From John Rockwell: When I was a child I HATED being schlepped to symphony concerts and museums. Yet I wound up deeply involved in them and all the high arts (and low ones, too). Perhaps our trips were poorly prepared when it came to the teachers providing the proper background for the "aesthetic experience." But maybe the very idea of exposing restless children to The Arts is somehow flawed.
From Eric Booth: We have many experiments of this kind happening, but our standard practices--from elementary school chorus, to high school band and drama class, to Art Appreciation 101 in college, to music study at Juilliard (where I have worked for a decade, indeed I work in all those settings)--do not prioritize the individual's artistic experience, which according to the new research (and my own decades of disparate experience) is the way nurture a lifelong hunger for the arts, lifelong yearners.
