Your discussion of his 1972 paper got me looking at other things that he had written and I came upon his last published paper, "Boredom – An Overlooked Disease?", Published in Challenge, September-October 1999. There, he reflects on the Columbine High School massacre, suggesting that the killers' "motivation could well be boredom".
This leads him to remark that high schools are "preoccupied with teaching skills useful for earning income and that they consider leisure skills secondary, with sports the most important of these in the fine arts not even mentioned." But he thinks that the cultivation of these leisure skills is important in maintaining a more peaceful society.
In contrast with what he says that the 1972 paper, "that art education is not a matter of pump priming but a continuous process", in the 1999 paper he writes:
"The availability of enjoyable activities was very different in my youth. Television and video game screens had not been in- vented. No wonder my contemporaries and I acquired quite a number of leisure skills. Most of us learned to read and write at the beginning of elementary school, a few even earlier, and reading a few simple novels was compulsory in the higher grades of elementary school. In Hungary at the time, I read Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, and my fascination with them turned me into a lifelong voracious reader of literature, history, and biographies. In England, novels by Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott were compulsory reading at the time - probably with the same happy consequences.
I also learned many other leisure activities, such as solving crossword puzzles, making my own radio when it was a novelty, playing the piano, enjoying jazz, classical music, dancing, skating, skiing, swimming, fencing, and tennis, and visiting museums, theaters, and the opera. I was not particularly good at any of these active leisure skills, but I never bothered to compare my skill with that of other youngsters, perhaps because being better or worse than others in any one of so many pleasant activities was not important."
He concludes his last published essay with these two paragraphs:
"That [an educational system that teaches the skills for many peaceful leisure activities] is not an easy task in our country, where even teaching children to read well enough to make them enjoy a fascinating book is a serious problem for thousands of our schools, and where the need to provide money for more and better teachers and more schools to keep up with our growing population usually leads to cutting back the teaching of music and the fine arts.
In short, the remedy lies in convincing our government, politicians, educators, and parents that culture and leisure skills are not luxuries we can easily do without if we want our society to become more peaceful, our streets safer, and our prisons less overcrowded."
Your discussion of his 1972 paper got me looking at other things that he had written and I came upon his last published paper, "Boredom – An Overlooked Disease?", Published in Challenge, September-October 1999. There, he reflects on the Columbine High School massacre, suggesting that the killers' "motivation could well be boredom".
This leads him to remark that high schools are "preoccupied with teaching skills useful for earning income and that they consider leisure skills secondary, with sports the most important of these in the fine arts not even mentioned." But he thinks that the cultivation of these leisure skills is important in maintaining a more peaceful society.
In contrast with what he says that the 1972 paper, "that art education is not a matter of pump priming but a continuous process", in the 1999 paper he writes:
"The availability of enjoyable activities was very different in my youth. Television and video game screens had not been in- vented. No wonder my contemporaries and I acquired quite a number of leisure skills. Most of us learned to read and write at the beginning of elementary school, a few even earlier, and reading a few simple novels was compulsory in the higher grades of elementary school. In Hungary at the time, I read Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, and my fascination with them turned me into a lifelong voracious reader of literature, history, and biographies. In England, novels by Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott were compulsory reading at the time - probably with the same happy consequences.
I also learned many other leisure activities, such as solving crossword puzzles, making my own radio when it was a novelty, playing the piano, enjoying jazz, classical music, dancing, skating, skiing, swimming, fencing, and tennis, and visiting museums, theaters, and the opera. I was not particularly good at any of these active leisure skills, but I never bothered to compare my skill with that of other youngsters, perhaps because being better or worse than others in any one of so many pleasant activities was not important."
He concludes his last published essay with these two paragraphs:
"That [an educational system that teaches the skills for many peaceful leisure activities] is not an easy task in our country, where even teaching children to read well enough to make them enjoy a fascinating book is a serious problem for thousands of our schools, and where the need to provide money for more and better teachers and more schools to keep up with our growing population usually leads to cutting back the teaching of music and the fine arts.
In short, the remedy lies in convincing our government, politicians, educators, and parents that culture and leisure skills are not luxuries we can easily do without if we want our society to become more peaceful, our streets safer, and our prisons less overcrowded."
I had not seen this essay before, thanks for sharing it
Really interesting--this is a new citation to me. Thanks.