Don't ignore the arts.

• Author: Williams, Harold M.

By concentrating on basic skills, schools are brushing aside the world's rich cultural heritage, to the detriment of students.

IT IS DIFFICULT to imagine a society without the arts. What dark and empty souls would populate an environment without paintings, statues, architecture, drama, music, dances, or poems? The arts define what is meant by civilization. They are part of the foundation and the framework of culture. As a universal language through which individuals can express common aspirations, the arts are a channel to understanding and appreciating other cultures. To be conversant with the arts is to be a civilized person.

The arts are a basic and central medium of human communication and understanding. They are how people talk to each other. The arts are the languages of civilization-past and present--through which they express their anxieties, hungers, hopes, and discoveries. They are the means of listening to dreams of expressing imagination and feeling.

The arts reaffirm humanity. They are the glue that holds society together. While improvement in the 3R's may enable Americans to compete more effectively in the world economically and technologically, they do not feed the human spirit. The most vital stages in the history of any society are marked by a flourishing of the arts. When most material goods have turned to dust, it is the arts that remain as testimony to the dreams and passions of the past.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman decided to learn how to draw at the age of 44. He eventually got quite good at it, even though he confessed to having been terrible at art in high school. Later. Feynman, who was a brilliant teacher and thinker in mathematics and physics at California Institute of Technology, explained why he had taken up art so late in life. He wanted to express the awe he felt about the glories of the universe, he said. Art, he felt. might be the only way he could reveal this emotion to someone who might share it.

Feynman, of course, wasn't the first or last scientist to seek a perspective on his life through the arts. He discovered late what many others are lucky enough to know intuitively--that the arts are key to building the metaphorical bridges that link individuals to their own creative powers and to each other.

Americans live in a society that is communicating more and more through visual images. Daily, they are bombarded by a constantly changing torrent of messages from billboards, architecture, magazines, four-color newspapers, television, and films. New technology controlled by computers combines words, pictures, and sound to convey information at a breathtaking pace. Computers, with their power to manufacture and animate images, are creating entirely new art forms.

Consider, also, that American civilization is increasingly diverse, mixing cultures from Europe, Africa, the Far East, and Latin America. Each group sends its own messages and images, jostling to preserve and advance its own identity. Meanwhile, many of the surviving messages from past civilizations exist in visual form.

In short, to be educated is to be visually literate--to understand the historical and cultural context of the message, make aesthetic judgments about what one sees and sort out these images in order to tell the good from the bad, the fake from the genuine, and interpret accurately the signals of other cultural groups in search of common humanity. Armed with an ability to make judgments, an educated person will learn to construct sound value systems for any event or object, whether it is art or not.

If seems fair to ask then, if the arts occupy...