summon the courage and resolution to use our own

understanding to dare to know. I suggest that it is only the self-actualized

person who can muster such courage, as evidenced in the person of Kason, to take the risks needed to dare to know.

Despite the divergent views and differing disciplines represented by the thinkers, whose names I have evoked above, there is, to my mind, an incontrovertible link that connects aspects of their views which has helped me to articulate how I view what it is to be fully human. The latter, to recapitulate, I have identified as incorporating elements of

Kant's explanation of what is enlightenment, Freire's notion of ontological vocation and Maslow's theory of self-actualization. The connections I see between aspects of these ideas, which may seem to be disparate to some, I shall presently try to make clearer.

Making Connections

On the surface, Kant's a priori form of rationalism, evidenced more in his other writings, clashes strongly with Maslow's notion of reason as would indicate one of the quotes cited above; the somewhat indignant voice palpable in Freire's subtext is missing in Maslow's psychological and, at times, spirituaily inspired writings and is also missing in Kant's philosophical analyses. Neither Kant nor Maslow are as politically motivated as Freire, although Freire and Maslow are quite vocal about dehumanizing forces in modernity, which was not as evident during Kant's time. And yet, I do not think it a stretch to propose that there is at least a common thread that connects some of the ideas of these men and that is what I find to be of discursive relevance here. They all subscribe to what I would call an "ethic of authenticity."l;r This last term I appropriated from

Charles Taylor, but am using it perhaps differently than the way he would have it.

Taylor tells us that he himself picked up the term from Lionel Trilling and means by it the ethic of self-fulfillment. Taylor explains that the moral of self-fulfillment was born in the late eighteenth century out of the ethic of sentiment, which supposed that each human possessed in their 36 own heart the moral sentiment to choose between right and wrong. This belief, Taylor tells us, was a reaction against that form of rigid morality where the "rules" for right and wrong, according to the will of God, were thought to be outside of one's person.

Jean Jacques Rousseau transformed this new moral sentiment into the notion of le sentiment de Ifexistence, from where emerged the modern concept of individualism. In the thoughts of Rousseau, we see the development of the idea that we can depend on the voice of the "nature within," that comes from our "authentic being," to guide us to do the right thing as opposed to our dependence on external forces. (This may be compared to Kant's caveat to use our own understanding without the guidance of another.) However, it is not so easy to follow your own voice because there is always the danger that it will be "drowned out" by other voices. (That is perhaps why Kant admonishes us to have the courage to use our own understanding.) Taylor points out that Johann Herder developed Rousseau's concept by proposing that not only is one's "inner vCicen the voice of morality but it is also that which incites us to a

"peculiar" and "original" way of being. (Aspects of this are definitely echoed in Maslow's notion of self-actualization and Freire's idea of ontological vocation.) The above brief sketch is how Taylor describes the origins of the Ethics of Authenticity, which is seen to be sliding in our era into two debased forms identified as relativism and atomism. 37 The Ethics of Authenticity are incompatible with relativism, Taylor claims. He posits that one cannot really understand in what their

"originality" consists unless one has a sense of what is really significant; that is, one really cannot know this unless one thinks or reasons about what gives one's life meaning or sense. Further, fulfilling one's self does not mean that one can continue self-indulgence; that one is not open to criticism or that there are no questions of right and wrong. To phrase it simply, Taylor seems to advocate what I can only term a responsible, or a

"mature" form of self-fulfillment (which itself seems to be a combination of the essence of Kant's definition of enlightenment and that which is palpable in Frankl's notion of logotherapy).

Taylor also finds the Ethics of Authenticity incompatible with atomism.

His argument, in an abbreviated manner, is that we need each other's recognition to be the human beings we are. Put another way, we discover who we are while in dialogue with others; precisely a point Freire makes.

The reason I brought Taylor into this discussion is because the Ethics of

Authenticity, in its uncontaminated form, is an integral element of the ideas of Maslow, Kant and Freire that I have sketchily outlined above in my attempts to define the way I understand full humanness or enlightenment, and also because his notion of the Ethics of Authenticity and its debasements, which are the malaise of modernity, have found resonance in me.

I should like, at present, to expand and explain this position within the

context of education. In other words, the questions that now need

answering are: what aspects of these ideas will give us something more

practical to work with in terms of understanding the conditions needed

for the development of full humanness in our schools and how does art

come into all this?

Looking For Full Humanness In Our Schools

Hopefully I have clarified somewhat by now how 1 understand the concept

of full humanness; one that combines various attributes and

characteristics and yet remains "open" and flexible for the simple reason that each person has unique aspects that can only be discovered and developed by that individual. I think perhaps what is more pivotal for this discussion is to inquire as to why it is so important that we become fully human. The answers to this have been already somewhat implied. Briefly, the self-actualized person is one with a balanced function of thinking and feeling, who can help transform our society for the better and thus provide the conditions for developing full humanness in each one. Another way of stating this is that in improving one's self, one improves society.

Maslow has accumulated the data, some points of which are echoed in Frankl's notion of the giving of one's self, which reinforce this position.

The empirical fact is that self-actualizing people, our best experiencers, are also our most compassionate, our great improvers and reformers of society, our most effective fighters against injustice, inequality, slavery, cruelty, exploitation (and also our best fighters for excellence, effectiveness, competence). .. it also becomes clearer and clearer that the best "helpers" are the most fully human persons. What I may call the Bodhisattvic path is an integration of self- improvement and social zeal, i.e., the best way to become a better "helper" is to become a better person. But one necessary aspect of becoming a better person is via helping other people. So one must and can do both simultaneously.18

In another context, one which relates to the above, Maslow has written that humans have a higher nature and this is instinctoid, that is, that it is part of the essence of being human. Apropos of this, Maslow posits:

"The lnstinctoid Nature of Basic Needs," constitute for me the foundation of a system of intrinsic human values, human goods that validate themselves, that are intrinsically good and desirable and that need no further justification. This is a hierarchy of values which are to be found in the very essence of human nature itself. These are not only wanted and desired by all human beings, but also needed in the sense that they are necessary to avoid illness and psychopathology. To say the same thing in another vocabulary, these basic needs and the metaneeds [I think he's referring to theory of metamotivation] are also the intrinsic reinforcers, the unconditioned stimuli which can be used as a basis upon which can be erected all sorts of instrumental learnings and conditionings. That is to say that in order to get these intrinsic goods, animals and men are willing to learn practically anything that will achieve for them these ultimate goods.

...it is legitimate and fruitful to regard instinctoid basic needs and the metaneeds as rights as well as needs. This follows immediately upon granting that human beings have a right to be human in the same sense that cats have a right to be cats. In order to be fully human, these need and metaneed gratifications are necessary, and may therefore be considered to be natural rights.

The hierarchy of needs and metaneeds ... serves as a kind of smorgasbord table from which people can choose in accordance with their own tastes and appetites ... in any judging of the motivations for a person's behavior, the character of the judge also has to be taken into account. He chooses the motivations to which he will attribute the behavior, for instance, in accord with his generalized optimism or 40 pessimism. I find the latter choice to be made far more frequently today, so frequently that I find it useful to name the phenomenon "downlevelling of the motivations." Briefly put, this is the tendency to prefer, for explanatory purposes, the lower needs to the middle needs, and the middle needs to the higher. A purely materialistic motivatizn is preferred to a social or metamotivated one, or to a mixture of all three. It is a kind of paranoid-like suspicion, a form of devaluation of human nature, which I see often but which ... has not been sufficiently described ...I g

In a similar vein, Yvonne Kason has compiled a list of the more important

signs of a healthy spiritual transformation that she found in her research

subjects. I include below those pertinent for my discussion here:

1. You will find yourself developing more noble traits of character, such as compassion, universal love, charity, truth, honesty, and humility. 2. Your desire to be of service to humanity will grow and may become a primary focus as your feelings of unity with all humankind and all creation grow.. ..

5. You will find yourself developing a more clear, discerning intellect and deeper psychological insights, along with a high moral fiber. 6. You may find yourself developing new gifts of inspired creativity.2 0

I think it important for us, as educators at least, to know whether any of these findings, which are corroborated by the work of many other researchers, are echoed in any of the official publications related to public school education. The first place that I looked for something of this nature was in the Education Act, published by the Government of Ontario, of which one part reads as follows:

235.--(I) It is the duty of a teacher and a temporary teacher, (a) to teach diligently and faithfully the classes or subjects assigned to him by the principal; (b) to encourage the pupils in the pursuit of learning; (c) to inculcate by precept and example respect for religion and the 41 principles of Judaeo-Christian morality and the highest regard for truth, justice, loyalty, love of country, humanity, benevolence, sobriety, industry, frugality, purity, temperance and all other virtues; ... [Chap. 129, Sec. 235 (l)]

Parts (a) and (b) of the above are more straightforward than part (c); the latter may be construed in a variety of ways which gives the interpreter of these words some leeway. Thus, "to encourage pupils in the pursuit of learning" is tantamount, in my view, to encouraging pupils to grow; an acknowledgment that learning is an on-going activity. What is more problematic is the interpretation of part (c). The problem is posed mostly by the word "inculcate," which my Oxford dictionary tells me means: "to endeavour to force (a thing) into or impress (it) on the mind of another by emphatic admonition, or by persistent repetition; to urge on the mind, esp. as a principle, an opinion, or a matter of belief; to teach forcibly." Since the word "inculcate" is followed by "precept" and "example," it must mean to "impress" or "urge on the mind" and cannot possibly mean to "teach forcibly"; it would be an oxymoron to teach forcibly by example or precept.

The Education Act does not require teachers to teach either Judaism or

Christianity, but "to inculcate by precept and example respect for religion," this would mean respect for any and all religions, "and the principles of Judaeo-Christian morality." Now "the principles of Judaeo-

Christian morality," are based partly on commandments as written in The

Bible.21 There are probably no features that might be part of the 42 principles of Judaeo-Christian morality (I am not referring to doctrine,

nor dogma, but purely principles of morals) that would be unacceptable by

any other major traditionai religion or wen by the most confirmed of

atheists (notwithstanding individual tastes). What I specifically mean

here is that we live in a democratic secular society with laws enacted by

our courts and legislatures that have incorporated within them the ethic

of Judaeo-Christian morality, gleaned partly on commandments which are

universal in nature, and as such are implicated in our interpretation of

them. As to the virtues listed, they seem straightforward and also are

universal in their identification; the virtues unlisted may very well be

contingent on local community standards as I would presume the listed

virtues would be as well.

Thus much of what underlies the "duties of a teacher," as specified in the

Education Act, may be interpreted to be similar in intent to the values

Kason lists her research subjects having acquired after STEs, including

herself, and I see them being similar as well to Maslow's idea of the

"striving upward," and part of what he observes to be "of a system of

intrinsic human values, human goods that validate themselves, that are

intrinsically good and desirable and that need no further justification."

The fact that the founder of public education in Ontario in the middle of the nineteenth century happened to have been Egerton Ryerson, and the fact that he happened to have been an ordained Methodist minister, seems 43 to me to have been the obvious catalyst in the stricter narrower

interpretation and implementation of the Education Act.

To see how the Act is interpreted today, I next turned to policy documents

by the Ministry of Education on elementary schooling. The most recent one, at this writing, that deals with this matter is The Common Curriculum:

Policies and Outcomes, Grades 1-9, published in 1995; a publication, like all other Ministry documents, subject to the Education Act. The Common

Curriculum outlines the policies and educational philosophy that form the basis of education for Ontario students from Grades 1 to 9. It also describes the knowledge, skills, and values students are expected to develop by the end of Grade nine. The 1995 version of the document reflects suggestions made to the Ministry after working documents were distributed in 1993 to teachers, parents, and the general public.

In 1997, the Education and Training Minister of Ontario, John Snobelen, introduced two new documents; one is entitled The Ontario Curriculum,

Grades 1-8: Language, the other is The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1-8:

Mathematics. In the Ministry's News Release Communique, dated June 13,

1997, we read:

The New Ontario Curriculum replaces the Common Curriculum introduced by the previous government in 1995. Parents and teachers found it to be too vague and broad and it resulted in an uneven patchwork of local curricula developed at the board level across the province, Snobelen said." 44 According to the introductory page of these two newer documents, each of them "replaces the sections in The Common Curriculum" (p. 3) that relate to the specific subjects in question, that is, Mathematics and Language.

The implication is that the policies outlined in The Common Curriculum dealing with other subject areas are still in force, until new policy documents are published.

The direction of the Ministry is clearly outlined in the new 1997 documents mentioned above. We read:

Where previous policy documents identified general outcomes for Grades 3, 6, and 9 only, The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1-8: Language, [or The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1 -8: Mathema tics] gives precise and detailed description of the knowledge and skills required for each grade. This provision of detail will eliminate the need for school boards to write their own expectations, will ensure consistency in curriculum across the province, and facilitate province-wide testing. (p. 3)

Giving a detailed account of what skills and knowledge are expected at each grade level does not mean that those expectations will be achieved any more than they are today. Expectations are not the issue. It is telling that in the new Ministry documents, the word expectations has replaced the word outcomes, as found in The Common Curriculurn, which had replaced words such as objectives, aims, and goals in the former policy document--as if changing names changes anything! The new Ministry's actions seem very much to be a case of trying to control outcomes through rational means. John Eisenberg amply illustrates in The Limits of Reason that such an approach historically has never been successful in implementing educational policy.

I think teachers are familiar with the knowledge and skills that children

require as they develop cognitively. Rewriting the expectations or

outcomes or aims in detail will not necessarily solve the problems facing

educators or schools. The publications emanating from the new Ministry,

have focused thus far on the development of measurable knowledge and

skills without explicit mention of values. My suggestion is that the

problems encountered in our school system are a reflection of the problem caused by the values we uphold in our society, and it is this thought that

underlies my discussion. The Common Curriculum, in addition to knowledge and skills also outlines expected basic values which I assume are still desirable as part of one's education.

I shall herewith cite passages from The Common Curriculum which seem relevant for my argument and comment briefly on the passage if warranted. The first thing I searched for was a close interpretation of

Chapter 129, Section 235, (l)(c) of the Education Act. This is the closest one I found:

Although schools do not play the primary role in developing children's values, they communicate a strong message about values both through the curriculum and through the attitudes and behaviour that are demonstrated and encouraged. Teachers, in particular, must remember that they are role models for students and can have great influence on their attitudes and behaviour.

The curriculum itself cannot be neutral about values. This statement has particular implications for our schools, in which the student 46 population represents a variety of races and cultures. The curriculum ... cannot ignore this diversity by focusing exclusively on the traditions and perspectives of a dominant group; it must draw from a wide range of beliefs, experiences, backgrounds, and viewpoints so that all students are k!uded and recognized, and are able to relate to learning experiences in a meaningful way. The values that are at the heart of the curriculum described in this document reinforce democratic rights and responsibilities and are common to many faiths and cultures. They are based on a fundamental belief in the worth of all persons, a recognition of the interdependence of human beings and the environment, and a belief in the inherent value of all forms of life in nature. They should help ail students to develop a positive sense of self and respect and concern for others, as well as a sense of belonging in the community, as sense of social responsibility, a commitment to democracy and human rights, and a love of learning... (pp. 16-17)

In general, this interpretation does not see n to be in conflict with how I understand the idea of full humanness. To me, such an enunciation expresses an underlying philosophical rat onale that is humanistic and sensitive to the diversity that may be found in any group of students. The following statement also indicates such an approach:

We have a common goal--to provide our children with the education that will best equip them to live in a complex and changing world. We should work together to meet this goal and to plan effectively and wisely for the future. (p. 5)

This seems to be an inclusive position which calls for a "dialogical encounter," amongst all those interested in furthering the cause of education. And to extend the statement into a practical direction, it is suggested that:

...in order to live and work with success in a fast-changing world, our students need to develop (1) creative thinking skills that will enable them to apply knowledge and information in a variety of situations and to solve problems involving a wide range of factors and issues; (2) the motivation and ability to continue to learn and develop new skills throughout life; (3) values and social skills that will allow them to participate fully in a society whose composition, structure, and needs are constantly changing. The Common Curriculum addresses all these 47 needs and does so in a framework that will enable all students, of all background and abilities, to develop the requisite skills. (p. 6)

Then the following "broad functional skills," identified in the 1992

Employability Skills Profile, developed by the Conference Board of Canada

are listed:

...academic skills (those in communicating, thinking, and learning), personal management skills (a sense of responsibility, adaptability, the willingness to take initiative, etc.), and teamwork skills (the ability to work with others). (p. 6)

However it is recognized that:

...no defined set of skills, however broad, can fully prepare our children for life in a world that is constantly changing. The citizens of tomorrow will need to be lifelong learners if they are to function effectively in an age of information and take on the challenges of the future ... In a world in which people are environmentally, economically, politically, and socially interdependent, it is no longer possible to plan for the future without looking at options and issues from a global perspective. It is crucial that we help students develop this perspective through global education ... [where] students will be made aware of planetary issues and will develop the knowledge, values, and understandings they will need to deal with such issues constructively and responsibly. Students will also realize that making decisions about their future endeavours and pursuits includes taking responsibility for the welfare of others and the survival of life on the planet. Only if the students develop this broader understanding of the challenges facing us will they be able to have a vision of the future that inspires hope and confidence. (p. 7)

Aside from the implication that a planned course of study cannot be absolute or final, the underlying attitude promoted above seems to be holistic; that of encouraging students to grow, learn and become socially conscious and responsible members of a community which is within a community which is within a community and so on.

Students must also be equipped to respond constructively to social 48 change ... develop the values, skills, and knowledge needed to live productively and harmoniously in a society that values diversity and is committed to equity and social justice. Adapting to changing attitudes is a difficult process for all of us and one that can place special demands on students, who are just beginning to develop and test their values. It is important, therefore, that schools and their programs provide both clear guidelines and a ciimate of flexibility and understanding in which independent thinking can thrive and in which students can develop values that they themselves consider relevant for the life they envisage. (p. 8)

This reinforces what is stated above and is a version of Freire's notion of ontological vocation. I will not list the ten essential outcomes listed in the document, from which I have already quoted extensively, except to note that they do reflect the philosophical rationale already cited, a rationale which may also be interpreted as reflecting a transformational position in keeping with the holistic curriculum.

In the last few pages I have tried to show that the aims of public education, at least in the past few decades, as articulated in recent publications by this province, are desirable and fully in tune with the idea of creating the conditions needed to develop fully human beings and reflect what we stand for as a society; having a bias towards a holistic, integrated program, is what I choose to see and interpret. But policies and guidelines are not generally interpreted nor implemented in a holistic manner.

Had we succeedeed in achieving the outcomes as desired and promoted by

The Common Curriculum, the malaise we have been experiencing as a 49 society most of this century might eventually have dissipated. But then had we achieved the desired outcomes envisaged in the former policy document of this province, entitled The Formative Years (1975), we would not have needed to formulate a new policy document and probably would not experience what appears to be an increasing hostility hurled towards our educational system from all sectors of society today. It should be noted, in retrospect, that The Formative Years was introduced and implemented in what seemed to be a "kinder, gentler" era where the general climate and mood seemed more receptive and tolerant to change.

Yet, it did not succeed.

This just pinpoints the fact that changing policies do not solve nor have they ever solved problems, probably due to the fact that the changes deal with the visible and most superficial aspects of the problem. Support for such a statement might be found in the fact that in the last few years, elementary public schools and teachers in Ontario have had to adjust, are still adjusting and will continue to adjust their curriculum to meet three different policy documents, first The Formative Years, then The Common

Curriculum, and now The New Ontario Curriculum. (This last one, as mentioned, has published the Language and Mathematics components for implementation beginning in September 1997. The curriculum for Science and Technology, History, Geography, Physical Education, and Arts have not as yet been published, as at this writing.) 50 The new remedy for what has been termed "the education crisis in Ontario"

is also treating the most visible and superficial aspect of the problem.

The real root of the problem is the system within which the policies have

to be implemented--a system which in itself is imbedded in a larger

system with what may be deemed to be deep inflexible roots which have

taken centuries to develop. In plainer words, there is nothing wrong with

what we say we want to achieve in education; the problem is that they

seem to be uttered in a vacuum and have a hollow ring which mirrors the

way things are run in our society, a society living a polluted version of the

Ethics of Authenticity--a society which has sacrificed spiritual and ethical values in favour of instrumental rationality, what Max Weber called Zweckra tionalitat.

Apropos of the latter, Richard J. Bernstein writes:

Weber argued that the hope and expectation of the Enlightenment thinkers was a bitter and ironic illusion. They maintained a strong necessary linkage between the growth of science, rationality, and universal human freedom. But when unmasked and understood, the legacy of the Enlightenment was the triumph of Zweckrationalitat- purposive-instrumental rationality. This form of rationality affects and infects the entire range of social and cultural life encompassing economic structures, law, bureaucratic administration, and even the arts. The growth of Zweckrationalitat does not lead to the concrete realization of universal freedom but to the creation of an "iron cage" of bureaucratic rationality from which there is no escape.22

David Held explicates this term in the following manner:

Weber's concept of rationalization is extremely complex. First, it refers to the growth of mathematization of 'experience and knowledge': the shaping of all scientific practice according to the model of the natural sciences and the extension of (scientific) 51 rationality to 'the conduct of life itself.' This in turn must be seen as part of a specific feature of secularization of the modern world which Weber often terms the intellectualization and/or the ciisenchantment of the world. Secondly, the secularization of life leads to a growth of means-end rationality, whereby there is 'the methodological attainment of a definitely given and practical end by the use of an increasingly precise calculation of. ..means.'. ..Third, there is a growth of rationality in terms of the development of 'ethics that are systematically and unambiguously oriented to fixed goa11.g3

The irony is, as Howard Gardner points out, that:

Though surrounded ...by evidence of the irrationality of human beings, philosophers have clung to the notion that human beings are logical and rational--or at least to the ideal that human beings should strive for rationality and that they have the potential to achieve it ... Empirical work on reasoning over the last thirty years has severely challenged the notion that human beings--even sophisticated ones--proceed in a rational manner...24

Yet the methodology used in our schools is based on these assumptions.

The emphasis seems to be on developing a lop-sided form of knowledge that is transferable to a market that values "means-end rationality." In doing this, we deemphasize other forms of knowledge that may be developed or had through other means, specifically the development of personal and transpersonal growth which are essential elements in helping the child in the process of becoming. Personal and transpersonal growth, in addition to intellectual growth require a balance between all of our functions. In pragmatic and practical terms, as Killinger notes,

"Wisdom and maturity develop when both Thinking and Feeling functions inform our decision-making."25 Yet the emphasis, even more so with the new Ministry, is mostly on thinking in our schools, and even that seems to me to be flawed. Although we seem to be seeing the "far goals" of 52 education, we are educating based on "near" goals, which is how we appear

to do things; these points will be deliberated more fully in the next

chapter of this thesis.

I have argued above that full humanness is the striving for growth; it was

implied that this was a holistic endeavour in that human growth is not

relegated to just one aspect of a being but encompasses a// of one's

aspects known or unknown, identified or unidentified. The one aspect that

I find most neglected in the implementation of the curriculum is in the

education of the feelings, which I locate in the "spiritual dimension."

...the teaching of spiritual values of ethical and moral values definitely does have a place in education, perhaps ultimately a very basic and essential place, and that this in no way needs to controvert the American separation between church and state for the very simple reason that spiritual, ethical, and moral values need have nothing to do with any church ...these ultimate values are and should be the far goals of education...26

Maslow expresses my view exactly. But how do we "teach" spiritual values, or how do we provide occasions for what Kason calls STE?

Near-death Experiences are not the only means of having an STE. In her book, Kason outlines the case experiences of those who have had STEs and

STEPS in many different ways. She implies that spiritual transformative experiences are not the domain of a select few but are within the realm of every person who wants to access them and the method she seems to advocate and prefer, like many others, is a form of meditation. 53 There has never been nor is there a tradition of disciplined meditation in our public elementary schools. Until a number of years ago, the nearest thing to meditation in On!srio's schools, was a long tradition of the recitation of morning prayers. Its ban still causes the occasional controversial debate, and not too long ago, the Ontario Legislature intimated that prayers might be brought back into public schools. Whose prayer, what prayer? The debate is already being vociferously argued in some circles. The idea of introducing meditation in our schools has been proposed but has not met with universal favour. The times do not seem to be propitious nor conducive to such a proposal. And yet, we do need an outlet, a venue, a means for reflection and self-actualization in our schools, in addition to the intellectual, physical, and manual skills we attempt to teach. We do need to facilitate growth in the spiritual realm, to help children access the ineffable, the numinous, which may transform one's view of the world and hence one's interaction with the world and life, perhaps giving meaning to one's life. We already have the

"mechanism" in place for such possibilities in our school curriculum and it is one that is generally accepted by the public at large, as well as already approved by the Ministry; it is just that its role has to rethought and redefined. What I am alluding to is, of course, art. The lmpact of Art

There are myriad illustrations of persons who have been transformed by an encounter or experience within a form of art that has been instrumental in helping them self-actualize. I have purposefully selected examples of a few such persons, found at random while scanning daily newspapers at the onset of my research; persons who are, as yet, relatively "unknown" in or out of their artistic discipline. The instances I have cited below are evidence of human beings who have experienced growth in the spiritual realm through artistic experiences and in the process have and are participating in the transformation of their own world and life.

The composer Jonathan Harvey is one such person. Here are excerpts of a report on him by Mark Pappenheim, upon the premiere of Harvey's opera,

Inquest of Love:

It was singing in a performance of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius that gave the young Jonathan Harvey his first intimation that music could be the key to some higher reality. His spiritual journey has taken him a long way since those post-war years as a boy chorister...

Inquest...[ derives] much of its inspiration from joyful images of the afterlife offered in the writings of the poet Kathleen Raine and the Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner.

"I take Steiner as poetry," he says, "as poetry in the profoundest sense. I've no idea whether it's true--but isn't it that what makes poetry important to you? Because in a sense you do feel that it's true." At the same time, he talks of his explorations in electronic music ... as attempts to realize his hopes in the accounts of near- death experiences which his wife Rosa has brought back over the 55 years from the hospitals where she has worked. "I remember her telling me about one woman ...when she revived, all she could say was, 'It was like a great symphony orchestra.' ...I've never been that near to death. But i think we all get little intuitions--glimpses in dreams. ...One needs one's craft ...but the essentials are there in dreams."

Inquest's philosophical agenda may appear symptomatic of the current spiritual resurgence in music ... But Harvey is not in the business of purveying second-hand religiosity to a secular age; he expects his audiences to work for their own enlightenment ... as he says, the idea that music can actually be an agent for spiritual change is neither new nor particularly cranky. "Some lord once said to Handel, after the Messiah, 'Splendid entertainment, my dear fellow.' And Handel replied, 'I hoped, sir, that it would be more than entertainment, but that it would change people's lives."27

The latter statement attributed to Handel is inherent in the thesis that this dissertation is expounding; that is, that the evocative nature of art may arouse such feelings that they have the revelatory power to transform one's life. In that transformation, people access another level of their being, humanizing it and making it fuller, as happened to James

O'Reilly in the following account:

And then a miracle happened. A Grade 13 English teacher took the troubled teen under her wing and introduced him to books. For the first time, O'Reilly had a hook into other worlds, ones that went beyond his steady television diet; they provoked him into feeling hopeful.

He turned out to be a true story-teller, a man who paints vivid verbal pictures and articulates with confidence, using a rich and varied vocabulary.

He doesn't know when the words began to flow, but says he "wasn't interested in being articulate or literary until I saw it was possible and felt some sense of belonging to the human race."

At home he read in private, unable to talk to his parents about the inner transformation that was taking place. His friends didn't understand. And at that point, O'ReiIly had never known anyone who had completed high school, much less university. And he had certainly never encountered an artist.28 56 Both O'Reilly's and Harvey's stories also serve to reinforce a point made earlier, that such transformative experiences are not age specific.

On the dancer Marie Chouinard:

She has been called a neo-primitive, but the term is really too shallow for her. It implies an imagination running on images from National Geographic, and Chouinard works from a much more [sic] deeper source. She talks of her body as a kind of radio receiver for "something far away." Like the ancient Greeks, she regards the person of the artist as a passage for the divine.

"The main thing is that I'm in awe of being alive," she says. "For me, it's amazing already that my hand cannot go through this couch, that the material world exists."

...the worst is when she isn't connected in herself, when the movements feel dead from the source. "It's only when the inner dance is right that the outer dance gets its power," she says. "Otherwise you're just on stage with your flesh and bones."29

These quotes are metaphorical condensations of some of the arguments of my thesis. Chouinard's exclamation that she is in awe of "being alive" and that her physiological self gets "its power" only when her inner self is

"right" is a poetic phrasing of my statement that being fully human is knowing that one is fully alive, mind, heart, body and soul as opposed to just subsisting in one's "flesh and bones." O'Reilly's transformation from being a marginalized member of society to a creative, productive, self- actualized being was made possible because of his active engagement in the world of words and books. And it was also the latter that gave him the sense of "belonging to the human race," which then motivated him to develop his talent for story-telling. In many ways, these examples also 57 show how such experiences provide meaning in one's life, the basis of

Frankl's logotherapy, the theory concerned with the meaning of existence

as well as the numan's search for such a meaning.

I refer to Frankl's theory here because artistic experiences perfectly satisfy some basic tenets of logotherapy such as "meaning in life" can be discovered "by creating a work or doing a deed," or "by experiencing or encountering someone." These two propositions apply in all the cases I have cited; in O'Reilly's experience, however, there was the additional instigation provided by a caring teacher who facilitated his initial exposure to the world of literature. Frankl affirms that experiencing goodness, truth, beauty, nature and culture may lead to a meaning of life but adds "last, but not least," the meaning of life can be had "by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness--by loving him... by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true."30 This applies fully in O'Reilly's case; that is, if his teacher had not "experienced him in his uniqueness," had not authentically cared, it is highly unlikely that he would have, as he remarks, become part of the human race.

As Frankl also attests, the facilitator may sometimes be a particular creation which instigates changes in a person. In the young Harvey, it was 58 Elgar's The Dream of Germtius. It was as a choir member singing Elgar's composition that allowed Harvey to experience a state of consciousness that changed the course of his being. In all of the above instances, as well as innumerable other ones that I have not mentioned that may be found in the writings of Maslow, for example, we can see an aspect of human growth experienced and expressed via an artistic medium; an experience that embodies and educates the spirit or the feelings of the practitioners in a way that transforms their "inner being," that takes them to a "higher reality," that may give meaning to life. And it is this state of being which

I have suggested needs cultivation in our schools; a state which I believe is necessary for our enlightenment and which may be accessed through art.

But, as I observe it, this cannot be done until we understand how

Zweckrationalitat has held our society and art in its grip for the past few centuries and why it needs to released. It is the exploration of these matters that I now turn to in the next section of my thesis. CHAPTER II

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. 1

Erich Fromm CHAPTER II

OBSTACLES TO FULL HUMANNESS

Introduction

The task in this chapter will be to outline the premise to be built upon as I move the discourse to the heart of my thesis in the next chapter, the realm of art; there I will endeavour to demonstrate that the changes wrought upon human society by Zweckrationalitat have changed the role, perception and practice of art. In this chapter of the thesis, I will argue that some of the forces that have shaped present Western thought and way of life have predominantly "objectified" the human being, or put more severely, have dehumanized humanity. This has induced fragmentation and the inability of the majority of individuals to develop their ability to become fully human. In so arguing, I will have expanded upon two major points that I deferred here for a fuller discussion; points that are essential components of my thesis. The first has to do with the suggestion that we think we have developed a hoIistic/humanistic philosophy of children and how they ought to be taught in our schools, but in practice, we treat and teach them in the opposite manner, reflecting the manner with which we conduct our affairs in society. The implication being that the modus vivendi of our society has caused fragmentation in most human beings. This idea is intimately connected to the other thought that I 61 wanted to expand here, and that is that fragmentation has prompted an

emphasis on developing and valuing a lop-s~dedform of knowledge in our

society, that is mistaken for "real knowledge" or intellectual

enlightenment.

Many critics of contemporary Western society have articulated somewhat

similar concerns. Oftentimes, this critique seems to be an extension and a

reworking of Weber's theory of Zweckrationalitat, summarily explained in

Chapter I. In relatively recent discourse, Zweckrationalitat seems to have

been metamorphosized into the notion of "instrumental reason," which has

assumed subtle shades of different meanings dependent directly upon the context in which it is used. My purpose is not to delineate the divergent definitions of instrumental reason nor other terms that are used to designate a similar phenomenon. All such terms seem to have, at their core, a meaning faithful to the gist of the disquietude expressed in

Weber's original theory; that is, a malaise about the direction undertaken by contemporary Western societies.

The point being made is that there is a mindset, that began to emerge after the Renaissance in the West, that has caused obstacles for full human development for a majority of its peoples, blocking their impulses to become fully human. That is the way I am using the expression

"instrumental reason," or alternatively Zweckrationalitlt; that is, as a 62 "modern" mindset that has resulted in numerous and troubling repercussions for humankind, particularly in this century. That most relevant to my thesis is that it has been and is the agent responsible for the continuing process of dehumanization in Western society by which I mean that it has desensitized the majority of human beings, atrophied critical knowledge and awareness, as well as snuffed out art as an integral element of human growth; what I would call the numbing of the mind, the "heart," and the soul.

The discussion presented here will begin with a synoptic view of how I see the evolution of fragmention and how this has resulted in a process I have referred to as the "dehumanization of humanity." I will turn to some of the ideas of Paulo Freire, Noam Chornsky and John Kenneth Galbraith to present these thoughts. The work and documented research by this trio amply bring into evidence the operationalization of the methods of instrumental reason. They show how these methods marginalize or alienate humans by limiting, or at the extreme, paralyzing their participation in society and thus inducing fragmentation or dichotomization. And they expose, as well how, dehumanization is engendered and rationalized in what is often an insensitive and indifferent world. Fragmentation and the Modern Mindset: A Synoptic View

It would be appropriate if I begin here by stating what I understand

fragmentation to be. Simply put, it is the gap between thought and feeling,

the gulf that separates acquired knowledge from that which is discovered through the self. By the self, I mean the essence of one's individuality, personhood, the soul; that which Carl Jung would say is at the nucleus of the psyche. I mean it as well as the source of spiritual and other insight, an understanding that transcends the corporeal, the empirical, and which includes what Michael Polanyi has called tacit knowledge,2 a source that clarifies and helps form the meaning and shape of one's life. I must mention here that my concept of the "spiritual" is not affiliated with any form of religion; although there are many individuals in the world with a developed sense of spirituality who have such affiliations. My assumption is that this ineffable, intangible dimension of a being is a necessary component of full humanness.

Later on when I refer to self-knowledge or knowledge of self, I mean by these terms the ability of people to get in touch with their personhood, their feelings, which reside in the "spiritual dimension"; being able to perceive their own strengths and weaknesses; having the control and freedom over their own thoughts and feelings, as opposed to internalizing 64 passively the thoughts and feelings of others, being susceptible to manipulation. The distancing of a human from the self is how I primarily view fragmentation. Another way of explaining this concept is by referring to Adolf Bastian's terms of elementary ideas and ethnic ideas.

Bastian had observed in his extensive travels as an anthropologist, that in all the religions and mythologies of the world, the same themes and images recurred constantly; this he called the elementary. This concept is akin to Jung's notion of the collective unconscious: universal psychic forces whose ordering content are primary images that have always been carried by humans. Bastian noted, however, that when the elementary did occur, it was expressed differently or assumed symbols that were coloured by the local environment or the particular conditions of that society; he called this ethnic or folk ideas. This corresponds in part to

Jung's concept of the personal unconscious, the contents of which are based on personal experiences that have been forgotten or suppressed and might be resurfaced at the conscious level.

The British scientist Richard Sheldrake has proposed a theory that I find enhances and lends credence to Jung's and Bastian's ideas, obviously viewed from a different perspective. The following lengthy quote from

Brian Appleyard, enframes the point that applies in this context.

Appleyard writes that Sheldrake has: 65 ...put forth the theory that our entire view of evolution and causality is wrong. We think of one thing happening and then another and all of this being guided by laws which somehow persist eternally within nature. The past simply provides a causal platform for the present; it has no organic involvement.

Sheldrake finds this improbable on a number of levels and, in any case, these laws of nature are items of faith which can nowhere actually be found in nature. We know of Newton's Laws of Motion but where are they and what are they made of? Instead he proposes that we are made by habit. The past creates patterns that persist via 'rnorphogenetic fields' which impinge on the present. Memory persists in all things. When one human being learns to ride a bicycle it becomes easier for the next human being to learn and so on. The original effort of learning creates a pattern in a field in which riding a bike is added to the realm of possibility and action.

The idea of a form of memory persisting in all matter and events through the medium of an as yet undetected system of fields is utterly at odds with all previous science. Yet it ... bypasses with almost extravagant neatness a number of problems in biology relating to the way organisms are formed. Mechanistically we think we are formed by our genes. But, in reality, we still have no idea how this happens... Conventional biology will say we merely have a problem understanding the way organic molecules 'fold' themselves into particular proteins. This problem will be solved. But, for Sheldrake, the fact that the problem has proved so intractable is because 'folding' occurs not because of some chemical process we have not yet grasped, but because the molecules are subject to the memory of previous foidings. We are formed by the pressure of the past transmitted through rnorphogenetic fields ...

If the theory is true, Sheldrake concludes, 'we shall sooner or later have to give up many of our old habits of thought and adopt new ones: habits that are better adapted to life in a world that is living in the presence of the past--and is also living in the presence of the future, and open to continuing creationQ13

Sheldrake's notion of human beings "formed by the pressure of the past transmitted through morphogenetic fields" corresponds to both the concepts of elementary ideas and the collective unconscious, the way I am interpreting them. And that "living in the presence of the past--and living in the presence of the future," suggests the ideas of the personal 66 unconscious and ethnic or folk ideas.

Briefly, the notion of fragmentation I am meaning might be said to be a

severence of the ethnic ideas, set in a material and historical context,

from the elementary ideas, which are inhered in the psyche. My suggestion

is that our emphasis in the West on developing the intellect, in the past

few centuries, has repressed the development of feelings whose contents

are the elementary ideas.

Ironically, feelings do inform the intellect; Killinger has implied that

without feelings of compassion and empathy to temper the wisdom of

thinking, unethical, dangerous, even evil acts can be rationalized or

justified. Emphasizing only the growth of one aspect of a being is an

antithetic, fragmentary notion of full humanness, and an unholistic

position. Yet that is exactly how I observe most humans developing in our

society: where many seem to have difficulty developing a meaning for life;

where there seems to be no empathy and compassion for other humans, for

the earth and other life forms on earth; and where life is lived on a

superficial level.

A column written by Tom Harpur in The Toronto Star, not too long ago. encapsulates my thoughts and feelings very well. Harpur begins by

invoking the following lines from T. S. Eliot: "Where is the life we have 67 lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowlsdge? Where is

the knowledge we have lost in inf~rmation?'He goes on:

The pundits never tire of telling us we live in a new, information age. The Internet or information highway is touted as the only road to travel. Yet information of itself can simply swamp us. Real knowledge can be swallowed up rather than enhanced by it. Wisdom, the greatest treasure of all, gets trampled ...

Wisdom was much prized by cultures of the past. So-called primitive peoples set great store by it. Individuals who possessed it were the heroes of their time. We, on the other hand, lionize those who excel in sports-hitting baseballs, shooting pucks, sinking basketballs--or those who run corporate empires, adorn the covers of fashion magazines, star in sitcoms, talk shows and movies, or lead the hit parade of pop music.

Is it any wonder many are finding that, deep down, life seems very shallow? Where indeed is the life we have lost in living?...

...in our scale of values, wisdom isn't just at the bottom of the pile; it's also nowhere on our screen of vision at all. Our culture is so entranced by technology, consumerism and bottom-line thinking that the pursuit of wisdom has been practically obliterated from consciousness altogether.

We can recognize wisdom on those rare occasions when we encounter it today but it's notoriously difficult to define. The dictionary is of some help, but not much ... True wisdom is more than experience plus knowledge plus discernment. It has a deeper, more spiritual dimension as well.

Wisdom flows ultimately from a profound awareness of who we really are, where we have come from and what our ultimate destiny is. It derives from having an insight, mythos or understanding of our place in the universe and hence of the meaning of life itself.

The truly wise of all cultures and times have been those who saw or intuited at the deepest possible level what being a human in the cosmic scheme is all about. Our superficial culture barely even raises this central question let alone attempts a satisfactory answer.4

There are several points that Harpur raises in this column that are an inherent part of my thesis. Firstly, his definition of wisdom is very close 68 to my definition of wisdom, which I also equate with the notion of full

humanness and/or enlightenment. Secondly, the notion of wisdom which he

describes as being more than experience, knowledge and discernment but

having a "deeper, more spiritual dimension as well," is strong support for

the development of such a dimension, with which I agree; my suggestion is

that one of the ways it may be developed is through the artistic

experience. Thirdly, Harpur's remarks about the shallowness of existence

felt by many, and of our culture's entrancement with technology and

"bottom-line thinking" almost wiping out the pursuit of wisdom, I find to

be another version of concerns articulated about the effects of

Zweckrationalitat; of the "numbing" of the mind, heart and soul; of

fragmenting the human being. And fourthly, the distinction that Harpur

makes between real knowledge and information is relevant for my

discussion here since it is information (or data gathering or statistics)

that seems to have become more important for Western societies as a

basis for knowledge.

This is not to mean that technology and information gathering are not

important; of course they are. What is of concern, for example, is that the selective "leak" and misuse of information are used to "manipulate"

people's thoughts (done knowingly or unknowingly). Putting faith in that kind of information, mistaking it for real knowledge, being unable to filter it through one's own understanding and "feelings," can only impede the development of real knowledge.

Examples of the first instance as referred to above, that is, the misuse of information, is amply illustrated in Noam Chomsky's works. He writes:

...the leading figure of the public relations industry, Edward Bernays, explains that "the very essence of the democratic process" is "the freedom to persuade and suggest," what he calls "the engineering of consent." "A leader," he continues, "frequently cannot wait for the people to arrive at even general understanding... Democratic leaders must play their part in... engineering ... consent to socially constructive goals and values," applying "scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs"; and although it remains unsaid ... those who control resources will be in a position to judge what is "socially constructive," to engineer consent through the media, and to implement policy through the mechanisms of the state. If the freedom to persuade happens to be concentrated in a few hands, we must recognize that such is the nature of a free society. The public relations industry expends vast resources "educating the American people about the economics facts of life" to ensure a favorable climate for business. Its task is to control "the public mind," which is "the only serious danger confronting the company," an AT&T executive observed eighty years ago.5

I should like to note here that Chomsky's voice is not the lone one in the academic world nor amongst other respected researchers in the West expressing such thoughts. His observations and conclusions, especially regarding mass media, are repeated in different ways by other thinkers.

In Canada, similar views as Chomsky's, regarding the control and manipulation of information, may be found in the writings of University of

Windsor professor of media studies, James Winter. He points out that:

In 1958, the three largest Canadian newspaper chains controlled about 25 percent of daily circulation. By 1970 ... this figure had reached 45 percent. ... in 1980, it was about 57 percent. Today, the Southam-Hollinger chain alone controls 43 percent of circulation. When one adds in Thomson (12%) and the Toronto Sun chain (1 1%), the total is 66 percent for three chains. Despite the best efforts of journalists, concentration in ownership means less diversity in the news. This has serious ramifications for our democracy ... Conglomerate ownership ... inevitably results in a fixation on bottom line profits, which is incompatible with public service. Conglomerate ownership also heightens the potential for a conflict of interest in reporting the news. For example, how could one rely on the four English-language New Brunswick dailies, al! owned by the Irving family to report fairly on the strike by workers at Irving Oil Ltd. in Saint John N.B., which began in the spring of 1994 and is still going two years later? ...

Winter goes on to detail other such conflicts. He also mentions cases of

corporate-political ties that could bias information shared with the

public. He observes:

...establishing who owns the news may seem like a silly exercise. We all "own" the news because we listen to, watch or read it. And besides, it is produced for us, with our interest in mind. But the reality of news media ownership... is one of tremendous concentration in the hands of the corporate elite: the likes of a handful of men with the names Conrad Black, Paul Desmarais, Ken Thomson, and Ted Rogers ... these men are all conservative ideologues. While they don't openly insist that their news media reflect their personal views, broadly speaking this is their ultimate goal and it is accomplished in a number of highly effective ways ... Linda McQuaig points out, "We must always remember that virtually all media outlets are owned by rich, powerful members of the elite. To assume that this fact has no influence on the ideas they present would be equivalent to assuming that, should the entire media be owned by, say, labour unions, women's groups or social workers, this would have no impact on the editorial content."

Far from providing democracy's oxygen, as they claim, the news media today legitimize a fundamentally undemocratic system. Instead of keeping the public informed, they manufacture public consent for policies which favour their owners ...6

Chomsky's and Winter's views vis-a-vis information in the media, ironically enough, are often discussed in the popular media. A researched 71 article on local television newscasts by Antonia Zerbisias, in The Toronto

Star, is an example. Zerbisias makes the case that: "We too often get grabbag journalism, a daily diet of attention- and ratings-grabbing headlines that often say little and explain less about the city and the world around us." She goes on to illustrate how "the commercials, sports, weather, the Hollywood trivia, plus the <

<< and other time-wasting techno toys, not to mention the folksy anchor blah-blah ... eat up 30 minutes or more of a 60 minute newscast in Toronto." The article also reinforces some of Harpur's notion, particularly that "information of itself can simply swamp usJ' and that

"real knowledge can be swallovled up rather than enhanced by it."

Zerbisias tells us that despite being armed with a stop watch and three

VCRs, and viewing and reviewing the different local evening news for one week, she "felt bombarded by information but not particularly well- informed." She comments that, "public opinion polls in both Canada and the

United States indicate that increasing numbers of people watch local news on TV. So how well TV newscasts do their job is of critical importance to how society functions." The article prints a BBM Bureau of

Measurement study, conducted in the spring of 1997, showing that out of a total population of 5,899,970 in Metropolitan Toronto and surrounding regions, 936,000 persons watch one of the local Toronto news shows at

6:00 p.m.7 The thrust of Chomsky's or Winter's and to some extent Zerbisias' message

in the above cited passages is essentially the same as that in the essay by

Kant, where he Dares us to know. Know what? Certainly not just

"information," but rather what Harpur calls "real knowledge." The kind of

enlightened knowledge, Kant explained, meant a process that released one

from immaturity; immaturity being the inability to use one's own

understanding without the guidance of another. The "engineering of

consent," can hardly be thought of as a means to use one's own

understanding without the guidance of another; nor is "the manufacture of

public consent for policies which favour" corporation owners. Engineering or manufacturing consent by leaking selective information is very much a

method of instrumental reason used to control thought rather than help a person strive towards enlightened thinking.

But enlightenment or wisdom is more than real knowledge, suggests

Harpur. It has a deeper more spiritual dimension. My thoughts exactly!

However, this spiritual dimension cannot be universally defined; it is felt differently by each person and in that sense is intimately tied with the realm of what we generally call "feelings." This is what I meant by the second point I raised above; that is, real knowledge and experience must be filtered through one's own "spiritual dimension" which is expressed or comes about through feelings and intuition. I think this is very similar to

Herder's notion of "inner voice," the voice which not only guides one to do 73 right or wrong but also guides each person to an original way of being.

In Western society from the Renaissance onward, when the foundations of the modern world were laid, the emphasis has been to pursue continuously a path of knowledge or intellectual enlightenment that has put our faith in the rational, technological, and the material while perhaps relegating as invalid or non-valuable that which is not, amongst them spiritual enlightenment or knowledge of self; those aspects of being that cannot be measured, quantified, and observed readily. This has obscured our efforts to answer, as Harpur puts it, the question of "what being a human in the cosmic scheme is all about." I am certainly not suggesting here that intellectual enlightenment is not a worthy goal. Of course it is, and it is a vital part of our humanness. What troubles me is that the pursuit of intellectual enlightenment appears to be hampered in the West by the championing of instrumental reason, which has pushed us to rationalize our actions to accommodate, value and expand our knowledge of technological expertise and the world apprehended through our cognitive apparatus, and then have most of us think that that is intellectual enlightenment. It is not! It is mostly unprocessed information.

Humans are more than their senses and physiology or more than the world we have created for ourselves; some believe, as Kason and Harpur, that we are primarily spiritual beings and that is what distinguishes us as 74 humans! And they believe this to be an irrefutable fact even though they have apprehended this knowing thraugh channels that cannot be verifiable and would not be recognized by traditional modern science.

R. D. Laing's following question is a form of answer that hopefully expands my meaning here: "Who could suppose that angels move the stars, or be so superstitious, as to suppose that because one cannot see one's soul at the end of a microscope it does not exist?"^ My suggestion is that a human's spiritual beingness, that which is not visible "at the end of a microscope," transpierces his physical beingness so that even if one is engaged in what tradition would deem to be the most "non-spiritual" of endeavours, that spirit would still inform the being.

Now of course, the question is: what spirit, whose spirit? The "spirit" is that which makes each human self unique and is active in the self- actualized human; that aspect of the being unbounded by time and space which either, I theorize, is activated when one engages in an authentically moving experience, or which lies dormant or atrophies when one is caught up in a society ruled by instrumental reason.

Instrumental Reason's Role

Instrumental reason, explained within the framework o! Killinger's work, 75 is a form of reasoning that champions thinking without feeling. It

gradually developed subsequent to the Renaissance, when humans were

induced to place, increasingly, reason above feeling and perhaps for some,

even replace feeling with reason.

The notion of full humanness involves the growth and development of all

of one's being; considering one faculty to be above another, or precluding

one in favour of another should certainly be construed as being contrary to

a human's raison d16tre. Nonetheless, that seems to be the direction of a society that functions within the unwritten codes of instrumental reason, such as ours. Such a condition may be imputed to the invention of the printing press, which eventually led the West, relative to other traditional cultures, to place greater emphasis on the written word.

In its earlier stages, this technology must have provided an exhilarating sense of freedom. It exposed and made accessible, forgotten, locked up ideas and moved an increasingly wider audience to imagine thoughts never dreamt before, to think thoughts never thought before, to do things never done before. How wonderful it must have been to be at the receiving end of such an ebullient efflorescence of fresh thoughts and ideas that up until then were confined to a minority of learned people and scribes. Soon daily newspapers sprang up in major cities in the West, spreading the news. The proliferation of cafes and "societies" permitted the interchange of 76 opinions, exchange of dialogue, formenting and brewing of new and old

ideas, such as the philosophes did in Paris, and members of the Royal

Academy in England. Whole populations dared, as never dared before.

"Discoveries" of new lands, such as the Americas, the overthrow of old

regimes, revolutions such as The French Revolution, the birth of

democratic nations, of new republics such as The United States. This

exciting flowering of intellectual development and effervescent activity

is well documented and recorded. I need not go into details to make my

point. It boded well for humanity. But as we know, things did not go as

thought; they rarely do. As John Eisenberg has aptly remarked, society "is

one big crapshoot."g

The power of print technology was formidable. Marshall McLuhan proposed,

that it propelled humzns in the West to think and create in a linear

sequential fashion which stressed a highly defined content; a content

which did not leave much room for the audience to imbue with their own

experiences. The result was that it produced a "society that cares deeply

about the logical, scientific, and mathematical concerns ...at the expense

of some of the more aesthetic or personal forms of intelligence."lo This

appears to have precipitated the Scientific Age which for many meant the

localization of knowledge in the objective world, habituating man to try to feel and react solely with his intellect--the only way rational man could and should react. It is the general consensus that this was 77 precipitated by the philosophy of Francis Bacon who, in the sixteenth

century, advocated !he inductive experimental method as the only true

path to knowledge.

Feminist thinkers, like Marilyn French, make many interesting comments

that reinforce such a position. French claims, for example, that Bacon's

thoughts were the first that established science as a propagational

vehicle for a society and culture that is controlled and organized by men,

that is, a patriarchal society. She writes:

Bacon set science on a course which has not been questioned until this decade: a course of attempting to dominate rather than understand and cooperate with nature, based on a belief that dominance hierarchies exist in nature. This belief has been undermined by study of ecology and of subatomic phenomena.

Descartes was important, if not alone, in furthering the kind of thinking Bacon had advocated. Descartes posited a split between mind and matter which was extended to fragment mind and body, mind and feeling ...

The new mode of thought ushered in what is called instrumentality, that is, people began to view other people and things not as ends in themselves but as instruments for the furtherance of their own ends. Those ends invariably involved power, which is its own motor, since one can never have enough of it. Instrumentality is therefore limitless: it is a continuing search for an end that is precluded by the very nature of the means used. Without instrumental thought, science would not have taken the course it did.11

As an expansion of the context within which this discourse is placed, it should be noted that French argues that a patriarchal culture's dominant principles are masculine as opposed to feminine. The following brief excerpts from French's writing explain these principles: The feminine principle is not the realm of the human, but of nature, and therefore those associated with it are considered nonhuman...

The terrible and terrifying aspect of nature (and by extension, women) is seen as hostile not only to civilization but to all its manifestations--legitimacy, authority, and significance. For the "feminine" mind, the only significance resides in being, and usually that mind is granted no relation with intellect. "Feminine" thinking is reflective, associative, and circular; it is found in some male poets. "Masculine" thought is of course rational--that is, logical, linear, and highly exclusionary. It always moves toward a specific goal ... Renaissance thinkers discriminated between spoken and written languages in gender terms: the spoken word "is stripped of all its powers, it is a female part of language...j ust as its intellect is passive; writing, on the other hand, is the active intellect, the 'male principle' of language. It alone harbours the truth."

These categories are translated into actions and attitudes. The men who have been most esteemed are those who controlled most-- people, territory, ideas, wealth. No other qualities are required of those who control--not humanity or decency, love or respect for others, not truthfulness, principle, or scruple. A woman who behaved in this way would be seen as a demon.12

Although French's views are framed within a feminist philosophy, a topic

beyond the discussion of my thesis, nonetheless, her remarks above

reinforce the notion of instrumental reason championing thinking without feeling; that is, creating an environment that is dehumanizing, not just for females, but also for disempowered males, as French readily admits; this is, the majority of humans.

The inductive experimental method has wrought a form of thinking that has infused the development of science since the Renaissance. Consider that chief among the discoveries in science during the Renaissance was

Galileo Gatilei's confirmation of the heliocentric theory. Sir Isaac 79 Newton's refinement of Galilee's theories and development of the method

of scientific reasoning based on empirical data and matiiematical proof in

the seventeenth century really brought to the fore the scientific age and

scientific inquiry in the west. In the following century, known as the

Enlightenment, the typical eighteenth century "literate citizen of the

world believed that Newton's laws ... were a perfect model of science ... and that the model was directly applicable to the 'science of rnan'.lt13 The science of man? To speak or to think of humans in terms of only science epitomizes the essence of what I am trying to express here. It is in such a mindset that we see the development of a somewhat mechanically ordered view of the world and the intellectualization, or as French would term it, the masculinization of all of humankind's endeavours.

Jose Argiielles makes the point forcefully when he notes:

...the most fundamental errors begin in assuming the absolute power of reason, or of right. This was the error of Faustian civilization, which created a science without conscience and an art without vision. Right (in French droit, the same word for law), ratio, reason, rote- -these are key words for the most fundamental assumptions of the technological civilizations that grew out of the European Renaissance.14

Some have suggested that such thoughts have made of reason an ideology.

When reason becomes an ideology, it is pursued for its own sake rather than for what it is meant to do: help one arrive at choices about life and living in a thoughful, patient, intelligent way, as I would suggest the

Enlightenment thinkers would have thought of the purpose of reason. 80 As already made abundantly clear, I fully support Kant's dictum: Dare to know. He goaded us to have the courage to make use of our own understanding! Now this to me would entaii, amongst other things, critical knowledge and critical self-knowledge. I have doubts and question the means we have used in the West to attain this knowledge and the limiting type of knowledge that we appear to have sought and uncovered. Because in this process, we have amongst other things, obscured our self-knowledge, limiting personal and spiritual growth--these, I would suggest, supply us with the courage we need to use our own understanding; to understand the manipulative forces in society that control our thoughts, that direct our wants and needs or the obverse, that prevent us from appreciating the wonder and beauty of life. For the knowledge that we seem to promote and value is that which is externally and exclusively produced and transmitted by its society rather than in concert with knowledge as that which is discovered and understood through the experiences of one's being in the world, of understanding one's self.

It seems that the agenda of The Enlightenment to "disenchant" the world, that is the goal to liberate humans from fear and superstition in the hopes of establishing their sovereignty meant the dissolution of myths, rituals and traditions, in many cases the fount of the artistic experience. In its place was substituted a handed down knowledge predominantly acquired through the methods of empirical scientific inquiry. I am certainly not 81 denigrating scientific inquiry, just bemoaning the transferrence of its applications and methods as the only valid procedure for all forms of inquiry, especially in its narrowly interpreted form as found in positivist philosophy and "scientism."

The result of all this has been the eventual polarization of thought and feeling in the West; the separation of art from life, the segregation of artist from public, leaving a vacuum in humans that only an active reengagement through the artistic cum spiritual experience may make whole again. This is the paradigm of our times; a time which still places reason above feeling, as opposed to balancing reason with feeling--and a reason which seems peculiar only to Western intellectual thought: instrumental reason.

Carl Jung wrote just before his death:

Our present lives are dominated by the goddess Reason, who is our greatest and most tragic illusion... In a period of human history when all available energy is spent in the investigation of nature, very little attention is paid to the essence of man, which is his psyche, although many researches are made into its conscious functions. But the really complex and unfamiliar part of the mind... is still virtually

The problem is stated in neurophysiological terms by Dr. Paul McLean, who calls it Schizophysiology, which he describes in the fol lowing manner:

...a dichotomy in the function of the phylogenetically old and new cortex that might account for differences between emotional and intellectual behavior. While our intellectual functions are carried on 82 in the newest and most highly developed part of the brain, our affective behavior continues to be dominated by a relatively crude and primitive system, by archaic structures in the brain whose fundamental pattern has undergone but little change in !he whole course of evolution from mouse to man.16

Both of these last quotes affirm the existence of fragmentation in man, one psychological, the other physiological. Both suggest as well that in the course of human history we have developed our conscious/intellectual functions, which are limited by our sensory and cognitive apparatuses, while shrouding in darkness an aspect of ourself which obviously also guides our behaviour. The implication is that we have a need for the illumination of the unexplored regions of the mind/brain; that dark region of our psyche/the archaic structures of our brain. One definite avenue for this exploration is the arts. For the symbols produced through art or the reflection and feelings induced after being engaged in the artistic experience may come to illumine the self. This is the why of art which seems to be intuitively grasped by preschool children or by traditional societies that are not yet within the sphere of Western hegemony. And it is an experience that defines itself as you engage in it--it is possibly the only way where, to borrow from Freire, one can "say his own word, to name the world"; a form of self-affirmation. It is this intent of art which has been irrevocably obscured as Western civilization from the

Renaissance onward pursued its particular path of intellectual enlightenment while shrouding in darkness its spiritual essence. 83 However, most of us are far from being inte!lectually enlightened beings

either. We have Seen deluded into thinking we have a semblance of control

over our lives and our minds; the majority of us do not. Oddly enough, the

same catalytic "channels" that brought the West an infusion of liberating thoughts, a few centuries ago, now seem to be doing the opposite. The

mass media of today, expanded manifold, are still delivering messages, are still broadcasting information, are still helping shape our minds and our societies. But what type of messages and information are they delivering? In what way are they shaping our society and our minds? I will argue, in the next few pages, that the mass media of today, more than ever, transmit the unwritten codes of instrumental reason and in so doing assist in the dehumanization of humanity.

Dehumanization of Humanity

"Humanization... is man's vocation. Dehumanization ... a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human,"l7 is a simple declaration by

Freire yet is potent in its subtextual meanings. Simply, our "call," our

"purpose" as humans is to become fully human, and that which deters us from this direction distorts our humanity. But of course this all depends on how one defines being fully human. In the first part of this thesis, I explained how I viewed the notion of full humanness which, to reiterate briefly, included: "...the freedom of mind to pursue and seek answers to the 84 questions of who we are, where we come from and where are going. It is the age old philosophical quest of acquiring and possessing wisdom, of being enlightened."

There is really no set definition for being fully human; nonetheless I do share the substance of what I believe Freire considers to be a fully human being--that is, a person who is a free Subject working to transform his or her world and in the process discovering and creating his or her self. For

Freire, as well as for me, a subject "denotes those who know and act, in contrast to objects, which are known and acted upon."l8

Note how, in a certain manner, this definition amplifies and reinforces

Kant's motto of the state of enlightenment, namely: Sapere Aude! It does take courage, risk or daring to ferret out, to seek, to confront, and to know so that one may surmount that which stands in the way of iiving life as a fully human being. That is real knowledge. Thus the onus is on the individual to live or act in one's own story. The alternative would be to live and work within an already prescribed fountain of knowledge, an accepted way of life; of living another person's narrative, acting out a life written or composed by someone else, passively internalizing it. And that,

I would submit is precisely what most of us are lulled to do, including most of us who work in the education system. 85 The way I see this may have already been inferred from the implications

made in the first part of this thesis. There I stated that there seem to be

various ideological positions on education. One extreme suggests the view

that humans are born blank slates, and much like machines may be

programmed to serve a specific purpose or live a certain kind of life; the

other extreme sees humans as being completely autonomous creatures who

are able to learn and live by instinct and intuition alone. I suggested such

ideologies were symptoms of a deeper structural problem that is

embedded in our society; this is what we see reflected in our educational

system and this is what drives "the hidden agenda" in our schools. And as

such it has to be factored into this discussion, however skimpily so.

The position I hold is that the source of the present conflicts in education stem from a system which, on the one hand, seems to subscribe to and promotes objectives that are holistic and humanizing in essence with the tacit mandate of facilitating the development of philosophical and practical wisdom in humans, akin to developing what Freire calls a free subject. On the other hand, however, public education seems to be unfolding in a milieu that is often the antithesis of holism and humanism; in an environment where the values and behavior of the majority are set by and seem to serve the needs of an influential and controlling minority whose primary goal is not necessarily the development of universally free subjects but what seems to be the maintenance of the status quo. 86 In the first part of this thesis, I tried to point out that there is really nothing in the policy documents for Ontario's public schools that would prevent a teacher's facilitation in helping a child's being in the world.

Further, I pinpointed to excerpts from policy documents and guidelines that would support a teacher's quest to help create a conducive environment that would help the full development of a child. However, there are factors and forces in our society, such as economic or political, that dictate what one consciously or unconsciously internalizes to survive or to subsist. This rationale is at the hub of instrumental reason; and it is an anti-human rationale that is tolerated and perpetuated by the most well-meaning and well-intentioned of people, including educators.

Egerton Ryerson, for example, thought that he had adopted a "humanistic" approach to education, when he founded Public Education in Ontario in the

1830's. Yet many have argued convincingly that he also established what came to be known as the "hidden curriculum," which, putting it crudely, meant the indoctrination of pupils to a pre-established mold; inducting them to the workings of the status quo. My point in bringing this up is that, there still is a hidden curriculum in our schools; it is fashioned by the invisible pen that reflects our culture and our society. The hidden curriculum is the subject explored in Sandro Contenta's Rituals of Failure.

He writes:

In the face of challenges that threaten our very existence, we seem to demonstrate that unique ability to look forward and fall backward at the same time. It's as though we're stuck somewhere between a recognition that survival demands creative solutions and a desire to preserve our culture by continuing to act in ways that got us into trouble in the first place. Schools today are mired in this contradiction.

The above observations are another way of phrasing the conflicts I have witnessed in the education system, that is of promoting one thing but operating within a system set up to do just the opposite. Contenta continues:

"We say that as a society we want independent learners, critical thinkers, I'm not sure society really wants that," says Angus McNeil, the principal of Coal Harbour High School near Darmouth, Nova Scotia. "If you put these guys out there who can think for themselves, they're not going to be told what to do anymore. It's a mixed message to the kid... What do we value? Obedience, respect for authority; we tend not to want that challenged. We discipline kids for challenging it. 'We want you to be a critical thinker but you open your mouth, buddy, and you're dead meat.' ...if we. .. said, 'Every kid in this province is going to come out with critical thinking skills,' My God, they'd tear the place apart! They'd start saying, 'We're not going to kill any more of that ozone stuff and we're not going to create any more greenhouse effect. We're going to make the world safe to live.' There's almost a lack of trust and honesty in the whole system... What we want everybody to do is talk in monosylfables and monotones. Education is a process, it's not a dozen eggs. But what we've got today isn't a joy or a lifelong pursuit. It's drudgery. It's 'meet the test and be evaluated.' It's a system of hurdles and I'm not sure I can overcome that or change it."

Contenta comments:

The seemingly immovable force McNeil feels unable to resist has been identified by educational researchers as the "hidden curriculum" of schools. Through the structure and practice of schooling, it constitutes a kind of arithmetic of socialization that tries to burrow deep inside the children and mold their very spirits ... Its lessons are passivity and submission, and it is responsible for an education system that fails both students and society. 19

Although I quite agree with Contenta, I disagree in part with the seeming 88 conclusion that it is the education system that fails both students and society. Contenta himself presents arguments and examples that would suggest it is not necessarily the education system that fails society but rather, reflects a problem whose roots originate in society as a whole.

Benjamin Levin, an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the

University of Manitoba seems to be delivering a similar message, in the following letter penned to The Globe and Mail:

...we've had 30 years of changing curricula, changing teacher training, and the like without making much difference. Many of the key influences on children's education lie outside the schools--in families and in the broader economic and social structure and culture. Young people are bombarded with messages from many sources telling them to be concerned about themselves and today rather than with the future. Do we live in a society which really values selflessness and hard work, or instant gratification through shopping? If the latter, why would we expect schools to be able to instill attitudes which are not found elsewhere? It has been suggested that ... schools are the last social institution we have ... which still gives the message that you can be whatever you want if you work hard.

Students aren't dumb. They look around and see that the school's message simply isn't true. Canada exports large numbers of its most skilled people, largely because they can earn more money elsewhere and feel that earning more money is more important than staying in Canada. That isn't something they learned in school ... The evidence is that economic outcomes for high school graduates without any post- secondary training are not much better than the outcomes for dropouts. Why be unemployed with grade 12 when you can be unemployed with grade lo? We seem to be creating a generation of children raised in poverty, even though we know that childhood poverty is highly related to low educational achievement and low economic status in later life. Meanwhile, our private sector has a dismal record in worker training, and the federal government has severely cut its support for training. In short, we are foolish if we think that changes in school organization will overcome deeply rooted problems in our economic and social structure.20 89 The following exclamatory expression by Ron Watts, a former principal

and vice-chancellor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario looks at the

problem this way:

Ultimately, I think we've been beating around the wrong bush all along. It's not the curriculum that's the answer, it's the teacher. A lousy curriculum taught by a brilliant teacher will bring the student alive. A superb curriculum taught by a lousy reacher will kill him.2 1

Levin, in stating that "many of the key influences on children's education lie outside the schools--in families and in the broader economic and social structure and culture," has zeroed in on a point that makes the crucial difference not just for pupils and families, but for teachers as well. Although I agree with Watt's assertion, I do so with the following proviso: one has to take into account that the teacher himself is also part of that same influential society that has had a heavy hand in shaping and molding him. Thus, the hidden curriculum will always persist as long as the "deeply rooted problems in our economic and social structure" persist.

And those problems will continue to persist as long as the values and behavior of the majority are set by and seem to serve the needs of an influential and controlling minority whose primary goal, as I have stated above, seems to be the maintenance of the status quo, what Galbraith has called the culture of contentment.

Galbraith tries to explain clearly the manifestations and the social 90 effects of the culture of contentment; a culture of which he considers himself !o be a member, economically at least, thus making his analyses and observations more poignant. I should mention here that although the work of Galbraith, and later on Chomsky and his colleagues are in reference to items as they pertain mostly to the United States, the findings or conclusions drawn may be generalized with implications for most Western countries including Canada.

Here is a description of the culture of contentment that Galbraith offers:

In past times, the economically and socially fortunate were ... a small minority--characteristically a dominant and ruling handful. They are now a majority ... not of all citizens but of those who actually vote. ...They will be called the Contented Majority, the Contented Electoral Majority or ...the Culture of Contentment. ... this does not mean they are a majority of all those eligible to vote. They rule under the rich cloak of democracy, a democracy in which the less fortunate do not participate. Nor does it mean ... that they are silent in their contentment. They can be... very angry and very articulate about what seems to invade their state of self-satisfaction.22

In a nutshell, the members of the culture of contentment are the majority of those citizens who are the decision makers of their society; what some call the elite. They have a life they are loath to give up for anyone or anything; they are the self-actualized, but not of the same ilk that Maslow talked about; that is, the "compassionate improvers and reformers of society, the effective fighters against injustice, inequality" and so on. The self-actualizers of the culture of contentment are "the economically and socially fortunate" self-indulgers, who in their opinion, uphold 91 civilization, little knowing that the underclass it disdains upholds their

lifestyle. Apropos of this, Galbraith's following observation is quite

telling:

There is no greater modern illusion, even fraud, than the use of the single term work to cover what for some is ... dreary, painful or socially demeaning and what for others is enjoyable, socially reputable and economically rewarding ...

From the foregoing comes one of the basic facts of modern economic society: the poor in our economy are needed to do the work that the more fortunate do not do and would find manifestly distasteful, even distressing. And a continuing supply and resupply of such workers is always needed ... later generations do not wish to follow their parents into physically demanding, socially unacceptable or otherwise disagreeable occupation; they escape or seek to escape the heavy lifting to a more comfortable and rewarding life... it is what education is generally meant to accomplish. But from this comes the need for the resupply or, less agreably, for keeping some part of the underclass in continued and deferential subjection.23

Barbara Killinger offers this observation on the role of work:

...work plays an essential role in defining the Self. Our well-being springs from a sense of accomplishment. We develop our strengths, set goals, and overcome difficult hurdles along the way. Our self- confidence comes through developing skills and mastering tasks that contribute to an entity greater than ourselves. As anyone who has lost a job will attest, without work, our personalities suffer profound emotionai disorientation.24

To want to keep a portion of the citizenry in "continued and deferential subjection," is a dehumanizing proposition. It is treatkg the other as an object, a commodity to be used and discarded for another's comfort or pleasure. Such persons have no voice; as deferential subjects, they are marginalized beings, and in their marginalization are silent, passive members of society incapable of transforming their world mostly because of an undevelopped sense of Self. It is substantially similar observations, 92 more passionately expressed, that appear to have motivated Freire to devise his pedagogy of the oppressed, as a method of liberating those caught up in such a culture of silence.

Dialogue is a central element in Freire's pedagogy. He writes:

Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which men transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. Men are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.

But while to say the true word ... is to transform the world, saying that word is not the privilege of some few men, but the right of every man. Consequently, no one can say a true word alone--nor can he say it for another, in a prescriptive act which robs others of their words.

...dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming--between those who deny other men the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them. Those who have been denied their primordial right to speak their word must first reclaim this right and prevent the continuation of this dehumanizing aggression.25

Dialogue, however, cannot exist alone. Freire names six other necessary components of dialogue. The first he mentions is love. He writes: "If I do not love the world--if I do not love life--if I do not love men4 cannot enter into dialogue."as The contented majority, so set in promoting their self-interest, are unable to love in Freire's sense of the word, and hence are unable to engage in dialogue. In many ways Freire's concept of love is similar to Frankl's. The latter suggests meaning in life is found in three different ways. The second meaning he describes as follows: ...by experiencing something or encountering someone.

He further elaborates:

The second way of finding a meaning in life is by experiencing something--such as goodness, truth and beauty--by experiencing nature and culture or, last but not least, by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness--by loving him.27

The second element of dialogue according to Freire is founded on humility, where the stance is accepting, non-judgemental, participatory. The third is faith, especially faith in humanity. The fourth he mentions is mutual trust. The fifth is hope. "Hope does not consist in crossing one's arms and waiting. As long as I fight, I am moved by hope: and if I fight with hope, then I can wait. As the encounter of men seeking to be more fully human, dialogue cannot be carried on in a climate of hopelessness." And the final necessary element of dialogue is critical thinking. "For the nai've thinker," writes Freire, "the important thing is accommodation to this normalized

"today." For the critic, the important thing is the continuing transformation of reality, in [sic] behalf of the continuing humanization of

The stance of the critic in combination with dialogue, as described by

Freire, is what I take to be an intellectually enlightened human. The other components of dialogue Freire describes such as love, hope, faith, humility and trust, are in the domain of feelings; these latter added to the stance of the critic comprise what might be a fully human being. 94 The Freirian concepts, although initially developed in the depths of the

Brazi!ian culture for a voiceless peasantry, are confluent in many respects with some of Chomsky's theories, borne out of the North

American experience. On the surface there may seem to be a great guii between an illiterate and impoverished Brazilian and a middle-class North

American; yet on one level, at least, both the Freirian and Chomskyan protagonists may be deemed to be marginalized as opposed to integral members of their respective societies, and they are in the majority. It is this marginalization, and all that it implies, which shows how dehumanization is played out and rationalized in our increasingly insensitive world.

Chomsky's findings suggest that the mass media in Western culture are preventing the majority of humans, to use Freire's words, "their primordial right to speak their word" and are contributing to a

"dehumanizing aggression." The first chapter of Chomsky's Manufacturing

Consent, co-authored with Edward S. Herman, opens with the following:

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their tunction to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.2 g

The mandate for our schools is to "inform, and to inculcate individuals 95 with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society." The mandate, at least, in a democratic, pluralistic, multicultural society such as ours, is not to inculcate with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that benefit mostly one group of people, such as the contented majority, which are a minority when compared to the rest of the citizenry. But that is exactly what happens when the "institutional structures of the larger society" are in the hands of a concentrated minority and especially when that minority has the added advantage of influencing the majority through mass media. And so in effect, the vision and agenda of the kind of society we are building are very much influenced by the media. This Chomsky amply illustrates with documented case studies and numerous deeply researched references. One he cites, for example, relates to what he calls the study of "paired examples." These reveal

...a consistent pattern of radically dichotomous treatment, in the predicted direction. In the case of enemy crimes, we find outrage; allegations based on the flimsiest evidence, often simply invented, and uncorrectible, even when conceded to be fabrication... Where the locus of responsibility is at home, we find precisely the opposite; silence or apologetics; avoidance of personal testimony and specific detail; world-weary wisdom about the complexities of history and foreign cultures that we do not understand; narrowing of focus to the lowest level of planning or understandable error in confusing circumstances; and other forms of evasion.

The murder of one priest in Poland in 1984 by policeman who were quickly apprehended, tried, and jailed merited far more media coverage than the murder of 100 prominent Latin American religious martyrs, including the Archbishop of San Salvador and four raped American churchwomen, victims of the U.S.-backed security forces. Furthermore, the coverage was vastly different in style--gory details repeated prominently in the former case, evasion in the latter--as was the attribution of responsibility: to the highest level 96 in Poland and even the Soviet Union in the former case, and in the latter, tempered allusions to the centrist government unable to constrain violence of left and right, in utter defiance of the factual record that was largely suppressed.30

This is how the media fare according to Chomsky and his colleague:

In contrast to the standard conception of the media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and their independence of authority, we have spelled out and applied a propaganda model that indeed sees the media as serving a "societal purpose," but not that of enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process by providing them with the information needed for the intelligent discharge of political responsibilities. On the contrary, a propaganda model suggests that the "societal purpose" of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state. The media serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeping debate within the bounds of accepted premisesg-,

These conclusions, even if sometimes phrased in strong language, are based on prolific, and, at times, irrefutable existing recorded evidence.

The "paired example" cited above illustrates the point being made. The information provided to the media and by the media regarding the murder of the Polish priest clearly was meant to discredit the Polish state, and by association, the Soviet Union, Poland being a member of the Warsaw

Pact in those days before the dismantling of the Soviet Union, when the latter was still considered the "Evil Empire"; it behooved the West that it be thought of as such. Whereas the report of the murders in San Salvador were largely subdued and became almost a case of "blaming the victims"; the motive implied is to protect the government backed by the United

States and by association, such interests--a typical example of a method 97 of instrumental reason. A slightly different slant provided in Galbraith's thesis offers another explanation for such a motive. He writes:

...while government in general has been viewed as a burden [by the Culture of Contentment], there have been ... significant and costly exceptions from this broad condemnation. ...Social Security, medical care at higher income levels, farm income supports and financial guarantees to depositors in ill-fated banks and savings and loan enterprises.

Specifically favored also have been military expenditures ... they are reflected in the economy in wages, salaries, profits and assorted subsidies to research and other institutions ... Weapons expenditure, unlike for example, spending for the urban poor, rewards a very comfortable constituency.

More important ... military expenditures... have been seen in the past as vital protection against the gravest perceived threat to continued comfort and contentment. That threat was from Communism... This fear, in turn, extending on occasion to clinical paranoia, assured support to the military establishment.

...It supported expenditure and military action against such improbable threats as those from Angola, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Grenada, El Salvador ...32

Now what does this all mean for my thesis? Let me very briefly recapitulate. My contention is that each person has a right to develop his or her full humanness; our education system has a tacit mandate to do so.

However, we are not successful at implementing such a mandate because our schools reflect the values of our culture and society; values which are shaped by the ethic of instrumental reason. Instrumental reason's values have been internalized such that our society eschews feeling and is concerned seemingly with the development of a way of thinking peculiar to it, thinking which cannot be construed as intellectual enlightenment. On 98 the contrary, it is a form of thinking that promotes intellectual dienation, marginalizing the majority by preventing the development of real knowledge and thus their meaningful participation in decisions about their lives. My purpose here is to substantiate these assertions.

The methods of instrumental reason have created societies that produce humans that will conform to their modus operandi-purposive instrumental rationality. One of the ways this is propagated is through the media. Chomsky has some potent observations in this regard. He writes:

...the major media--particularly, the elite media that set the agenda that others generally follow--are corporations "selling priviledged audiences to other businesses."... It would hardly come as a surprise if the picture of the world they present were to reflect the perspectives and interests of the sellers, the buyers, and the product. [Those Galbraith calls the culture of contentment.]

Furthermore, those who occupy managerial positions in the media, or gain status within them as commentators, belong to the same privileged elites, and might be expected to share the perceptions, aspirations, and attitudes of their associates reflecting their own class interests as well ...

The influence of advertisers is sometimes far more direct. "Projects unsuitable for corporate sponsorship tend to die on the vine," the London Economist observes, noting that "stations have learned to be sympathetic to the most delicate sympathies of corporations." The journal cites the case of public TV station WNET, which "lost its corporate underwriting from Gulf+Western as a result of a documentary called 'Hunger for Profit', about multinationals buying up huge tracts of land in the third world." ...

Many other factors induce the media to conform to the requirements of the state-corporate nexus. To confront power is costly and difficult; high standards of evidence and argument are imposed, and critical analysis is naturally not welcomed by those who are in a position to react vigorously and to determine the array of rewards and punishments. Conformity to a "patriotic agenda," in contrast imposes no such costs. Charges against official enemies barely require substantiation; they are furthermore, protected from correction, 99 which can be dismissed as apologetics for the criminals or as missing the forest for the trees.33

The idea of journalists in the major media internalizing the values of the elite, what Galbraith calls the culture of contentment, conforming to a

"patriotic" agenda as a means of survival, does not bode well for a public that receives most of the "information" about the world through such a media, the media being the most influential arbiter in the lives of most

Westerners.

I share James Winter's observations in this regard. He writes:

Daily and perhaps hourly, Canadians are presented with information, ideas and viewpoints which help to describe and explain the events and indeed the very nature of the world around them. In this way we learn about the latest political election or about the economy, but also about wars or "conflicts" in faraway places, coups, earthquakes, and other selected events. This information builds upon our previous store of facts and values: what American journalist Walter Lippmann once called the "pictures in our heads" of the world around us.

In the global village, these pictures are almost entirely assembled and constructed by the news media, rather than resulting from personal experience. A sort of living montage, these media creations form our individual and collective world views. Thus, the news media are essential to the formation of attitudes, opinions, beliefs and values in our society. They play an essential role both in reflecting our culture to us, and in creating that culture itself. lndeed, some authors have argued that the media play a significant role in determining our consciousness.

Given this crucial role played by the media in our society, it is essential that a broad cross-section of the public owns them. Such broad-based ownership would greatly enhance the diversity of information and opinion. Indeed it is fundamental to democracy itself .3 4

And, as already pointed out, Winter shows that in Canada, most news 100 media, and thus much of the dissemination of news, are concentrated in the hands of a minority of men.

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century with its flourish of intellectual development and infusion of new thoughts and ideas, such as liberty, fraternity and equality for all the people inspired succeeding generations to work for such a goal. The message was transmitted in pamphlets, in books, in newspapers and journals. To this day we use those same apparatuses, supplemented and expanded by electronic updated versions. However, such media seem no longer to be used to provide the inspiration to transform the world for the better, to ease the suffering and extend the happiness of all humankind.

Let me make one point clear, if I have not done so already, being fully human means transforming the world to make a better life for one's self and all other humans; by extention this would have to include everything else in this world since we interact with and are dependent on everything on this planet, directly or indirectly. Making an individual's or a group's milieu better at the expense of another person or group, is engaging clearly in a dehumanizing form of activity. But of course this does not mean that one is automatically entitled to a better world without effort; as Freire put it, one cannot cross one's arms and hope. But neither does one shut others out because they are unable to understand, nor make informed 101 decisions. It has to be a mutually responsible act. Unfiltered information has to be presented in an understandeable manner and allowed to filter through each person's system. Ths: is one of the roles of media in a democratic society, as well as one of the roles of public education.

But, in the case of mass media at least, their role, as Chomsky, Winter, and many others have documented, primarily seems to be "to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state." As such, they extinguish any possibility of a "dialogue" that might occur. It becomes in Freirian terms a

"prescriptive act which robs others of their words," and makes one passively accept what others have thought for them, or make one indifferent to the whole experience. This does not bode well for the pursuit of enlightenment.

When one constructs a view of the world in reference to what is being fed through the media, and when the media are heavily biased in one direction, where is the substance one needs in order to shape an informed opinion?

Where is the support one needs to deveiop independent thinking, become intellectually enlightened? I would suggest there are none. Instead of being armed with "real knowledge" so that one may engage in dialogue with others to understand one's self and the world, one has to play a role in a story scripted by another; or is shut out of the conversation 102 altogether because the method of communicaticn is shrouded in obscurist,

cpecialist language or means; or the trickles of information being seeped

are selected to give only one view. Chomsky again:

Case by case, we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs that may be severe, even in a society that lacks such means of control as death squads, psychiatric prisons, or extermination camps. The very structure of the media is designed to induce conformity to established doctrine. In a three-minute stretch between commercials, or in seven hundred words, it is impossible to present unfamiliar thoughts or surprising conc!usions with the argument and evidence required to afford them some credibility. Regurgitation of welcome pieties faces no such problem.

It is a natural expectation, on uncontroversial assumptions, that the major media and other ideological institutions will generally reflect the perspectives and interests of established power.35

The educational system, generally reflects the "perspectives and interests of established power"; its very structure is designed "to induce conformity." It is supposed to help individuals develop independent critical thoughts and ideas; at least that is what educational and societal rhetoric indicate; that enlightenment is a desired and worthy goal. Yet the way in which society and the educational system operate seem to preclude such development; on the contrary, we seem to be perpetuating and imposing on our students the same regurgitated, digested, handed down experience of the world we have inherited.

Chomsky's following analysis bears repeating:

The dean of US. journalists, Walter Lippmann, described a "revolution" in "the practice of democracy" as "the manufacture of consent" has become "a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government." This is a natural development when "the 103 common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality." He was writing shortly after World War I...

Fifteen years later, Harold L~sswellexplained ... that we should not succumb to "democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests." They are not; the best judges are the elites, who must, therefore, be ensured the means to impose their will, for the common good. When social arrangements deny them the requisite force to compel obedience, it is necessary to turn to "a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda" because of the "ignorance and superstition [of] ...the masses." ...

After World War II, ...historian Thomas Bailey observed that "because the masses are notoriously short-sighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our statesman are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests. Deception of the people may in fact become increasingly necessary, unless we are willing to give our leaders in Washington a freer hand."

At another point on the spectrum, the conservative contempt for democracy is succinctly articulated by Sir Lewis Namier, who writes that "there is no free will in the thinking and actions of the masses, any more than in the revolutions of planets, in the migrations of birds, and in the plunging of hordes of lemmings into the sea." ...

The people must be kept in ignorance, reduced to jingoist incantations, for their own good. ...so the "cool observers" must create the "necessary illusions" and "emotionally potent oversimplifications" that keep the ignorant and stupid masses disciplined and content.

Despite the frank acknowledgment of the need to deceive the public, it would be an error to suppose that practitioners of the art are typically engaged in conscious deceit ... It is probable that the most inhuman monsters, even the Himmlers and the Mengeles, convince themselves that they are engaged in noble and courageous acts.36

In the last few lines cited above, Chomsky seems to be reinforcing

Maslow's theory of the "downlevelling of the motivations," referred to in

Chapter 1, where, to put it briefly, a "purely materialistic motivation is preferred to a social or metamotivational one, or to a mixture of all three"; very much symptomatic of a society dominated by instrumental reason.

If I seem to be relying too much on Chomsky as an authority, it is because

his observations as well as his conclusions are based on carefully

researched documentation corroborated by a myriad of respectable

scholars and researchers which he lists in his publications. And they do

support the gist of the arguments I am making here.

Although Chomsky has been accused by his detractors of stirring up

unfounded allegations or creating conspiracy theories, I would suggest his

message is not unlike that of Kant: Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding without the guidance of another. As Freire notes:

"The peasant begins to get courage to overcome his dependence when he realizes that he is dependent. Until then, he goes along with the boss and says 'What can I do? I'm only a peasant."'37

One cannot become intellectually enlightened when conditioned to think

"I'm only a peasant"; has been made to passively accept what others have ordained, or has become indifferent to the whole experience of living in society, just as O'Reilly was. He was the one who was spiritually and intellectually lethargic on "his steady television diet" until he was

"provoked into feeling hopeful"; in other words, until he found a meaning in his life. The agent was a caring teacher, the medium was the art of 105 literature; the experience transformed him and humanized him. O'Reilly's

is a transformative experience that was a blend of an intellectual and

spiritual awakenmg. And, becoming fully human entails both intellectual

and spiritual enlightenment as well as what we do not as yet know or have

not as yet named.

What is becoming disconcerting is that many members of the "deceived public" are now themselves using the media to deceive the media and consequently the public. This comes very much to the fore in an article written by Antonia Zerbisias. She writes of "ordinary people" learning

"how to wrangle reporters and to get their message into the media and out to the public ... how to manipulate the media." She reports:

It's a way to make your small voice heard above the propaganda deluge from slick corporate communicators...

That's why Marlene Freise is here [at a training session on how to manipulate the media]. She's the leader of the HIV-T Group, a lobby for people who have been transfused with the virus that causes AIDS. Why ... would a reporter pick on her?

Media trainer Ian Taylor explains: "What if she comes up against Claire Hoy? (The columnist and broadcaster has written a book ... that argued AIDS research funding was disproportionately high compared to that for breast cancer, given the deaths of each.) ... I'll help her deal with him."

Taylor makes it sound easy. Follow his tactics and strategies in his course and his training manual... he says, and you, too, can master the science of the sound bite.

"I can't change television," he says ... "All I do is change my students. And sure there are a lot of dangers. One down side is that you are contributing to the oversimplification of the issues in the media. And, yes, a lot of that is revolving around spin ..."

David Climenhaga, a Calgary journalist and former public relations lo6 adviser to government has recently released his book ... "Manipulating the media is laughably easy to do," he says. "1 think we operate in the kind of intellectual climate that makes it easy for people to manipulate the media," he explains. "For example, I advise readers to frame their statements as if they were being delivered from on high by a white male authority so that journalists, either due to laziness or lack of intellectual rigor or because they don't have time to do anything else, will buy them."38

Zerbisias provides some of the suggestions found in Climenhaga's book, which she concludes are tactics "politician's do all the time," such as:

"never answer a question you've just been asked. Answer the one you'd rather have been asked." Taylor, she writes, "believes you should always answer the question. The trick is knowing how to answer it."

This article very much reflects some of Chomsky's thesis such as the oversimplification of issues to fit into a timeslot; not giving straight answers and the overt and covert manipulation of the facts. It is an illustration as well of the acceptance and seepage into society of the tactics of instrumental reason, which not only deceives the other but is very much a form of self-deception.

In this chapter, I have evoked Chomsky, Gaibraith and Freire, amongst others, as providing the references to illustrate the methods deployed by proponents of instrumental reason in marginalizing the majority not belonging to the culture of contentment. The discussion has centered on intellectual alienation or how the lives of the majority are separated 107 from political and economical decisions, from developing real knowledge.

This has impeded the development of intellectual enlightenment. AS the

Brazilian peasant realized, it is only when one recognizes personal

dependence or as Kant might phrase it, immaturity, can one take the steps to acquire critical thinking. The kind of thinking, as Freire writes:

"discerns an indivisible solidarity between the world and men and admits of no dichotomy between them--thinking which perceives reality as a process, as transformation, rather than as a static entity ... For the critic, the important thing is the continuing transformation of reality, in [sic] behalf of the continuing humanization of men.'&

Freire, in his notion of the more fully human being, also incorporated ideas that belong to the spiritual dimension, such as love, faith and humility; specifically, a kind of knowing that helps in the development of personal and transpersonal knowledge which are essential elements in helping one in the process of being and becoming. And, as Maslow might say, that transforms one's "inner being" taking one to a "higher reality."

I am submitting that such "spiritual enlightenment," wherein reside the realm of feelings and that may be mediated through art, is separated from the lives of a large number of people in a society dominated by instrumental reason, in the same way as intellectual enlightenment. That art is an ally which may help humans with their struggle to recover a lost 108 humanity, a humanity thwarted by instrumental reason, which, as in

O'Reilly's case, can become the conduit in helping students transform their

lives.

But art has become, more than ever, an ally of instrumental reason and

rarely works to advance the causes of all humankind, which was not the case prior to the Renaissance. A brief trek through the history of Western art might prove the point. Such a history of art has to be understood by teachers so that we may effect the practical changes necessary to integrate art once more into our lives and the curriculum. The discussion in the next chapter of my thesis will entail such a journey. CHAPTER Ill

I believe there is something outside of what we see ... I think every human group has found something of what we call, "What there is behind what we see. "...the whole idea of what there is behind, is something that escapes us... I find my church in concert halls ... I feel more, I have more feeling for something behind humanity, behind what we see, when 1 hear Moza rt... I think music, painting, literature are something which in a sense connect us to something that is beyond us... It is something that is much larger than our rationality, much larger than our concepts. Something that cannot be put in words... We feel it ... fortunately, we cannot put it in words because if we could, it would reduce it to something less than it is. 1

Hubert Reeves CHAPTER Ill

CHANGING ARTS, CHANGING SOCIETY; CHANGING SOCIETY, CHANGING ARTS

Introduction

This chapter will focus on an exploration of how society has changed the practice of art, and how that practice has changed humans. The purpose in doing so is simply to establish my theory that art has been derailed from its role as an important contributing element to the development of full humannesss, and has become, instead, allied and subserviant to the causes of instrumental reason. The best evidence for proving such a theory is through concrete examples culled from what we know of the history of art, demonstrating how art has separated from life.

What do I mean by the separation of art from life? An indirect meaning for this question has already been interspersed throughout this dissertation.

A more direct explanation might be: if one thinks of human life as the continuous growth of all the different aspects of a being, identified and known or unidentifiled and unknown, and if doing art constitutes one of those facets, then its continuing practice allows for the growth of that human life. When one no longer practises art or its practice becomes subject to another facet of growth, art loses its formerly autonomous and

110 111 distinguishing features that went into the "pool" to form the being; it

ceases to contribute to the growth of a human life as it, and only it, can

do, and hence becomes separated from life.

A comparable analogy might be that of binding a person's perfectly healthy legs immediately after that person has learnt to walk and run; the leg muscles would eventually atrophy and become useless. No other body part can make up for the loss of perfectly healthy legs. Even if one tried to compensate for the loss of the use of the legs by using the arms, for example, the arms might continue to develop in strength, flexibility and so on, but that will not help the physical development of the person in the same way as the legs might have done. Those legs would cease to contribute to the growth of a human life as they, and only they, could do, and hence become separated from that person's physiological existence.

Yet if those legs were left to grow as they normally would have, the person in question would have developed more wholistically; keeping in mind that I am discussing the arbitrary binding of healthy legs. A similar case may be made for art.

Engaging in art is part of one's development, just like exercising one's legs is part of one's development. The former might be said to be in the spiritual dimension whereas the latter might be said to be in the physical dimension. It is of course universally accepted that we use our legs; I do 112 not think that many persons would bind up their healthy legs. However,

many people bind up their propensity for engaging in art, usually without

knowing it. Tying up one's legs interferes with one's physical mobility; it

impedes freedom of movement. But the doing of art allows for freedom of

feeling, spiritual mobility, amongst other things, so that persons who

have eschewed the doing of art in their lives have lost a venue for getting

in touch with their feelings, their self. (This definition is of course

contingent on how one defines art or doing art; that will hopefully become clearer during the course of this dissertation. For the time being, the above provisional explanation will have to do so that I may carry on with my argument.)

If one's healthy legs are tied up and one is desirous of freedom of movement, the problem, because it is physiological, is easily seen and resolved. One cannot see one's spiritual dimension so easily however. To see if it is bound up or not, or to be able to "untie" it, one needs to acquire some knowledge about it. I have implied that it is such knowledge that is absent and needs cultivation in our society, and one venue for the acquisition of such knowledge is the development of the artistic experience, especially so in our schools.

In other words, as humans, we have an impulse to develop holistically by engaging all of our being in living and life and a necessary component of 113 that is the artistic experience; but most of us in Western societies do not engage in an artistic experience of the kind that will help us develop holistically because such experiences have undergone a mutation. I want to probe briefly into how this happened and why it continues to happen for

I believe that in doing so we may understand why so many of us do not achieve our "vocation" to become more fully human.

I shall argue here, then, that with the advent of Zweckrationalitat and expansion of the modern mindset, art became something other than what it had previously been, which was predominantly, a humanizing experience. I would suggest art, by its very nature, is an antidote to Zweckrationalitat; but when it was appropriated by a society firmly entrenched in the practices of instrumental reason, it could no longer function as it was meant to do. Instead of broadening and widening the outlook of each individual, its role became constricted and specialized, serving its new master; instead of helping humans to self-actualize and in so doing help them discover or identify or gain greater understanding of themselves and hence the world in which they live, it fragmented them. I am suggesting this happened when art was primarily taken away from the general public with nothing comparable to replace it. Further, art was fashioned into an

"industry" of sorts that reflected the "power brokers" into whose hands it had fallen. To back up these postulations, my inquiry begins with a brief trek through the history of art. In The Beginning

In the beginning there was art! Evidence of the urge to create and to

produce art parallels the emergence of the first modern humans upon the

world scene. About 100,000 years B.P. (before the present), there exists

proof that humans had the impulse to make objects that surpassed their

functional utility.

At that time in a place called Klasies, on the southern shores of Africa,

lived a community of humans whose remains show that they not only were

anatomically like us but also behaved very much like today's Homo sapiens.

Of particular interest to this thesis is the fact that some of the tools

uncovered in this region are made of a distinctly different stone from that

available in the local environment; that is, they are fashioned from a

crystal-like quartz found some 35 kilometres away. One has to pause and wonder what made these humans of 100,000 years ago seek material from so far away, especially when the local stone was just as useful for fashioning tools. What made them use their precious daylight hours, time away from finding food and protecting their shelters, to undertake what might have been a perilous journey, to bring back such stones? Even if we suppose that they came upon these stones accidently during a hunting or food gathering expedition, what made them pick up these particular stones and carry them all the way back to their camp? Surely not an easy endeavour.

Hilary Deacon, of the University of Stellenbosch, who has been excavating and researching this site for many years, suggests that these artifacts, because of their out of the ordinary appearance "were used in gift exchange processes to cement relationships between individuals and between groups."n Deacon gives us a clue as to the motivation for carving these tools but they do tell us more. These glistening, attractive 100,000 years old objects, left behind by the inhabitants of Klasies, are evidence to me that humans have always had an innate urge to create; the impulse to fashion objects that surpassed their functional utility. A tool by any other stone would have been just as serviceable! Why go to all that trouble? Perhaps while fashioning and working with the exotic material they experienced ethereal moments, perhaps even prehistoric peak experiences which a llowed them to learn something about themselves and thus a bit about the world.

The story becomes interesting when we realize that according to scientific evidence these same humans from Klasies eventually migrated north and replaced the Neanderthal population, another humanoid species, now extinct, that once lived in Europe and around the Mediterranean basin.

The disappearance of the Neanderthals and the emergence of modern humans (or Homo sapiens, or Cro-Magnons-the latter, named after a cave I16 in the Dordogne region of France) coincide with what seems to be a veritable eruption of art produced in this region beginning around 35,000

B.P. As a result, most scholars of prehistoric art place the origins of human art around this period. I would suggest that the Klasies connections may lead us to infer that the impulse to art is an inherent aspect of human growth that originated with the evolution of the first modern humans.

This will have to remain a supposition until more evidence is forthcoming.

For the time being, the art work left us by the Cro-Magnons provide sufficient proof that art played a humanizing role, or helped one to become more fully human from the begining.

The most renowned of these art works are some of the more than 200 cave paintings found in southern Europe. These cave paintings were uncovered in southern France and northern Spain mostly at the turn of this century.

The most famous of these are the Trois Freres and Lascaux in France and

Altamira in Spain, and most recently, the cave found by Jean-Marie

Chauvet and friends, in Vallon-Pont-d'Arc in the Ardeche River canyon of

France, referred to as the Chauvet Cave. These paintings usually date from the last period of Paleolithic culture and depict for the most part animals man hunted at that time. A few of the paintings contain masked human figures costumed in animal fur; some caves show as well patterned footprints evoking a dance. Various scholars of these caves, such as

Joseph Campbell, amongst others, have explained that these paintings 117 suggest that they were more than just a naturalistic reproduction of primitive man's environment. They often liken the caves to temples of worship and explain that they were centres of hunting magic and that the images served a magical purpose. There also seems to be an agreement that paintings and artifacts dating to the prehistory of humans were used as integral elements in what today we would call religious rituals, most notably rites of passage.

One particular painting found at the Lascaux cave shows a wounded bison with a lance across its hindquarters while a human form stands by. This has led Horst Kirschner, as quoted by Kijhn, to theorize that what has taken place in this painting is a "shamanic incantation." "A bird or post beside the bison would point to the spirit migration of the shaman in his trance."g Kijhn himself has written:

The strange thing is that a good many primitive paintings have been used as targets. At Montespan there is an engraving of a horse that is being driven into a trap; it is pitted with the mark of missiles. A clay model of a bear in the same cave has 42 holes.4

The supposition is that the images in the cave symbolize the real animals and were used as part of a ceremonial ritual. By engaging in a form of symbolic slaughter the real animal was supposed to have felt all the blows showered on the replicas; not too uncharacteristic of the sympathetic magic that is practised by some of the more remote tribal cultures existing today. 1I8 In some caves human footprints are discernible around animal figures. In

one particular cave, the Tuc dlAudoubert, "only heel parts can be seen,"

Kuhn notes. "The dancers had moved like bisons. They had danced a bison

dance for the fertility and increase of the animals and their slaughter."s

Here is an excerpt of a description by Kijhn of a visit in 1926 to the cave

of the Trois Freres in the Pyrenees mountain region of France:

The silence is eerie ... The tunnel is not much broader than my shoulders, nor higher ... The passage, in places, is hardly a foot high, so that you have to lay your face right on the earth ... And so, yard by yard, one struggles on: some forty-odd yards in all ... Then, suddenly, we are through, and everybody breathes...

The hall in which we are now standing is gigantic ... a majestic room-- and there, finally, are the pictures. From top to bottom a whole wall is covered with engravings. The surface has been worked with tools of stone, and there we see marshalled the beasts that lived at that time in southern France: mammoth, rhinoceros, bison, wild horse, bear ... And one sees darts everywhere, flying at the game ... Several pictures of bears attract us in particular; for they have holes where the images were struck and blood is shown spouting from their mouths. Truly a picture of the hunt: the picture of the magic of the hunt.6

Joseph Campbell, in his research work on the Ainu people, corroborates in

essence, what has been just briefly outlined. Campbell notes that the typical system of belief amongst hunting peoples, as the Cro-Magnons were (just as some of the Native Indians of the American plains who

relied on the buffalo for their sustenance) considered the animal not as a

lower form of life but as an equal form in another aspect. The animal was considered a voluntary sacrifice, who came willingly to be killed with the 119 understanding that it would be slaughtered with gratitude. The ceremonial

rite was conducted to return its life back to its source so that it might

return and continue to replenish the human's source for nourishment. The

practices of the Ainu, a semi-nomadic, paleo-Siberian hunting people, at

the same time a "neolithic planting people," who today still inhabit the

isolated northern islands of Japan, live a life that is almost an animate

illustration of the cave paintings. This is visibly evidenced in the festivals that surround their catching and slaughter of bear cubs. All the arts are implicated in these rituals as vividly described by Campbell. He records that the Ainu have:

...the wonderful idea that the world of men is so much more beautiful than that of the gods that deities like to come here to pay us visits. On all such occasions they are in disguise.

Campbell goes on to explain that the Ainus consider the bear as one of the most important of the divine visitors. When a young bear cub is caught, he is brought back to the village to be suckled by one of the women in the tribe. There the cub plays with her children and is reared with great affection. When he becomes too dangerous for play, he is caged for about two years, after which he is prepared for the festival of the "sending away." When the time comes, the man who is to provide the feast calls out to the villagers. Prayer-sticks are made by the guests, venerated, and eventually stuck in the ground where the bear is to be sacrificed. The men move towards the bear cage followed by the dancing and singing children 120 and women. All then sit in a circle before the bear. One of them approaches

the bear and speaks the following*

0 Divine One, you were sent into this world for us to hunt. When you come to them, please speak well of us and tell them how kind we have been. Please come to us again and we shall again do you the honour of a sacrifice.

The bear secured on a rope is then made to walk around the circle while

the assembled tease him by flinging blunt decorated bamboo arrows at him

(could a similar ceremony have taken place at Trois Freres, or at

Montespan that would explain the 42 holes found in the clay model of the

bear?) He is then tied to a decorated stake. A number of men seize him;

the "poles for strangling" are placed one above the neck, the other under

his throat. An arrow is shot into his heart while the strangling poles are

squeezed. The bear dies swiftly. Subsequently his head is removed with

the hide attached, brought into the home and arranged amongst prayer-

sticks, foods, gifts, and a morsel of his own flesh. Another speech is

uttered beseeching the cub to take the items surrounding his flesh quickly

to his parents before some "devils" take them, and upon arrival to tell his

parents that he had been well taken care of by an Ainu father and mother

and had returned with all these gifts since he had grown up.

The feast is then celebrated with some dancing and the making of more

prayer-sticks which are placed on the bear's head. A stew of the meat is put before the bear and after enough time has elapsed for the bear to "eat" 121 it, the host calls out: "The little god is finished; come let us worship!" He takes the stew and divides it amongst the guests ceremoniously. The blood of the bear is drunk by some of the men and smeared on their clothes. The head of the bear is separated from its pelt and placed on "the pole for sending away" with other skulls from such other feasts. The festival continues for several days until all the meat is consumed.7

This contemporary ritual of the Ainus seems to contain the same elements as rendered visually in the paleolithic caves. The dancing, the flinging of the arrows, the smearing of the blood, the animal's pelt, the representation of the animal found in the Ainus' ceremony are all symbolically present or physically evident in the cave paintings mentioned. Features of the Ainu ritual that are not evident in the works found in the caves are those aspects that are more elusive such as the humane sacrifice of the bear, "the prayers" recited, the speeches uttered, the songs chanted, the pretend play of the sacrificed bear eating.

Nonetheless, they not only bear out Campbell's thesis of the covenant between animal and the human community in hunting cultures but demonstrate as well all the elements found in what we now call the arts, all of it taking place in a designated space much like theatre--a privileged space transformed into theatre by the movement and action of performers for an audience, involving expression and communication. In the Trois

Freres, the privileged space was the almost inaccessible large hall in a 122 cave; for the Ainus, the settings were more accessible spots in the

village.

Above the engravings at Trois Freres is found what is commonly referred

to as the Sorcerer of Trois Freres; it is a large picture, predominantly

painted in black, bearing the body and facial features of different animals

but with the beard and dancing legs of a man. Breuil believes that this

figure represents the presiding "god" or "spirit" controlling the "hunting

expedition and the multiplication of game." Kuhn thinks it to be the artist-

magician himself. Campbell opines:

...as we know, and see amply illustrated in the ritual lore of modern savages, when the sacred regalia has been assumed the individual has become an epiphany of the divine being itself. He is taboo. He is a conduit of divine power. He does not merely represent the god, he is the god; he is a manifestation of the god, not a representation.

A differing view is expressed by Carlton S. Coon who claims:

...this is just a man ready to hunt deer. Perhaps he is practising. Perhaps he is trying to induce the spirit of the forest that controls the deer to make a fat buck walk his way ... Whatever the artist's overt motive in painting it, he did it because he felt a creative urge and liked to express himself, as every artist does, whether he is painting a bison on the wall of a cave or a mural in the main hall of a bank.8

Although I agree with Coon that the cave painters were probably motivated by creative urges and liked to express themselves, I do also agree with Campbell that these paintings mean much more than Coon or thinkers like him are willing to admit. The impracticality of such an endeavour, if it was just a yen for self-expression, cannot be easily 123 explained, nor can the arduous trek needed to reach some of these caves;

not that I am dismissing the aesthetic sensitivity of these artists. I think

the cave paintings prove without a doubt that from the beginning humans

were susceptible to beauty and endowed with aesthetic sensibilities, if

not all humans, at least those who created those cave compositions. But I

do believe that they also prove something else; the recent discoveries of

the caves in France have rekindled such thoughts.

Of the Chauvet cave, Robert Hughes states:

...aesthetic pleasure, in our sense, was the last thing the Ice Age painters were after.

These were functional images, they were meant to produce results. But what results? To represent something, to capture its image on a wall in colored earths and animal fat, is in some sense to capture and master it; to have power over it. Lascaux is full of non-threatening animals, including wild cattle ...but Chauvet pullulates with dangerous ones--cave bears, a panther and no fewer than 50 woolly rhinos. Such creatures, tc paraphrase Claude Levi-Strauss, were good to think with, not good to eat. We can assume that they had a symbolic value, maybe even a religious value, to those who drew them, that they supplied a framework of images in which needs, values and fears--in short, a network of social consciousness--could be expressed. But we have no idea what this framework was, and merely to call it "animistic" does not say much.9

Of these same cave paintings, Robin McKie writes:

The artists responsible have rightly been hailed for their sophistication and talent. But there is more to be read into those daubed black and red figures of ibex, mammoths and hyenas than creative ability with soot, ochre and blood. In those images, we can see the origins of art itself ...

The story of Vallon-Pont-&Arc ...touches all our lives, its creators demonstrating--for the first time in archeological record--the crucial qualities we now recognize as being those of modem humans ...

"These were Stone Age people who had evolved in Africa, but who 124 could endure a climate like that of modern Iceland or Greenland," points out archeologist Clive Gamble of Southampton University, England. "And ine only way they could have managed that was through sophisticated interaction ..."

... art must have been critical to the business of survival. Only much later did it acquire a sense of "art for art's sake."

"Art had a social role in the beginning," Gamble says. "It was used to solve the problem of who belonged where, and of what roles a person had to fulfil in order to ensure groups and tribes could survive a tight, hard way of life. Our predecessors needed to have that constantly reinforced."

In other words, the roots of art lie with a need to create initiation ceremonies, to hold rituals, to settle territorial squabbles and to demarcate roles in society.. .I 0

If I may paraphrase McKie, the roots of art lie with humankind's need to express its humanity, understand humanity, and develop its humanity through the "spiritual dimension," through feelings. The compositions in the paleolithic caves are more than "creative urges" and a liking for "self- expression," especially when we consider the "mindfulness," meaning heightened awareness and engagement, with which so many tribal cultures today carry out their rituals, as detected in the Ainu ceremonial. Here again I share Campbell's thought:

...this chamber, and the whole cave, was an important centre of hunting magic; that these pictures served a magical purpose; that the people in charge here must have been high-ranking highly skilled magicians...; and that whatever was done in this cave had as little to do with an urge to self-expression as the activity of the Pope in Rome celebrating a Pontifical Mass.11

Robin G. Collingwood makes many interesting observations about "magical art." He submits that the similarities between magic and art are both 125 strong and intimate. He also states that the central element of magical practices are artistic activities. He claims that magic is "essentially" a means to a preconceived end and because he had earlier established that that which is used as a means to an end is not "art proper," it follows that the artistic activities in magical practices are what he terms "quasi- artistic." I would argue that such activities are the product of the "magic" or the ritual. If we think of the singing and dancing in the ritual of the

Ainus, all indications are that the singing and dancing are spontaneous actions as opposed to being rehearsed or choreographed. It would be difficult to believe that the children, in particular, are taught the dance precisely for that ritual. It seems to me that the artistic activities that are and might eventually be used in a ritual, emanate themselves from the ritual. And it is in the experience of the activity where the meaning or value is to be found. One cannot classify before hand what the experience is to be; surely it must be different for each participant. Collingwood proposes that the end of magic "is always and solely the arousing of emotions" and that this is "done by representation." He elaborates:

Magic is a representation where the emotion evoked is an emotion valued on account of its function in practical life, evoked in order that it may discharge that function, and fed by the generative or focusing magical activity into the practical life that needs it. Magical activity is a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanism of practical life with the emotional current that drives it. Hence magic is a necessity for every sort and condition of man, and is actually found in every healthy society. A society which thinks, as our own thinks, that it has outlived the need of magic, is either mistaken in that opinion, or else it is a dying society, perishing for lack of interest in its own maintenance.12 126 The latter is preciseiy the argument I am trying to develop here, but with

a different focus.

As the Ainu ceremony of the "sending away" suggests, the purpose of the

ritual is to come to grips with the slaughter of the bear and the consuming

of its f esh; to reconcile the violent act of killing a being thought of as

more than an equal. Consider that this is an animal the Ainus believe to be

a divinity; he has been nurtured, treated almost as a family member, and

yet needs to be killed because he poses a danger to the community as he

matures and his meat is a source of nourishment and sustenance. How does

one reconcile the conflicting emotions that this surely must arouse? How

does one appease the feelings that come to the fore? How does one

understand and accept that to survive you must kill a "divine" being? The

Ainus do it by practising the ritual of "the sending away." In engaging in

the drama of "sending away" the little cub, are they not, as Collingwood

suggests, evoking emotions "in order that it may discharge that function,

and fed by the generative or focusing magical activity into the practical

life that rieeds it?" Surely this ritual helps the Ainu understand and accept

their action vis-a-vis the cub, and in a larger sense understand a part of the workings of the cosmos. Since we are here dealing strictly with an

aspect of the human that is in the complex area of emotions, a means of

reaching these emotions, or feelings, is through the doing of activities we call the arts. 127 We still practise rituals in our culture today to deal with many events

that also arouse our emotions. The way we generally handle funerals, for

example, is a comparable version of the "sending away," regardless of the

faith practised or not practised by the mourners. There are speeches,

processions, an assemblage; in short a way to behave or to be. In fact,

many rituals that we still practise today such as baptisms, bar mitzvas,

confirmations, graduations, ordinations, weddings and so on, contain

elements that are suggested by the Ainu ritual and where the arts are

implicated. But there are differences, other than the obvious ones. I would

like to try to explain this difference by drawing on Campbell's

observations in reference to the Sorcerer figure of Trois Freres.

As I quoted Campbell earlier, when in a magic rite the shaman or host or

whomever assumes the regalia of a mythic figure, that person does not

merely represent the god, but becomes the manifestation of the god; the

same is also true if, instead of assuming the mythic figure, an image or a

symbol is designated as such. All the participants in the ritual also experience the mythic figure as a manifestation. Many researchers explain that the participant in the magic ritual knows full well that the revered,

in whatever form it is present in the ritual, is not "real," but is perceived as being real operating at the same level of make-believe as children are wont to in spontaneous play. This make-believe operates purely at the intuition and sensation level, with no mediation by the thinking process, 128 and thus becomes more than representation, as Collingwood seems to

imply. Emotions are evoked, "in order to discharge them into the affairs of

practical life," as he writes, but I would submit only on an ethnic level. C)n

the elementary level they are to be experienced as a revelation that is

spiritual in its essence; a revelation that emanates from the "spiritual

dimension," what some also placa in the religious sphere. Arguelles notes:

True religion implies a reversal of the historical process. An authentic religious revival ... is a return to the "beginning," to the primordial state of unity. This "beginning" is omnipresent as the on- going self-renewal of the cosmos in all its aspects ...

The significant fact is the realization of an immensity that no words can describe, and that impoverishes the grand illusions of the individual ego.13

When Collingwood later on remarks that magic, and in this instance he is

discussing it in reference to what he calls magical art, and religion are

not the same, I would agree only insofar as we are talking about them in the sphere of the historical and temporal. At the elementary level, magic and religion are quite the same and the medium of their revelation and expression are the arts. To Collingwood's pronouncement that: "The brilliant naturalism of the admittedly magical paleolithic animal paintings cannot be explained by their magical function,"l4 one can only respond by stating that they would not exist at all were it not for their magical function.

The magical function is what is missing in our rituals today but that is 129 mainly due to the repression of feelings in favour of thinking. In our zeal to wipe out superstition, we have, as Weber had noted, disenchanted our wcrld. I would posit that superstition and magic are two very different things. The magic practised by the earliest humans and by the more primitive societies today is very much a means by which one tried to see, as Harpur wrote, "what being a human in the cosmic scheme is all about." I agree wholeheartedly with Collingwood when he utters: "A society which thinks, as our own thinks, that it has outlived the need of magic, is either mistaken in that opinion, or else it is a dying society, perishing for lack of interest in its own maintenance."

The cave paintings of the earliest humans are evidence that the arts as we know them today were an integral element in a ceremony or ritual; a way to understand the cosmos, or as Campbell had indicated a way to honour the mystery of nature, in the case of the Ainu ritual, the mystery that life lives by death. Apropos of such mysteries, Aniela Jaffe makes the following compelling comment:

... when conscious ... knowledge has reached its limits and mystery sets in... man tends to fill the inexplicable and mysterious with the contents of his unconscious. He projects them, as it were, into a dark empty vessel. 1 5

More often than not, I would suggest, they are projected in the form of an

"artistic experience." 130 The visual symbols found in the cave paintings in relation to what we know of the cultural practices of some extant primitive tribes, strongly indicate that all of the other elements of arts were also used and all were part of what we might today call a religious ceremony. At the Tuc dlAudoubert, dance is suggested by the circle of footprints found; human forms clothed in animal fur, and the playing of a primitive type of flute by a human figure at Trois Freres, suggest costume and music; the reenactment of a hunting scene as evidenced by spear marks found on the images of animals suggests drama; and finally the rituals occured in a specially designated location, like a cave or grotto, used specifically for the ritual.

It is remarkable how many of these same elements are common to many places of worship to this day in the West, such as those found in the more traditional Christian churches like the Roman Catholic or the Eastern

Orthodox Churches. Some points in common are: the specially designated locations such as the consecrated grounds and the chamber in which the ritual or Mass is celebrated; the symbolic vestments worn by the celebrant, the requirement that women cover their head and their arms in the church--in ancient pagan rituals the initiate's head was covered so that an epiphany might be experienced; the performance of music in various forms; the reenactment of a scene, such as the hunting scene depicted in some caves and in the Catholic Church, the washing of the feet 131 of the poor on Maundy Thursday; and the evidence of visual symbols

surrounding the place of ritual, such as the paintings and statues found in

the caves or the statues, icons, stained glass windows, paintings and so

on found in the churches.

What appears to be the case is that what we now call the arts grew out of

the innate spiritual needs of humans. It was in trying to deal with their

precarious and mysterious position in the universe, a position which is not

any less mysterious today; in trying to make sense of their lives, that

humans probably developed their myths and rituals. It is out of such myths

and rituals that "art" developed; the inspiration of which sprang from the

depths of the psyche. And so in this sense, the artistic experience seems

to be intimately bound with the spiritual history of humans.

The works left behind from the late Paleolithic period demonstrate the

need to engage in art. The same urge that later on helped to create theatre, dance, music, gardens, foods, clothing, literature, societies, science,

institutions and one can go on listing creations named or not yet named that provide humans with sustenance for the soul, that is at least as necessary as sustenance for the body.

It is in these early cave paintings that we see evidence of dramatic action performed by costumed players in the form of ritual--a type of practice 132 that continued well into the Middle Ages in Europe. Such dramatic events

were communal social expressions stemming from rituals, common motifs

being the passing of rites such as birth, death and the passing of the

seasons. There were in these rites what Jung called participation

mystique. Whether these rites were practised by prehistoric hunters, the

early Christians or by primitive peoples of today, there was and is

probably for the participant a sense of a submersion in the collective

unconscious; the dissolution of the ethnic self in the elementary self--an

ineffable experience which recognizes the numinous, ;he kind of

experience alluded to by Maslow, Kason, and Harpur. And during that

fleeting moment, one can, I am sure experience "what being human in the

cosmic scheme is all about."

This is the beginning! This is the primordial state of art in quest of a primordial state of unity--the authentic archaic experience as defined by

Jose Arguelles. This too is the primordial state of religion, where the person is "immersed in the kind of revelations" where "he must confront something far vaster than his own memory could encompass ... the self- renewing cosmic experience that transcends tirne."l6 This "revelation" that Argiielles speaks of is not unlike the accounts of the experiences I have read of some contemporary physicists, astronomers and astronauts who have been confronted with the mystery, complexity and immensity of the universe. Relating To The Beginning

In all of this we can see that which I have been trying to show and what

Arguelles has observed, namely that:

The very meaning of religion, which art once served as a handmaiden, is to bind back into one, to relate to the beginning, to the origin of all things.17

Not only is the meaning of religion and its connection with art suggested

by these cave paintings but the harmonious and organic integration of all the major art forms is evident; something that may be likened to the

Wagnerian notion of Gesamkunstwerk. The visual arts, for example, were interwoven, in what might be deemed this collective communal experience, in different forms. Indeed, the visual arts were present from the beginning either as images in the form of sacred stones such as menhirs and dolmens, structures such as the caves or latnr on Stonehenge, and animal or human sculptures and carvings. Of the latter, the most prolific are the paleolithic "Venuses" that have been found across Europe, such as the famous Venus of Willendorf, usually set up in what appear to be shrines. In fact, what has been left behind from the early humans, indicate that it is in dramatic action where is assembled all the elements of the arts and that art itself is a progeny of some type of ritual with the intent to create "magic."

We can suppose that this "magic" may have satisfied the spiritual needs of 134 thsse early humans and in this way fashioned for them an understanding of the universe in which they lived. An understanding vital for a human's existence but not as yet attainable through the limiting channels of the observable world. The following reflections by the astrophysicist Hubert

Reeves speak of what I mean:

It is not only our ignorance of physics that prevents us from going back to our origins. There are also limits imposed by language. These are the limits of the scientific method and of logic itself, insofar as they must rely on language. Our words are built on the objects of our experience. They have acquired their effectiveness by adapting themselves to the occurences of our everyday world. But when we approach realities of another scale, these words can become obstacles. Cosmology is particularly badly off in this respect, especially when it touches on questions of "finiteness" and on the limits of the universe in space and time.

The only valid method of exploration is the empirical method. When it conflicts with philosophy or logic, it is my opinion that they are the ones that must adapt themselves to the new facts. Philosophical "difficulties" disappear if one recognizes that the only true "problem" is that of the existence of the universe itself: Why is there something rather than nothing? We cannot answer this question on the scientific level. After many millennia we are still at the same point as our ancestors, the prehistoric hunters--at absolute zero.

Our ignorance, once recognized, is the true point of departure for cosmology. There is something. There is a reality. How did it appear? What is its age? These are questions that do fall within the scope of scientific research. The problem of the existence of reality has an additional dimension: consciousness. It is by means of our consciousness that we perceive the existence of "something rather than nothing." But this consciousness is not outside of the universe; it is part of it. Today we are beginning to perceive the richness of the connections between consciousness and observational data.18

Reeves' observation: "Why is there something rather than nothing? We cannot answer this question on the scientific level. After many millennia we are still at the same point as our ancestors, the prehistoric hunters-- at absolute zero," indicates on one level at least that despite the 135 incredible advances made by humans we are still powerless in answering a fundamental question about our being.

I think it significant that mainstream science cannot answer this question, nor are there any indications that it may do so in the immediate future. This fundamental question we still have to ferret out for ourselves; and like humankind from the time of the appearance of prehistoric hunters, rituals of various kinds have developed by which we have searched for and found that which satisfied our yen, even if temporarily, for why there is something instead of nothing. The language of those rituals was art in its various forms for the simple reason that art is the language of feelings, and humans need to understand life through feelings as well as the intellect. As Reeves intimates, and many others claim, our language limits our understanding; that is so because our society thinks of language in terms of "the word" only and eschews other languages, such as art, which help us discover other ways of being and understanding. It may be that activating our feelings may help us reach the nether of a world that Reeves calls "realities of another scale," and which, in a similar vein, I have referred to as the spiritual dimension.

The mathematicians Andre Bonaly and Michel Bounias appear to have established such a dimension in theory. In a an article in Physics Essays19 they introduce the results of their work which theoretically supports the 136 existence of many dimensionalities in our universe that are beyond human

perception. The reason for my invoking this work is to underscore the

suggestion that the depth of our unconscious, the spiritual dimension, can

now, at least, be considered a bona fide theoretical entity, according to

the rigourous and accepted research of Bonaly and Bounias since it too is a

dimension beyond ordinary perceptions; this is the significance of this

work, a work that points to a rapprochement of science with other forms

of human activity and thought, often dismissed as being charlatan and

discouraged; that is, that there is a way of knowing and understanding in

ways other than through what has become the traditional methods of

science.

The introductory sentence of Bonaly's and Bounias' article echoes Reeves'

question, in a sense: "At the end of the twentieth century, it still remains

difficult to answer the question, What is the universe?"20 This is the

fundamental question that has been posed and reposed in different ways

since the emergence of modern humans. And it has been answered in

manifold manners ever since. In the West, subsequent to the Renaissance,

the question and its answers began to gradually limit themselves mostly to what could be observed and empirically verified. The doing of art, one

of the means of finding an answer, also became limited.

Campbell again: 137 The impulse to art--the impulse to echo, through accord, an apprehended order of beauty--underlies the grandiose formation of the archaic orders of society; ...whole populations could be caught up in such a picture and given form, a new foiii~, in which, paradoxically, all was surrendered and yet a heightened life was gained. We cannot suppose, however, that all who participated in the mime experienced its wonder in aesthetic terms. For the majority its value must have been only magical ... primitive man could bring his mind to rest in the mystery of the universe and therewith attain to a knowledge that can justly be called wisdom. His technical and scientific knowledge was limited to the horizon of his pitiful temporal community, but his wisdom, his enlightenment, his sense and experience of the mystery and power of the universe was of eternal worth.2 1

The "wisdom" and "enlightenment" Campbell mentions is not unlike

Harpur's idea of "what being a human in the cosmic scheme is all about"; it is a similar notion which Arguelles articulates, and which Bucke called cosmic consciousness. The consensus seems to be that the driving force to attain such wisdom was the prime instigator for the majority of the participants in the rituals of the earliest human; the aesthetic pleasure or satisfaction, as Campbell intimates, was not the focus, although it may be said that the beauty of the experience for some might have been the catalyst needed to strive for enlightenment. The purpose of the rituals, which were incorported into various forms of more organized religions as humankind expanded, continued to be much the same until the Renaissance and in such rituals, art's role may be deemed to have been the facilitator to enlightenment. Such is the thrust of my thesis: that the role of art in helping one attain, as Campbell eloquently puts it, "knowledge that can justly be called wisdom," seems no longer to be the case for the majority of today's humans. The extant by-products of what appear to be the 138 spiritually divine experiences of the earliest humans have the same forms

of what we call art today but a role that has now changed.

Cherchez /'art

In the beginning then there was action! Dramatic action performed by

costumed players as evidenced in the illustrations of some cave paintings.

As Western civilization advanced, the arts became increasingly more

complex accruing new elements as they evolved. The emergence of an

individual who began to specialize in writing scripts based on myths and

stories was a major turning point in the history of dramatic action. Here

the history of drama begins in the West; it begins in fifth century 6. C.

Greece.

Little documentation exists as to how the Greek plays were staged as such, but we do know that the playwrights of that time competed with one another to have their plays "produced" at great religious festivals spanning several days and honouring the god Dionysus. Once a playwright's work was selected, he (the playwrights were all men at the time) was assigned a choregoi, or patron, who helped financially. Oscar Brockett remarks that it was the playwright who "directed his own works and was in charge of the production as a whole."22 It is commonly agreed that the onus here was neither on the playwright nor the play however; the onus 139 was on the communal experience. It was as well an embodying experience,

a joyous celebration of life through art, much like the Mardi Gras celebrations around the world today, or the yearly Caribana Festival that takes place in Toronto every summer. And in this celebration not only did the whole community participate but all the arts, such as those delineated and defined much later on in the eighteenth century, were implicated: music, dance, costumes/masks, drama/poetry, all performed in the most impressive of the Greek visual arts--its architecture.

After the introduction and adoption of Christianity in the West, rituals associated with pagan beliefs were banned. Nonetheless, the majority of the peoples continued with many of the rituals practised in their communities. It is also the contention of many that Christianity itself is of a syncrestic nature built upon earlier mythologies, such as t:he Greek mystery cults, and adapted for the new faith. These mystery cuIts mostly were based on and evolved from an agrarian culture.

The vast majority of the population in the West, up until the Renaissance, lived in small rural self-sufficient communities where their folk tales, myths and so on were expressed and experienced in terms of the land.

When the higher clergy wanted to inculcate the precepts of the new faith, it found the best way to reach the unlettered populace was to render the new religious creed in the form of drama and pictures. Since many of the 140 lower clergy that carried out these functions were also illiterate, the practices associated with some pagan myths and ceremonies crept into the Christian ritual. One of the many examples that illusicate this point is the initiation rite celebrated in the Eleusinian mysteries. These were the rites and worship of the fertility goddesses Demeter and her daugher

Persephone.

The myth is that one day as Persephone is out picking flowers, the earth opens out of which Pluto appears on a chariot. He whisks her off to the ruler of the underworld, Hades. Demeter hears her daughter's cries, and goes in search of her. In her grief, she leaves the world of the gods, and serves as a nurse in a royal household in Eleusis, near Athens. Angry,

Demeter curses the earth to bear no fruit for humans or the gods. Zeus, the god of the gods, eventually releases Persephone. After she exits from the underworld, the fields are covered once more with plants.

As Campbell relates it, the intent of the ritual associated with the

Mystery Cult of Eleusis, was to shift consciousness from the purely material to the spiritual. The principal theme of the rite was rendered symbolically in the drama of the Kathodos (descent) and Anodos (ascent) of Persephone; the idea of death and resurrection. The initiate into the rite "learned (as a grave-inscription let us know) that 'death was not an evil but a blessing1."23 Joseph Henderson writes: This all points to an initiation into death, but in a form that lacks the finality of mourning. It hints at that element of the later mysteries--especially of Orphism-which makes death carry a promise of immortality. Christianity went even further. It promised something more than immortality (which in the old sense of the cyclic mysteries might merely mean reincarnation), for it offered the faithful an everlasting life in heaven.24

The culminating moment in the ritual was the elevation of a grain of wheat, the Anodos of Persephone-the elementary idea that out of the darkness of the ground comes the plant that nourishes humans. This in the

Christian ritual becomes the wafer of bread elevated at the culmination of the Mass.

The reason I wanted to establish the link between Christianity and the mythologies and rites of pagan cults, is because in its apprehension by the early worshippers of that faith, Christianity seems to have been understood precisely in a mythic manner. It was not understood as it is mostly today, a historical rendering of hard and fast realities absolute and closed in its interpretations; rather, it was understood, like many mythologies of other religions, as suggested by the ritual of the Ainus, a way by which humans could, as Campbell put it, bring their "mind to rest in the mystery of the universe and therewith attain to a knowledge that can justly be called wisdom." The arts were the conduits by which one could access such knowledge. And all took place in the drama of the ritual.

The prime purpose of the arts in the medieval world, as I interpret it, was 142 not unlike the one amongst paleolithic humans nor amongst the ancient

Greeks. It was an expression and engagement in symbolic form of the spiritual oneness that acted as the carrier wave of the community, a form of the "participation mystique." The arts were not only produced to spread the faith, so to speak, but inspired from the faith as well, just as magic was for the earlier primitive Westerners. Those individuals who created the exquisitely beautiful illuminated manuscripts or who built those magnificent churches were doing it for and with their community, primarily for God's sake. In this era, the Balinese in rural areas operate somewhat on a similar principle.

That art is intimately connected to spirituality or religion is particularly evident amongst many non-Western cultures today. The entwinement of the arts may be observed in the rituals and also the every day lives of peoples such as the Inuit in the isolated north of Canada, the Balinese, who have adopted Western technology but have adapted it to their culture as opposed to having it shape their culture and thought, the Native peoples of various continents and so on. What I find most telling about all this is that these peoples do not have the Word "art" in their vocabulary; it makes perfect sense to me when you think of art as a language. Why call it by another language when you are already using it as such?

It was Margaret Mead who first noted that the arts were an integral part 143 of the daily life of the Balinese as much as the life of the village and the

land. The observation was that the Balinese did not create art as an

expression of the individcsl but as the group's effort to commune with the

gods, much in the same way as religious rituals or "magical" rites have

been used since the beginning. The concept of godlGod may be said to

reside in that dimension as uncovered by Bonaly and Bounias, or Jung, or

Bucke, which I am imputing to be the spiritual dimension; thus, the idea of

communing with god/God corresponds to the idea of having an experience that accesses such a dimension. For the Balinese villager, as for me, it is the doing of art.

Entire villages in Bali are made up of families of rice farmers who are at the same time either sculptors, dancers, musicians, puppet makers, dramatists and artists, yet they have no word for art. A village farmer, who is also an artist, sums up the Balinese philosophy when he states:

"Painting starts from religion because everything coming from God ...when we make painting first we must think of a god--painting make man closer to God.'& Being closer to god/God might be seen to be equivalent to "what being a human in the cosmic scheme is all about." It is that aspect of being human that gives an opportunity for the discovery of the cosmic self; a glimpse into one's inner nature--a notion of Maslow's.

Maslow opens his text, Toward a Psychology of Being, with an effusive 144 account of "a new concept" of psychology. Among the "basic assumptions

of this point of view," Maslow lists the following:

1. We have, each of us, arr essentially biologically based inner nature, which is to some degree 'natural,' intrinsic, given, and, in a certain limited sense, unchangeable, or at least, unchanging. 2. Each person's inner nature is in part unique to himself and in part species-wide. 3. It is possible to study this inner nature scientifically and to discover what it is like--(not invent--disco ver) .

He also states that this inner nature is "not strong and overpowering ...it is weak and delicate and subtle and easily overcome by habit, cultural pressure, and wrong attitudes towards it." He goes on to write: "Even though weak, it rarely disappears in the normal person-perhaps not even in the sick person. Even though denied, it persists undergroung forever pressing for actualization. Maslow advises that since this inner nature "is good or neutral rather than bad, it is best to bring it out and encourage it, rather than suppress it. If it is permitted to guide our life, we grow healthy, fruitful, and happy."zs

Now I am writing all this because Maslow's description of an inner nature

I find similar to Bastian's elementary and ethnic ideas, and of Jung's personal and collective unconscious--thus more support for an unobservable but nonetheless an existing aspect of being. Also, I find his distinction of invention and discovery very serviceable, tying in with the distinction I want to make between Western art pre- and post-

Renaissance. Further, I would also hypothesize that this inner nature is 145 that which is made conscious through the doing of art. And in pre-

Renaissance communities this was done predominantly through various

forms of rituals involving most members of a community.

When for example Christianity became more widespread in Europe, dramas

such as the mystery, morality, and miracle plays evolving from the

Christian liturgy, had the same intent as the pagan rituals that had preceded them. They, I am sure like some rituals in other religions, were presented and produced by the community for the community in a way that was naturally multi-levelled, multi-sensory, and multi-informational involving the whole situation; an experience that allowed its participators an opportunity to connect with Bastian's suggestion of elementary ideas,

Herder's notion of the "inner voice," and Maslow's concept of "inner nature."

In the early stages of Christianity in England, pagan-like rituals such as the Plough Play, performed on the old New Year's Day, January the 6th, were rampant. This particular play's origins were rooted in Anglo-Saxon ritual but the elementary ideas are nonetheless evident. Richard Courtney describes the play in this manner:

Ploughmen harnessed to a plough dragged it round the village with sword dancers. In origin Anglo-Saxon (perhaps the horse sacrifice), it enforced Plough alms. The Plough-car was linked to the Egyptian ship- car: the ceremonial plough was kept in the church, like the horns of the Abbots Brornley deer dancers today. The "Tommy" (Fool) had an animat's skin and tail. The "Bessy" was a man dressed as a woman. The old year (father) was killed by the new (sons). There were bawdy I46 scenes, a hobby-horse and a dragon. The plough was a fertility symbol in the sense that Shakespeare used it of Cleopatra ...27

Similar themes are found iii most British folk dramas that were played out in the Middle Ages, such as The Padstow Horse Ritual, a play which still survives. The performer dons the mask of a horse, a conic like black mask with a red tongue sticking out, and is costumed such that he appears to be a man on horseback. There is no dialogue. The ritual is enacted in the spring and concerns death and resurrection during a dance and a fertility rite. Another popular play dating from around the same period, The British

Mummers Play, was performed at Christmas. A version of the play is still performed today in Newfoundland. The Mummers Play is also a death and resurrection rite. The play concerns the defeat of the hero by an adversary and is then brought back to life. One version has five scenes of death and resurrection. An elaborate disguise is worn made of a set of papers. Like

The Padstow Horse Ritual, some of the action is performed in a circle instead of the processional.

The same themes as found in the Ainu ceremony of the "sending away," or of the initiation rite in the Eleusinian mysteries, or as those suggested by the cave paintings are found in the above depictions. Through action involving various art forms the mystery of death and resurrection is played out in dramatic form. In such plays, there is evidence of an incorporation of the basic themes deriving from the primitive cultures of 147 hunting and planting tribes. The common motifs being the passing of the rite ritual most often expressed in the form of birth and death and the passing of the seasons. In hunting cultures, animals were the main manifestations of the powers and mysteries of nature where humans dressed as and imitated beasts. In agriculturally dominant societies, the myth was that a human sacrifice was offered to the earth and buried; out of it plants would grow thus providing physical and spiritual nourishment.

The plant was eaten with the understanding that it was a divine gift.

Such recurring imagery is common to all traditional religions: namely, that out of death comes life. Rituals seem to have been performed as a means of trying to find answers to the why of such events, consciously or unconsciously, or coming to grips with the kind of question Reeves poses:

"Why is there something rather than nothing?" so that one might direct one's actions in the world. These were rituals in which whole communities participated, where, through the engagement in art, the contents of the unconscious surfaced to the conscious; facilitated the bringing out of one's inner nature. During the Middle Ages in the West, rituals involving

Christian stories were the most common.

The mystery play, for example, evolved from a processional liturgical service. The mystery play derives its name from the French mystere, used to designate a trade or craft; these plays were backed, financed, and 148 produced by a particular guild. They were staged usually on pageant

wagons in the main centre of a town, where each wagon presented a

dramatized cycle from the Bible. Each play presented in the cycle was put

under the charge of a different guild. It appears as if the mystery plays

were town projects emanating under the auspices of the local church and

town council; much like the Passion Play held in the village of

Oberarnmergau every ten years in our era. In a sense, the method and

approach of the mystery plays were similar to the Dionysian festivals but

here the subject matters were drawn from the scriptures, such as in The

Second Shepherd's Play. This play was presented as a rather light,

humaurous and sometimes farcical show with some bawdy humour, despite

its serious message.

Miracle plays generally appe ave dealt with subject matters that were of a graver nature than mystery plays; they could be likened to Greek tragedies. For example one surviving extract of a miracle play deals with the incestuous relationship between a father and his daughter. Miracle plays were usually performed on the day of the celebration of a saint's name. The focal point of such presentations, however, lay not in what was being said as much as what and how it was being done, like the Greek plays. This may be easily glimpsed in the description of the staging of one of the earliest morality plays, The Castle of Perseverance. 149 This play was performed outdooors on a set enclosed in a circular area,

much in harmony with the medieval concept of the geocentric theory of the universe, or in Jungian terms, a symbol of the totality of the psyche.

The circle was surrounded by a moat of sorts. In the middle stood the castle, around it scaffolds which represented God, the World, the Devil,

Flesh and Covetousness. Persons experiencing this drama were physically and psychically in the centre of the action. The audience, as Jung might have said, did not reflect upon the symbols of the play, they lived them and were animated by their meaning.28 It might even be said that the effect produced was the meaning. Richard Southern writes of the medieval rounds:

...in England individual speeches might have been delivered conventionally (in the Mummers' tradition); that there are many suggestions that dances might be called for in the performances; and lastly that there are repeatedly directions asking for music to be 'piped up' and for songs to be sung.29

All of this suggests that these plays were open works, as Umberto Eco would say, or low in definition, as Marshall McLuhan might have said, as they required high participation or completion by the audience; where the audience could imbue the activities with personal meaning allowing for the experience of a spiritual insight. And by the latter I mean what every religion in its fundamental non-doctrinaire, non-dogmatic form strives for and which formerly was expressed and discovered through art: a connection to "the beginning," whose essence is inspired by each participant's inner nature. Not as religion was to become mostly, in its 150 organized form in the West: a literal and historical interpretation of the

Bible which dissociated humans and the world from the divine or what

may be called one's spiritual dimension.

These plays engaged the "as if" qualities of each participant. Richard

Courtney examines this quality and submits a notion, which reinforces my

thesis, that is, that: "Play is a medium." He continues:

It is a "thing between," a dynamic that relates our consciousness to the world and so creates meaning. In play the medium is, indeed, the message.

Dramatic play is so all-inclusive that those who define it find it has slipped between their categories. Play is not an object: it is something people do. But it means different things in different times and places ... The significance of the dramatic act always varies with the context of the player. Whenever play has been regarded as Being "as if," thinkers have regarded play as vital to learning.30

In reference specifically to court plays, Courtney notes:

The Middle Ages created symbolic allegories, whereby one thing was understood as another ("as if"). Three traditions united: the Old Testament was an allegory for the New; rural labourers danced in skins and horns, or took the parts of Robin and Marion on May Day; and the Mystery Cycle had multiple meanings. The Renascence court expanded these ideas. The Tudors had social dramas based on the "allegory of love," the tournament and the city pageants--dramatic world to understand life... The "as if" of allegory and myth infused the whole realm.31

Dramatic play, or the doing of art, experienced in its different forms, from the time of the appearance of the first Homo sapiens, has been a

"vital" means of learning, knowing, understanding, and finding meaning in one's life by the majority of the populace in the West. The examples I have 151 evoked thus far, seem to provide the evidence needed to prove the point as such.

Campbell writes:

...[ in] the range of festival games and attitudes... from the mask to the consecrated host and temple image, transubstantiated worshipper and transubstantiated world--1 can see, or believe 1 can see, that a principle of release operates throughout the series by way of the alchemy of an "as if"; and that through this, the impact of all so- called "reality" upon the psyche is transubstantiated. The play state and the rapturous seizures sometimes deriving from it represent, therefore, a step rather toward than away from the ineluctable truth; and belief--acquiescence in a belief that is not quite belief-- is the first step toward the deepened participation that the festival affords in that general will to life, which, in its metaphysical aspect, is antecedent to, and the creator of, all life's laws.

The opaque weight of the world--both of life on earth and of death, heaven, and hell--is dissolved, and the spirit freed, not from anything... but for something fresh and new, a spontaneous act.32

In these words Campbell appears to have explained the role of art in the ritual, including plays engaging in the "as if" quality, akin to Courtney's role of the play. Campbell has also described in part what I believe to be part of the process involved in the act of creation, namely "the freeing of the spirit for something fresh and new." Creation described in a similar manner is echoed in the ideas of many others, including some of the renowned artists of this century. A few examples are: the Russian filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein's notion of dialectical montage, where conflicting viewpoints are presented, then come to a "collision" out of which arises a new concept--similar to what Arthur Koestler called bisocia tion; or Bertolt Brecht's idea of the verfremdungseffekt, a 152 technique used to confront the audience with the unexpected producing a contrapuntal relationship with that which was viewed, inducing the viewer to lcak ar the familiar in a way never seen before--to discover new meanings, understandings, and experiences.

I am implying that the freeing of the spirit for something fresh and new is precisely what happened to the majority of the populace prior to the

Renaissance, by virtue of their active participation in either pagan rituals or Christian drama, as outlined above. By engaging in the "as if," they were able to gain a sense of heightened consciousness (a form of self- reflection) which helped them understand "what being a human in the cosmic scheme is all about." . Of course we still practise rituals today around similar themes as earlier humans. Plays are still performed, but hardly with the same mindfulness or intent and with a role ascribed to doing art that is limiting and limited to the very few. This is what I am imputing is sorely missing in our culture, the participation in depth in activities that may help us transcend the surface of our consciousness and help us uncover and discover that which is underneath. I hope that with the examples I have introduced above

I have been able to demonstrate that art is indeed a definite means for such an exploration. 153 The next step in my dissertation is try to investigate why most of us in

the West have ceased to use art in such a manner; or why the quality of "as

if," or of doing art, or what Collingwood has called "magic" has been lost

to the majority of the people of the West. It seems to have been lost with the upsurge of the movement that erroneously supposed that delving into one's unconscious through activities which used the arts, was superstition. It is superstition only when the "as if" quality dissipates; it was lost when the intellect took charge of most of our learning, and supressed other means of knowing. It is in tracing briefly the history of this loss that I hope to make a strong case later for the reintegration of the arts in one's life; not to replace but to become an equal partner of the intellect.

The intellectualization of the Arts

The changes that began to occur in the West, following the Middle Ages, began to transform that somewhat holistic organic society. In that society the arts were not thought of or consciously reflected upon as we think of the arts today, rather, as I hope I have demonstrated, they were an integral part of a person's existence; an indeterminate process of discovery. This began to alter during the Renaissance when art gradually turned into a highly defined ostensive concept, developing a structure that required training by most of those who engaged in it. 154 The reader may wonder here whether perhaps I have an idealized or a

romantic view of the Middle Ages. I am not suggesting here that we hold

their way of life as an exemplar; I am well aware of some of the

deplorable and horrific conditions which existed at that time. My interest

here is in examining the role of the arts and it is merely to point out that

in the Middle Ages, the arts were a more embodying practice. It seems to

me that medieval citizens, through their intertwining of art and life, were able to understand their self better than we understand ours. Let's not forget that we generally look at the Middle Ages with modern eyes coloured by the epitaph that the Renaissance gave it--The Dark Ages. It may have been in the dark about the material world, but as various scholars have pointed out, in Medieval culture, there was: "serenity, poise, and wholeness" that we lack now.33

Although the citizen of the Middle Ages may have felt that life was in the hands of God, nonetheless, he "felt secure in the midst of what we should regard as insecurity precisely because he was keenly aware of his own weakness."34 As Arguelles notes: "The point is not to become them but become ourselves. The vision of what we are to become is already within us, awaiting the proper discipline through which it might be appropriately expressed.'& I am suggesting, art is such a "discipline"; and the medieval citizen by participating in depth in the early Christian rituals, used the arts as such.

However this was lost to them, with the continuous literal and historical

reading of the myths of Christianity. This change, alluded to above, had

begun in earnest in the later stages of the Middle Ages under the reign of

Pope Innocent Ill. However, it was during the Renaissance that, in the

words of Alan Watts, "the orthodox hierarchy" was to consistently degrade the myth of Christianity "to a science and history"; in a sense, to expound

its ethnic ideas without reference to the elementary. Watts remarks:

... when myth is confused with history, it ceases to apply to man's inner life... The tragedy of Christian history is that it is a consistent failure to draw the life from the Christian myth and unlock its wisdom ...

Myth is only a "revelation" so long as it is a message from heaven-- that is from the timeless and non-historical world--expressing not what was true once, but what is true always.36

The timeless and non-historical world that Watt names is what I have called on many occasions the spiritual dimension; which is what Arguelles probably implies is "the vision ... already within us, awaiting the proper discipline through which it might be appropriately expressed." Despite the way Arguelles or Watts may have meant it, to me this means what Maslow has called an "inner nature," in part unique to one's self and in part species-wide. I should underline here that notwithstanding the references to Christianity, it is not only in the Christian myth that one may " unlock wisdom," wisdom may be unlocked from any myth; it's just that the 156 Christian myth has been the dominant one in the West and since my thesis

is located within this sphere, my references are to the Christian myth.

Gutenberg's technological breakthrough in the fifteenth century, the invention of the printing press, not only precipitated the Renaissance but it too literally changed the concepts and practice of the arts. In theatre, this changed concept is reflected in the innovations taking place in the space occupied by theatre and the new expectations by the audience. In art, we see a descent from the spires of Gothic cathedrals to the pleasures provided by earthly delights, the senses overtaking the spirit in a sense, the whole becoming centred in the intellect.

The Renaissance began in ltaly which was its undisputed centre. It was from ltaly that the dissemination of information and classical learning spread to other points in Europe, facilitated by the printing press. What appears to have appealed most to those living during the Renaissance were the grand values and traditions in the arts, sciences, philosophies and mathematics that were promoted in the literature produced in the heyday of the Greeks and Romans; that as expounded in the works of Plato,

Aristotle, Horace and the architectural treatise of Vitruvius for example.

They might be considered to be the instigators of a systematic analytic and rational outlook. The quest of the learned Renaissance Italian was to return to the grandeur and idealized states that once were Rome and 157 Greece in their non-Christian days. This inspired Niccolo Macchiavelli, for

example, to advocate the secularization of life and thought. It is said that

his: "realistic attitude toward religion produced the objective view that

religion (that is Christianity) hinders the strong state by preaching meekness." The solution seemed to be very much in keeping with the emerging rationale of instrumental reason resonant in the thoughts of

Macchiavelli. For him, not unlike the action of some world leaders today,

...the existence of the state and its acquisition of power became ends in themselves. Towards these ends all other considerations must be sacrif iced.37

This was a pronouncement very much favoured by the merchants and mercenary soldiers crowding the cities of Florence, Venice and Rome-- city states teeming with wealth as a result of a flourishing trade market and the immense amount of gold plundered from the newly discovered

Americas. With thinking that promoted a strong state, and in those pre-

Adam Smith times, the view was that wealth in a society was measured by the amount of gold it owned, and with an ever-growing wealthier church relaxing its views of profit-making, the seeds were sown for capitalism. This allowed for a greater number of people to expand their wealth and develop what might be termed the culture of contentment of yesteryear. It also created the opportunity for these yuppies of yore to display their fortunes in new ways:

The display of wealth was part of the mechanism of power. Luxury was less a reward than an expression of success; and the itch for luxury as a mark of social status was one of the drives of the Renaissance. Much of the trade in which the city-states thrived, was in fact, luxuries.3 8

We can see in this the development of a mentality which Paulo Freire calls

the oppressive capitalist: "In their unrestrained eagerness to possess, the

oppressors develop the conviction that it is possible for them to

transform everything into objects of their purchasing power: hence their

strictly materialist concept of existence. Money is the measure of all

things and profit the primary goal ... For them to be is to have and to be the

class of the "haves."39 Compare this with Galbraith's assessment of the

value of money in the culture of contentment: "money, in singular measure,

is what the contented majority enjoys and deploys. It is to this audience that television and the press are directed."40 In those days sans television or a popular press, I would suggest the arts became the commodity which was directed towards the contented majority.

We are beginning to see here a new role for art; a new relationship developing between an artifact or art object and humans in the West. One of the ways that Renaissance man displayed his wealth was in living and surrounding himself with visible luxurious objects; these objects which were objets dtart in most cases, not only spoke of his wealth but glorified him in the process, such as in the case of the Medici family of Florence. It seems that it became the metier of the artists and artisans of the period to cater to these nouveaux riches. Art was being created increasingly now 159 not be shared by the community but for specific individuals and obviously

to serve a different purpose. For the most part, the artists of the period,

or those with whom we are mcst familiar, worked on commissioned

pieces; their tableaux became a status symbol, a signature piece that gained more prestige for its owner as the artists became more renowned,

usually because of their technical expertise. Formerly it had not mattered too much who had painted what or how, who had created what. The why was always more important.

Michaelangelo, Raphael, Titian, to name but a few, created their masterpieces as a result of an order from a wealthy patron, usually a member of the church or merchant aristocracy, or the nobility. The same applied to theatre. Moliere's theatre troupe in France for example, first found a benefactor in the duc de Guise, then the duc d'Epernon, the prince of Conti, the king's brother, and then eventually won the patronage of the king, Louis XIV. Moliere would not have survived otherwise and we would not have had his plays today. Nonetheless, one has to ponder as to the compromises that these artists had to make in producing an order. And I sometimes wonder as well whether we would esteem their works as highly if the artist's reputation were not as acclaimed, especially when one considers that it was usually done so by influential individuals who had an investment in the art object. I am certainly not trying to denigrate nor judge the worth of any artist past or present, nor am I questioning the 160 fact that the patrons of these artists truly appreciated the works. 1 am sure they were and are. What I am questioning is the treatment of these artists and the changing role of art.

Some of these artists were very much treated as commodities by their patrons; Moliere is a noteworthy example. As celebrated and as renowned as Moliere was during his lifetime, he was buried in the dark of the night without a proper burial service, despite pleas to the king, who was his patron, probably because one of his earlier plays, Tartuffe, had satirized the hypocricy of the elite of seventeenth century Paris. Ironically, a year after his death, the acting troupe he had founded, was merged with another by the king, to form the celebrated Comedie Fran~aise,an acting company still esteemed highly around the world. I am merely suggesting by this, and I am suggesting much more than I am writing at present, that the designation of artist, work of art, masterpiece, is becoming more and more arbitrary and defined by the emerging powerful elites; sometimes contingent on the circumstances that surround it. And I think it not an exaggeration to suggest that art probably needed to be highly defined so that it could be kept under control; perhaps a subliminal means of shutting out those that were not as well versed in its definitions.

It is useful within this context, to keep in mind:

It was not until the eighteenth century that the fine arts were thought of as distinct from the crafts, sciences, and other human 161 enterprises. An aesthetic or theory of fine art, thus had no place in ancient and medieval thought. The Greek techne and the Latin ars, both of which are often rendered as "art," were applied to all skilled activities, including many we would call crafts or sciences. Plato and Aristotle considered mimesis... to be common to some poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and the dance, but this was also, as they saw it, common to sophistry and the imitation of bird calls. And as late as the Renaissance...p ainting, sculpture, and architecture were classed with such manual crafts as carpentry and shoemaking.41

Consider what Ernst Gombrich has written:

Lorenzo [Cosimo's grandson of the Medici dynasty] may have seen his patron's role not as that of a 'regular customer' but--perhaps for the first time in history--as one who offers his influential support to advance the interest not of the individual artists but of what he considered the interest of art as such.42

The above thought I find to be appropriate to the position I wish to raise in this passage. That is, prior to Lorenzo's time, art would never have been thought of as having an interest of its own; it was too much part and parcel of one's life--a "human enterprise" like any other. What was then this new interest of art? Aside from a form of glorification for its patrons, a luxurious commodity accruing in value depending on the market and so on; art was retreating more and more to the salons and palaces of its wealthy patrons and to secluded places of worship. A far cry from the state of the arts in the Middle Ages! Even those select few who had access to the art produced, became mostly its passive consumers, for they were no longer open works that invited active engagement. More than that, the common person in the Renaissance no longer could be expected to engage in an encounter with a work which was rarely seen and which required the 162 cultivated eye and vocabulary of the burgeoning connoisseur. Art works were being produced now more and more "primarily for their realization as value and profit, and not for their capacity to satisfy human wants and desireslU43 or human needs. Instead, art was growing to serve its own newly created needs; it was becoming an industry, an effective form of massification. Freire explains this latter term in the following manner:

In the "organization" which results from acts of maniputation, the people--mere guided objects--are adapted to the objectives of the manipulators. In true organization, the individuals are active in the organizing process, and the objectives of the organization are not imposed by others. In the first case, the organization is a means of "massification," in the second, a means of liberationmn44

Marilyn French expands upon the context of the cause and effects of massification in terms of the "scientific advance upon nature" when she writes:

...the scientific advance upon nature led to industrialization, which is also a mixed curse and blessing; and industrialization led to the expansion of capitalism. The backbone of capitalism was the middle- class family, with its objectives of "the continuity of the male line, the presevervation intact of the inherited property, and the acquisition through marriage of further property or useful political alliances." These values--power through property possessed by males-"intensified the stratification of classes: the rich had more ease and luxury than any but an oriental despot had possessed in earlier ages, and the poor were more utterly dispossessed, vulnerable, destitute--landless, homeless, and starving--than they had been under feudal regimes.

Industrial capitalism carried to an extreme the tendencies of instrumentalism. Having lost the land they used to work, the communities in which they used to live, people were forced to sell themselves, their labour power. For the first time, masses of workers were deprived of any control over the production of what they needed: they could not choose what to make, when to make it, or how to make it. Workers became, for capitalists, merely another factor of production, along with raw materials and machinery. Moreover, if the capitalist wants to survive, he must act I63 "rationally": that is, he must treat workers as means to his end (profit) rather than as fellow human beings.45

The concept of massification merges with my thesis thusly. Whereas prior

to the Renaissance, individuals seemed to be "active in the organizing

process" of their psyche by means of being full fledged members of a

community and thus by implication participating in communal rituals;

post-Renaissance, they became "deprived of any control over what they

needed ...what to make, when to make it, or how to make it." They were

also deprived of doing different forms of art. Since art was becoming

more and more organized in line with industrialization, the "objectives" of

art were being imposed by others, usually people like Lorenzo, and

becoming more solitary activities where there is no longer a sense of a participation mystique or interconnectedness with fellow community

members. In such a situation, the doing of art as a means of accessing the spiritual dimension no longer becomes as feasible, and ipso facto, feelings that might have surfaced during the active doing of art remain dormant-- feelings that might have influenced the participant's directions in life.

Around the beginning of the Renaissance, a shift in human attitude and behaviour becomes apparent, a shift moving towards what is usually termed modernity. One such change, referred to already, is an intellectual awakening of sorts; another change is a new-found gratification and development of sensual pleasures--in sights, sounds, tastes. Examples 164 abound of new developments in the arts beginning around this period: in music, architecture, gardening, theatre, food preparation, furniture, porcelain making, jewellry, fashion, and so on. This is especially evident in the courts of kings, and the palaces of the upper echelons of society-- the culture of contentment of yore.

The withdrawal of art from the main square of the village or town where the whole of the community participated, such as in the performance of the Medieval Mystery Cycles, and the general retreat of such art into the reclusive chambers of a proportionately fewer members of the community, marginalized those uninvited or unable to participate. Art also changed to become a more sensually and/or intellectually satisfying source of consumption for those partaking in its pleasures, as opposed to being a source for a more spiritual encounter, as I have intimated art had been in earlier times.

Art was becoming highly defined like the printed book. "The printed book," observed McLuhan, "had encouraged artists to reduce all forms of expression as much as possible to the single descriptive and narrative plane of the printed word.'& The technical skills that artists began to develop in the Renaissance were acclaimed because they rendered a painting or sculpture as realistic as possible; this did not matter at all prior to this period in Western art and has never ever mattered in many 165 non-Western cultures today, even though artists are quite awarc and capable of the technical skills involved. Because the why of art had never beer: technique until that time. As an aside apropos of this, Otto Rank offers an illuminating possibility for such a change when he notes:

The most definite representation possible of an idea is imitation, in the ideoplastic sense; and we might explain this very character of abstraction of primitive art by the fact that it faithfully represents an idea which is itself abstract. That is the soul was depicted as abstractly as possible, in order that it might be like this abstract, and the further the divinizing of the soul in different personifications proceeded, the more concrete, or, as we should say, naturalistic, art became.47

The push for what McLuhan might call high definition art probably began in fourteenth century Italy with the Florentine architect Filipo Brunelleschi; it was he who provided the mathematical rules, inspired by Hellenistic art, that allowed for the painting of perspective successfully. Gombrich writes:

The Florentine masters of Brunelleschi's circle, had developed a method by which nature could be represented in a picture with almost scientific accuracy. They began with the framework of perspective lines, and they build up the human body through their knowledge of anatomy and the laws of foreshortening.

Northern artists of the time such as Jan van Eyck, as evidenced in his painting The Betrothal of the Arnolfini, achieved the illusion of nature in their painting by adding, Gombrich tells us:

...detail upon detail until his whole picture became like a mirror of the visible world ... To carry out his intentions of holding up the mirror to reality in all its details, Van Eyck had to improve the technique of painting. He was the inventor of oil painting.48 166 It is becoming evident that the artist during the Renaissance is

endeavouring to run a course parallel to the educated savants of his time,

in passionate search for truth as found in the external world conveyed

through invented new techniques, a truth which is everchanging and

circumscribed within a limited time and space. The medieval artists had

no urge to invent ways to mirror reality in their works nor had their

spectators required it; the truth for them did not necessarily lie in the

exploration of the material world but rather in the discovery of their

inner world, which many may have also called heaven.

The artists that came to be renowned during the Renaissance oecame so

particularly because they were able to solve technical problems, some of them as mentioned above. Others developed highly refined skills related mostly to draughtsmanship, such as: foreshortening, illusion of space, perspective and drawing figures to scale in relation to background.

Paintings of f gures also showed an increasing scientific knowledge of anatomy; they were now moulded in light and shade which contributed to the illusion of depth. However the most celebrated technica I innovation of the time was Leonardo Da Vinci's invention of sfumato, which was able to eradicate the static quality of paintings that had appeared up to that time.

One can see the technique of sfumato in'the Mona Lisa; the blurring of the outline and the mellowing of colours allowed one form to dissolve into the other. This famous painting is an example as well, like that of most of 167 Leonardo's works, of the spirit of dimostratione, excercises that demonstrated the power of art in creating illusion and the "ingenious way in which the great master solves the artistic problern."49 It seems that the ingenious ways for Leonardo were much inspired by the scientific

Zeitgeist emerging in this era. But then Da Vinci probably considered himself more of a scientist than an artist. This is more than evident in some of his writings and of course in his prolif ic output of rnechanicaSly inspired sketches and inventions.

No one who is even dimly aware of Da Vinci's work can remain indifferent.

The profundity of the talents and skills he demonstrated were truly impressive. Nonetheless, for me, our modern conception of him as an artist is problematic, although paradoxically he was and will always be an artist. I shall try to explain such a position.

Leonardo painted very few compositions in his lifetime. Rather, he left behind stacks of sketches minutely detailing the human anatomy, fauna and flora, and numerous plans of various inventions from war to flying machines and so on. These amply show, amongst his other attributes, his creativity, abundant skills, inventiveness, and versati ity.

Notwithstanding, our modern fascination and reverence for him as an artist may be imputed mostly to his technical and scientific brilliance. We honour him because he was a scientist. To refer to him as an artist but 168 honour him for his technical brilliance speaks to what I mean when I

suggest that art has come under the tutelage of instrumental reason.

As such, the West's view of Leonardo, in a sense, was a precursor of the

Newtonian legacy--a somewhat mechanically ordered view of the world.

Such a view also epitomized the essence of an intellectual approach to art; for it was Leonardo's scientific cum mathematical approach to his work which probably made him such a venerated figure in the centuries to come. Leonardo's oeuvres came to represent in the West the growth of a new understanding of art, one that celebrates and exults in the creation of an ever-expanding intellect; an art which seems to felicitate itself on finding the means to replicate a mirror image of the world in a manner that aspires to imitate the new mathematical and scientific rules of the time. Art became a convert to this new method and approach. And

Leonardo's works fit the bill perfectly.

Consider as well that it is at this time that the arts truly become separate from the whole, no longer working within the whole. They begin to withdraw into their own new niches--shrink in production size and fully withdraw indoors. In terms of visual arts, this begins upon the establishment of an art academy in Bologna in 1585. Soon after, art academies are founded in all major European cities. In theatre, there is now a smaller and more specific troupe of specialized players who act and I69 gear their performance to a smaller and more specific audience. There is

more emphasis placed on organization of the acting area and the entrance

and exits of players. What Leonardo did with sfumato, Sebastiano Serlio

does for theatre with his fixed point of view. In Architettura, he expands

on Vitruvius' ideas and describes how illusion of distance and space can be

created; the illusion of perspective is painted for the first time on stage.

Later on the Bibiena family extend this illusion of perspective by shifting

it from one point to two-point. The erection of a such a highly defined background, as well as the introduction of a raised platform and the enclosure of the audience in a walled area creates a physical as well as psychical distance.

As the arts ceased to be an integral part of the community, the religious movements brewing in this period caused more divisiveness, not only spiritually and emotionally but physicaily as well; it gave rise to new demarcated frontiers for most Western European countries. Art began to function and develop framed within these new frontiers. Beginning with the effects on organized religion instigated initially by Martin Luther's protest, religion was made "a thing of this world and achieved the miracle identifying good works with the accumulation of riches"50--the capitalistic ethos was sanctioned from one of society's highest authorities. What had been an aspiration to "transubstantiate materiality" seems to have reversed itself subsequent to the Renaissance. 170 Consider the fact that in the West, the various Christian sects that sprang up after the Protestant Reformation, divested themselves completely not only of the rites and rituals of the early Christians, but also of any accoutrements associated with them. Thus a large number of the population stopped engaging altogether in rituals whose means of expression were the arts. Even though the Roman Catholic Church held on to its traditional rituals, whose roots go back to mystical ceremonials and the elementary ideas--ideas that have a commonality with myths and rites that span the globe, it eventually distanced itself from its mythic source and intellectualized it.

From all this emerges a general picture of an integrated communal society prior to the Renaissance, where human beings seemed imbued with a sense of wholeness, that will evanesce as that peculiar form of Western rational thought, Zweckrationaiitat or instrumental reason, begins to dominate gradually that life. And in this context, art's role changes leaving in its wake a disembodied society and a fragmented human.

Arguelles eloquently sums up the gist of my argument in the following passage:

Ignoring the laws of internal necessity, materialism has no real place for art, the means by which all matter may be regenerated as spirit. The primitive peoples of the world have indeed been able to speak to rocks and listen to voices issuing from mountain-tops simply because for them art is the transubstantiation of materiality. Because Western civilization has lost this art, which is the essence of art, both the physical body and the intuitive psychic faculties have been neglected in favour of a disembodied and exalted intellectualism whose chief fruit has been the gargantuan planetary system of runaway 171 technology. Instead of a harmoniously integrated and thorough psycho-physical training, the civilized human is educated to use and rely on the intellect alone, while dealing with a world of inert but exploitable matter, of which nobody is a part.51

In such a milieu, our need to discover and invent our selves unfettered by the imposition of arbitrary rules or the adoption of arbitrary symbols was covertly and overtly repressed. One had to be trained to be an artist, identified as an artist, view art in buildings separated from the whole; systems of evaluation were instituted, critics passed judgment on creations stemming from personal visions. Art became trapped in a

Verwaltete Welt (a world caught up in administration), its own version of the "iron cage." Here I sympathize with Hans Cornelius who had lamented:

Men have unlearned the ability to recognize the Godly in themselves and in things: nature and art, family and state have only interest for them as sensations. Therefore their lives flow meaninglessly by, and their shared culture is inwardly empty ...52

Whereas prior to the Renaissance, the arts engaged the participation of a majority of the people in the West; subsequent to the Renaissance, they grew to become solitary activities, closed works, more and more defined, making it difficult for the majority of the audience to participate in them with any active engagement. This led to a type of audience conditioning that has been a factor in the development of a culture of silence, and the antecedent to Adorno and Horkheimer's notion of the "culture industry," which is not dissimilar in meaning to this more recent description Alice

Goldfarb Marquis calls the Art Biz The Art Biz today casts a long, dark shadow across the swarming visual panaroma that surrounds us during every waking moment and penetrates even into the inner spectacle of our fantasies and dreams. The Art Biz distorts what we see by drawing an arbitrary line around the valuable and calling it the sum total ot art while ignoring all else. The Art Biz powerfully imposes its own values which find their highest expression in high prices. Manipulated by a few, even in deepest secrecy, it influences many, most obviously the large audience for art. Drilled in college art history classes, schooled in art publications, impressed by the millions a few collectors wager on the drop of a hammer, overawed by museums, intimidated by critics and scholars, the art audience dutifully "appreciates" what it gets. Ill equipped to form independent judgment, lacking the arcane vocabulary for discussing art, and intimidated by the wealth of its collectors, the art public meekly admires what it is given.53

The subtext of Marquis' thoughts above shows the marginalization of the

"art public." Tactics to pacify and indoctrinate art audiences are used in a way similar to those Chomsky attributes to the mass media, or Galbraith observes are being used by the purveyors of the culture of contentment or

Freire states is the condition whereby the oppressed have internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines; in this case, it is guidelines about the arts. Such are methods of instrumental reason.

The quest to attain an idealized classical purity in art, that had begun in the Renaissance, governed and dominated the works of most artists subsequent to it. This came to a climax in the Neoclassic age which was based mostly on the belief that man, through rational analysis, could discover an adequate explanation for everything in life. In the eighteenth century, the rise of the bourgeoisie induced a reevaluation of the social and political theories that had led to class structure. Soon after, faith in 173 reason was replaced by trust in the natural instinct; primitive society, where man freely followed his natural inclinations came to be idealized.

Freedom of action and expression formed the basis of a new ideology. In the arts, Neoclassicism gave way to this new spirit of thought and expression in man, Romanticism, inspired by the philosophical works of

Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The reaction of the Romantics to the classical concept of art set the tone and acted as the precursor for the art movements that followed in the late nineteenth century and earlier twentieth centuries, particularly

Symbolism and Expressionism.

It was probably Odile Redon's compositions with his emphasis on painting what he felt; on transforming the world of nature to suit his dreams and his maginative visions that paved the way for the symbolist movement in art. Artists such as Paul Gauguin continued the tradition of painting from the imagination and not from life. This quest for a return to the elementary, substantially changed the style of painting: there was a predominant use of pure colours, simple forms, and the suppression of perspective. These changes were to influence the works of Matisse,

Bonnard, and Vuillard amongst others.

Expressionism as an art movement had its roots in the northern countries 174 of Europe. In the works of artists such as Vincent Var: Gogh or Edvard

Munch, the anguish and instability of modern existence is rendered in turbulent lines and bold strokes. The shadowless drawings, the pure colours and the deemphasization of llusion are all present.

These two art movements provided the impetus for the artistic revolutions that were to follow in this century and generally the movement towards abstract art. It may be generalized that if the arts during the Renaissance held up a mirror to nature and if the Romantics turned the mirror inward to reflect humankind's natural instincts, then the new art movements of the twentieth century propelled the eye towards the mind and the psyche, to the sub-strata layer of our consciousness, much like that which occured during the doing of art in the

Middle Ages. This delving into the depths of the mind and psyche parallels in a sense the new approach and discoveries in physics.

The Dematerialization of Matter

The earlier years of this century had undergone cataclysmic changes in all disciplines, particularly io science. There was what Arthur Koestler calls the holistic development in physics. This was predominantly brought about by Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity; Werner Heisenberg's Principle of

Indeterminancy, the implications of which are that "on a subatomic level, 175 !he universe at any given moment is in a quasi-undecided state and that its state in the next moment is to some extent indeterminate or freeM;54 and Mach's Principle which, very simply put, intimated that one's frame of reference framed one's view. Koestler explains Mach's work in this way:

...the inertial properties of terrestrial matter are determined by the total mass of the universe around us. There is no satisfactory causal explanation as to how this influence is exerted, yet "Mach's Principle" is an integral part of relativistic cosmology. The metaphysical implications are fundamental--for it follows from it not only that the universe as a whole influences local, terrestrial events, but also that local events have an influence, however small, on the universe as a whole. Philosophically-minded physicists are acutely aware of these implications--which remind one of the ancient Chinese proverb: "If you cut a blade of grass, you shake the Universe.'&

In the vernacular of Quantum physics, such a concept is articulated as

"consciousness collapses the quantum wave." This phenomenon may be explained in the following way: observing this page in front of me, for example, affects its quantum wave; thus observing any thing collapses the quantum wave leading to the supposition that consciousness has an independent existence that can affect the quantum wave of things56 If this is so, then the Chinese proverb, "If you cut a blade of grass, you shake the Universe," makes perfect metaphorical sense.

Briefly, the notion is that "the whole is as necessary for understanding its parts as the parts are necessary for understanding the whole."s;r In other words, the new physics and physicists admitted that science did not have absolute answers nor explanations for everything in life and was not 176 necessarily the only path to enlightenment. As Koestler observed:

...the strictly deterministic, mechanistic world-view can no longer be upheld; it had become a Victorian anachronism. The nineteenth century model of the universe as a mechanical clockwork is a shambles and since the concept of matter itself has been dematerialized, materialism can no longer claim to be a scientific philosophy.5 8

It might have been a matter of pure coincidence or alchemy that at the same time that the new theories were being forwarded in physics, practising artists had begun to "dematerialize matter," so to speak, in their compositions (or was it the artists who influericed the physicists?).

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque with their Iaunch of the Cubist movement marked a sudden break from the traditional and naturalist representations that had begun in the Renaissance. They rejected representation of art in the third dimension. They did not strive to

"capture the impression of the moment," as the Impressionists had done, but broke forms into planes that could simultaneously present multiple aspects of an object which produced movement in depth.

Marcel Duchamp experimented with the Futurist variant of cubism in one of the most controversial canvases of that era: Nude Descending a

Staircase. In this painting, the whole action of a movement is recorded at once on a canvas. It is five schematized figures superimposed one upon another coming down the stairs. Regressive and progressive movements 177 are captured in one coup showing concurrent:y the memory of the image

and its present state; a far cry from the movement that Leonardo wanted

to capture with his invention of sfumato. Whereas Leonardo's intention

may have been strictly physical, Duchamp's might be considered

metaphysical. The composition seems to be a concrete realization of

Sheldrake's theory that: "a world that is living in the presence of the

past ... is also living in the presence of the future, and open to continuing

creation." This particular work of Duchamp's and generally all his oeuvres

(he never repeated the same style twice) seem also to incarnate one of the

tenets of Futurism, that is: "That the gesture," to be reproduced "on canvas

shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism. It shall simply

be the dynamic sensation itself (made eternal). Indeed all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing."sg

Statements enunciated by those artists engaged in the new movements in art seem to correspond in part to those views articulated by the new wave of physicists versed in quantum theory. Duchamp for example, was the creator of "anti-art," which he baptized 'readymades," and the forerunner of the Dada movement, which revolted against the established aestheticism of the time, the kind of aestheticism that the Western art world had projected on someone like DaVinci.

Two of Duchamp's most celebrated readymades are Fountain and L. H.O.O.Q. 178 In 1917, Duchamp entered Fountain, a urinal, as tho work of R. Mutt, the

urinal's manufacturer, at the Exhibition of Independent Artists. It was

refused. L.H. 0.0.Q is a reproduction of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa with a

moustache drawn on it. When the letters L.H.O.O.Q. are pronounced in

French, they read, "Elle a chaud au cul," she has hot pants. Ursula Meyer thinks this act "ridiculed bourgeois reverence for a classical

Renaissance,"60 According to Hans Richter, Fountain was Duchamp's way of "pissing on the establishment's aesthetic values, which supposedly determine what is and what is not art."61

I would suggest that Duchamp's anti-art was anti the art which was the veritable anti-art. For it was the establishment of Western society that made art the domain of the elite and of the intelligentsia beginning in the

Renaissance; which in turn removed the arts from every day life of the masses into the specialized realm of aesthetics. Despite the irreverent nature of Duchamp's acts, by drawing the moustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, for example, Duchamp was reclaiming art back as part of everyone's existence. By presenting Fountain as a work of art, he was underlining the fact that anything and everything could, when no longer viewed in its normal surroundings, take on a completely different identity, perhaps what Campbell meant when he wrote on the "as if" quality, that of "the spirit freed, not from anything ... but for something fresh and new, a spontaneous act." 179 The research and work in physics and cosmology in this century has demonstrated that the world is not what classical science would have us believe. Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, for example,

...saw the possibility that his own scientific insight might undermine science itself. In overthrowing previous theories, it potentially suggested both that all science was not more than a temporary culturally determined hypothesis. Worse still, the nature of quantum theory was such that it evoked a world of seething uncertainty and strangeness. The 'real' world on which the idea of science was based might be a fiction like any other. All of which could leave science as potentially vulnerable as retigion.62

Like the new wave physicist, :he new wave artists in this century were engaged in the same kind of search for answers as humans had always done, since the beginning, but of course using different media. And the thoughts of the new wave physicists and the new wave artists sometimes appeared to converge. Appleyard maintains that David Bohm, a leading quantum theorist, profferred:

...that what we have discovered about the fundamental nature of matter is so radically opposed to our everyday forms of knowledge that nothing can remain unaffected.

For Bohm the central change that must occur is that we must abandon old, fragmented ways of understanding the world. Classical science has conditioned our language to conform with its understanding of the world. This view ... consists of breaking down of problems into discrete, experimental and observable parts. We acquire our knowledge of the world by seeing Galilee's falling weights as a separate phenomenon from the air pressure which, in reality, gives us a 'false' reading. Equally, we see our own minds as irrevocably separate from the world they attempt to interpret.

The whole of quantum theory seems, to Bohm, to undermine this view. Non-locality indicates that particles can affect each other over immense distances. In some sense we do not yet understand they may be actually one system. To see them as different is merely a useful generalization. Yet to see them as the same appears to deny all that we 180 think we know of the world. Bohm has argued that this is precisely what we must accept, whatever the difficulties: '...our notions of order are pervasive, for not only do they involve our thinking but also our senses, our feelings, our intuitions, our physical movement, our relationships with other people and with society as a whole and, indeed, every phase of our lives. It is thus difficult to 'step back' from our old notions of order sufficiently to be able seriously to consider new notions of order.'

...There is, therefore, a discontinuity between the way the world 'really' is and the way we behave as if it were. And this discontinuity may be at the root of all our woes.63

Similarly, the wave of revolutionary artists in this same era, in every discipline of the arts, have undermined traditional views about our world.

A strong current that underlies the works of Duchamp and the Dada artists that followed, for example, is echoed in the works of the playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd. Eugene lonesco, an absurdist playwright, defines his understanding of the term in this manner:

Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose... Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.64

As Duchamp's Anti-art, The Theatre of the Absurd in its devaluation of language is anti-literary; that is, it is a protest against language having become the predominant form in theatre, precisely the kind of criticism directed against a limiting language by some of the scientists quoted above. Like the visual arts, theatre too had become highly defined after the Renaissance and removed to a realm of its own separate from the other arts. As I tried to demonstrate earlier, primitive rituals and 181 medieval plays integrated all of tile art forms. Subsequent to the

Renaissance, most of the artistic forms were expunged, in a sense, until all that was left was an intellectualized version of the "play." Theatre too, like the visual arts had become preoccupied with holding up a mirror to nature, not too concerned with "causing the Word to resound behind words." This drive for verisimilitude probably reached its climax in the latter part of the nineteenth century, such as in Andre Antoine's Theitre

Libre.

Language, reduced to words, is necessary, useful, important when dealing and trying to understand the world in historical terms and at an intellectual level. But humans are more than intellect. To assign such a role to the arts, as I am suggesting the West had done, was to rob humans of the means by which they could understand the world on a non-historical and metaphysical level. Martin Esslin's following observations speak to my thesis:

Concerned as it is with the ultimate realities of the human condition, the relatively few fundamental problems of life and death, isolation and communication, the Theatre of the Absurd, however grotesque, frivolous, and irreverent it may appear, represents a return to the original, religious function of the theatre--the confrontation of man with the spheres of myth and religious reality.

In trying to deal with the ultimate of the human condition not in terms of intellectual understanding but in terms of commiinicating a metaphysical truth through a living experience, the Theatre of the Absurd touches the religious sphere. There is a vast difference between knowing something to be the case in the conceptual sphere and experiencing it as a living reality. It is the mark of all great religions that they not only possess a body of knowledge that can be taught in the form of cosmological information or ethical rules but that they also 182 communicate the esseme of this body of doctrine in the living recurring poetic imagery of the ritbal. It is the loss of the latter sphere, which responds to a deep inner need in all human beings, that the decline of relig~onhas left as a deeply felt deficiency in our civilization .6 5

In most of the avant-garde artistic movements that followed Dada, and particulary in surrealism, there was a move to delve beyond the surface of an object, of reality: to produce new images and generate new thoughts; to confront and understand what Aniela Jaffe calls the "secret soul of things." She writes:

From the psychological standpoint, the ...gestures toward the naked object (matter) and the naked non-object (spirit) point to a collective psychic rift that created its symbolic expression in the years before the catastrophe of the First World War. This rift had first appeared in the Renaissance, when it became manifest as a conflict between knowledge and faith. Meanwhile, civilization was removing man further and further from his instinctual foundation, so that a gulf opened between nature and mind, between the unconscious and consciousness. These opposites characterize the psychic situation that is seeking expression in modern art.

She goes on:

Painters began to think about the "magic object" and the "secret soul" of things. The Italian painter Carlo Carra wrote: "It is common things that reveal those forms of simplicity through which we can realize that higher, more significant condition of being where the whole splendour of art resides." Paul Klee said: "The object expands beyond the bounds of its appearance by our knowledge that the thing is more than its exterior presents to our eyes.'&

This principle to reach and attain a higher principle in art by going beyond what "meets the eye" parallels in a sense the delving beyond the surface of matter in physics, as indicated above. For the new wave scientist 183 facing the abyss of the universe and for the new wave artist facing the

abyss of the psyche, those zones of no time and space, there is, as

Koestler remarks "the awed recognition of mystery"; just as there was, I

am sure, for those first artists of the paleolithic era and just as there

was in the ritual of every religion.

The higher "significant condition of being" is tantamount to what I have called enlightenment. I have devoted a number of pages in this chapter to

indicate that the doing of art is a necessary component in achieving that

enlightenment, regardless of what one's discipline or position is. The engagement in art, whatever form it takes, is the mediator that may bridge the "gulf" between "nature and mind," between the "unconscious and conscious." Art can open up the elementary, and bring to the surface some of the mystery of our existence that is transmitted through our morphogenetic fields, as Sheldrake might put it. I am suggesting this is what happened to those who used, and in some parts of the world still use, the doing of art as a means of accessing their "inner nature," that transcends and transpierces the surface. Most of us though have lost this drive to face this mystery, to experience it; we have forgotten its existence, so mired are we and used to search for answers in the

"material world" that we have created. Appleyard points out:

Developments such as quantum mechanics and the Anthropic Principle have challenged the central fiction of classicism--the idea that we could regard ourselves and the universe from outside, as gods of objectivity. 184 Such considerations have inevitably led people--like Bohm, Sheldrake and Capra--to speculate that we might have been too eager to take the bleakest of all views. The whole scientific effort which resulted in leaving us cold and alone might have been denying not only our instincts, but also the whole truth.67

Ironically, this notion has not yet seeped through the fabric of our society.

Because most disciplines have lost their interconnectedness, any

evolution or revolution undergone in this century has come about in a

compartmentalized fragmented fashion still functioning it seems within a

mechanistic world view. And this is pretty much the case in the realm of the spiritual dimension, as far as I can see, a dimension whose language is

art. Whereas in the Middle Ages and in the primitive world (today's and yesteryear's) the arts were an integral part of everyperson's existence, a vehicle by which one could express and develop full humanness, it is only a select specialized recognized individual, the artist, in whatever field,science or art or any other, who "enlarges human consciousness.

Their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a man or woman fulfilling his or her being in the ~0dd."68

It seems to me that fulfilling the being in the world of each individual should be the domain of all and not just a select few. I have tried to show that this had been the traditional role of art in the West, that is until art began to change its role under the auspices of Zweckrationalita t, where, for example, the terrestrial value of the object overpowered its worth as a vehicle for enlightenment. The artist, Oskar Kokoschka defined art "not 185 as an asset in the stock exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing."eg

A few decades ago, Jack Burnham asked: "Obviously it is no longer important who is or is not a good artist: the only sensible question is ... why isn't everybody an artist?"70 This question is one that continues to reverberate in my mind, and is especially significant to me as a teacher. I believe that the nature of art is such that it may help all of its practitioners fulfill their being in the world; an outcome, that I am assuming is desired universally for all the students in our schools. But the way art is thought about and taught in our schools is very much influenced by a stance adopted in the post-Renaissance period, when art had already separated itself from the life of the majority; that is an art reduced into two major divisive areas, referred to, amongst other titles, as "popular culture" and "high art." An art reduced as well, for many, to a sensual and/or intellectual level.

The Reduction of Art

Most discussions relating to art, not directly connected with the business of art, seek to answer questions such as: "What is art? What is good or bad art? How is art identified?" and so on. Answering such questions are 186 peripheral to an authentic artistic experience and in many ways obfuscate it since such questions seem to be articulated within the framework of a notion of art, as ambiguous as such a notion is, that became accepted after the Renaissance; that is, that art became a "manufacture" of the type of society that developed after the Renaissance.

Another way of delineating the difference of pre and post-Renaissance art is to evoke the distinction Jung makes between psychological and visionary artists. Stephen A. Martin explains Jung's terms this way:

Whereas the psychological artist creates in accordance with canons of style or beauty and personal preference, the visionary artist has no choice but to express what the unconscious wishes, gripped by a numinous impulsion that, if resisted, can split the personality. The visionary artist does not so much make art as be seized by the daimonic force of the artmaking process.71

Following this line of thinking, we could say that prior to the Renaissance, art may be deemed to have been visionary, since formal aesthetic considerations were still non-existent and would not have been a priority.

What was of import was the experience provided through the engagement in the art and almost everyone participated in such an experience. Post-

Renaissance, aesthetic considerations may be deemed to have grown such that they became of primary importance. Art seemed to have changed to become a more sensually and/or intellectually satisfying source of consumption, an aesthetic enterprise, for those partaking in its pleasures, as opposed to being a source for a more spiritual encounter, as I have intimated art had been in earlier times.

Having reduced art to mostly a sensual oi inteliectual endeavour severely reduced its active participants. This not only separated the doing of art from life but in its separation created, simply put, a two-tiered system: an art for the masses, referred to as low art or popular culture, amongst other monikers, and an art for an elite, referred to as high art, amongst other names. Such a division (with more divisions within these divisions) caused and causes concerns that parallel in some ways Chomsky's concerns, especially as regarding his views on the negative effects of media. (I am taking for granted that today's media are a more complex and expanded version of the popular culture that began to emerge during the

Renaissance.) As quoted in chapter II, Chomsky's research sees: "the

<

What I am getting at here, in general terms, is that a form of a specialized group of persons became the producers of art, catering to another elite 188 group who established its standards. Instead of engaging the whole of the population in "the magical participation of art," as Campbell had phrased it, where one could bring the "mind to rest in the mystery of the universe and therewith attain to a knowledge that can justly be called wisdom," those who still experienced or knew of the "magic" of art got entangled in an intellectual debate such a concern had spawned.

Leo Lowenthal's self-contained essay entitled, The Debate Over Art and

Popular Culture: A Synopsis, in his book Literature, Popular Culture, and

Society concisely chronicles such a debate. The most salient point

Lowenthal makes is that the field is dominated by the Pascalian condemnation of entertainment and since popular art is perceived to be nothing but entertainment, it is generally viewed negatively, although it is accepted by some such as Alexis de Tocqueville to be a necessary evil.

There has been in effect no champion as such of "low art." Lowenthal proposes that a theoretical defense of popular art seems to be only possible in the form of a rebuttal, or in the form of questioning the basic assumptions of the defenders of high art or genuine art. One assumption that has been explored is that, if, as the critics of popular art assume that genuine art fulfills a purpose other than entertainment or escape, what is it? On this there has never been nor is there any agreement now.

Frankly, it seems to me that a debate over popular and high art is 189 misplaced for numerous reasons. The most pertinent one that relates to my thesis is that in debating the issue, authentic art is reduced to "high" art, usually to an art associated with the kind found or approved by established art institutions and persons belonging to or approved by such institutions. The underlying assumptions of this seem to be that there are only specialized individuals or groups of individuals who are artists or know what art is, and that art occupies a realm separate from the rest of our existence; that is, that art is the exclusive purview of an elite, an elite, which I might add, is very much male-dominated in its production, in setting its "agenda," and in its consumption. The fact that the whole of the discussion on art has been dominated by male voices during the past few centuries is evidence enough.

Although it is beyond the discussion of my thesis to delve into how or why men came to dominate the arts, what might be called by someone like

Marilyn French, the masculinization of the arts, it merits some attention here, however briefly and generally, as I do find it to be part and parcel of this dissertation's notion of the submission of art to instrumental reason.

The fact that the artistic agenda and art became circumscribed within the premises of a privileged male milieu very much illustrates, in my opinion, how art distanced the majority of the populace in the West, particularly the female population, from active participation. Contrary to the 190 intentions of some of the proselytes of high art, a view was perpetuated where the female, as the passive subject of a work of art, began to become increasingly reduced to and manipulated by her male creators as an object. This image and treatment of the female gradually seeped into the art of popular culture and then was transferred to society itself.

Thinkers, iike Marilyn French, theorize that such treatment was due mainly to the identification of females with nature, and man's quest to want to dominate and control nature. Since the female was considered part of nature and with the advent of the scientific method and the faith placed in science for controlling and dominating nature, such a treatment was easily rationalized. French writes:

...the body was approached by scientists with the same attitude of conquest implicit in the general culture, and the struggle for a science of health was specifically equated with a struggle against women and nature--"female nature had been unclothed by male science." Wax figures were made of men to demonstrate various physiological systems; these were usually upright and often in a position of motion. Those of women were recumbent, seductive, and sometimes even adorned... The Paris medical school of the eighteenth century contained a statue of a young woman with bared breasts and bowed head: it was inscribed, "Nature unveils herself before Science." Female figures were intended mainly to demonstrate procreative functioning, and the conclusions drawn from such research emphasized the natural passivity of women.72

Such remarks explain in part the preponderance of nude women in

"recumbent, seductive" positions adorning the scenes of many renowned classic works of art, such as in the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens or

Franpois Boucher. 191 Boucher had also painted many portraits of Mme de Pompadour, not

necessarily in nude poses, but certainly in a way that displayed, as

Friedrich Schiller might have put it, value to her form and appearance or

her style. It was probably Madame de Pompadour's sense of style that

propelled her to the position she eventually achieved. Born Jeanne

Antoinette Poisson in a bourgeois family, she was treated as an objet

d'art by her parents from the time she was a child, and seemed to have

been moulded into a decorous artistic creation, traded in to men who could

offer the family prestige and a more prominent social standing until she

became mistress to King Louis XV of France. Her treatment epitomizes one

of the general ways females were seen beginning in the Renaissance, a vehicle for evoking sensations that becomes reflected in the "high art" produced in the proceeding centuries.

John Berger's way of seeing this, simply put is: "men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at ... The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object and most particularly an object of vision: a sight."

Such a notion is reinforced more forcefully in the works of many contemporary feminist art theorists. Whitney Chadwick, for example, claims that: "one way that patriarchal power is structured is through men's control over the power of seeing women."73 Berger elucidates further:

In the nudes of European painting we can discover some of the criteria and conventions by which women have been seen and judged as sights.

The first nudes in the tradition depicted Adam and Eve... They became aware of being naked because, as a result of eating the apple, each saw the other differently. Nakedness was created in the mind of the beholder.

...the woman is blamed and is punished by being made subserviant to the man. In relation to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God.

In the medieval tradition the story was often illustrated, scene following scene. .. During the Renaissance the narrative sequence disappeared, and the single moment depicted became the moment of shame ... Later the shame becomes a kind of display.

When the tradition of painting became more secular, other themes also offered the opportunity of painting nudes. But in them all there remains the implication that the subject (a woman) is aware of being seen by a spectator.

She is not naked as she is. She is naked as the spectator sees her ...

The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

The real function of the mirror was. .. to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.74

The treatment of women as sight in works of art demonstrates the way in which they were moulded to suit the fantasy of their creators. It demonstrates as well the reduction of art to a sensual realm; women in many art works became, in a sense, a vehicle for evoking sensations. 193 The French poet, Charles Baudelaire tells us how he sees a woman in the following quote:

Woman is for the artist in general... far more than just the female of man. Rather she is divinity, a star ...a glittering conglomeration of all the graces of nature, condensed into a single being; an object of keenest admiration and curiosity that the picture of life can offer to its contemplator. She is an idol, stupid perhaps, but dazzling and bewitching.. .Everything that adorns women that serves to show off her beauty is part of herself ...

No doubt woman is sometimes a light, a glance, an invitation to happiness, sometimes she is just a word.75

The creation of someone like Mme de Pompadour typifies what Baudelaire might be meaning; the woman no longer seen as a human but as an objet d'art, "an object of keenest admiration and curiosity ... an idol, stupid perhaps, but dazzling and bewitching..." Further, it could even be argued that the lifestyle that Mme de Pompadour cultivated might have become the precursor of the Itart pour Itart movement which reached its zenith in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The essence of its credo is captured fairly well in the following lines from Le Voyage, penned by

Baudelaire:

Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brole le cerveau, Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe? Au fond de I'lnconnu pour trouver du nouveau!7g

Baudelaire, art for art's sake leading exponent, typifies, par excellence, the kind of artist who had completely retreated into his art and the kind of community created by and for his fellow-artists. It is an art that seeks to escape reality by seeking new sensations, regardless of whether these 194 are heavenly or hellish. The above lines certainly hint as much.

Baudelaire's journey seems to be a quest to seek the new, the unknown. We

know his life was lived by escaping into his art. One might even say that

his life was his art!

The treatment of the female by the artist as described by Baudelaire,

continues in various forms today; it is most evident in popular art

especially that of cinema, particularly so in films produced earlier in this

century. The use of the actress Marlene Dietrich in the films of the

director Josef von Sternberg, dating from the 19301s,speaks to what I

mean.

Marlene Dietrich was Sternberg's greatest creation! He began to mould her

in the first film they completed together, The Blue Angel. The role that

Marlene was to play had already been formed in Sternberg's mind before she came on the scene. He had changed Heirich Mann's heroine's name from

Rosa Frolich to Lola, an adaptation of Frank Wedekind's Lulu, already portrayed on the screen by Louise Brooks. "Lulu," writes John Baxter, "like

Lola is a dancer exercising a cold fascination over an older man who sacrifices his reputation for her ...she even appears in male evening clothes to tantalise a lesbian countess who adores her." This Luluesque image of

Marlene was to reappear again and again, in succeeding films made with

Sternberg. Felicien Rops' etchings of prostitutes, notes Baxter, also 195 provided a source of inspiration for Lola--the black stockings, the fancy garters, and the masculine headdress are very much part of the costume of the Ropsian female. Other Ropsian touches in The Blue Angel are the

"salacious cherubs" decorating the stage and hanging over Marlene in the cabaret where she performs.77 The garter and black stockings are cultural markers of eroticism; the masculine touches add another titi Hating dimension to the Rops-Wederkind-Sternbergian erotic fantasy wh ich is reinforced by the cupids, identified with Eros, the god of love.

If Sternberg began to paint, to form and to shape with lights, costumes, and the camera an erotic portrait of Lola/Marlene in The Blue Angel, he was to refine his creation in subsequent films. The Marlene we see next in

Morocco is a more elegant creature; she is no longer an icon of sensuousness as in The Blue Angel but the symbol of an aristocratic ideal who when she expresses herself does so through elegant, refined, and graciously controlled gestures. Her eroticism is masked behind a face which hardly ever betrays any emotion; a face beautifully sculpted by

Sternberg's lighting system.

His close-up style, intricately lit, involved three basic lights; one to backlight the hair, a low spot to illuminate the face and force out the bone structure, and another from the side to blur and soften the shadows. Diffusers around the lights, objects in the beam to break the line and animate the forehead, gauzes over the lens were all employed to create the dream-like atmosphere...78

Yes, Marlene had become an ideal fashioned out of a Sternbergian dream. A 196 temptress still, for she easily lures men; we know that Tom Brown

(played by Gary Cooper) has been "bitten" by her charm when he bites into

the apple given to him by her. But she remains aloof, one who hides her

feelings behind her beautifully made up face, sometimes veiled

mysteriously behind tulles and gossamers.

In Botticelli's painting, The Birth of Venus, the goddess of love is portrayed standing weightless in a shell--an ethereal nude form fashioned from gently curved lines. The expression on her face belies the fact that she is Cupid's mother; the look is tranquil, calm, even gentle. A soft, barely perceptible wind blows from the mouths of nude male and female figures coiled in an unusual embrace. On her left, a fully clothed girl, her arms upraised, is ready to enfold Venus in a richly decorated cloak.

Although Venus herself betrays no overt sign of sensuality, it is suggested by the undulating contorted position of the couple on the right, the tactual fabrics, the folds in the girl's dress, the rich textures of the foliage in the background, and the waves in the sea. Overall the composition is painted in the classic Florentine style of the Renaissance.

Sternberg's Venus, in the film Blonde Venus, emerges slowly from the confines of a fuzzy dark gorilla costume, a white bejewelled hand appearing first until she is fully exposed. She is not unlike Botticelli's

Venus. Her form is slender, curved and ethereal. The expression on her face 197 is calm, tranquil, impassive. The difference between Botticelli's creation and Sternberg's creation, aside from the obvious, lies in the atmosphere generated by the milieu created. The Blonde Venus is preceded on the screen by a feverish African tribal dance performed by a dozen or so Black women in pseudo-African costumes. The camera follows them about the club, which is decorated with lush foliage associated with tropical countries. The scene reeks with primitive and earthy sensuality. African masks, spears, and the music which beats in imitation of the staccato rhythms of tom-toms reinforce the primitive elements of the scene.

Against th is hot exciting background rises the cool blondness of

Sternberg's Venus--truly a "Donatello among the Fauves."79

Sternberg marshalls our attention throughout with his combination of mise-en-scene and smooth camera movements until the moment of impact, just as an artist does with lines, position in space, colour, and other techniques to lead his viewer to the focal point of his composition.

Marlene is the dominating element in Sternberg's composition; his most perfect creation--the ultimate decor. That's why Sternberg's claim,

"Marlene is not Marlene. She is rnel1'8o makes so much sense. Botticelli might have said the same about his Venus.

The image of women, as described above, and subsequently the treatment and role of the majority of them within society, was reduced to that as I98 created on a two-dimensional plane, seen in various art forms. This made most females, like marginalized males, conspicuous members of the culture of silence. In other words, most women were seen, and saw themselves, as they were seen by those who controlled them and their image. This reduction of females to objects also explains in a way why female artists never gained the renown and accolades that male artists received. French's following observation explains such an oversight:

Men as a class have chosen to see women with expertise in government, the military, in intellectual, scientific, or artistic endeavours, as aberrations; in some societies, even women who displayed "virtue' (chastity, fidelity, and submission) have been considered unusual in a sex seen as vicious, depraved, foolish, lustful, and, in general defective, not full members of the human race. Over and over again women--and those men who supported them--have had to remind their society that women are human.

Because women who were able to achieve in the public sphere were seen as aberrations, men could with impunity obliterate their words and deeds from the record of history. Thus they were forgotten.81

Feminist researchers in the past few decades have re-established the oeuvres and accomplishments of many women artists heretofore ignored by most art historians, artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica

Kauffmann, or Elizabeth Vigee Lebrun, amongst others.

In a sense, persons like Madame de Pompadour, Baudelaire, Marlene

Dietrich and others ended up, as Schiller put it, "by giving value to form and appearance only."82 Developments such as these limited or reduced the experience of feelings to the senses, whereas before, those same means of 199 expression emanated from and delved into the spiritual dimension. Art was now created for its own sake, not for God's sake, as for example the

Balinese villager would have it; and by the latter I mean the venue to an enlightenment, as I have defined it, that helps one to understand life and thus how to live it. It is a contradiction in terms to think that one's life could be elucidated by escaping into art; I should think that the opposite would happen.

I am not implying here that poets like Baudelaire did not ascend into a state of enlightenment in creating their works but we may presume that the majority of his audience, in interpreting his stance and thus reducing his art to an intellectual andlor sensual level, could not have experienced it as a means to self-actualization. By submitting such a thought, I am not suggesting that the experience of doing art was reduced for Baudelaire; not at all. As is the case for Leonardo, it is rather the modern western human's interpretation of the way such artists came to represent what art is that stood in the way of the majority from doing art.

One of the reasons for this shift may have been the association of spirituality with organized religion, which in writings of critics like

Erasmus, for example, publicized the hypocritical and corrupt ways of some of its proselytizers. The spiritual dimension of one's intelligence further found disfavour by the championing of the scientific method during 200 the Enlightenment; it brought about the practice of objectivity sans

subjectivity, which is, simply, thinking without feeling. Such attitudes

have served to encourage the repression of feelings and made us admire

those who can maintain their sang froid under all circumstances to advance a cause; a Macchiavellian prescription infused throughout our society it seems. Chomsky's examples are proof enough.

Ignoring or repressing what exists in the spiritual dimension, even though and probably because its contents are a mystery, will not erase the existence of feelings; on the contrary, such repression may manifest itself in acts and behaviour that are viewed as inhuman, as Killinger, for one, records, and as we have witnessed and continue to witness being acted out in the world, throughout this century.

I begin with the assumption that everyone is an artist, that art is an integral and necessary aspect in the development of a being and society but not in the defined categorical sense that we seem to practise it in western culture.

Perceived as such, debates of art and popular culture become immaterial primarily because the focus becomes answering the what of art.

Answering the question about what is art and the like presupposes that there is a predetermined outcome to art. If there is a predetermined 201 outcome, it exists only in the intellectualized sense of the practice of art, which is one of the many roles we have created for art. In its practice as a form of non-intellectual knowing, which is eventually filtered through the intellect, the question of what is art becomes peripheral-at the extreme, irrelevant. The authentic doer or practitioner or participant in the artistic activity does not engage in art knowing beforehand what it is that will be its ultimate outcome except mostly in the material or physica sense; until one experiences the doing, one can have no idea what will be generated from the experience. This is the role of art that has dissipated in the modern world and which I have been arguing needs to be rekindled in our society and in our schools. That is why the question that I feel that needs to be answered before we begin to engage in any debate on what is art, or what is good or bad art is: why art?

The glib and facile answers that quickly come to mind in answering the question are a compendium of some of the thoughts that have been uttered by the thinkers evoked by Lowenthal in his essay, namely: that art gratifies a need on a higher plane (Montaigne); awakens our spiritual quest and heightens consciousness of our inner selves (Pascal); stimulates the creative process (Goethe); and fuses the disparate aspects of our being, desire and reason (Schiller) or what has also been termed the Dionysian and Apollonian, thought and feeling, anima and animus, and more recently mind and body split. These in part answer the question. However, a more 202 personal interpretation of these ideas will underpin the pursuit of my discussion in the next chapter, placed within the context of education. How grateful I was to fate for having subjected me to the ordeal of learning an Oriental language (while in the army), opening before me that strange way of thinking and teaching me word pictography. It was precisely this 'unusual' way of thinking that later helped me to master the nature of montage, and still later, when I came to recognize this 'unusual,' 'emotional' way of thinking, different from our common 'logical' way, this helped me to comprehend the most recondite methods of art. 1

Sergei Eisenstein CHAPTER tV

THE NATURE OF ART and ELEMENTARY EDUCATION

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to try to explain the nature of art. To be able to do so, the underlying question that needs answering is: "Why art?"

Why do we create or engage in art and have done so since the beginning of the appearance of modern humans? It seems logical to me that only in ferreting out the answers to the why of art, will we be able to come to a consensus about the nature of art and thus its application in elementary education.

My argument, stated again, is that after the Renaissance,n art became the practice of a small number of persons under the control or influence of another small group of persons; a circumstance that excluded the majority of Western peoples from authentically engaging in it. The previous chapter was written to substantiate such a proposition; in so doing it also answered indirectly the question: Why art? Here I will expand on some of the ideas already introduced as to the whys of art, mainly that art is one of the universal means, a form of symbolic language, by which we may express and discover part of our essence as a human; that it is a vehicle by which, as Maslow put it, 'truth, beauty and virtue" might be learnt and 204 205 by which students may be propelled to move "upward," to grow; and that the doing of art responds to a deep inner need in all human beings to know and learn that which they cannot apprehend intellectually. The latter is what I interpret Eisenstein recognizing as being the "'emotional' way of thinking, different from our common 'logical' way..."--that is, thinking with feeling as opposed to thinking without feeling. In other words, unrepressed or acknowledged feeling or the emotions, as an integral part of being, is a component of thinking. The suggestion here is that engaging in art, as a revealer of feeling, is a necessary component of becoming and being fully human.

Teaching and learning through the arts may probably be one of the best means of addressing all of the requirements of the curriculum in elementary public schools in Ontario, certainly at the primary level

(Kindergarten to grade three), and the means by which one may be helped to move upward in all dimensions; that is, to self-actualize or even go beyond it. Given the above, the questions and corollary questions that need to be answered here and now are: what is the nature of art that it may help one move upward, or to grow and what is the nature of this growth?

How is art a vehicle by which we may learn truth, beauty and virtue? And how does our public school system generally fare in relation to these questions? In responding to these queries, I will begin by reframing the notion of thinking and feeling within an educational context; and briefly 206 examine the current official policy stated for the Arts in the elementary curriculum. In presenting such a discussion, I hope to fortify further the main arguments of my thesis and to bring to the fore an explanation of the nature of art with the express purpose of clarifying the meaning of art within the context of education, giving it a definition that will lead us to understand how it can be used in helping the child to become fully human.

The How and Why of Thinking and Feeling: Equal Partners in the Enlightened Being

To be able to develop fully as a human being, an individual has to learn to balance thinking and feeling; as Barbara Kitlinger has written: "You can't have one without the other." Since psychological research in this area indicates that humans rarely manifest such a balance, it behooves us to acquire it. For a teacher, the question becomes how? How does one learn or teach such a thing? However, before the how can be answered, we have to know the why. Why do we need to balance thinking and feeling? Why not go on with one's inclination either to be predominantly a thinker or predominantly a feeler? I have answered that question indirectly throughout this paper; simply, so that one may become fully human. The thoughts and work of John Miller expand on this notion.

Miller, who has conducted extensive research and studies on holistic 207 education, sees a balance between thinking and feeling as central to the idea of such an education. Briefly, he provides strong arguments for learfiing to listen to our feelings to assuage our thinking so that we may arrive at a more "compassionate service level of consciousness."~The implication seems to be that by dealing compassionately with ourselves and others we develop a positive connection with all persons and things that touch our lives. It only follows from this that we become more accepting, more tolerant. We view the "other" as part of a whole and therefore part of us. As Miller contends: "It is difficult to injure a living thing if one sees all life as part of a connected whole. How can you injure someone when you see the person as part of yourself?"4

Barbara Killinger's research and study in this area, addresses the question more directly still. She explains that:

Thinking and Feeling functions link up the information acquired through Sensation and Intuition and use it to make decisions, form judgments, reach conclusions, and develop opinions about both people and things. Each function has its special strength and its own liabilities or negative, Shadow side.

She nonetheless interjects with a statement that echoes my observations:

"Unfortunately, in our society and within the individual, thinking often devalues and overruns feeling values."s She describes the consequences when thinking dominates and feelings are repressed, as follows:

Judgment is always affected when Thinking or Feeling do not function well. Behavioral changes will become increasingly evident as this imbalance between Thinking and Feeling widens. 208 For instance, Thinking without feelings of compassion and empathy to temper its wisdom allows one to justify and rationalize deceit and to condone unethical behavior. Uncensored, wilful thinking permits one to commit dangerous, even evil acts, such as premeditated murder... The defenses of intellectualizing, rationalizing, projecting blame, dissociation, and compartmentalization... can all be used to justify and excuse insensitive and destructive dysfunctional thinking.6

Such characteristics seem to me to be attributes Gatbraith ascribes to

some of the citizens of the culture of contentment. They describe in part,

as well, those persons whom Chomsky has identified as manufacturing

consent and those whom Freire depicts as oppressors. The description by

Killinger is tantamount to acknowledging what I have ascribed to persons

who subscribe to or are manipulated by the rule of instrumental reason.

Her description of the "evil" effects produced by the absence of feelings of

compassion and empathy to temper thinking is the equivalent of my notion of the dehumanized human.

On the other hand, Killinger outlines the effect on persons who base their actions on feeling without thinking in a manner which I find similar to

Freire's requirement of critical thinking as the sixth component necessary for dialogue. She writes:

Feeling without Thinking to guide and inform it leads one to remain naive, irresponsible, even ignorant. Hysterical, childish behaviour results when one is hypersensitive and overreacts to situations. Denial, moodiness, temper tantrums, rages, and extreme stubborness are signs of unhealthy feelings.7

Her conclusion at the end of this passage, a conclusion which I share, is that: "Wisdom and maturity develop when both Thinking and Feeling 209 functions inform our decision-making."a "Wisdom and maturity," may be

taken to be the philosophical and practical wisdom needed to illumine

one's life, as I outlined in the first chapter; within my discourse, it may

be achieved through an amalgam of my interpretation of Kant's definition

of enlightenment, Maslow's idea of self-actualization, and Freire's

concept of one's vocation to become more fully human; in brief, what I see

to be a balance between thinking and feeling--my base definition of an

enlightened being.

Killinger further reinforces and elucidates her position with the following

remark: "The Inferior function, according to Jungian theory, whether it be

Thinking, Feeling, Sensation, or Intuition, typically possesses five qualities." She lists these as being primitive, childlike, negative, stubborn, and rigid. She deduces:

No one can reason with us when we are caught up in the Inferior function's clutches. Our Thinking or Feeling cease to operate, so we become increasingly immobilized. We are possessed and lose all objectivity. Our judgment is distorted.

To counteract its negative influence, we need to develop our opposite functions. Then we will be in a better balance psychologically.g

Killinger's delineations seem to be powerful enough motives for each of us to want to develop such a balance within ourselves but they are especially conducive for a parent or a teacher who would like to encourage a balanced development between the thinking and feeling functions in a child. The more difficult endeavour, concerns how one develops such a balance.

Killinger suggests that to counteract the negative influence of the

Inferior function, we need to develop our opposite functions. For example a person who is a thinker, will have to develop the function of feeling and so on. The question now becomes: How does one develop or teach the opposite function? To be able to answer this last question, I am again going to draw on Killinger's study, specifically the definition she provides on the notion of shadows. She explicates:

The Shadow, a term used by Jung, has three parts. First, the negative Shadow consists of all the unfavourable aspects of ourselves that we have repressed or disowned, often for adaptive reasons. Second, the positive Shadow contains our admirable, but often hidden strengths, which have remained largely undeveloped...

Last... the Shadow contains the wisdom of the Collective Unconscious. Jung used this term to describe the innate information and knowledge carried deep within each individual. There are many collectives that influence our behaviour. Our society, for instance, offers laws, rewards, and punishments that filter through to us via newspapers, radio, and television. Family values are taught by example and words. Similarly, the collective--affiliations we identify with-our schools and our spiritual, financial, and business institutions, for example-- all strongly influence our choices. Which partners we choose, what friends we gravitate to, and which work setting we select can be influenced by age, race, status, and historical or political factors.10

Killinger underlines Jung's warning that:

...considerable effort is needed to recognize the "dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance.') 1

The consequences of refusing to see the shadow in ourselves, as Jung noted, is to "bungle" one's life. The essential point made here by

Killinger/Jung in response to my question, as to how we may learn to 21 1 balance feeling and thinking, seems to be the often heard precept uttered in the West beginning with Socrates: Know thyself--particularly, in this case, know your "shadows"; without such knowledge it would be difficult to develop one's opposite function.

The way this notion fits into my argument is that the shadows inhabit what I have referred to as the spiritual dimension; that zone of no time or space that is our unconscious and of which little is known. As such the shadows may be likened to a combination of ideas already briefly discussed, and which, in certain cases, I have associated with Jung's collective and personal unconscious. These ideas are: Bastian's notion of the elementary and ethnic ideas; Herder's concept of the inner voice; and

Sheldrake's theory of morphogenetic fields. The latter thought seems to me to be related in part to McLean's theory of Schizophysiology, particularly the hypothesis forwarded that the section of the brain dealing with emotions has a pattern that has undergone little change since evolution whereas our "intellectual functions are carried on in the newest and most highly developed part of the brain." When I brought McLean's finding into the discussion in chapter 11, it was to offer support to my argument that humans have indeed become fragmented, even in neurobiological terms, suggesting that the area in the brain dominating feelings needs to be developed on a par with that part of the brain dominating thinking. That still is the quest here but on a psychological 21 2 level, as opposed to just a biological or physio logical leve I. Self- knowledge seems to be the beginning of the answer.

A way to self-knowledge is through an authentic engagement in the doing of art, for the doing of art is an exploration of the spiritual dimension; its output-an expression of the self. The exploration of such a dimension unleashes its unique symbolic language which is the invisible content of the psyche. These symbo s, whatever form they take, are an aperture to that large but little known area of the self that is our unconscious. They are, as Reeves phrases it, "What there is behind what we see."

The works of the most renowned non-figurative artists of the twentieth century seem to suggest as much. Aniela Jaffe evokes comments uttered by some of these artists that support the point I have just made. She writes:

A great number of artists were seeking to get past appearances into the "reality" of the background or the "spirit in matter" by a transmutation of things--through fantasy, surrealism, dream pictures, the use of chance, etc. The "abstract" artists, however, turned their backs on things. Their paintings contained no identifiable concrete objects...

But it must be realized that what these artists were concerned with was something far greater than a problem of form and the distinction between "concrete" and "abstract," figurative and non-figurative. Their goal was the center of life and things, their changeless background, and an inward certitude. Art had become mysticism.

No artist sensed this mystic background of art more clearly or spoke of it with greater passion than Kandinsky. The importance of the great works of art of all time did not lie, in his eyes, "on the surface, in externals, but in the root of all roots--in the mystical content of 21 3 art." Therefore he says: "The artist's eye should always be turned in upon his inner life, and his ear should be always alert for the voice of inward necessity. This is the only way of giving expression to what the mystic vision commands."

This statement by Kandinsky is what I have been suggesting the role of art

once was, a role that has been discarded by a majority of our society and

become the domain of a specialist human, the artist. Jaffe continues:

Paul Klee... says: "It is the artist's mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret ground where primal law feeds growth. ... Our beating heart drives us downward, far down to the primal ground." What is encountered on this journey "must be taken most seriously when it is perfectly fused with the appropriate artistic means in visible form," because, as Klee adds, it is not a question of merely reproducing what is seen; "the secretly perceived is made visible." Klee's work is rooted in that primal ground. "My hand is entirely the instrument of a more distant sphere. Nor is it my head that functions in my work; it is something else ..."

Jaffe goes on:

A different expression of the hidden unconscious spirit can be found in ...Jackson Pollock. ...he revealed that he painted in a kind of trance: "When I am in my painting I am not aware of what I am doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess..."l2

This trance-like approach of Pollock's to doing art is akin to how Jung saw the visionary artist, as opposed to the psychological artist. Stephen A.

Martin, as quoted earlier, explained the visionary artist as one who "does not so much make art as be seized by the daimonic force of the artmaking process." A process illustrated by Pollock's description of the way he paints, or Klee's idea of his hand being the "instrument of another sphere," or the manner in which the dancer Marie Chouinard, mentioned in the first 214 chapter, talked of her body as being a kind of radio receiver for "something far away."

The testimonies of such artists are similar in kind to many others not mentioned; as well as by persons, not necessarily "artists," whom Maslow has documented as having had peak-experiences or those whom Kason describes as having had STEs, or those whom Bucke had deemed to have had cosmic consciousness, etc. This attests to the fact that the above named artists, amongst others, had/have opted out of the fetters imposed on the means of acquiring knowledge that had come to the fore with the advent of the scientific revolution; that is, they had realized the fallibility and incompleteness of knowledge based solely on the observeable, the decipherable, the accessible. Perhaps, they intuitively sensed or were aware of the research findings of contemporary physicists and psychologists, that there were unknown, unidentified elements behind the surface appearance of things and beyond the consciousness of the human mind.

Scientists seemed to have been left to grapple with the unknown in the natural, conscious world; the visionary artist left to untangle the mystery of the unknown by looking inward into the unconscious. Moreover, the visionary scientists also "tapped" into the unconscious for inspiration to clues about the workings of the natural world; they engaged in the doing of 215 art, in a sense, before the doing of science. The recorded experiences of

many scientists demonstrate as much. Albert Einstein's famous pronouncement that "imagination is more important than knowledge," speaks to this, his meaning being that knowledge is limited by its content whereas the imagination knows no bounds. An approach artists, like Franz

Marc, for example, also adopted.

Marc's goal was "to reveal unearthly life dwelling behind everything, to break the mirror of life so that we may look being in the face."l3 My contention is that it is not only the artist's prerogative to make the

"secretly perceived visible," or reach that "distant sphere," as Klee phrases what I have called the spiritual dimension, the unconscious, or look "being in the face." Nor is it solely the scientists' unique task to explore the natural world. It is everyone's right to do so for the simple reason that humans have to marshall through both the consciously and unconsciously perceived worlds to be able to lead an enlightened existence. In our society, where thinking predominates, it is the undervalued function of feeling that seems to need development.

To be human means having a feeling function as well as a thinking function. This feeling function resides in the unconscious, soul, psyche, spiritual dimension--amongst many of the names given to this aspect of the self. To know this self one has to access one's shadows, something the 21 6 "visionary," in whatever field, has always done. One of the most accessible

means of getting in touch with one's psyche, has been the doing of art, as

the pronounceliients of the above mentioned artists testify.

Feelings do exist, and they need to be brought to consciousness on a par

with thinking for the reasons articulated by Killinger above. One of the

ways of accessing those feelings is through an authentic engagement in

the doing of art. By an authentic engagement in art, I mean a total focus on

the doing of the activity; what I call, in perhaps oxyrnoronic terms, active

meditation. The trance-like intensity Pollock experienced when painting,

is an example. Such an authentic engagement is a path that leads to one's

psyche or self--and knowing one's self, is knowing how to be in the world-

-it is being and becoming human. Precisely what I would suggest is the genuine role of art. Stephen Nachmanovitch, like many others, made a similar observation when he wrote:

We have something in us, about us; it can be called many things, but for now tet's call it our original nature. We are born with our original nature, but on top of that, as we grow up, we accommodate to the patterns and habits of out culture, family, physical environment, and the daily business of the life we have taken on. What we are taught solidifies as "reality." Our persona, the mask we show the world, develops out of our experience and training, step by step from infancy to adulthood. We construct our world through the actions of perception, learning, and expectation. World and self interlock and match each other, step by step and shape by shape. If the two constructions, self and world, mesh, we grow from child to adult, becoming "normally adjusted individuals." If they do not mesh so well, we may experience feelings of inner division, loneliness, or alienation.

A little later, in the same text, he goes on to remark: 21 7 Since rational, materialistic epistemology came to define the direction of Western culture in post-Renaissance times (with roots going far back into antiquity), we have progressively denied the reality of those processes that relate (re-ligio) us to context and environment--namely, art, dreams, religion, and other roads to the unconscious. Gregory Bateson has shown how art, religion, and dreaming are necessary remedies for correcting the inherent narrowness of conscious purpose. That healing element (in whatever field our creative act takes shape) is to learn to address the world in a way that comprehends the unconscious totality, the inherent paradoxes: "not just pretty poetry, but the glue, the logic upon which living things are built." Art, music, poetry, paradox, sacrament, theater are the very medicines we need, yet they are the very things our modern minds drop by the wayside.14

A Sketch on the Nature of Art: Getting Closer to an Explanation

The above ruminations may now help me to formulate an answer to the first question posed at the beginning of this chapter; that is, what is the nature of art that it may help one move upward, or to grow? By nature of art, I mean the essential character or quality of a thing that makes me call it art. Thus, the question reposed becomes: How does the essential character or quality of a thing I call art help an individual move upward, grow, self-actualize? But before this last question may be answered, 1 have to identify what those essential characteristics of art are. Although there are many qualities attributed to art, the following two connected characteristics are those I consider essential in terms of my thesis: the first is art as a language of the feelings; the second is art as a means of experiencing "truth, beauty, and virtue" and through that experience learning about them.

In the introduction to my thesis, I wrote that art is a form of language,

expressed in symbols peculiar to each individual, symbols that work very

much like a language to help individuals communicate and apprehend in a

way speech cannot; and that humans appear to have an innate urge to

create in such a language. This urge I ascribe not so much to the need to

create, but rather to the desire to understand and to communicate (with

others and with one's self). To be human is to want to communicate, to

learn, to cultivate, nurture and understand all the aspects of being--

including those that are not readily observable or knowable, such as what

is often deemed to be the spiritual nature of one's being. It is this desire to know, our desire to grow, our curiosity, in other words, our desire to become enlightened, which often induces us to do art, or create.

Obviously there are various and many ways of knowing. My intention here is not to engage in a discourse on epistemology; it is merely to point out that the doing of art is an access to our feelings as well as the degagement of feelings articulated in symbolic forms emanating from that area of our being that is in the spiritual domain; aesthetics and pleasure, amongst others, are the side-effects of this doing for the most part. Then, what I am suggesting, is that doing art is a means of exploring the psyche by which humans may learn about their "spiritual beingness" that cannot 21 9 be apprehended by any other means; and this spiritual beingness is expressed in feelings.

Feelings is an ambiguous word that may mean many things. In this case, I am adopting the key concepts Barbara Killinger attributes to feelings, which in a holistic manner, she does by referencing it with thinking. She proposes:

It is important to remember that Thinking and Feeling are ways of making decisions. Thinking has a focused awareness that concentrates on getting from A to B. In the extreme, Thinking becomes narrow and one-tracked. It deals with things one at a time, and follows a logical process aimed at an impersonal finding. Ideas and goals are formed through the Thinking process. This function also checks for flaws or errors in decisions based on emotion and intuition.

Feeling, on the other hand, uses a diffuse awareness that is directed outwards. In fact, it is often too other-directed! Feelers may disregard what matters to them simply because they wish others to be happy.. .

Feelers can concentrate on a number of things at once. Feeling considers the person's own thoughts, but also is open and receptive to cues and feedback from other people, and from the surrounding environment. Feeling bestows a personal, subjective value on things. Feeling decisions, therefore, evolve from one's personal value system, and are influenced by what one appreciates.

Feeling opens us up to wait, watch, and wonder. The key concepts of Feeling are openness, receptivity, and reaching out to others. [that's doing authentic art] It is our thoughtf A, sensitive, empathic, tactful, gracious, loyal side. It values harmony above all. Sharing, intimacy,and devotion are its goals. People and relationships are its interest. 1 5

Killinger goes on to give "tasks" that may help an individual to develop a feeling side, tasks that are geared to adults. Since my interest is the welfare and development of children, as an elementary teacher, and since 220 my experience with children indicate that they are born "feelers," my suggestion is that the doing of art in schools is that which will allow access and develop one's feelings to complement thinking.

Thus, to recapitulate, art may be seen to be the language of the feelings, or of the spiritual dimension, which permits entry into the unconscious via the symbolic renderings it produces. This is a two-way process in the sense that the authentic engagement of doing an activity, which may be called by many other names but, which, in retrospect we can know it to be the doing of art, generate the feelings which produce the symbolic renderings which we call art. When these symbolic renderings are studied or reflected upon (a method of therapy Jung, for example, used and is used universally today), it may help us understand aspects of the self that are revealed. These revelations, in turn, are integrated into one's developing sense of philosophical and practical wisdom.

This is what I have been insinuating art's genuine role to have been all along--the language of the feelings, the entry into the unconscious, brought to the fore by the intellect; and that is what I tried to demonstrate in chapter Ill. But, as I have also tried to argue, this role of art has been usurped by the society dominated by instrumental reason, and needs to be reactivated and introduced as such into the school system-- that is, not just as a subject; nor as a support of the "basics," just as a 221 boon to cognition; nor just as means to aesthetic appreciation. It can play all those roles but these are roles predominantly acquired and assigned to art in the modern Western world, which eschews feeling in favour of a form of thinking which has become distorted without feeling.

A More Precise Explanation of the Why of Art

As I have already implied throughout this dissertation the doing of art or the experience of art, or what is also called magic or religion, depending from where one originates, permits one to activate what may be found in the abyss of one's subconscious. This then complements and completes that part of consciousness that exists in time and space. This is primarily so because engaging authentically in art results in the production of genuine feelings, which are spiritual in nature, grounded in the unconscious; that is, an authentic engagement in art goes beyond sensations--the latter being grounded in the material and physiological world. These feelings may be seen as the conscious expressions of the unconscious that make visible some of the invisible part of the self through the feelings that are created; these being contingent upon whether we allow ourselves the chance to feel, express and then reflect upon those feelings.

Feelings are the issue of a dimension that is amorphous, thus undefinable 222 in a material sense. Every expression of those feelings created is unique to the individual, although the same medium may be used by a variety of

individuals in the expression of their creations. And these creations are all expressed through symbolic renderings of two kinds, either in an ethereal or in a permanent form. An example of ethereal forms might be an idea, or a feeling, or a spontaneous dance, or an extemporaneous play or tune and so on. They are ethereal because once thought, felt, danced, acted, sung, they evanesce, becoming a memory; or are forgotten forging a part of the participants' subconscious; or a myriad of other experiences that may become a channel for transformation. Examples of symbolic renderings expressed in a permanent form are copious and abundant; from the cave paintings in Lascaux to drawings composed by many children today, found on the refrigerator doors of many homes, or adorning the walls of many schools. These creations may be expressed orally, or physically through movement, or strictly in the mind through fantasy or meditation or ideas, or by using a tool like a paintbrush, a pen, or a camera and so on. It is feelings then that produce, in one form or another, art, and paradoxically, it is the authentic participation in the doing of art that produce or generate the feelings. This suggestion differs from a view of art which sees it solely as a transmission or communication of feelings sans thought by the artist.

What I am proposing then is that the shadows that lie deep within the 223 unconscious are accessed and brought into consciousness in this two-way

process; the doing of art is its central processor. The process is

incomplete if reflection or thought is not subsequently brought into play.

Thin king is what recognizes, identifies and delineates the shadows.

However, one has to be in a receptive frame of mind, from the beginning,

to feelings that are animated during this process; otherwise the

possibility of a path that may lead to knowledge and particularly self-

knowledge may never clear.

Unfortunately, our society's value on the development of a peculiar form of intellect as the sole inhabitant of intelligence, and the push for the devaluation of subjective expression, has acted to repress authentic feeling so that many of us engaged in expressive activities do not go beyond the sensations that are produced. Yet if one authentically engages in the experience of doing art, many things that cannot be planned, may ensue.

I should like to offer for your consideration the observations made by

Maslow below. I offer his remarks as support of what I have tried to explain above, in the sense that the experience of doing art may be or become a peak experience if one authentically engages in it as it was predeominantly practised in rituals prior to the Renaissance. I think

Maslow outlines the many other forms of knowing that such experiences 224 reveal that may illumine the self and one's shadows as well. However, what is of import in terms of my thesis, is Maslow's conclusion that "the miraculous >of things" breaking "through into consciousness" is

"a basic function of art." Hence, Maslow's thoughts voiced in this passage reinforce, in my opinion, the desirability of this basic role of art in our schools. Here is what Maslow has to say:

...g reat insights and revelations are profoundly felt in mystic or peak-experiences, and some of these are, @so facto, intrinsically valid as experiences. That is, one can and does learn from such experiences that, e.g., joy, ecstasy, and rapture do in fact exist and that they are in principle available for the experiencer, even if they never have been before. Thus the peaker learns ... that life can be worthwhile, that it can be beautiful and valuable. There are ends in life, i.e. experiences which are so precious in themselves as to prove that not everything is a means to some end other than itself.

Another kind of self-validating insight is the experience of being a real identity, a real self, of feeling what it is like to feel really oneself, what in fact one is--not a phony, a fake, a striver, an impersonator. Here again the experience itself is the revelation of truth.

...if it were never to happen again, the power of the experience could permanently affect the attitude toward life. A single glimpse of heaven is enough to confirm its existence even if it is never experienced again ...

The history of science and invention is full of instances of validated peak-insights and also of "insights" that failed ... there are enough of the former to support the proposition that the knowledge obtained in peak-insight-experiences can be validated and valuable...

...Why has there then been such a flat rejection of this path to knowledge?...

In peak-experiences, several kinds of attention-change can lead to new knowledge. For one, love, fascination, absorption can frequently mean "looking intensely, with care" ...fascination can mean great intensity, narrowing and focussing of attention, and resistance to distraction of any kind, or of boredom or even fatigue. Finally, what Bucke called Cosmic Consciousness involves an attention-widening so that the whole cosmos is perceived as a unity, and one's place in this whole is simultaneously perceived. 225 This new "knowledge" can be a change in attitude, valuing reality in a different way, seeing things from a new perspective, from a different centering point ...

Another kind of cognitive process which can occur in peak- experiences is the freshening of experience and the breaking up of rubricizing. Familiarization dulls cognition ... and it is then possible to walk through all sorts of miraculous happenings without experiencing them as such. In peaks, the miracuious "suchness" of things can break through into consciousness. This is a basic function of art ...I 6

In a sense, we might say that the miraculous suchness of things breaks through into consciousness through symbols produced or reflections and feelings induced after being engaged in the artistic experience. Such an experience cannot be predetermined since it defines itself as one engages in it. As I indicated earlier, it is a way where, as Freire phrases it, one can "say his own word, to name the world."

The miraculous suchness of things is an element missing in lives dominated by instrumental reason and one that is sorely needed in our schools if we are sincere in our efforts to want to help the development of fully human beings. I am proposing that art in its "basic role" be reactivated and introduced as an integral part of the curriculum, intertwined with all that goes on in the classroom, as the means of awakening the "miraculous suchness" of life; as a path to knowledge unattainable by any other manner. Art as "the magic" each of us and a

"healthy" society cannot do without. And these thoughts in reference to our school system is the subject matter I should next like to discuss. The Quest for Magic: Art in the Elementary Curriculum

We read in The Common Curriculum:

The arts speak to our emotions, imagination, and intellect, and throw new light on our experiences. ...the arts offer a picture of what people have felt, thought, and valued over the ages, enabling us to see that people in the past expressed ideas and feelings similar to our own. The arts also show us that, while people of diverse races and cultures have unique ways of expressing themselves, people of all backgrounds have many similar interests, concerns, and ways of seeing things. The study of the arts can therefore help students develop a sense of connection with the past and with people of various races and cultures, and can broaden their knowledge and understanding of human achievement. (p. 38. Italics mine.)

The subtext of this passage seems to ally itself with the notion of a collective unconscious, or a universality that exists amongst humans expressed through the arts. The fact that the arts offer a picture of what we feel, think, and thus value, is in keeping with what I have put forward to be the genuine role of art as is the notion of the arts being an expression of ideas and feelings. However, the idea that it is through "the study of the arts" that students can help develop connections, and so on, and broaden knowledge and understanding of human achievement, I find problematic. Of course "the study of the arts" is important, for the reasons articulated in the document; what I find problematic is that there seems to be no hint that the arts may help develop studer~ts'knowledge and understanding of the self.

The exploration and understanding of the self through the arts, I find 227 unacknowledged. This unacknowledgment is reinforced by the paragraph that follows the one cited above, that is:

All of the Arts ... are valuable means of expression and communication. It is therefore important for students to develop the ability to explore and express their ideas effectively in each of the arts. In making and presenting art works, students develop their ability to communicate and gain understanding of how and why works of art are created. (Ibid. Italics mine)

I have tried to show that the arts are a valuable means of expression and communication but to limit such a means to ideas only, without reference to feelings, limits the means of expression and communication, not to mention understanding. Further, the notion that the purpose in making and presenting art works is to develop the students' communication and understanding of "how and why works of art are created" limits the doing of art to the intellectuaI sphere. The how and why of the creation of works of art is doing what I am doing at present; I am doing it by making and presenting arguments. The thinking and research I have had to do and continue to do are helping me understand better how and why works of art are created. In writing about what I am learning and discovering, I am communicating to you. But this exercise does not give me much of an insight about my self, rather it helps me to develop insights about why other people do art and why I engage in the doing of art, it does not give me the experience of doing it, except vicariously; and what happens vicariously is far from authentic, unless, of course, I was wholly engaged in doing this work with mindfulness and experienced it as an active meditation.

As I have repeated often enough, one of the basic functions of doing of art is to develop knowledge not had by any other means, which may sometimes result in a created object, called science, or art, or religion, but the emphasis is not on the end-product as much as on what the doer experiences; this might be a peak-experience of the totally transformative kind or it might not. It might reveal one's positive or negative shadows or it might not. The point is that what is valuable is one's own unique authentic experience and one cannot determine before hand what that experience will be or will lead to. Thus I find it a contradiction in terms to speak of outcomes when it comes to genuine art or, as the Ministry would have it, solely in terms of skills and knowledge.

Studying the arts and outlining specific outcomes or expectations for the

Arts contradict the basic function of art as I have tried to explain it thus far; this is what I find missing in our schools. Studying and predicting outcomes fall under the category of art as practised subsequent to the

Renaissance and are a study of the Arts as prescribed by a society that has separated it from life; a kind of art enframed by the values of a society dominated by instrumental reason, or what Heidegger has called

Gestell, a technological and scientific frarning.17 229 I am not recommending that art as developed in the West should not be studied. Of course it should; it is and probably always will be. But studied only as such, art becomes a support to the development of the intellect and a predetermined activity, a way perhaps of expanding what McLean has told us is already "the newest and most highly developed part of the brain." The section of the brain we need to develop is the one dealing with emotions which McLean tells us has a pattern that has undergone little change since evolution. The point is that art studied and taught only in the manner prescribed does not allow for experiencing the doing of art as an active meditation; it allows rather for experiences of the kind Elliot

Eisner has outlined in a monograph entitled The Role of Discipline-Based

Art Education in America's Schools.1 8

On Discipline-Based Art Education

In this work, Eisner argues the importance of including Disciplined-based art education (abbreviated DBAE) in America's schools from Kindergarten to Grade twelve. Eisner begins by positing that the general view seems to be that school programs should emphasize the basics, which he feels is

"hard to dispute." However, he goes on to say that what is considered basic is not perfectly clear. He believes that Americans not only want their children to develop reading, writing, and arithmetic skills but also "to have well-developed minds and to be able to enjoy the intellectual and 230 artistic wealth that our culture and nation have to offer." Eisner, in

effect, is arguing that the arts are basic to education and as such should

be an important factor, in their own right, in the school syllabus; however,

they are not.

Eisner outlines the steps entailed in DBAE. He begins with assumptions

about learning and art within the DBAE framework. He notes that children

develop not only from the "inside out but from the inside in"; "that the

acquisition of artistic skills in the making and perception of art is

complex and subtle in character"; "that learning in art is related to the

course of human development"; and that curricular tasks in which children

engage must be intrinsically meaningful and transferable outside the classroom. Then he proceeds to describe the aims and content of DBAE and their educational significance. These are: production, which allows for the development of cognitive skills; criticism, which allows for the development of attitude and skills; history and culture, which helps the student understand the relationship between culture and art; and aesthetics, which encourages students "to join in the continuing conversation about the nature and meaning of art in life." He then deals with objectives for DBAE and states that mechanistic and reductionist approaches to curriculum planning are inappropriate in the teaching of art.

Although Eisner states that DBAE "provides no recipe for instruction," he 231 does mention the following considerations that influence the character of teaching in DBAE: motivation; problem-centered curricula aimed at encouraging children to engage in an inquiry process; the fostering of a sense of competent independence in the students; and allowance for flexibility of curricular forms through which the aims of DBAE are realized. Eisner calls for a written curriculum, replete with instructional materials and illustrated activities, for grades K-12 so that continuity in structure and support are provided.

Evaluation plays an important role in DBAE. Eisner highlights three

"subject matters" for evaluation; curriculum; quality of teaching; and the outcomes of the program. He calls for students to play an increasingly greater role in evaluating their work as they mature.

Eisner's paper encapsulates and explicates clearly the aims of DBAE and its role in formal education. It also suggests the measures by which DBAE may be implemented in schools and the roles its mediators need to play to achieve its outcomes. As such, our Ministry's approach to the teaching of the Arts, as outlined in The Common Curriculum, seems to adhere closely to Eisner's proposals, and is in essence a form of a Discipline-Based Art

Education.

As an arts advocate, I have no quarrel with most of what is implied in 232 DBAE. Its course is desirable but in a lop-sided way. It is an approach which I find incomplete and limiting. What is particularly problematic about DBAE, is that it is predominantly based on an intellectually induced approach to art, where the cultivation of the arts as subserviant to the intellect seems to qualify it as the raison dt6tre for arts in education. The role that the arts have played traditionally in all cultures and which has gradually ceased to be the case in the West is not taken into account; that is, the education of the psyche which allows for the manifestation of one's spiritual being.

If we are to educate the whole child, then we must take into account spiritual enlightenment and self-knowledge as part of this whole. A fully human being needs to balance the intellect with feeling. One of the ways of experiencing and hence educating one's self about the feelings is through a genuine doing of art, engaging mind and body in the activity using, ironically, the same methods advocated by the Ministry and Eisner.

Art as an area in a program of studies with expected outcomes takes it into a completely different arena. There can be no outcomes stated for genuine art in any form, because art creates its own outcome as it is practised. One cannot engage in a "visionary" artistic activity and plan the outcome beforehand although one can predict other outcomes, but they are artistic only in the non-visionary way; and are, in fact, technical 233 outcomes. For example, I can listen to a melody in my mind and

subsequently write the notes down. Writing down the notes in this case is

not engaging in art; it is a directed intellectual activity. The genuine

artistic activity happens whilst experiencing the melody in my mind or

whilst playing it on an instrument in the sense that it is the experience of the music which will affect me, in whatever a small way, in a manner that cannot be planned. How the music will ultimately affect me in its

"visionary" form is the artistic doing. Each time I experience it, and if I am receptive or mindful, as Miller might say, to this experience and if I am fully engaged in it and aware of it, I will experience it in a new manner. Experiencing it in a new manner each time pushes me on to another level of growth, a "higher reality" that may inform the intellect but is not intellectual in nature.

The Common Curriculum, the policy document still in force for the arts, lists four general outcomes in the Arts program. They are: "Understanding

Form in the Arts; Exploring Meaning in the Arts; Understanding the

Function of the Arts; Experiencing the Creative Process in the Arts." Each of these outcomes is dealt with separately and broken down into more specific outcomes for students to the end of Grade 3, to the end of Grade

6, and to the end of Grade 9. All the outcomes are desirable. For example under the general heading of Understanding the Function of the Arts, one of the specific outcomes expected for a student to achieve by the end of 234 Grade 3, is to: "describe ways in which works of art affect people's emotions and help them understand their own experiences and abilities."

Again, such an exercise incorporates many aspects of the basic functions of art that I am suggesting need to be embodied into the curriculum.

However, nowhere is there mention of the doing of art to achieve the basic function that Maslow tells us is "the miraculous of things" breaking "through into consciousness." This "miraculous ~

In a documentary I viewed a number of years ago, the artist Henri Matisse was asked whether he believed in God. He replied: "Only when I paint." As to what God or whose God, does not really matter; what matters is that whilst he was painting he experienced or discovered that which led him

"to believe in God." This is another way of expressing a belief in something that transcends materiality and cannot be apprehended through the senses or the intellect (although it is mediated, or brought to consciousness, through them). This is the magic of art.

Matisse's reply that he is transported to that place of no time or space where one can get to know God, not necessarily the defined God of 235 traditional religions, but what God represents: the spirituaI, the ineffable, the ineluctable, the divine, is akin to Maslow's idea that a "single glimpse of heaven is enough to confirm its existence even if it is never experienced again." And it has always been so. Many practising artists have articulated as much. The painter Marc Chagall is one. He has written:

"Everything may change in our demoralized world except the heart, man's love, and his striving to know the divine. Painting, like all poetry, has its part in the divine; people feel this today just as much as they used to."^ 9

The aspiration to know the divine, as far as I know, is an experience unique to humans. Art may be the language that facilitates such an endeavour. The theory proposed is that if one is deprived of developing such a language, that aspect of a being atrophies and thereby distorts a person's vocation and right to become fully human. Thus I have implied that one must have art, in one or many of its myriad forms, in one's life as part of the humanizing process.

The engagement in doing art produces the language that brings to consciousness those feelings that emanate from the unconscious--what

Sergei Eisenstein meant, in the introductory quote of this chapter, when he mentioned the "'emotional' way of thinking." I see this as a restatement of what Pascal had uttered some four hundred years ago: Tout raison se reduit au sentiment. This latter should not be translated as reason is 236 reduced to feeling but rather as thinking through feeling; the emotional

way of thinking, which Eisenstein acknowleges to be so different from the

logical sequential way of thinking associated with the West. This is principally brought about through an authentic engagement in the doing of art which, to reiterate, I think of as a two-way process.

Feelings, or awareness of what one is feeling produce, in one form or another, art, and it is the authentic participation in the doing of art, whether as a spectator or practitioner, that produces the feelings that may lead one to delve into the unconscious, that gaping black hole of the self which we know so little about. The resulting consequence of this doing may produce a tangible thing, such as an invention, a design, or a sculpture, and so on or it may produce an intangible thing such as an idea, an emotion, a peak experience, or a mystical experience, that transcends the realm of the material world, or offers a glimpse of the divine or uncountable other things; all of which impact on one's development.

To sum up simply, the essential nature of art is the language of the feelings and is manifested in a myriad of ways, for feelings are an amorphous intangible reality that can only be defined by the person experiencing them. That which comes to the fore by accessing these feelings, which reside in the spiritual dimension, is art and because these feelings are expressed or experienced in innumerable ways depending on 237 the individual, there can be no set definition for art, or using Reeves'

wcrds, art is "something that cannot be put in words." Thus, the nature of

authentic art will always remain ambiguous and in a state cf flux, and yet

may co-exist with all the other roles of art we have created and defined

over the centuries.

What makes an authentic engagement in art a humanizing endeavour is that

it can bring to consciousness that aspect of the human psyche that is

unique to the individual and cannot be accessed by the intellect, in other

words, it is a means to self-knowledge. Unlike other endeavours, an

authentic engagement in art allows us to see, again using Reeves' words,

"what there is behind what we see ... in a sense connect us to something that is beyond us... something that is much larger than our rationality,

much larger than our concepts ..." To be fully human means to develop such a dimension as well as the intellect; it is a necessary component of

becoming and being fully human. Authentic engagement in an artistic experience helps to access this dimension, if nothing else it will allow

"the miraculous "suchness" of things" breaking through into consciousness; a means by which, as Maslow has recognized, individuals may become more truly themselves, more perfectly actualizing their potentialities, closer to the core of their Being, more fully human. CHAPTER V

...if we think of imagination as a part of our intelligence, universally, then we must be ready to admit that, like the rest of human intelligence, it needs educating; but this will now entail, if we are right, an education not only of the intelligence, but going along with it, of the feelings ... Imagination is necessary, on the one hand, for the application of thoughts or concepts to things, and without such application no human discourse and no goal-directed activity would be possible. But it is also that by which, as far as we can see, we "see into the life of things. "1

Mary Warnock CHAPTER V

LEARNING THROUGH ART: EXPERIENCES IN THE EARLY FRENCH IMMERSION PROGRAM

Introduction

One of the arguments in this dissertation has been that our society, in

placing a premium on a peculiar form of reason, has devalued our capacity

for authentic feeling with the unwelcome consequence of fragmenting the

being in the majority of individuals. It has been proposed that to become fully human, feelings, which I have located in the spiritual domain, need to

be "rediscovered" and reintegrated into the lives of every individual to balance the thinking our society has and continues to emphasize--an emphasis, however, which, sans feeling, has distorted the role of thinking itself. That is, one has to have a conscious and clear cognition and understanding of the world so that one may be able to marshal one's self in it. However, as intimated, knowledge of the world for the majority of people seems to be shaped (manufactured?) by our culture which is operating under the influence of the philosophy of instrumental reason.

Such a stance propels people to carry out with docility or passivity the business that has been deemed to be right and in the process obscures who we are or who we can be. After all, this is an efficacious means of doing 240 business. It would complicate matters if persons started questioning the

"rightness" of things decided by others. In the second chapter, I tried to

show how the majority of the public have been marginalized in this

manner.

Thus, it would seem that the thinking and feeling functions in many of us

are not only disconnected but, in many ways, distorted, making it easy for

us to become manipulated by a host of phenomena peculiar to the West.

The implication has been that our educational system, reflecting the

society in which it operates, also emphasizes this peculiar way of

thinking at the expense of feeling such that the lofty aims, or what are

currently referred to as expectations, stated in its policy documents, are

impeded. The problem, as I had posited earlier, is that philosophically we

proclaim, and continue to proclaim one thing but in reality we engage in what seems to be the opposite of what is enunciated, willingly or

unwillingly; that is, in theory, we, in the education system, seem to be wanting to help develop the whole child, but in practice, do not provide nor have the required conditions nor approaches to balance thinking with feeling. The doing of art, I have claimed, is one of the best means of bringing feeling into the being and the curriculum, and in so doing, also set us on the road to clear thinking.

The quote introducing this chapter expresses this thought concisely. 241 Warnock's L;sa of the word imagination, in stating first that it is necessary for the application of thoughts or concepts to things, is thinking; and in saying that it is also that by which we "see into the life of things," is what I referred to, in the last chapter, as the two-way process of how by engaging in authentic art, feelings are accessed and generated. This suggests that part of the required conditions and approaches needed to develop the whole child include feelings as an aspect of a human's intelligence on a par with thinking.

The exploration of these suppositions, gleaned chiefly from my personal teaching experiences and observations, most of it in the French lmmersion program (hereafter abbreviated as FI), is the thrust of this chapter. To be able to give practical resonance to the discussion and to demonstrate how the practice of art may help in developing a balance between feeling and thinking, I will be situating it in the Early French lmmersion program

(hereafter abbreviated EFI). By EFI, I mean where the child enters the FI program in Senior kindergarten and where the whole program is taught in

French, usually until the end of grade two. In grade three, English is introduced as a "language arts" subject for one period each school day.

Thereafter, more and more subject matters are taught in English so that by the end of grade six, about half of the curriculum is taught in French and the other half in English. This is the general practice of EFI programs in Toronto public schools and most cities where the program is offered in 242 Canada. I begin the discourse with some information on the FI programs.

Some Background Information About the French Immersion Program

The FI program came into existence at the insistence of a group of anglophone parents at the South Shore Protestant Regional School Board in

St. Lambert, near Montreal, in 1965; three years before Canada became an officially bilingual nation at the federal level which eventually led to legislation that institutionalized bilingualism in the federal civil service and other federal agencies. The traditional way of teaching French as a second language (hereafter abbreviated L2), up until then, had been to teach it as a subject for a school period each day beginning at different grade levels; for the majority of pupils who are not in FI classes, this is still the way that French as a L2 is taught. This method of L2 instruction has never been known to produce bilingual students in Canada.

Following the move towards institutionalized bilingualism and with the reported success of the St. Lambert experiment, the idea of FI programs appears to have generated great excitement amongst many parents who began to clamour for them. Subsequently, various forms of FI programs began to mushroom across Canada, again at the insistence of groups of parents. It is now estimated that there are over a quarter of a million 243 pupils in some type of immersion program in Canadian public schools.

Although we cannot presume exactly what goes on in the minds of parents who enroll their children in FI classes, we do know that at its inception, the goals of FI programs were specifically stated as being:

1. To provide the participating students with functional competence in both written and spoken aspects of French; 2. to promote and maintain normal levels of English language development; 3. to ensure achievement in academic subjects commensurate with the student's academic ability and grade level; and 4. to instill in the students an understanding and appreciation of French Canadians, their language and culture, without detracting in any way from the students' identity with and appreciation for English-Canadian culture.2

The bulk of the research undertaken since the outset of FI programs has demonstrated that, in Canada, they are a superior method of developing

"bilingualism" in English language majority pupils as compared to the traditional French language teaching programs. It has shown as well that

FI programs do not hinder the students' first language (heretofore abbreviated L1) skills nor their cognitive and academic growth. Research has also uncovered that by the end of grade six, EFI pupils show native- like receptive skills, that is, understanding spoken and written French, but much weaker productive skills, that is, writing and speaking French.3

However, more and more is now being written and concern raised about pupils in FI classes, who after having spent their whole elementary and secondary school lives in the program are unable to communicate 244 "accurately and fluently" in French. Hector Hammerly notes, like many others, that the French spoken by FI pupils is peculiar only to them; a dialect not spoken elsewhere, and what he calls "FrenglishN--others call

"lmrnersionese" or use Etiernble's coinage "Franglais."

Although I do not agree with everything Hammerly writes about L2 acquisition or FI programs, and despite the fact that many of his notions have been challenged and questioned by his peers, he expresses my sentiments exactly when he writes:

In the past bilingualism has been defined too loosely, even by certain scholars. Anyone with a smattering of a second language has been called a 'bilingual.' This won't do. A considerable quantity of a second language knowledge must exist before we can call a person bilingual... A certain standard of quality should also be part of the definition of bilingualism. A person is not considered bilingual simply because they can put their ideas across in another language in any old way. Speech and writing that are full of errors can hardly be considered bilingual ... People who speak a second language fluently but very incorrectly will at times be misunderstood because of their errors ...

French immersion programmes have promised to deliver bilinguals. This means they should deliver graduates who can communicate accurately and fluently in French.4

Most FI teachers whom I know professionally express such concerns, particularly junior (grades 4-6) and intermediate (grades 7-9) teachers.

My own experiences teaching in the junior grades corroborate the anecdotal evidence of these teachers, evidence which often contradicts the published research. These FI teachers report that as the popularity and population of the FI programs have increased (although it seems to have 245 levelled off in the past few years), students in their classes are generally experiencing greater problems in coping with the academic program, mainly due to French language difficulties; this is despite the fact, as I have observed it, that many pupils demonstrating problems in EFI, have already left the program by the latter stages of the primary grades.

Here are excerpts of an intermediate FI teacher's experiences that speak for themselves:

When I first began teaching in a French Immersion program at the grade 8 level, I was initially surprised at the kind of French I was hearing... I had assumed after eight years of French Immersion these ... students would already have acquired native-like proficiency. I consistently heard errors like Je suis douze and Ga regarde bon... Sur sarnedi j'ai alle a le magasin avec mon mere... No matter how often I tried to correct the errors, they seemed incorrigible. The immersion interlanguage had fossilized. And yet I kept hearing the success stories ... Nonetheless, in spite of the research, I remained skeptical, caught between what I read and what 1 saw and heard every day.

It was obvious to me that my students' English skills were not suffering, but it was much less evident that their receptive skills in French were native-like... their reading skills in French were not native-like as I observed them struggling with French novels intended for young francophones. My students' listening skills did not seem native-like either. After having prepared a film study unit in order to expose students to more oral French, I realized that many of the students could not understand the fast French of the narrators and actors ...5

Not understanding what is being said or what is being read surely inhibits and impacts on one's development particularly in an academic setting. The concern is not that we "produce" future Zolas or Camus; the concern rather is that an inaccurate grasp of the language of instruction in any program impedes development in all domains of the curriculum especially academic 246 development--meaning thinking. Our quest is to help the development of fully human beings and this means balancing thinking and feeling in the pupil. However, when the principal means of communication is hazy or remains superficial or is misunderstood, surely both thinking and feel ing in the child is negatively affected.

It appears evident that although the second and third goals of FI programs, as stated above, seem to have been realized, the first goal is not. I shall not deal with the fourth goal as it is a complex issue in itself. My preeminent concern, at this time, is in examining the inability of EFI programs to produce truly bilingual students which then limit the participants' "functional competence in both written and spoken French."

Part of the problem may be situated in the way the curriculum has been and is implemented in the EFI classroom and the assumptions upon which these are based. I should like to enlarge this point further by engaging in an explanatory probe of the problem in EFI and its relation to my thesis.

A Brief Discourse on Method in EFk Putting it in Perspective

Learning in its most general sense has been an indubitable aspect of a human's existence probably since the time of Klasies. In comparison, education, the formal teaching of humans, is a relatively late 247 development. That the nature of formal education in the West has

undergone changes at different periods in modern times appears to be a

historical fact. We might even generalize that education over the

centuries and decades has directly or indirectly created diverse and

divergent societies and has sometimes emerged from the milieu in which

it was offered; by the latter I mean that education is a reflection of the

society in which it is practised. As such, I think it reasonable to assume

that education, whether public or not, is an important arbiter in our lives;

a determinant which may, in one way or another, contribute to the growth

or maybe the destruction of a being. Our concern is that public education

should contribute positively to the development of a human being,

especially the most vulnerable of these, children.

As a result of the rapid changes in society in the West, particularly since

the fifties, varying opinions on how to help children learn and how,

concurrently, to use varying instructional approaches have been advocated

for use in public education. Common sense would indicate that there is no

single "method" that can be advocated, but rather, various methods may be

integrated in a teaching day. The major factor in influencing an

instructional approach would be the intent of the program which a teacher

has been entrusted to implement.

An intent of the FI program, and a problem that its teachers have to deal 248 with, is to prcduce in their pupils proficiency in spoken and written

French. This inherent objective of EFI is in addition to all the other

expectations that are part and parcel of the regular elementary

curriculum. Over the years various methods have developed to

operationalize the goals of EFI programs. One method that has been

actively promoted, since the beginning of the 1980is, for use in regular

elementary classrooms, where instruction is conducted in English, usually

the L1 of the children involved, has at the same time been advocated for

use in the EFI class. This method, often referred to as the learning centre

approach, seems now to be the general practice of EFI classrooms across

Metropolitan Toronto. It is deemed to be a child-centred approach to

learning, in the sense that the child is not viewed as an empty receptacle

to be filled with the ideas and thoughts of the teacher but where the child,

independently or in small groups with peers, engages in different

activities at various centres in the classroom. These centres are set up and supervised by the teacher with the express purpose of allowing the child to develop skills and knowledge in a variety of domains, mostly thinking, negotiation and social skills. Some common centres are the mathematics centre, with a supply of various forms of manipulative objects to help develop and reinforce mathematical concepts such as measurement, volume and so on; the reading centre to foster and encourage literacy; the listening centre, to help develop listening skills through the use of various recording devices; the paint centre, to allow 249 the child to engage and experiment in different forms of symbolic

expression; the puppet centre, to allow the child to express and develop

dialogus in dramatic form; and so on. Although in theory such a method

seems desirable and is in keeping with a child's need to interact actively

with the environment, this approach or similar ones, when used

predominantly in the EFI class, appears ineffective in developing

linguistically competent pupils and, indeed, is not especially conducive in

implementing all the outcomes of the primary curriculum; whereas

learning predominantly through the arts would be.

On the Curriculum in Primary Grades

There are no separate policy documents for FI classes, although there are many resource guides, published either by the Ministry or various Boards of Education, that give direction as to how to implement the curriculum.

My present concern is to clarify what is expected of teachers who teach primary grades in public schools across Ontario; in so doing, I will have described what is expected of EFI teachers as well.

In The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1-8: Language (1997), the role of the teacher is described this way:

Teachers are responsible for developing a range of instructional strategies based on sound learning theory. They need to address different student needs and bring enthusiasm and a variety of teaching approaches to the classroom. Good teachers know that they must 250 persevere and make every reasonable attempt to ensure sound learning for every student. (p. 4)

The "sound learning theory" that has been promoted predominantly by

educational theorists in the past few decades, and which has influenced teachers and teaching, has as its underlying rationale, a child-centred

philosophy or what has also been called a "progressive" philosophy of education. This latter, very briefly, is often traced back and deemed to have been propounded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, echoed, expanded and reworked with the findings of educational theorists such as Pestalozzi,

Froebel, Herbart, Montessori, culminating in the twentieth century in its more definitive form with the pragmatic teachings and writings of John

Dewey. The progressive philosophy of education in concert with research in the field of developmental psychology predominantly led by Jean Piaget and Erik Eriksen, amongst others, has led to a concept which primarily sees education as a series of processes of development. This view, amongst many others, differs with the other two more traditionally held views of education; that is, that of a content-based curriculum where transmission of knowledge is seen as the priority of a product-based curriculum, as expounded by Ralph Tyler and Benjamin Bloom, where the emphasis is on the aims and objectives to be attained.

British researchers Blenkin and Kelly, who have written extensively on the progressive philosophy of education, claim that: "the essence of the 251 process approach to education is that it is primarily concerned with what

children are rather than with what they are to be turned into; it regards

education not as a process of moulding but as one of guided growth and

development, of a kind whose precise end cannot and should not be

p rede t e r m i n e d . " 6 They also suggest that the notion of progressive

education is founded on empiricist epistemology, as first expounded by

John Locke, and is basic to progressive thinkers such as Dewey. The

advocates of this theory maintain that "the acquisition of knowledge is

not just a matter of the application of the intellect but requires a wider

form of personal experience ..." and that one should only interfere with the

natural growth of the child to promote such growth.

The more salient feature of this "policy is the creation of conditions in

which the child can learn from experience ... It leads therefore to a view of

education as child-centred: the individual ... rather than knowledge

becomes the focus of the process.";r This view allied with the findings of

developmental psychologists offers a concept of learning that is an

active, dynamic process which can only occur if there is genuine interaction between learner and hidher experiences, a genuine involvement of the learner with those experiences.. . True education it claims, is not mere learning, it is far more than that; it is the development of the individual's capacities which result from a properly active engagement with the wealth of experiences the sensitive teacher can provide.8

Another way of looking at this relatively new thrust in education is, as 252 some have argued, more in keeping with the era in which we are presently

living, declared to be the "Information Age," an age in which "information

does not stand still."g This implies that we have to change with the new

information, deal with it, or forever remain an anachronism in our own

times. Whereas in the "Industrial Age," education was a form of isolated

training, devoid of personal meaning, where one sought the right answers

and perhaps needed them to survive, in the Information Age, "when

students learn to look for right answers, they are preparing themselves

for a reality that is fast fading from their lives."l 0

John Dewey probably summed up the progressive view best vis-a-vis

schooling, when he stated:

...when it is said that education is development, everything depends upon how development is conceived. Our net conclusion is that life is development and that developing is life. Translated into its educational equivalents, that means (i) that the educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end; and that (ii) the educational process is one of continual reorganizing, reconstructing ...

...the purpose of school education is to insure the continuance of education by organizing the powers that insure growth. The inclination to learn from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process of living is the finest product of schooling.1 1

The philosophical position described above was certainly palpable in guidelines and policy documents for teachers promulgated by a multitude of sources and had been incorporated in the policy documents of this 253 province, specifically in The Formative Years (1975) and The Common

Curriculum (1995). Faculties of education in the past few decades have also promoted such a view so that many elementary school teachers today have incorporated this philosophy in their teaching practices.

I would suggest that such a position is an amalgamation of two curriculum orientations, amongst a number of others, that H. H. Stern states Eisner and Vallance succinctly articulate as being one that develops "the cognitive processes ... to train children in skills of enquiry, to develop their cognitive functioning, to help them learn how to learn"; and one

"described as self-actualiza tion or curriculum as consummatory experience." 1 2

Current educational policy in Ontario seems to emphasize the development of cognitive processes or skills development in the elementary classroom, even if there is a tacit understanding that we help in the development of the whole child. This is not surprising when one considers that we live in a society under the grip of instrumental reason. The push for skills development is evidenced in the following directive to teachers, as found in this excerpt from The Ontario Curriculum, Language (1997):

In planning language programs, teachers should aim to help students acquire varied and correct language through instruction combined with interesting and purposeful activities in reading, writing, and the use of oral language. Because the various language functions are interdependent, teachers will plan activities that blend material from the different strands ... 254 Teachers will pay particular attention to skills that are needed in the workplace ... They will also teach specific aspects of grammar, spelling, and punctuation, making sure to include the skills identified for each grade...

Teachers will also emphasize effective communication. They will provide language activities that stress communications, such as reading and discussing each other's stories or essays, writing letters to real people, producing class newspapers, and interviewing members of the community. They will encourage communication within the classroom by providing opportunities for students to interact with one another individually, as well as through small- and large-group assignments. (p. 6)

This directive does not seem to encourage the development of fully human

beings, defined as I understand the term or, using Killinger's shorthand,

balance thinking and feeling in the child. However as argued in Chapter I,

the highest authority in terms of formulating policy in our province, the

Education Act, specifically Chapter 129, Section 235 (1) (a), (b), and (c),

may be interpreted to require that teachers provide a holistic program; that is, where the education of the intellect is balanced with that of feeling, including personal growth, as advocated by humanistic educators,

and spiritual growth, as advocated by transpersonal educators.13 Now the question is how this situation pertains to the implemention of the program in EFI? And how is the specific objective, "to provide the participating students with functional competence in both written and spoken aspects of French," to be reconciled with the rest of the program?

These are the questions I will now attempt to answer. lrnplementing the Curriculum in EFI

Even though there is not as yet a published document that explicitly

outlines a policy for FI programs, the positior; on L2 learning is evident in

many publications. For example, in a resource guide entitled, French

Language Arts: Extended and immersion Programs (1993), we read:

Methodology in extended and immersion French programs ... provides learning experiences that promote each student's intellectual, social, physical, and emotional development ...

The prime aim of integrated language activities is meaningful communication. Therefore, they are designed to respond to students' needs, interests, and learning styles, and to balance experiences initiated or directed by students with those initiated or directed by the teacher. They provide continuous opportunities for purposeful language use, capitalizing on the potential in all school and classroom activities for second-language [earning. In planning and designing integrated language activities, teachers should draw both on their own strengths and interests and those of their students.

... integrated language activities balance and combine the program components--language skills, language knowledge, cultural understanding, and language-learning awareness--according to the students' level of development. In the area of language skills, they include an appropriate balance of listening, speaking, reading, and writing as four interdependent skills.

In elementary schools, French language arts in extended and immersion French programs will be integrated with other areas of the curriculum ...

It is important that teachers not assume an excessively dominant speaking and decision-making role, and that they encourage and facilitate student involvement in planning and implementing the program. A key aspect of the teacher's role is to stimulate in each student a desire to learn and a sense of pride in achievement... (pp. 19-20)

In this extensive quote we can see that the concern is that FI programs provide the opportunity for the education of the whole child ensuring in 256 the process that every child attain a degree of success; it is subsumed that L2 skills should reach a competent level. The method that seems to be advocated in implementing the program is one that is activity oriented and child-centred, what I referred to earlier as using predominantly learning centres, where the teacher should not have an "excessively dominant speaking" role. This is reinforced in the Curriculum guide on Language cited above where the directive of the Ministry is for teachers to:

provide language activities that stress communications, such as reading and discussing each other's stories or essays, writing letters to real people, producing class newspapers, and interviewing members of the community ... [and] within the classroom by providing opportunities for students to interact with one another individually, as well as through small- and large-group assignments. (p. 6)

My experience has been that such an approach hinders the development of

L2 competency in the EFI pupil primarily because it does not provide much opportunity for interaction between the native speaker of the L2 and the pupils concerned; and seems to be an approach predicated upon erroneous assumptions about EFI classes.

Assumptions of EN classes

At the inception of FI schooling, the view on language learning seems to have been heavily influenced by Noarn Chomsky's nativist position. E.

Lennenberg, who shared Chomsky's view, maintained that all children with rare exceptions 257 ...learn the language of their community at the same age, irrespective of the degree of structural complexity and ... seem to pass the same stages of development in acquiring it ... child language learning does not appear to be a process of pure imitation but seems to involve active selection from what is heard and personal constructions of form, according to the child's developing system.14

This notion seems to be somewhat echoed by Wallace Lambert:

...immersion schooling was based on a very important and fundamental premise that people learn a second or third language in the same way as they learn their first; that is in contexts where they are exposed to it in its natural form and where they are socially motivated to communicate.15

We still seem to take the above observation for granted; that is, that the

FI program is a natural way of acquiring a L2--that in the EFI classroom

mechanisms are in place that provide the conditions that make L1 =L2.

This, I would suggest is just not the case, and further, I would suggest

that the learning centre approach in EFI reflects this perspective. And it

is this approach which has been advocated for use in Metro Toronto's EFI

schools since the publication by The Metropolitan Toronto School Board of the French Immersion Language Arts Guidelines: Primary (1 986, hereafter abbreviated as FLAG), and as implied in the 1993 resource guide, French

Language Art: Extended and Immersion Programs.

The assumption seems to be that EFI classrooms, as they exist, are truly an immersion setting where the child can "pick up" the language whilst engaged in other forms of learning. Two points I should like to make here:

1) the FI program in Ontario is more like a foreign language program 258 mostly because of the lack of environmental support of the French

language; and 2) paradoxically, it does not seem to be considered as a

language program per se, even though its raison dUtre is to allow its

pupils to develop bilingualism, albeit in an educational setting. Apropos

of the distinction between foreign language and second language, H. H.

Stern makes this most telling observation in relation to this discussion:

"A foreign language usually requires more formal instruction and other

measures compensating for the lack of environmental support. By

contrast, a second language is often learnt informally ('picked up') because

of its widespread use within the environment."ls (italics mine)

Let us assume it to be a fact that language is one of the principal means

of communication, of conveying and acquiring ideas. Howard Gardner aptly

notes:

In most societies, for most of the time, and most strikingly in a complex society such as ours, language is as often as not a tool--a means of accomplishing one's business--rather than the central focus of attention.17

Even a recent publication by the Ministry reinforces this thought. In the

1997 Language Curriculum cited above we read: "Language is central to students' intellectual, social, and emotional growth, and must be seen as a

key element of the curriculum. Parents, students, and teachers need to understand that language is a crucial tool for learning in all areas ..." (p. 5)

I agree wholeheartedly! (However, I would add that language, or symbolic 259 forms of communication and expression, is not confined to just traditional forms.)

Now when one reads in FlLAG that the immersion teacher should plan programs to educate the child and not just teach him the language, I understand it to mean that language should not become the "central focus" of the program, just as language is not the central focus of society. But then, traditional language forms in our society are one of the principal tools that a child needs to get on with the "business" of learning, acquiring and communicating thoughts and feelings; it is the primary link across the curriculum. How can an FI child acquire and convey ideas if that child does not develop a competent grasp of the French language? I am suggesting that child cannot. I think if anything will constrain the development of a child in the FI program, it is not having a firm handle of the French language. Language is, to borrow from Dewey, one of the

"powers that insures growth." My observation is that in implementing the

EFI curriculum with the assumption that the child will pick up the language naturally, not enough opportunity has been provided for the child to interact with a native speaker, her teacher in this case,l8 who might provide her with L2 feedback; for the predominant interaction that occurs in the EFI class is amongst the pupils themselves. 260 Consider these points: the majority language of the community of the

Immersion pupil in Ontario is English, not French. This is not taking into

account that technically, the majority language of some communities in

cosmopolitan Toronto, might also be a language other than English. The

only "active-selection" on which the child can rely on to acquire his L2 is

his teacher whom he has to share with the rest of the class. Spending

most of the day at learning centres or working independently does not

allow the child to pass through the same stages of language development

as she went through in acquiring her L1. Learning centres are hardly the

most natural way to acquire a L2 simply because the L2 is made incidental

to the other types of learning that happen. Because the emphasis is on

communication in EFI and taking into account that teachers are encouraged

to encourage pupils to speak French as often as possible (FILAG, p. 52) but

not to correct errors immediately (FILAG, p. 67); given that the perception

is that although at the beginning of the program the children will not use

French exclusively during the activities but must be encouraged by giving them the opportunity to converse with the teacher or between themselves which will lead them to speak French spontaneously and to understand

better (FILAG, P. 14). As well, given the notion that once pupils feel at ease with their classmates and hear the structures and appropriate vocabulary a few times French will progressively enter into their conversation (FILAG, p. 51). However, a situation has developed in FI which is akin to what Wilga Rivers describes below: if care is not taken by the teacher, students who are plunged too soon into expressing themselves freely in the new language in a relatively unstructured situatio:: can develop a glib but inaccurate fluency clothing native-like structures in a foreign language vocabulary. This 'school pidgin' is difficult to eradicate later ... when grammatical structure and vocabulary are being more systematically studied because it has been accepted and encouraged for so long.19

This seems to be precisely the core of the problem in EFI.

Although I may be sounding overly critical of FILAG, or similarly based

publications, I sympathize with the principles and intent of such

documents, find many useful ideas and suggestions in them, and share in

what seems to be the underlying concern of their authors, namely, that a

transmission approach to education is inappropriate for young children.

What I find troubling is that some of the suppositions concerning language acquisition, as subsumed in their suggestions, seem to be based on invalid assumptions. For example, the suggestion that teachers encourage pupils to speak amongst themselves in French without being ready to do so and without feedback may increase language fluency but it is an "inaccurate" fluency that fosters the fossilization of the immersion interlanguage as

Lyster described above. For what seems to be happening is that because the child does not have enough exposure to the L2 (what Stephen Krashen calls "comprehensible input") or enough opportunities to interact with a native speaker and because he is encouraged to speak before he is ready to do so in an unstructured setting without opportunities for correction or 262 feedback, he acquires his L2 based on internalized L1 rules which result in a speech riddled with errors. This is in turn reinforced as the child interacts with peers with similar faulty speech patterns at the learning centres.

S. Pit Corder's findings illuminate the matter further:

[Corder] suggests that the learner's Ll may facilitate the developmental process of learning a L2, by helping him to progress more rapidly along a 'universal' route when the L1 is similar to L2. Interference errors result not from negative tranfer but from 'borrowing'. That is, when learners experience difficulty in communicating an idea because they lack the necessary target language resources, they will resort to their L1 to make up the insufficiency... In effect, Corder's proposal reframes the concept of 'interference' as intercession. Whereas interference has been traditionally seen as a feature of learning , 'intercession' is to be considered a strategy of cummunication.20

Apropos of the delineation that Corder makes regarding the facilitation of learning a L2 when the universal route of the L1 is similar, Anne Trevise adds some light on the subject in terms of the English and French languages. She has hypothesized that standard French is characterized as a subject-verb-object language like English. She makes the point however, that spoken French is a topic-prominent language. So there is similarity in structure between standard French and English but little between spoken

French and English.2l This compounds the language acquisition problem in the EFI pupil. That is why it needs to be stressed that opportunities be created in the class for greater interaction between the native speaker and those learning the target language. 263 It has been noted by Dulay, Burt and Krashen as well, that children:

... learn the basic word-order rules of language first and omit what are called 'grammatical morphemes' ... These markers contribute relatively little to communicating a message even though they are required for grammatical correctness.22

And as Ellis notes:

Once learners have obtained sufficient L2 knowledge to meet their communicative and emotional needs, they may stop learning. This results is what Selinker has called fossilization. No matter how much input and no matter in what form the input is provided, the learner does not learn. 23

In immersion then, the child picks up early on just what is needed for the purposes of communication and seems to relegate the L2 to a non-role in a sense--there is no motivation to learn more of the language than is needed. Since the problem seems to occur early on in the program, it suggests that intervention strategies must also be adopted then; something which has not been directly addressed in my years of teaching in FI despite the concerns that have been raised. It seems the position put forward has always been that the EFI and the regular programs are the same; the only difference is the language. I would suggest precisely because of the language there is more than a cosmetic difference, as is implied, between the two programs.

I would suggest that a predominent use of the learning centre approach not only prohibits L2 proficiency but is limiting as well in the development of other domains. It is a thought which has been introduced already that I should like now to extend briefly in this context.

As i have already indicated, a plethora of literature published by

educational leaders, not necessarily political leaders, continue to

encourage us to accept children for what they are, not what we want them to become; to help children know themselves for the purposes of living life fully and help them self-actualize. We are encouraged as educators to provide a program that will allow them to engage in meaningful experiences and develop in all domains, whilst at the same time learning all the skills appropriate for the functioning well in our society. The implication seems to be that we ought to guide and facilitate the being in the world of each child. This is the basis of a "sound learning theory" that research indicates is the best climate for teaching and learning based on theories that can be traced back to Rousseau. This is a holistic notion as well in the sense that fulfilling the being in the world of each child is not restricted to any one domain but includes the emotional, physical, intellectual, social, and spiritual dimensions and more. It seems to me that this becomes a difficult endeavour when it is advocated that the learning centre approach be used predominantly in the primary classroom, as it has become the preferred method since the 1980's.

My observations indicate that the practice of this approach is based for the most part on the theories of developmental psychology as found in 265 Jean Piaget's works intertwined with the philosophy of empirical epistemology--a notion first expounded by John Locke. That Piaget and

Locke have made an invaluable contribution io the development of Western intellectual thought is unquestionable; but for us to limit ourselves to such a course is questionable. But then, Western society, beginning in the

Renaissance, has grown to value above all else that form of intellectual growth epitomized by Piagetian and Lockean-like thinking; that is, logical-mathematical reasoning. Apropos of Piaget, Gardner maintains:

Piaget's model of development assumes relatively less importance in non-western and pre-literate contexts and may in fact, be applicable only to a minority of individuals, even in the West ... The steps entailed in achieving other forms of competence are ignored in Piaget's monolithic emphasis upon a certain form of thinking.24

Like some others, Gardner has noted that specific details in Piaget's theories have proven to be incorrect in light of new evidence in the past few decades. In some cases Piaget's theories are limited in their applications or in other cases certain details are just not addressed. As already noted, Gardner also has stated that more recent empirical evidence challenges the notion "that human beings--even sophisticated ones--proceed in a rational manner ..." Yet the methodology used in our schools is based on these assumptions. The emphasis seems to be on communication in our schools but it is rather a lopsided one that mostly encourages logical-mathematical reasoning. Many challenge the assumption that we are even successful in this area, thus the increased emphasis on skills development. Although such reasoning may be seen as 266 desirable and necessary for the well-functioning of our society, it nonetheless indirectly deernphasizes other forms of knowledge that may be developed or gained through other means.

This form of thinking coupled with the philosophy of the process approach to learning, which emphasizes process as opposed to product through the active engagement of the learner (a notion with which I agree), has been narrowly interpreted to mean that the best conditions for our elementary classes are where the child concretely and actively manipulates and explores the environment. This seems to ignore totally the development of personal and transpersonal growth which are essential elements in helping the child in the process of becoming. Further, and more pertinent to my main argument in this chapter, it is logical and spatial competence that develop in the "confrontation with the world of objects," as Gardner notes, whereas linguistics originate in the auditory-oral sphere. Thus, there is not oniy imbalance in thought and feeling in this case, but also in the realm of thought; that is, no balance in the logical and linguistic domains. This is felt rather acutely in immersion classes because we are, to begin with, functioning in such a poor linguistic environment.

I am not suggesting that learning centres be eliminated from EFI classes; they provide needed experiences and are instrumental in developing necessary concepts and skills in the young child, mostly the fundamental 267 "language" and ''grammar" of the maths and sciences, as well as negotiation skills and so on. I firmly believe in the old Chinese adage: "I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; 1 do and I understand." However, it is difficult to "do" language the way one can do the maths and sciences.

What I am rather suggesting is that learning centres be used judiciously in conjunction with learning that is done predominantly through the arts in the primary classroom, which, when one considers the various forms that this may incorporate, is a versatile and flexible approach in itself.

Many studies in the past few decades such as those conducted by Gardner,

Eisner, Courtney and others have clearly demonstrated that the arts inform and enhance all learning in children. They may also be used as the adhesive that binds and interconnects the learning of traditional core subjects as well as allowing the child to unfold from the "inside out" as opposed to just "outside in", which seems to be the general practice in our classrooms. Educational theorists also recognize the importance of the role of arts education. Perhaps more importantly for the argument of my thesis, learning through the arts, in its spontaneous, natural manner, allows for Maslow's idea of "the miraculous <~suchness~~of things" breaking "through into consciousness," as explained in the last chapter.

Within the context of EFI, learning through the arts, as contrasted to learning centres, permits more interaction between the native speaker

(the teacher) and the children in his class, thus increasing the chances for 268 the development of L2 competency. It is this that I shall now probe into briefly by focusing on my experiences in a Grade one EFI classroom.

Learning Through the Arts in a Grade One French Immersion Program

Drama, which can incorporate all of the other arts like song, dance, music, movement, and costume, is completely amenable to the imaginative thinking of a child and his need to engage in learning with his whole body and being. Anyone who has ever worked with children senses that for the majority of them, truly "all the world's a stage." Life is one long continuous story with an everchanging cast and setting, and sense to be made out of the "confusion" of its plots and sub-plots. And when the teacher takes on this "as if" perspective, creates, shares and grows with the children, wonderful things can happen for the children and the teacher.

We pretend, physically and overtly, when we are very young; or we may do it internally when we are adults. But we are being 'as if' every day ... Acting is the way we live with our environment, finding adjustment in play. The young child, facing what is not understood, plays with it dramatically until it is. Alongside the actual world we create a dramatic (fictional) world, which allows us to work with the actual and master it.25

This is one of the essential roles of drama in the primary curriculum. It was, as well, the essential role of drama as found in the rituals of the pre-Renaissance world in the West. The use of drama, and all its constituent elements, is also an important force in the development of 269 language, especially in an L2 progrm (and possibly in English as a Second

Language programs).

Many studies have now been done in Contrastive and Error Analysis regarding FI programs. Even with little teaching experience, the FI teacher fairly soon can get a good idea as to the common errors made by FI pupils, such as: il (elle) a donne moi instead of il (elle) m'a donne [he (she) gave me]; je j'aime instead of j'airne [I like]; cet un instead of celui-18 (this one); je regarde pour instead of je cherche [I am looking for]; sur le telephone instead of au telephone [on the telephone], and so on. Research and experience have shown us as well that if "care is not taken," these errors tend to fossilize making their correction impossible in the later stages of the program. Common sense, if nothing else, indicates that some intervention should be taken in the beginning stages of the program.

One problem that has surfaced by some studies in L2 acquisition is that when input is stressed without equal opportunity for output at the start of a L2 program, faulty 'subvocal speech," something akin to what

Vygotsky called inner speech (not to be confused with Herder's idea of inner voice), develops.26

The idea of balancing language input and output is found in many researchers. Merrill Swain, for example, calls it comprehensible output.27 270 The intent is to give the child opportunities to listen to the language as well as practise it in a way that is comprehensible so that the faulty subvocal speech does not develop. While this may eventually correct itself when a child is functioning in an environment with many opportunities to interact with native speakers, this does not hold true for the immersion pupil who does not function in such a milieu.

My simple suggestion is that before a faulty subvocal speech is given a chance to develop, the children from the first day in the program be engaged in "speaking" through songs, rhymes, or poems that can be easily acted out, mimed, and danced. There are innumerable French songs and rhymes that lend themselves to such activities (or the teacher can invent some). They may be done in whole groups, small groups, or by partnering the children where one asks a question in song or rhyme and the partner responds "in role." For example: An old traditional song like Sur le pont dlAvignon can be done as a circle dance or in partners. The song is about people dancing on the bridge of Avignon acting out appropriate gestures as to their vocations. The children may be invited to suggest the names of different groups of people and invent appropriate actions for them. The teacher would translate and everyone would perform. Instead of the bridge of Avignon, the location may be changed to: /a Tour CN, Le Carnaval, or

I'ecole, and so on. Moreover, learning through the arts provides many more opportunities to integrate FrenchIFrench Canadian culture into the 271 program. It is akin to the notion of "language IN culture, culture IN

There are also simple stories which may be read and acted out; the

teacher narrates and prompts the children with the dialogue. The whole

idea is to engage the children in such oral/aural activities from the

beginning where the teacher is in role as well; that is, where the teacher

is engaged as a participant in the activity as opposed to standing on the

periphery. These activities are not mechanically learnt but are engaged in

with mindfulness and in a way that is comprehensible to the children and

appeals to their imagination. Such songs, rhymes, and stories when

performed dramatically involve different modalities like tune, speech, and

action; it seems to be the case that children learn better when more than

one modality is involved. They are, after all, "whole-brain learners."ag

Such activities may be thought of as "readiness" activities for language

development. Grade one EFI pupils cannot be asked to engage in

spontaneous "dramatic doing" because they have not as yet had enough of what I would term a lived experience in their L2; they engage in

spontaneous play in their L1 when they have free time to explore the

learning centres. We have concrete manipulative objects for classification, seriation, ordering, measurement and so on at the math 272 centre, a changing display of objects and items for observation and experimentation at the science centre, as well as other centres where the children engage in working with different materials to develop problem- solving and thinking skills and concepts without consciously reflecting on them; but for these to be effective, my experience has been that the concepts have to be brought to consciousness with the guidance of the teacher.

The same principle is applied when the children are engaged in language building activities with the teacher--where the children manipulate language in dramatic form without consciously reflecting on it. They get a feel for the L2 as they hear it, practise it, and let its sounds resonate in their bodies. Some rhymes and poems are learnt for the sheer pleasure of their sounds while the children create actions for them. We sometimes seem to be so overzealous in our quest for literal meaning that we forget that a different type of meaning can be had just from the form. Remember

Marshall McLuhan's famous adage: the medium is the message! I would engage in such activities off and on for at least two hours a day during the first month in school.

When the children seem comfortable in the class these language/dramatic activities are expanded, the texts of these activities written together.

Copies are made for the children so that they have their own booklets of 273 these rhymes or stories which they may illustrate. Longer stories are

read. Sometimes familiar ones are read and aspects of the story changed

or original collective stories may be written. These are then adapted to

scripted dramas and informally performed in class. The teacher need not

be restricted to fiction. I have often used scientific literature as a

vehicle for dramatic activities appropriate to the children's

understanding; such as on the solar system, where the children assume the

role of the sun, the planets, and the satellites, or on the metamorphosis of

the butterfly.

Some of these activities are taped by the children; the tape placed at the

listening centre where the children may listen to them as they follow it in their booklet during free playtime. The children eventually become the authors, directors, and players of their own dramas. The teacher acts as transcriber and translator of these dramasfstories, and while doing this, at the appropriate moment informally informs the children as to the differences and/or similarities between the French and English languages whether this might be of a phonological, morphological, syntactical or semantic nature or in areas that are known to pose problems for FI pupils, such as noun gender errors or overgeneralizations. When the situation presents itself, they are also helped "to discover the rule."

Contrary to what seems to be the popular perception, EFI children are 274 quite receptive to and welcome such overt intervention; of course, it is

not done in a dry pedantic manner but in a playful context where the teacher models curiosity and inquiry--a mini Jeopardy game. It has to be done consistently and with sensitivity, whenever the situation presents itself, for in children, to use Jane Healy's words: "an activity must be

repeated many times" not just a few times, "to firm up neural networks for proficiency."30 This seems to be true in developing L2 skills as well.

What seems to happen is that the children allow such skills to be brought to consciousness and become sensitive to the different features of the target language. This gives them the ammunition they need to monitor their speech when they are ready to speak their L2. Danesi and Di Pietro present a convincing argument that seems to follow this line of reasoning.

They state for example:

A knowledge and understanding of the similarities and differences that exist between the learner's native language and the language to be taught ... is so obviously useful to the teacher that it would be sheer foolhardiness not to be at least generally familiar with them. 31

I would expand that argument to suggest that it is just as useful for pupils in EFI to become aware of the similarities and differences between their L1 and L2. The proof is that children, who have been exposed to greater oral/auraI activities and been made conscious of certain linguistic features of the target language from the beginning, have been more apt to correct themselves when they were ready to speak their L2.

Unfortunately, one of the problems of immersion schooling, as it exists 275 now, is that during those two summer months when the children are not

attending school, most EFI pupils are rarely axposed to their L2. I think

Hammerly's observations are quite true when he notes: "The larger an

interruption in a language program, with intervening activity in another

language, the more of the second language will be forgotten."gn

One way this problem may be resolved is to have the same teacher stay

with the same group of children throughout the primary years, that is, from kindergarten to the end of grade two or three. This is a standard and successful policy with Waldorf Schools. My experiences teaching the same group of children in a grade 3 and then again in grade 4 FI program, for example, have confirmed the advantages of this idea for me. The benefits would be greater in the earlier grades. I see more advantages than disadvantages in such a move. Some advantages that come to mind are: continuity from one grade to another--the children do not have to go through an emotional upheaval or perhaps even trauma every time they change their grade, nor do they have to adjust to a new teacher's style or new classmates. They have more "space" to develop at their own pace and speed in these most crucial formative years. Furthermore, time is not wasted by the teacher in getting to know her pupils, their learning styles, and in trying to gauge where "they are at" in their development socially, emotionally, intellectually, and linguistically. 276 If dramatic activities help the child develop L2 oral skills, the visual arts may help the child develop writing and reading skills which may also complement "dramztic doing."

Strategies for writing are modelled when collective stories, plays and so on are created in different literary styles (songs, stories, plays, etc.). The children also engage in "process writing", where the end product is de- emphasized and the child is encouraged to take risks while savouring writing as a creative means of self-expression. Although the philosophy that guides process writing has been adopted in the classes that I have taught, the strategies and methodology as advocated by its instigator,

Donald Graves, have been adapted to meet the needs and capabilities of the children. Suffice it to note that at the start of grade one, when the children have hardly begun to internalize the rules of their L2, it becomes an extremely frustrating experience for them to express themselves in a language they barely know or use symbolic notations they have hardly mastered. Rather, from the first day in school, the children should be encouraged to write stories using their own personal symbolic notations, such as drawing, a variety of materials for which is made available to them. When their story is in the process of being composed, or "read" to the class, it is re-phrased in French orally. Each child has at least one turn during the week to share his story with the class. This is done in a non-judgmental, non-threatening environment and usually the audience of 277 peers is appreciative. T3 stimulate the children and to encourage them to think of different "literacy1' forms, reproductions of paintings, photos, or experimental films are brought in for discussion. Eventually all these repeated language activities help them to begin to assimilate some of the structures and vocabulary. They begin to want to know how to write certain words and phrases; an illustrated bank of these is made and put or displayed in the classro~mso that the children may refer to them easily.

This exposure is all ultimately reflected in their compositions. What is wonderful about the whole experience is that not only does it help in developing their reading skills, but it continuously helps them to develop an awareness of the process of writing; they become intrinsically motivated to write and lose their inhibition to express themselves and take risks.

An important adjunct and component of our dramatic activities, viewing of films, listening to music and so on, in terms of language development, is that they are always followed by our circle time. Here the teacher sits together with the children as they engage in a spontaneous discussion generated by what has just been done, seen, or heard. These are "here and now" conversations and the closest that the teacher can come to

"rnothere~e";~~where the flow of language is sustained by asking questions, helping the child expand an answer, and generally engaging in mind-stretching and language stretching conversations. The discussions 278 also allow the children to reflect on what they have just experienced.

These then, presented here summarily, are a few of the ways in which the arts may become a vehicle for language development in the EFI class, a problem that has caused and causes great concern to FI teachers.

Moreover, in teaching through the arts, all the other benefits of the artistic experience, whose outcomes cannot be determined beforehand, are also accrued by the child engaged through such learning.

The discussion in this chapter has been an extension of my thesis in the sense that it has centred on a discussion where the arts were shown to be a means of solving a practical problem in an academic setting, that is, developing a student's L2 competency in an accepted form of the French language, without diminishing art's true role. It was argued that the problem in FI seems to originate in the primary grades and is probably situated in the way that the EFI program is implemented. It was suggested that measures must be taken in these early grades to alleviate the problem.

An attempt was made to show how learning predominantly through the arts was a better approach in satisfying all the objectives of the EFI curriculum than learning centres, the method which is predominantly practised in the EFI classroom. It was implied that although both these 279 approaches seem to have the same intent, and appear to be consistent with

the general goals of primary education, its means were different thus

inducing z different teachingAearning and teachedpupil interaction.

The implication was that emphasis on a particular form of communication

via learning centres tended to induce mostly pupil-pupil interaction that

exposed students to an immersion interlanguage leading to the

fossilization of errors. It was also suggested that the reason a learning

centre approach to education seems to have been adopted in EFI was based

on the false assumption that immersion classes, as they exist today, are

truly in an immersion setting; such a setting presupposes that the

language learner is submerged in a situation where the L2 is practised in

its natural form wh ch is not the case in EFI. It was inferred that as a

result there is real y no effort made in the EFI class to plan concrete

strategies for second language teaching; it is assumed that the correct form of the L2 will be "picked up" while the children are engaged in other

forms of learning.

An attempt was made to show that learning through the arts stresses a different type of communication where the emphasis is placed on active participation in oral/aural activities through drama, which includes song, dance and movement as well as languagehpeech, and the visual arts. The assumptions that underlie such an approach in the EFI class are that not 280 only is the artistic experience completely amenable to the imaginative thinking and feeling of a child but that it provides a better forum for the development of L2 skills by promoting more interaction between the pupils and a native speaker, that is the teacher, who is often engaged in learning with the children, as well as allowing more opportunities for feedback and the inclusion of indirect and informal second language teaching.

My experiences teaching in the FI program have given me an opportunity to reflect upon and to think and rethink about method and practice in such a program and the assumptions upon which we base our instructional approach. It has above all convinced me that learning through the arts, especially in the primary grades is by far the most productive approach in teaching and learning that will help balance thought and feeling in the child. This can only be possible, however, if we reclaim and use the arts in their authentic and original roles in our schools and in our lives, along with the other roles assigned to them. SUMMARY

When a language does not already exist, one must be something of an artist to speak it, however poorly. For to speak it is partly to invent it, whereas to speak the language of everyday is simply to use it.1

Christian Metz My thesis has been an expression of concern about the state of our society, the direction in which it is heading and the influence formal education has had and can have in shaping that direction. It was intimated that the development of fully human beings may help in the amelioration of these matters. Briefly, a fully human being was defined as a person in the process of continuous development, who, by maintaining a balance between the thinking and feeling functions, develops the philosophical and practical wisdom needed to self-actualize at every stage of growth. Such persons, in the process of their self-actualization, are able to contribute positively to the well being of their society and thus humankind. It was suggested that a tacit mandate of our education system is also to help develop full humanness in the student. It was argued that the doing of, or active engagement in art is an indispensable element in this endeavour, as art is a natural manifestation and generator of authentic feelings.

However, it was demonstrated that this particular role of art has been eschewed by the majority of the public in the West since art has subordinated itself to the ideals of a society ruled by instrumental reason or Zweckrationalitat; that is, a society that champions a peculiar form of thinking at the expense of authentic feeling--a state of matters that is inadvertently reflected in our schools. I have proposed that by recognizing

282 283 and reintegrating art in its natural role within the public school

curiiculum, without necessarily encroaching upon the other roles art has

assumed in the West, we might arrive at helping students develop full

humanness, a term used interchangeably in the thesis with the

expressions fully human, wisdom, and enlightenment.

An attempt was made to show that the relatively passive acceptance and

operationalization of instrumental reason have hindered the growth of

critical knowledge, particularly critical self-knowledge, and suppressed

the development of other human faculties, principally those located in the

spiritual dimension; and that these have allowed for a continual process

of dehumanization in our communities, leading to a greater escalation in

human suffering and social injustice.

I implied that the transformations and social changes that have occured in the West, particularly since the Renaissance, seem to have benefitted only a small portion of its peoples even though innumerable individuals and groups have experimented and struggled for universal justice, freedom, and lappiness. I indicated that we may be able to grasp and cope with at least some of the problems that confront our society and become agents of socia change once we can understand and analyze our own true nature and our role in the world around us. One of the most accessible means to self- knowledge or inquiry into the self, may be found through an authentic artistic experience, but not as art is practised today.

The error of our Faustian civilization, as Arguelles so vividly put it, is

that it "created a science without conscience and an art without vision."

The result of this has been the eventual polarization of thought and

feeling, a split which is acutely palpable as one of the root causes of the

conflicts prevailing in education today. A holistic curriculum, as its name

implies, proposes a fusion of this rift and implicates the arts in this

endeavour underlining its importance in the school syllabus. However, in

our preoccupation to justify the role of the arts in our schools as a means

of enhancing intellectual development, important as this is, or in

developing aesthetic awareness, as Discipline-Based Art Education proponents advocate, we have limited the role of the arts.

When the arts are taught, if taught at all, they are so most of the time as separate subjects, psychically and physically removed from the rest of the curriculum where the emphasis still seems to be on technique and product. As in the rest of education, art education seems to heed for the most part, what Miller calls a "transmission" approach, that "focusses on a traditional academic approach," or a "transaction" approach, that

"focusses on problem-solving and instructional strategies that facilitate problem solving." Such approaches concern themselves mostly with a student's intellectual development and the acquisition of technical skills. 285 These approaches are necessary of course, yet the intent of education, or

at least elementary education, is that as teachers we provide the

conditions and devise a curriculum that nurture the whole child and noi just one aspect of the being.

Education, especially of the child, cannot be restricted to any one domain

but must address the whole child in terms of the aesthetic, spiritual, physical, and intellectual as well as what we do not understand nor have names for as yet. To do this we would have to incorporate various approaches such as the transmission, the transaction, and the

transformational; the latter would include personal and transpersonal growth, to provide a truly balanced curriculum.

The majority of humans, certainly in Canada have had some form of formal education, and thus, as befits a democratic society, engage and express themselves on the subject. At the forefront of many conversations regarding education today are questions about its public role. Many persons seem to think that the main purpose of a public school is to act as a training ground for students so that they may acquire the skills and knowledge necessary and valued in our society. I have implied that at a time when there seems to be a great push and thrust in our public schools to develop numeracy, literacy, technological, and scientific skills, which of course are necessary for the functioning well in our society, 286 nonetheless, we must be wary that the development of such skills do not overpower and take charge of the curriculum. In and of themselves, skills, however necessary may prove to have no value. It is how, when, where and why one uses those skills that may prove to be more valuable.

The history of our modern Western world has shown us that our trust in the development of such skills alone has led to a repression of feeling in favour of thinking, but a form of thinking that has come under the thrall of instrumental reason. Ironically feelings inform the intellect. As

Barbara Killinger has noted, without feelings of compassion and empathy to temper the wisdom of thinking, unethical, dangerous, even evil acts can be rationalized or justified. In the quest to become fully human, both the feeling and thinking functions need to be developed in a balanced manner.

Thus my suggestion has been that public schools, in addition to helping students acquire the cognitive skills needed to function well in our society, need to help students access and develop their spiritual dimension as well; that cognitive growth be balanced with an education of the feelings. And in this, I argued, art may play a major role. For if we think of speech, words, and so on as the language of the intellect, then we can think of the arts as the language of the feelings.

One hundred thousand years ago, 500 hundred years ago, 100 hundred years 287 ago, our common ancestors lived completely different lives; today the life

of a Canadian in a large urban centre is vastly different from that of a

Canadian living on a Native reservation, or a small rural agricultural area,

or in the far north, or sometimes even next door. The point is that in many

ways we have created the societies and communities we all live in by

sometimes adapting to the environment and living harmoniously in it, with

it or by changing and dominating it to suit our needs. We will probably

continue to do so with every new revolutionary invention.

One hundred thousand years ago it was tools made out of stone, 500

hundred years ago it was the printing press, 100 years ago it was the

cinema, today it is cyberspace, virtual reality, and the information

highway that are causing changes in our habits and the way we live in the

West. These have all been and are exciting, wondrous changes but frankly,

as a species, we are still a huge mystery and largely ignorant in many

ways about the most fundamental questions about who we are, where we

come from and where we are going. We may have learnt much about our

physical universe since the days in Klasies but we do not necessarily know

more about our spiritual universe than the more mature developed

inhabitants of Klasies did. For I think the mystery of where we come from, who we are, and where we are going probably underlies most of what civilization has achieved since its beginnings. When we have not been able to find absolute answers to such fundamental questions, we have 288 formulated questions that were easier to answer, easier to research and buried the unanswerable and the more difficult ones underneath.

Over the centuries we have posed and answered so many questions that lie outside the boundaries of our original quest that all we now see are the shadows of those questions, and the shadows of those answers not unlike

Plato's notion in The Simile of the Cave. But it seems that we now accept that there are many answers to the same question and that there are no necessarily right or wrong answers or questions for that matter. The point is that it is up to all of us to question and to answer for ourselves how we are to understand and live our existence, as opposed to having some force out there telling us where we come from, who we are, and where we are going; that is enlightenment.

Physicists and astronomers tell us that we are familiar with only about five to ten percent of the universe; that which is observable, visible or measurable. The rest, called Dark Matter, is still a mystery. To be able to understand the universe, continuous effort is made to shed light on its

Dark Matter. Similarly, I have been suggesting that to be able to know and understand our selves, we need to bring to light our own "dark matter."

That is something our education system must also emphasize, alongside the more laudable visible human accomplishments that can be measured and evaluated. The artistic experience can help us access our own "dark 289 matter." My argument is that an authentic artistic experience allows us to develop and speak the language of our shadows. This is the language of our own dark matter that we must bring to light and learn to speak, hljwever poorly, or else, to borrow from Christian Metz, we are consigned to use another's language; in other words, live an unenlightened life. NOTES Introduction

1. Quoted in: Drews, Elizabeth. On Being and Becoming Human. In: Rosner, S. and Abt, Lawrence E. (Eds.) (1974) Essays In Creativity. Croton-on- Hudson, N. Y.: North River Press, p. 91.

2. Collingwood, R. G. 11958) The Principles of Art. New York: Oxford University Press, p. vi.

Chapter I

1. Source Unknown.

2. Killinger, Barbara (1995) The Balancing Act: Rediscovering Your Feelings. Toronto: Key Porter Books Ltd., p. 19.

3. Ibid., p. 23.

4. Ibid., p. 14.

5. Miller, J. (1988) The Holistic Curriculurn.Toronto: OlSE Press, p. 6.

6. Maslow, Abraham H. (1971) The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. New York, N.Y.: The Viking Press, Inc., p. 346.

7. Quoted in: Killinger, op. cit., pp. 13-14.

8. Maslow, A. H. (1970) Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, pp. xii-xiii.

9. Maslow, A. H. (1968) Toward a Psychology of Being. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, p. 97.

10. In: Maslow, (1971), op. cit., pp. xvi-xvii.

11. Kason, Yvonne and Degler, Teri. (1994) A Farther Shore. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., p. 1. 291 12. Ibid., pp. 14, 17.

i3. Bucke, Richard Maurice. (1967) Cosmic Consciousness. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., pp. 1-3.

14. Frankl, Victor E. (1984) Man's Search for Meaning. New York: Washington Square Press, p. 133.

15. In: Freire, Paulo. (1988) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (trans. Myra Bergman Ramos) New York: Continuum, pp. 12-13.

16. Kant, I. What is Enlightening? (Trans. A. F. M. Willich. London: 1789, 1790) In: Manuel, Frank E. (Ed) (1965) The Enlightenment. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

17. Most of the references that relate to the "ethic of authenticity" that follow in this passage may be found in: Taylor, Charles. (1991) The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

18. Maslow, (1971),op. cit., pp. 346-347.

18. Maslow, (1 970), op. cit., pp. xiii-xiv.

19. Kason, op. cit., p. 308.

20. Some of the Commandments as found in the Bible I am referring to are as follows: Honor thy father and thy mother, ... Thou shalt not kill. Neither shalt thou commit adultery. Neither shalt thou steal. Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbor. Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbour's wife, neither shalt thou covet thy neighbour's house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or any thing that is thy neighbour's. (Deuteronomy, Chapter 5, verses 16-21) Or this next one: A new commandment 1 give unto you, That ye Love one another; as I have loved you that ye also love one another. (John, Chapter 13, verse 34) The Holy Bible. (date of publication unknown) London: British and Foreign Bible Society. p. 217, p. 1106.

21. Bernstein, Richard J., (Ed.) (1985) Habermas and Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, p. 5. 292 22. Held, D. (1980) Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. Berkeiy, Calif.: University of California Press, p. 65.

23. Gardner, H. j i985) The Mind's New Science. New York: Basic Books, pp. 360-361.

24. Killinger, op. cit., p. 15.

25. Maslow, A. H. (1976) Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences. New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, p. 57.

26. Pappenheim, Mark. Music From Beyond the Grave. The Independent. London, U.K., June 5, 1993, p. 24.

27. Friedlander, Mira. Anary Stuff. The Toronto Star. November 9, 1992, pp.

28. Everett-Green, Robert. Face to Face: Marie Chouinard. The Globe and Mail. October 31, 1992, pp. C1, C6.

29. Frankl, up. cit., p. 134.

Chapter I1

1. Source Unknown.

2. Here is a brief excerpt of Polanyi's explanation of his notion of tacit knowledge: "What is usually described as knowledge, as set out in written words or maps, or mathematical formulae, is only one kind of knowledge; while unformulated knowledge, such as we have of something we are in the act of doing, is another form of knowledge. If we call the first kind explicit knowledge, and the second, tacit knowledge, we may say that we always know tacitly that we are holding our explicit knowledge to be true ... Tacit knowing appears to be a doing of our own, lacking the public, objective, character of explicit knowledge. ...tacit knowing is in fact the dominant principle of all knowledge, and that its rejection would, therefore, automatically involve the rejection of any knowledge whatever." His concept is expanded in: Polanyi, Michael. (1969) The Study of Man. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 12-13. 293 3. Appleyard, Brian (1992) Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man. London: Pan Books Ltd., pp. 188-189.

4. Harpur, Tom. The Toronto Star. January 14, 1996, p. F4.

5. Chomsky, Noam. (1989) Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. Toronto: CBC Enterprises, p. 16.

6. Winter, James (1997) Democracy's Oxygen: How Corporations Control The News. Montreal, P. Q.: Black Rose Books, pp. xii, xv.

7. Zerbisias, Antonia. The News about TV News. The Toronto Star. July 20, 1997, pp. B1, 88.

8. Laing, R. D. (1967 ) The Politics of Experience. New York, N.Y.: Pantheon Books, p. 22.

9. Eisenberg, John (1992) Limits of Reason. Toronto, Ontario: OlSE press, p. 10.

10. Gardner, H. (1983) Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books, p. 164.

11. French, Marilyn (1985) Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals. New York, N.Y.: Summit Books, p. 1 17.

13. Manuel, Frank E. (Ed) (1965) The Enlightenment. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, p. 3.

14. Arguelles, Jose. (1975) The Transformative Vision. London: Shambala, p. 290.

15. Jung, Carl G. Approaching the Unconscious. In Jung C. and von Franz (Eds.) (1964) Man and his Symbols. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company Inc., p. 102.

16. Quoted in: Koestler, A. (1974) Janus: A Summing Up. New York: Random House, p. 1 1. 17. Freire, op. cit., p. 28*

18. Ibid., p. 20.

19. Contenta, Sandro (1993) Rituals of Failure: What Schools Really Teach. Toronto: Between The Lines, pp. 7-8.

20. Letters to the Editor. The Globe and Mail. May 23, 1992, p. D7.

21. Contenta, op. cit, p. 27.

22. Galbraith, John Kenneth (1992) The Culture of Contentment. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, p. 15.

23. Ibid., pp. 33-34.

24. Killinger, op. cit., p. 44.

25. Freire, op. cit., pp. 76-77.

26. Ibid., p. 78.

27. Frankl, op. cit., pp. 133-134.

28. Freire, op. cit., pp. 80-81.

29. Chomsky, N. and Herman, Edward S. (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, p. 1.

30. Chornsky, (1989), op. cit., pp. 137-138.

31. Chomsky, (1988), op. cit., p. 298.

32. Galbraith, op. cit., pp. 23-24.

33. Chornsky, (1989), op. cit., pp. 8-9.

34. Winter, op. cit., p. 1. 35. Chomsky, (1989), op. cit., p. 16.

36. Ibid., pp. 16-19.

37. Freire, op. cit., p. 47.

38. Zerbisias, Antonia. The ABCs of Becomino Media Savvv. The Toronto Star. May 27, 1996, p. A13.

39. Freire, op. cit., p. 81.

Chapter 111

1. Current Affairs Group Ltd. Pamela Wallin Live. CBC Newsworld. Aired October 16, 1996.

2. A & E Networks, Producers. (1994) Ape Man: The Story of Human Evolution. Documentary.

3. Christensen, Edwin. (1959) The History of Western Art. New York: Mentor, p. 14.

4. Jaffe, Aniela. Symbolism in the Visual Arts. In Man and his Symbols. Op. cit., p. 234.

5. Ibid., p. 236.

6. Campbell, Joseph. (1976) The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. Markham, Ont.: Penguin, pp, 307-308.

7. Ibid., pp. 334-338.

8. Ibid., p. 310, p. 311

9. Hughes, Robert. Behold The Stone Aae. Time. Volume 145, Number 6, February 13, 1995, p. 46.

10. McKie, Robin. The Caves where Culture Beaan. The Toronto Star. February 5, 1995, p. C8. 11. Campbell, op. cit., pp. 310-311.

12. Collingwood, Op. cit., pp. 68-69.

13. Arguelles, op. cit., p. 277.

14. Collingwood, op. cit., p. 69.

15. Jaffe, op. cit., p. 254.

16. Arguelles, op. cit., pp. 277-278.

17. Ibid., p. 277.

18. Reeves, Hubert (1993) Atoms of Silence. Toronto: Stoddart Publishing Co. Ltd., p. 36.

19. Bonaly, Andre and Bounias, Michel. The Trace of Time in Poincare Sections of a Topological Space. In: Physics Essays. Volume 8, number 2, 1995, pp. 236-244.

21. Campbell, op. cit., p. 470.

22. Brockett, Oscar G. (19'74) The Theatre: An Introduction. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, p. 73.

23. Campbell, op. cit., p. 186.

24. Henderson, Joseph L. Ancient myths and modern man. In Man and his Symbols. Op. cit., p. 148.

25. Birch, Miriam, producer and writer. (1990) Bali, Masterpiece of the Gods. Documentary. Pittsburgh: WQED and the National Geographic Society.

26. Maslow, (1968), op. cit., pp. 3-4.

27. Courtney, R. (1989) Play, Drama & Thought. Toronto: Simon & Pierre, pp. 156-157. 297 28. Jung, (1 964), op. cit., p. 81.

29. Southern, Richard. (1961) The Seven Ages of Theatre. New York: Hill and Wang, p. 103.

30. Courtney, op. cit., p. 33.

31. Ibid., p. 38.

32. Campbell, op. cit., p. 28.

33. Brinton, C. et al. (1967) A History of Civilization: Volume One. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, p. 331.

34. Ibid., p. 332.

35. Arguelles, Op. cit., p. 280.

36. Campbell, Joseph. (1976) The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology. Markham, Ont.: Penguin, p. 51 5.

37. Brownowski, J. and Mazlish, B. (1975) The Western Intellectual Tradition. New York: Harper and ROW,p. 37.

38. Ibid., p. 23.

39. Freire, op. cit., p. 44.

40. Galbraith, op. cif., p. 147.

41. Kennick, W. (Ed.) (1966) Art and Philosophy. New York: St. Martin's Press, p. 3.

42. Gombrich, E. (1971) Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Phaidon, p. 55.

43. Held, op. cit., p. 41.

44. Freire, op. cit., p. 145. 298 45. French, op. cit., p. 1 18.

46. McLuhan, M. (1 964) Understanding Media. Toronto: New American Library, p. 62.

47. Rank, Otto (1989) Art and Artist. New York, N. Y.: Agathon Press, p. 14.

48. Gombrich, E. (1984) The Story of Art. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, pp. 178-179.

49. Gombrich, (1971), op. cit., p. 9.

50. Brownowski, op. cit., p. 106.

51. Arguelles, op. cit., p. 283.

52. Jay, M. (1973) The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research,1923- 1950. Boston: Little Brown and Company, p. 45.

53. Marquis, Alice Goldfarb (1991) The Art Biz: The Covert World of Collectors, Dealers, Auction Houses, Museums, and Critics. Chicago: Contemporary Books, p. 10.

54. Koestler, op. cit., p. 249.

56. This notion was forwarded in a paper read by Dr. Kason at the Kundalini Research Network, 1996 Northeastern Regional Meeting, held in Toronto on June 15th, 1996. It was during this lecture, as well, that I became aware of the research work of Bonaly and Bounias.

57. Koestler, op. cit., p. 256.

58. Ibid., pp. 249-250.

59. Marinetti, F. T. Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto. In Ross, Stephen David (Ed) (1987) Art and its Significance: An Anthology of 299 Aesthetic Theory. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, p. 532.

60. Battcock, Gregory. (Ed) (1973) Idea Art. New York: E. P. Dutton, p. 118.

61. Ibid.

62. Appleyard, op. cit., p. 192.

63. Ibid., pp. 190-191.

64. Esslin, Martin. (1961) The Theatre of the Absurd. New York: Anchor Books, p. xix.

65. Ibid., p. 293, p. 312.

66. Jaffe, op. cit., pp. 253-254.

67. Appleyard, op. cit., p. 196.

68. May, Rollo. (1975) The Courage to Create. New York: W. Norton, p. 40.

69. Ashton, Dore. (Ed) (1985) Twentieth Century Artists on Art. New York: Pantheon Books, p. 21.

70. Battcock, op. cit., p. 47.

71. Martin, Stephen A. Meaning in Art. In Barnaby, Karen and D'Acherno, Pellegrino. (Eds) (1990) C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Towards a Hermeneutics of Culture. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, p. 174.

72. French, op. cit., pp. 1 17-118

73. Chadwick, Whitney. (1 990) Women, Art, and Society. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., p. 11.

74. Berger, John. (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: BBC and Penguin, pp. 47-51. 300 75. Quoted in: Pollock, Griselda. (1988) Vision and Difference: Femininity, feminism and histories of art. New York, N.Y.: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc., p. 71.

76. Quoted in: Fischer, Ernst. (1984) (Trans. by Bostock, Anna)The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, p. 179. 1 would loosely translate the lines quoted as: We desire, so deep burns the fire in our minds, To plunge into the depths of darkness, To the depths of the Unknown to find the new, whether they lead to Heaven or Hell matters not. In Ernst's text it is translated thus: This fire burns so fiercely in our brains that we want to plunge to the bottom of the abyss, heaven or hell, what matter0?to the bottom of the Unknown to find the New!

77. Baxter, John. (1971) The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg. London: A. Zwemmer, pp. 68-69.

78. lbid., p. 18.

79. The expression belongs to the art critic Louis Vauxcelles who uttered it at an exhibition at the Salon des lndependants in Paris when he noticed a bronze statue in the Florentine style amongst the widly colourful canvases of Matisse and company.

80. Weinberg, Herman G. (1967) Josef von Sternberg. New York, N.Y.: 1967, p. 196.

81. French, op. cit., p. 260.

82. Lowenthal, Leo. (1 961 ) The Debate Over Art and Popular Culture: A Synopsis. In Literature, Popular Culture, and Society. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall Inc., p. 27.

Chapter IV

1. Quoted in: Wollen, Peter. (1969) Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. London: Secker & Warburg, p. 51.

2. I'd like to point out here that my reference to a period prior to and subsequent to the Renaissance is strictly academic and is adopted for the 301 purposes of presenting my arguments; the divisions are not so clearly evident nor marked in historical time. What is of import to my point is that the shift in practices and attitudes to art have occured and they usually coincide with the beginnings of the modern period in Western history, considered to be the Renaissance.

3. Miller, J. (1981) The Compassionate Teacher. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall Inc. p. vii.

4. Miller, (1988), op. cit., p. 55.

5. Killinger, op. cit., p. 15, p. 16.

6. Ibid., p. 14.

7. /bid., pp. 14-15.

8. Ibid., p. 15.

9. /bid., pp. 33-34.

10. Ibid., pp. 39-40.

11. Ibid., p. 40.

12. Jaffe, op. cit., pp. 262-264.

13. lbid., p. 262.

14. Nachmanovitch, Stephen. (1990) Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc. pp. 23-24, p. 187.

15. Killinger, op. cit., p. 183.

16. Maslow, (1970), op. cit., p. 75, p. 77-78.

17. See Heidegger, Martin. (trans. by William Lovitt) (1 977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York, N. Y. Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. The Introduction in this book by William Lovitt speaks in a tight encapsulated manner what I mean to convey by 302 Heidegger's terms in this passage.

18. Eisner, Elliot. (date of publication unknown) The Role of Discipline- Based Art Education in America's Schools. Los Angeles: The Getty Center for the Arts in Education.

19. Jaffe, op. cit., p. 257.

Chapter V

1. Warnock, Mary. (1 978) Imagination. Los Angeles: University of California Press, p. 202.

2. Genese, F. (1 987) Learning Through Two Languages. Cambridge, Mass.: Newbury House, p. 12.

3. See for example: Cummins, J. and Swain, M. (1986) Bilingualism in Education: Aspects of Theory, Research and Practice. London: Longman, pp. 57-79.

4. Hammerly, H. (1989) French Immersion: Myths and Reality. Calgary, Alta.: Detselig Enterprises, pp. 3-4.

5. Lyster, R. Speaking Immersion. The Canadian Modern Language Review. 1987, pp. 701-702.

6. Blenkin, Geva M. and Kelly, A. V. (1987) The Primary Curriculum: A Process Approach to Curriculum Planning. London: Harper & Row, p.74.

7. lbid., p. 15.

8. Ibid., p. 22.

9. Aspy, David N. (1986) This is School! Sit Down and Listen! Amherst, Mass.: Human Resources Development Press, p. 24.

10. Ibid., p. 25.

11. Dewey, John. (1944) Democracy and Education. New York: The Free Press, pp. 49-51.

12. Quoted in: Stern, H. H. (1983) Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford U. Press, p. 436.

13. A discussion of these notions are found in Miller (1988), op. cit., pp. 62-72.

14. Quoted in: Rivers, W. (1 381) Teaching Foreign-Language Skills. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 75-76.

15. Lambert, Wallace. (1984) An Overview of lssues in immersion. Studies in Immersion Education: A Collection for United States Educators. Sacramento, Calif.: California State Department of Education, p. 11.

16. Stern, op. cit., p. 16.

17. Gardner (1 983), op. cit., p. 96.

18. 1 am presupposing here that even if the FI teacher's native tongue is not French, he has an "accurate and fluent" knowledge of all aspects of the French language and a grasp of French or at least French Canadian culture.

19. Rivers, op. cit., p. 33.

20. Ellis, R. (1986) Understanding Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford U. Press, p. 37.

21. Trevise, Anne. 1s it Transferable, Topicalization? In: Kellerman, E. and Smith, Michael Sharwood, (Eds.) (1 986) Crosslinguistic Influence in Second Language Acquisition. Elmsford, N. Y.: Pergamon Press, p. 189.

22. Dulay, H., Burt, M. and Krashen, S. (1982) Language Two. New York: Oxford U. Press, p. 7.

23. Ellis, op. cit., p. 11.

24. Gardner (1983), op. cit., p. 20. 304 25. Courtney, op. cit., p. 17.

26. For Vygotsky, "the child's intellectual growth is contingent on his mastering the social means of thought, that is, language" and that "thought is born through words. A word devoid of thought is a dead thing and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow." Soutar-Hynes, M. (November, 1979) Vygotsky-Three Key Aspects. Unpublished paper. p. 6, p. 14.

27. See, Communicative competence: some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In, Cummins, J. and Swain, M., Op. cit., pp. 116-137.

28. Stern, op. cit., pp. 206-207.

29. Healy, J. (1987) Your Child's Growing Mind. Toronto: Doubleday, p.

31. Danesi, M. and Di Pietro R. (199'1) Contrastive Analysis for the Contemporary Second Language Classroom. Toronto: OlSE Press, p. 2.

32. Hammerly, H. (1985) An Integrated Theory of Language Teaching and Its Practical Consequences. Burnaby, 0. C.: Second Language Publications, p. 111.

33. For the concept of motherese, see Ellis, op. cit., pp.130-132.

Summary

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