ion with the environment is held to be essential to "developing the urge and attitude toward exploring and investigating other forms and in voicing preferences or being able to discriminate differences more easily at a later age" (Lowenfeld & Brittain, pp. 120-121). To be sure, Dewey does not hold that it is "possible to proceed at once from direct esthetic experience to what is involved in [the] judgment" of works of art (1934, p. 298). But it is an essential point in his theory that, while the work of art is judged by standards that incorporate more than the everyday experience of aspects of the aesthetic, it is necessary to understand how the aesthetic is part of ordinary experience in order to understand how art is experienced.
Read's contributions, especially his early synthesis of psychological findings about art and development, have had a broad influence as well. Read's interest in education per se meant, of course, that more of his ideas are reflected in today's approaches to art education. The moral, behavioral, and social aspects of his ideas, for example, are often incorporated into pedagogical approaches. His proposition that "perceptions [that] result in images [and] sensations [that] result in feelings . . . are the elementary materials out of which we build our conception of the world and our behavior in the world" is widely viewed as a fundamental tenet of art education (1958, p. 56). Lowenfeld and Brittain stress, for instance, the importance of art as a form of communication (as social, as opposed to a purely personal, form of expression) in which a child's work of art is "an extension of the self out into the world of reality as it begins to encompass others in the viewing of the subject matter" (p. 65).
Circumstances, however, limit what art educators can hope to accomplish and, in the meantime, they strive to achieve some basic effects, while continuing to work for a broader role for aesthetic educati...