SENSES AND SENSIBILITIES

posted by James Reel

    Several weeks ago, my wife and I were treated to lunch by Carroll Rinehart, the man who goes into elementary schools to help students—not necessarily music students—write and perform original operas. He’s worked on at least 1,500 kid-created operas, and even though the man is now past 80 years old, I wouldn’t be surprised if he works on another 1,500 before he’s through.
    Carroll Rinehart is an evangelist for arts education and creativity in general, and like any evangelist he is well practiced in the delivery of his message. At lunch, he handed us a printout he may well give everyone he meets; it’s a sheet titled See Everything, Do Everything, Feel Nothing, displaying three quotes relating to Carroll’s interests. There’s a striking line uttered in 1959 by children’s lit specialist Leland Jacobs: “We must develop critics and creators rather than regurgitators and imitators.” You need only look at the lit programs in American universities to see that Jacobs’ remark has had zero impact during the past 46 years; the academy is infested with enough cultural parasites feeding on and degrading the creativity of othres to warrant immediate quarantine.
    Even more apropos to contemporary society is the text block occupying the top half of Carroll’s handout. It’s from a Norman Cousins editorial in the Jan. 23, 1971 issue of the long-defunct and much lamented Saturday Review:

    The highest expression of civilization is not its art but the supreme tenderness that people are strong enough to feel and show toward one another. Art proceeds out of an exquisite awareness of life. The creative spirit and the compassionate spirit are not things apart but kindred manifestations of response to life. If our civilization is breaking down, as it appears to be, it is not because we lack the brainpower to meet its demands but because our feelings are being dulled.
    What our society needs is a massive and pervasive experience in re-sensitization. The first aim of education should not be to prepare young people for careers but to enable them to develop respect for life. Related lessons would be concerned with the reality of human sensitivity and the need to make it ever finer and more responsive; the naturalness of loving and the circumstances that enhance it or enfeeble it; the right to privacy as an essential condition of life; and the need to avoid the callousness that leads to brutalization. Finally, there is the need to endow government with the kind of sensitivity that makes life and all its wondrous possibilities government’s most insistent concern.