are mastering the world's great literature and philosophy and science. Each of these contributions not only tells its own story effectively and interestingly but gives in passing many suggestions of possible enlargement of the scope of extension activities and many indications of growing enthusiasm for the whole movement. No other one of the "new possibilities in education" is more vital to the interests of democracy than the nation-wide attempt that is now being made to keep alive the spirit of youth and progress among all classes of the adult portion of our population and no other single educational enterprise is likely to be more uniformly successful and popular in the immediate future.5

CONCLUSION

Education using the term in no narrow or pedantic senseis the chief business of a democracy. Because it comprehends every human interest and may be made to minister to every human need it must be made accessible and free. It is not alone for the gifted nor for any special or privileged class. For most people (above the elementary grades) it must be predominantly vocational, in order that for them it may be truly cultural. All professional training must aim at social service. Education must be controlled by all the people in the interests of all the people, and it must be a continuing, life-long, process. Thus only may we as individuals and as a nation come into full possession of the spiritual inheritance of a free people.

See Perry, A. C. The Extension of Public Education in the United States. United States Bureau of Education, Washington, D. C.

APPRECIATION OF MUSIC, LITERATURE AND ART

AS A SOCIAL AIM

BY A. DUNCAN YOCUM, PH.D.,

Professor of Educational Research and Practice, School of Education, University of Pennsylvania.

One of the most fundamental factors in the furtherance of unity in our national life is the development of a popular taste for music, literature and art. Such a taste furthers this national unity both through the promotion of the common culture which is essential to a truly social democracy, and through the creation of a common pride in national aesthetic achievement that constitutes one of the finer phases of patriotism. In a socially unhomogeneous republic such as ours, each of these means to national unity must supplement the other. A common culture confined to appreciation of universal literature and art can promote a social intercourse between groups otherwise segregated by nationality, specialization and mode of life, without strengthening the emotional appeal of national aesthetic achievement. Aesthetic education confined to students in a particular type of institution or course of instruction made so technical as to repel or to reject all who are not naturally artistic, however strongly it may emotionalize national achievement, makes of the more broadly educated class an aristocracy in aesthetics as well as in learning. If our composite American people is to become a whole people, democratic, socially homogeneous, and politically homogeneous because socially homogeneous, each citizen must be made a lover not only of music, literature and art universal, but of American music, American literature and American art.

Our boys and girls should not be taught that there is no such thing as American literature or that there are no great American artists and composers. Even foreign-born Americans, whatever pride they feel in the aesthetic triumphs of the fatherland, should be proud of the contributions their compatriots have made to the aesthetic side of American life since they together came as immigrants to our shores. It is America that inspires the foreign-born genius; it is in America and for America that he labors, and it is the

recognition of Americans that is winning him renown.

But after all, that art is most strongly American which, in addition to being "made in America," expresses our national spirit and emotionalizes our national features and characteristics. Where its appeal is powerful enough to add to the patriotism of childhood and youth in place of borrowing from it an interest which it otherwise lacks, it should form a conspicuous part of aesthetic training.

THE BAR TO AESTHETIC OPPORTUNITY

However, the most fundamental contribution of aesthetic training to citizenship and democracy is the common and intelligent love of the beautiful which makes possible the finer forms of social intercourse and is essential to the most manysided enjoyment of individual leisure. Curiously enough it is in a free system of public education rather than in prohibitive material and social conditions, that aesthetic enjoyment finds its real limit. The only obstacle which still stands in its way is a lack of that good taste and manysided interest which education alone can develop. The bar to an appreciation of the beautiful no longer lies in absence of opportunity that socially and economically limited environment denies.

On the one hand, individual leisure, both in the sense of shortened hours of employment and of multiplication of periods assigned to rest and recreation, is steadily increasing. On the other, every form of aesthetic enjoyment is being brought within the reach of all. Every type of book can be cheaply bought. Free libraries, local and circulating, make it possible to read the most expensive books for the price of a couple of street car tickets or postage stamps. The world's greatest pictures are reproduced in penny prints. Through a miracle which we do not as yet fully understand the whole world of nature and of art, so far as it is expressed in sound and in color, however distant in time or space, can be faithfully and dramatically reproduced through the phonograph and the moving pictures. Dress can be made as harmonious and becoming in chintzes and calicoes as in the wardrobe of a princess, while the laborer can afford to gratify his taste in the furnishing of his cottage more completely than the millionaire can express his artistic cravings through his architects and decorators. We are potentially a truer democracy in aesthetics than in economics or politics. We are aesthetically undemocratic only in our education.

TECHNIQUE UNDEMOCRATIC: APPRECIATION DEMOCRATIC

To be sure, a system of public education offers equal opportunity to every future citizen to become an artist. But opportunity in the material sense is conditioned by a peculiar sort of ability possessed by the chosen few. Until recently the boy who could not learn to write a poem or an essay or even to comprehend and remember the technique which makes literature an art was denied the story-telling, the dramatization, the unalloyed enjoyment of selected masterpieces impressively interpreted, that would make him a lover of literature in a variety of forms and through a multitude of interpreters. Until the coming of the phonograph, the teaching of music in the school has had for its aim singing by rote, without even the possibility of teaching the pupils to identify and enjoy the songs and themes of the great composers and to feel the thrill of symphony and opera. Even now, the great majority of pupils in the ordinary school are wasting their time in a hopeless effort at self-expression through brush and pencil possible only to the artistic few, when each one of them with a normal sense of form and color could be surely taught to love nature, to appreciate beautiful pictures, to select artistic ornaments and utensils and to wear appropriate and becoming dress. The late Dr. Harris, former United States Commissioner of Education, was wrong when he insisted that we would become artistic in our industrial products when the introduction of drawing into our public schools should develop workmen capable of artistic design. We now know that our workmanship and our merchandise will not become artistic until our people are well enough educated aesthetically to enjoy and to purchase the simple and the beautiful.

Whether in literature, painting or music, art is essentially aristocratic. Aesthetic training, on the contrary, being possible for all, results in a common love of the beautiful which must be added to common opportunity for its enjoyment before America can become aesthetically democratic. Those tendencies and practices in the teaching of music, literature and art that emphasize the development of aesthetic appreciation, therefore, will be most helpful in pointing the way to the adjustment of the material and method of instruction to the aesthetic demands of social life in a republic.

Curiously enough, it is the irresistible movement toward specific preparation for life, bitterly resented by lovers of culture, that is most largely responsible for this changing emphasis. To them the social aim means vocation. Confusing aesthetics with general training in the sense of discipline and generally useful habits, they have failed to see that every step toward more intensive academic study is a step away from literature, music and art, while the social aim, on the contrary, makes definite preparation for leisure an end in itself, rather than a by-product of formal study. A glimpse at some of the definite ways in which appreciation is being taught in representative schools will serve not only to show how far the social movement is furthering democracy in culture, but to illustrate concretely some of the local conditions and distinctions already discussed.

THE OVER ANALYSIS OF THE LITERARY MASTERPIECE

In the field of literature, so long as the four years of high school English were largely confined to the technical analysis of a few masterpieces as wholes, appreciation suffered not only through failure to develop interest in a variety of writers and forms of literature adequate to individual tastes and moods, but often through the creation of a distaste for exhaustive literary study, for the masterpieces exhaustively studied, and for the general literature of which they served as types. Any mode of study that turns attention from the masterpiece or passage as an emotional whole to the meaning of petty details and even to the technical means through which the emotion is produced, lessens appreciation and enjoyment. If appreciation is to become universal and manysided, the study of artistic technique, whether in literature, music or art, must be confined to special schools or elective courses, except in those phases that can be so readily developed and become so much a matter of course, as not only to avoid interference with emotional appeal, but to be a part of it and to make it intelligent.

Dramatization, for example, especially in the earlier school grades where pupils with minimum of preparation and costume or as a spontaneous exercise take the parts of various characters in their story-books, is being made in hundreds of schools a means to appreciation of what is most fundamental in dramatic art.

Not only is this technical analysis being lessened or abandoned