You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Read's book is built around the thesis that '… the general purpose of education is to foster the growth of what is individual in each human being at the same time harmonizing the individuality thus educated with the organic unity of the social group to which the individual belongs'. He regards æsthetic education as being fundamental in this process.
The technical aspects of æsthetic education comprise (a) visual and plastic training, which is achieved through the eye and the touch of the hand, results in design, and is governed by sensation; (b) musical and kinetic education trains the ear and the muscles, finds expression in music and the dance, and relates to intuition; (c) verbal education is achieved through speech, results in drama and poetry, and expresses feeling; (d) constructive education leads to craftsmanship, and uses thought as its main mode of activity. This classification is further regrouped into basic instincts. The communicative instinct with its desire to talk and to listen, together with the dramatic instinct with its desire to act, form the sympathetic instincts. The desires to draw, paint, model, dance, and to sing are expressions of the artistic and musical instincts, which form the larger group of æsthetic instincts. The inquisitive instinct which wants to know the 'why' of things, and the constructive instinct with its desire to create things are grouped in the scientific instinct.
Regardless of which group of instincts is selected, or which area of æsthetic education is furthered, the following two main principles are always involved: the principle of form, which is a function of perception, and the principle of origination, which is a function of the imagination. 'These two mental activities exhaust, in their dialectical counterplay, all the psychic aspects of æsthetic experience. But